Book Review: We Are Our Language: An Ethnography of Language Revitalization in a Northern Athabaskan Community

We Are Our Language: An Ethnography of Language Revitalization in a Northern Athabaskan Community, Barbra A. Meek, 2011. University of Arizona Press: Arizona. 202 pages, illustrations, photographs, appendix, and index included. $29.95. Paperback. In recent years, the declining state of the world's indigenous languages has warranted an urgent need to revisit those ethnographies which have made valuable contributions to the global understanding of intersectional vulnerability. This increasingly relevant text, published several years ago, is the topic of this review because it provides an essential vantage point into a community affected by the institutional disruption of linguistic autonomy. Not only does Meek provide a framework through which to understand the linguistic issues impacting a native community, but she also provides a brief context to discuss what it means to be positioned within a community as a female ethnographer. She notes in the preface that her ethnographic positioning as a woman within the community allowed her to engage more fully with the direct experiences and social knowledge of other women: ... my gender and the nature of my research led me to work primarily with women and not men. Being female, I was expected to work with and learn from women. Researching child rearing and language development also predisposed me to work with mothers and women involved in raising children. Hence, women were my socially appropriate teachers. (Meek, 2011: xvi) This suggests that there are still existing gender gaps surrounding research methodology, and that these gaps may be related directly to the type of data that is transmitted to the gendered ethnographer in various sociocultural settings. She notes that an elder told her that It is important that there are men teaching the boys, and women teaching the girls. (Meek, 2011: xvi) This is an interesting note, and addresses a significant occurrence of gender-based transmission in the context of interactional practice. This text is relevant to today's audience because it addresses the increasing concerns about the vitality of indigenous languages, as well as addressing the multiple and intersecting layers of marginalization affecting the social experiences of native people in everyday life. In this moving ethnography, Barbra Meek writes about her work with the shifting sociolinguistic landscape of the Kaska language. This ethnography is the result of extensive linguistic anthropological fieldwork in the Yukon territory of western Canada and British Columbia. Meek writes specifically on the contemporary disjuncture in a native community between what is known and what is spoken. She incorporates data to show that in-home use of Kaska has decreased, despite the evidence that more about the language is known than is communicated. She writes that this silence is largely in relation to the attempted erasure and extermination of indigenous social and linguistic identities through government-implemented boarding schools existing up until 1975. This work is particularly compatible with the writing of Susan Gal, and explores in some ways how the use of silence in relation to the mother tongue can be symbolic and representative of the effects of social oppression: Indeed, it is in part through such linguistic practices that speakers within institutions impose on others their group's definition of events, people and actions. This ability to make others accept and enact one's representation of the world is another aspect of symbolic domination. But such cultural power rarely goes uncontested. Resistance to a dominant cultural order occurs when devalued linguistic strategies and genres are practiced and celebrated despite widespread denigration; it occurs as well when these devalued practices propose or embody alternate models of the social world. (Gal, 1989: 3) Meek introduces the reader to the choices that are made, both for and by native people, about the usage of a language that is simultaneously viewed as both heritage and obstacle. …

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