Up until the last decade most of the research and scholarship on indigenous issues has been framed by ideas of ‘loss’ and ‘endangerment’. This framing presupposes an inevitable disappearance, an inevitability that is beyond repair such that indigenous peoples appear as helpless, ineffective participants observing their own (cultural, linguistic, territorial, etc.) demise. More recently, a reorientation toward survival and renewal has emerged accompanied by an ethnographic approach that privileges indigenous participation and collaboration and recognizes the complex social realities mediating existence. Rarely does an ethnography untangle the complexities of this existence in such a novel and convincing way. Nevins has achieved this through a sustained engagement with Bauman and Briggs' (Reference Bauman and Briggs2003) treatise on modernity complemented by her own ethnographic insights. The introduction opens with the striking juxtaposition of two quotes, one from UNESCO and the other from Gerald Vizenor, a well-known Anishinaabe scholar. It is a juxtaposition that frames the entire ethnography, the tensed balancing of local culture encompassed by an opposing (predatory) national one that articulates and recognizes (Native) difference in ways that are antagonistic, if not outwardly opposed. Through an investigation of such tensions among residents of the Fort Apache reservation in Arizona around the Apache language, Nevins brings into relief the ‘covert politics of language documentation and maintenance’ (p. 2). What is especially refreshing about her approach to these politics is her own enfigurement. While linguists working in endangered-language contexts recognize the political dimensions of these contexts and write about how to conduct language-endangerment research with indigenous communities (e.g. Austin & Sallabank Reference Austin and Sallabank2014; Bowern Reference Bowern2015), Nevins demonstrates the relevance of the particular ways she was recognized for understanding community politics and their impact on language practices. She assumed that any authority she might claim was not necessarily predicated on her external institutional affiliation(s) but on local institutional procedures and protocols. Similarly, her insights emerged from listening rather than speaking, and her ethnography aims to provide a model for listening ‘to diverse community voices [in order] to anticipate processes of (creative) misrecognition in indigenous language advocacy’ (p. 3). To that end, Nevins sets out by re-framing community ambivalence around heritage aboriginal language-documentation efforts as an ethnographic issue of ‘social relations of speaking’. Each subsequent chapter carefully unpacks these relations by moving between on-the-ground language dynamics and encompassing sociopolitical orders, beginning with an interrogation of scholarly concepts of endangerment, maintenance, and indigeneity.
Chapter 2 opens with an episode wherein Nevins was directed to stop all work on the Ndee Biyati’ Apache language project, a project run by a tribal office and directed by tribal members with the goal of creating language materials to be stored and accessed through the tribe's server. She argues that ambivalence in community reception of indigenous-language advocacy efforts should be expected ‘because it is not at all trivial to the political role of research and maintenance programs’ (p. 4). As the later chapters demonstrate, language is immersed in contradictions and a range of social encumbrances, not least of which is the process of political integration into a national regime. For indigenous peoples, this integration is primarily one of differentiation and inequality. Furthermore, assimilation and calls to save endangered languages, Nevins claims, are comparable ‘modernist and nationalist devices of integration’ (p. 25), but they afford different possibilities. Calls to ‘save languages’—unlike earlier projects of assimilation—provide discursive alignments between indigenous groups and nation-states. They allow for expressions of mutual affiliation around what are seemingly alike, but in fact are nonidentical goals. Such phrases can facilitate collaborations but, as Nevins highlights, they ‘can also prevent [people] from recognizing their differences from one another’ (p. 35). Nevins argues that academic scholars need to understand and frame such research as a cultural encounter between state and tribe. In so doing, ambivalences and controversies can then reveal what is at stake for different participants, an issue to which the rest of the chapters turn.
The third chapter builds on these ambivalences and controversies by exploring in more ethnographic detail people's differing ideas about language loss at Fort Apache, revealing that some of the controversy arose as a result of different understandings of ‘language’, ‘standards’ of linguistic competence, pedagogical style, and authority. She examines a conflict around teaching Western Apache in schools (see also Nevins Reference Nevins2004). On the one side, support for teaching Apache in schools is an argument for raising the language's status and rendering it equivalent to English. On the other side, support against teaching Apache in schools is an argument about the contradictions between Apache pedagogical styles and generational relations of authority and the school's style and authority. The creation of a language preservation program led to conflict because of different understandings of what it meant to know and speak Apache and due to an asymmetry between educational institutions (teachers, linguists) and home environments (elders). Thus, to learn language and become a good speaker means to listen well and to participate in activities like bread-making or wood-chopping. In this case, language loss becomes attributable to the dispossession of authority (to teach language) rather than English media preferences or ‘disappearance’ (of language practices and fluent speakers). Furthermore, while educational language programs need to take into account local language ideologies, Nevins stresses that they must also locate language within expected ways of speaking and the social relations of speaking that resonate with the indigenous community being served.
