Many theoretical models of second or additional language learning posit a crucial role for meaningful social interaction in the target language. However, it is not always clear to language educators how to create such opportunities or what counts as meaningful interaction. This can become even more difficult when the target language is an…

For over thirty years, a political and social battle over bilingual education raged in the U.S. and in and around the Crow Indian Reservation of Montana. This book, a period piece rich in political, historical, and local western context, is the story of language, education, inequality and power clashes between the dominant society and the Indian…

Indigenous women stand in solidarity on the frontline of refusal, protecting their ancestral homelands and their ways of life across North America and beyond. The Indigenous stand-off at Standing Rock in opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline inspires this photo series of vignettes where Indigenous voices accompany images of Indigenous women in…

With the (re-)discovery and gradual transcription and translation of native-language primary sources in the twentieth century, a new branch of Mexican ethnohistory developed around Mesoamerican native-language research. This scholarship has profoundly reshaped the understanding of a history that for centuries had followed a Eurocentric paradigm.…

Territorial acknowledgments of Indigenous peoples, places, and settler-colonial histories have become a common practice among settlers in Canadian universities and activist spaces. While these territorial acknowledgments are assumed to be a move toward reconciliation, no research examines what the practice accomplishes pedagogically amongst…

This article looks at the web comments to two video clips posted on YouTube in 2014. One video features the song 'Sangre Maya', by Pat Boy and El Cima, two Maya rappers from the Yucatán peninsula of Mexico. The other song is called 'Rap de la Tierra' and is performed by Luanko, a Mapuche rapper from Santiago in Chile. First, I discuss significant…

This dissertation examines individual, constricted agency in a multilingual environment within the context of a language discussion group and the form of social capital possessed by their Mexican Indigenous diasporic community living on the California Central Coast. The research is based on participant-observation ethnographic work with a language…

Scholars acknowledge that Indigenous Latinx immigrants' complex process of adapting to life in the United States, or incorporation, differs from that of their non-Indigenous counterparts. Understanding these differences is especially important as arrivals of Indigenous refugees and asylum seekers from Central America have increased steadily over…

This article addresses the invisibilization of the existence of indigenous teachers in the Colombian ELT (English language teaching) field. Their existence, which is admittedly a phenomenon that lacks quantitative saliency, offers opportunities to reflect on the epistemological asymmetries that traditionally have linked the Colombian ELT field to…

The aim of this chapter is to take a critical and decolonial stance towards the experiences of Indigenous people in the urban diasporas of Brazil. We do this by discussing ethnographic data that provide insights into the impact of this migration on the construction of the identities of Indigenous Brazilians who move to urban spaces and consider…

Previous studies have shown that language contributes to humans' ability to orient using landmarks and shapes their use of frames of reference (FoRs) for memory. However, the role of environmental experience in shaping spatial cognition has not been investigated. This study addresses such a possibility by examining the use of FoRs in a nonverbal…

This paper explores the sociolinguistic practices of a group of young bilingual rappers in the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. Against the background of ongoing language shift to Spanish in the region, the language choices of a group of Maya youths involved in Hip Hop culture and their agency as policy-makers at the grassroots level is analysed.…

This paper explores the production of new meanings linked to written practices in the Wichi language in the Impenetrable Chaqueño (Argentina). Through collaborative ethnography examining different collective experiences and points of view, we study changes in writing in connection with changes in the access, distribution and availability of…

Categorization of objects' parts varies across human populations. This dissertation provides evidence that the linguistic and non-linguistic aspects of this categorization are closely linked. English speakers apply mostly terms with abstract geometrical meaning, like "top," to the parts of any arbitrary object. However, in the languages…

This article describes how cellphone technology, specifically cellphilms -- films of varying lengths made with cellphones by everyday people -- are being taken up in the community of Union Hidalgo as a platform to foster an intergenerational dialogue between youth and Elders, with the specific goal of preserving the Zapotec language and ancestral…