This is the third in a bi-weekly series that for my Native American Assimilation and Activism class. Every two weeks we make posts sharing what we learned in the class.
Over the last two weeks we covered two important topics regarding Native American expression: Cultural Expression, and Language.
Cultural Expression as Activism
In Native American communities, cultural expression often serves as a powerful form of resistance and activism. The lecture focused mainly on appearance as activism but the idea can be more broadly applied to other forms of cultural expression as well. Physical appearance is a form of activism by taking back the meaning of traditional clothing, hair, and tattoos which were previously repressed. Many if not all traditional Native American forms of expression have deeper meanings. Tattoos told stories of people or signified states of life.
Language
Here are a few interesting/terrifying statistics about Native American languages.
- ~150 Still spoken (Most are almost extinct)
- 300+ spoken at the time Europeans made contact
- This figure is likely SEVERELY underestimated because there are over 500 federally recognized tribes
- 57 distinctive families of languages
- 14 large families
- 8 smaller families
- 25 isolates (no known relative languages)
One interesting term I had not heard of before was a Pidgin language which essentially just means an amalgamation (that word does not do it justice) that combines various different languages. Notable examples of Pidgin languages are Chinook Wawa and Hawaiian Pidgin.
Many of these languages are at risk of dying out because of the practices of boarding schools which operated until the late 1980s and early 1990s. These boarding schools enforced the use of English with strict punishments for failing to comply.
Some cool facts I learned during lecture about Native American Languages are:
- Genderless pronouns
- Many more words for describing the natural world
- The Inuit have 40-70 different for describing snow
Some interesting readings from this lecture are:
- Miluk Language Archive
- Super interesting website that attempts to archive/preserve the language through recordings of the last speaker of the Miluk Native American Language
- Department of Interior: Biden-Harris Administration Plan on Native Language Revitalization
- Biden Administration Plan to try to promote the use and keep Native American Languages alive