In chapter 4, Nevins shifts attention to Western Apache place names. As with Nevins (Reference Nevins2008), this chapter gently interrupts scholarly trends that focus exclusively on indigenous language nomenclature at the level of code, overlooking linguistic patterns such as the use of English phrases for identifying neighborhoods. By attending to these patterns, Nevins carefully extends the genre of place-naming practices as discussed by Keith Basso (Reference Basso1996) to the ways in which people use English language discourse drawn from popular commercial media to name newly constructed residential areas on the Fort Apache reservation. Not only does she disrupt scholarly proclivities, but she also shows how these naming practices are not evidence of assimilation into English norms or of a shift to English. Rather, these naming practices illustrate the creative uses to which Fort Apache residents put popular media discourse in order to comment upon disjunctures posed by new housing developments. These are acts of community self-definition that confound expectations. Counter to earlier research, Nevins makes the point that English and Apache can belong to the same ‘cultural world’ rather than different ones. In so doing, she reveals how these playful names are commentaries upon ongoing changes in reservation life, on new residence patterns, and the lifestyles they accompany.
Chapter 5 examines the process of text collection between indigenous language speakers and nonindigenous linguists in documentary encounters. Here Nevins argues that the texts collected under the guise of ‘salvage’ documentation hold traces of indigenous perspectives that have gone under-recognized by the documentarians. Through the analysis of four rhetorical strategies deployed by two different Apache speakers at two different historical moments, Nevins shows that part of the interactional encounter between subject (indigenous speaker) and researcher involves subtle attempts to shift the researcher's perspective and the dominant institutional framing of the interaction. These encounters are negotiations over expectations of text, of relationship, and of socio-cultural boundaries.
In chapter 6 Nevins focuses on the socializing effects of storytelling practices and their significance for present and future generations. Building from Shirley Brice Heath's research on schools, literacy, and narrative in students’ lives, Nevins attends to the complicated life of Apache ‘traditional’ narratives across new and expanding encounters, from early documentary efforts of anthropologists (such as Hoijer) to more recent projects of institutionalization in schools and governments. Nevins analyzes the form of Coyote narratives in order to make evident the boundary-making work they entail. She accomplishes this in two ways. First she discusses the predicaments and buffoonery of Coyote's activities and how the voicing of these characters varies across storytellers. Second she analyzes the metapragmatic features (such as hearsay constructions) and repeated formulaic phrases. These features open up a space for the listener to come into their own ‘revelatory’ interpretation of the narrative. When such narratives are recontextualized within an institutional setting, Nevins suggests that their meaning and purpose become standardized in such a way that the ‘revelatory’ aspect gets erased and listeners’ expectations diminished.
Chapter 7 investigates how language articulates with religion at Fort Apache. Nevins shows that restrictions on language through religious prescriptivism do not necessarily negatively impact a language's vitality or hasten its demise. In fact, she argues that such contestations work to sustain a language, making it viable in new contexts. She focuses on two contemporary religious movements, Traditionalism and Independent Apache Christian Churches, and their use of Apache in their ceremonies and services. She shows that while leaders and members of these movements differ in their stances toward Traditionalist ceremony, they align in relation to ideas about appropriate Apache language usage in classroom settings and they both allow for the integration of Apache language as part of religious practice. Additionally, both movements situate authority over Apache language practices outside of dominant institutional domains and within spiritual leadership of their communities.
In her conclusion, Nevins argues for a re-orientation to language endangerment from one of documentation and preservation to one of sustainability. As with much of the recent scholarship in the areas of language revitalization and endangerment, Nevins proposes that this re-orientation happen in part through collaborative negotiation, through the recognition of different agendas, ontologies, and participants so that the boundaries and expectations remain flexible, though intact. That is, conceptions and assessments of success must emerge through these moments of encounter that engage indigenous languages rather than being imposed from elsewhere (as acts of dominion). Furthermore, she encourages attention to responses of pushback and friction because they will keep languages alive.
This is a beautifully crafted ethnography that tells the reader much about the complicated terrain upon which contemporary indigenous language practices subsist. It challenges the reader to question her everyday assumptions about language, American Indianness, and survival. It also demands that the reader reconsider ideas of advantage and salvation that underscore mainstream, institutionally driven interventions and to ask, what are we saving and for whom?
