There is still little research about the people and language spoken in the Pacific Northwest. Northwest voices: Language and culture in the Pacific Northwest is a welcome and timely contribution to this new area of linguistic research.
When I started to read this anthology, I was personally excited to learn more about where I come from in British Columbia (BC). What initially made the biggest impression on me was that the anthology is about Washington and Oregon State, with the odd mention of BC. The title is therefore misleading—it is a little like leaving out France in an anthology of Western Europe.
But what does this omission tell us? In part, it affirms the omission of many voices in the Pacific Northwest (PNW). To me, it seems, countering this omission is the point of the anthology. Kristin Denham summarises poignantly that the reason PNW English speakers feel they have no accent, as documented in Betsy Evans’ contribution, is because they are not stigmatised. They consider themselves to be ‘normal’ because they have the highest linguistic capital in the PNW.
In Part 1, devoted to the linguistic history of the area, a table is displayed in which the indigenous languages of Oregon and Washington are merged into an ‘other’ category. Spanish and Vietnamese share the largest immigrant language numbers in both states. Although we learn more about the vast variation in indigenous languages in Part 2, and multilingualism is consistently referred to especially throughout Parts 3 and 4, there are no sections devoted to multilingual voices. I wondered what it might have felt like growing up speaking Japanese after the internment camps of WWII. And what it might feel like now, speaking a small minority language merged within the ‘other’ category.
We get closer to this in Danica Sterud Miller's contribution, where she describes her experiences of organising an indigenous language revitalisation programme. Just a generation ago, speaking Lushootseed in the home was cause for the state to remove children from their families and send them to boarding schools where they were forced to speak English. In these boarding schools (known in Canada as residential schools), if students used their indigenous language, they were punished and beaten. Sterud Miller explains that indigenous language revitalisation classes today not only teach the language, but also work to overcome the abuse that took place during the recent colonization of the PNW.
There is a wealth of information to be learned within the pages of this anthology and the contributions are exciting territory for future research programmes. But my overall impression is that more voices could have been included to really capture the diversity of the PNW. This is the area colonised last in both Canada and the United States. The further North you go, into Alaska and the Yukon, the later this colonisation occurred. This book is a welcome start toward reflecting the diversity of these voices, but it is not conclusive.
