This thesis provides a comprehensive account of the intonational phonology of Lakota, an indigenous North American language of the Siouan family. Lakota is predominantly a verb final language, characterized by complex verbal morphology. The phonological description of Lakota intonation and prosody presented here is based on acoustic analysis of…

Drawing on evidence from indigenous language immersion programs in the United States, this article makes the case that these immersion programs are vital to healing the negative effects of colonialism and assimilationist schooling that have disrupted many indigenous homes and communities. It describes how these programs are furthering efforts to…

At first glance, Miami University in southwestern Ohio seems an unlikely spot for a major American Indian language and cultural preservation and revitalization project. There are no reservations in the state, nor is there a significant American Indian population. Yet, Miami University houses the Myaamia Project, a unique collaboration between…

Many commercial images and names linked to Native Americans are created for and perpetuated by popular culture and stem from past linguistic usage. In this article the authors present a case study of the questionable naming and the quiet, almost unnoticed, righting of a name for a Native derived garment in the American clothing industry, the…

Arming themselves with "manifest destiny" rhetoric, which claimed divine Anglo-Saxon superiority as justification for the conquest of Indigenous and Mexican peoples and the land they occupied, white settlers forcefully pushed into California territory. The two-year-long Mexican-American War resulted in the acquisition of the present-day…

In line with a broader Latin American turn to the left, since 2006 Bolivia's "politics of change" of president Evo Morales includes a new "decolonising" education reform called "Avelino Sinani Elizardo Perez" (ASEP). With the aim to break down deep historical processes of indigenous denial and exclusion in education,…

On a chilly Toronto evening in November 2005, an envelope was opened in a darkened auditorium, and the words spoken reached out across the land to Muskoday First Nation in Saskatchewan. No doubt Lindsay Knight's family was watching the televised Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards that night and would have felt elated to hear her being honored with…

This article investigates discourses of intercultural education, taking as its starting point two "encounters" in 2010 with contrasting aims and expectations of intercultural education. One is the launch of the 2010 Global Monitoring Report, where intercultural education is viewed as a means of overcoming marginalisation and promoting…

While radio personality Will Rogers's pioneering role in radio is obvious (he worked in the medium during its earliest years), its connections to Cherokee and other tribal technologies have been neglected. This failure to recognize Rogers's part in this particular strain of Cherokee history is a symptom of a larger cultural illness in the United…

In this discussion of a set of studies that fits the trope of "Indian Languages in Unexpected Places," I explore the obvious necessity of developing a relevant notion of linguistic "leakage" following a famous image from the writings of the linguistic anthropologist Edward Sapir. Though in its original use, the concept applied more to the order of…

Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine in "Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World's Languages" state that indigenous peoples represent about 4 percent of the world's population but speak at least 60 percent of the world's languages. They point out the reality of an ominous linguistic crisis of global proportions--languages die and continue to…

There is no "typical" rural teacher. But wherever rural teachers are, they struggle against mighty forces, and they often struggle alone. This article provides a glimpse into the lives of three teachers in diverse, far-flung settings: Haralson County High School in northern Georgia, Red Cloud Indian School on the Pine Ridge Reservation…

Despite having been immersed in the Hopi culture throughout their lives, many of today's Hopi youth do not understand or speak their heritage language. This article highlights the notion of "affective enculturation"--the development of an emotional commitment to Hopi ideals--cultivated through the myriad practices that comprise the Hopi oral…

In this paper, we share phenomena experienced by a multi-cultural research team working collaboratively with Wolastoq (Maliseet) First Nations Elders to document rapidly disappearing Wolastoq language, culture, and knowledge. This knowledge will ultimately be stored in databanks for future educational, community, and heritage use. Embedded within…

For the state of Washington's one-hundredth birthday, in 1989, Native peoples there decided to revive a distinctive mode of transportation--long-distance journeys by canoe--along with an entire culture associated with it. Born as the "Paddle to Seattle," during the past two decades these canoe journeys have become a summertime staple for…