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Lessons from Fort Apache is an ethnography of indigenous language dynamics on the Fort Apache reservation in North America with implications for global concerns over language endangerment. Moving beyond a narrow focus on linguistic documentation, the author examines the ways in which the linguistic and cultural identities of indigenous populations are attributed with meaning against yet other sociocultural concerns and interests. While affirming the value of language documentation and maintenance, Nevins also provides a much-needed appraisal of the potential conflicts in authority claims and language practices bet
The author argues that the debates surrounding the revitalization of indigenous languages need broadening to include larger questions of social mediation, shifting cultural identities, and evaluation of the politics intrinsic to the relationship between indigenous community members and university-accredited experts like language researchers and educators. This engaging ethnography examines these questions, and investigates the language dynamics of the Fort Apache Reservation, including unintended challenges that standardized textual models can sometimes pose to local interests. Nevins reveals the community's historical and contemporary concerns for language documentation, maintenance, and revitalization. Her text provides perceptive commentary on the need for language maintenance programs and for flexibility in finding politically sustainable forms of collaboration and exchange between researchers, teachers, and those community members who base their claims to an indigenous language in alternate terms.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Indigenous Languages and the Mediation of Communities
3. Learning to Listen: Coming to Terms with Conflicting Meanings of Language Loss
4. They Live in Lonesome Dove: English in Indigenous Places
5. Stories in the Moment of Encounter: Documentation Boundary Work
6. What No Coyote Story Means: The Borderland Genre of Traditional Storytelling
7. "Some 'No No' and Some 'Yes'": Silence, Agency, and Traditionalist Words
8. Sustainability: Possible Socialities of Documentation and Maintenance
Appendix A: Lawrence Mithlo
Appendix B: Eva Lupe on Her Early Life
Index
About the author
M. Eleanor Nevins is an associate professor of anthropology at Middlebury College, Vermont. She is the editor of
World-Making Stories: Maidu Language and Community Renewal on a Shared California Landscape (Nebraska, 2017).
