Language Planning and Policy in Native America

Comprehensive in scope and rich in detail, this book explores language planning, language education, and language policy for diverse Native American peoples across time, space, and place. Based on long-term collaborative and ethnographic work with Native American communities and schools, the book examines the imposition of colonial language policies against the fluorescence of contemporary community-driven efforts to revitalize threatened mother tongues. Here, readers will meet those who are on the frontlines of Native American language revitalization every day. As their efforts show, even languages whose last native speaker is gone can be reclaimed through family-, community-, and school-based language planning. Offering a critical-theory view of language policy, and emphasizing Indigenous sovereignties and the perspectives of revitalizers themselves, the book shows how language regenesis is undertaken in social practice, the role of youth in language reclamation, the challenges posed by dominant language policies, and the prospects for Indigenous language and culture continuance current revitalization efforts hold.

Dedication

Statement by Miami Tribe of Oklahoma Chief Thomas Gamble

Foreword by Richard E. Littlebear

Acknowledgements

Preface

1. Contextualizing Native American LPP: Legal-Political, Demographic, and Sociolinguistic Foundations

2. Conceptualizing Native American LPP: Critical Sociocultural Foundations

3. Native American Languages In and Out of the Safety Zone, 1492-2012

4.Indigenous Literacies, Bilingual Education, and Community Empowerment: The Case of Navajo

5. Language Regenesis in Practice

6. Language in the Lives of Indigenous Youth

7. Planning Language for the Seventh Generation

Appendix

References

Index