Aboriginal Performance Cultures and Language Revitalization: Foundations, Discontinuities, and Possibilities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper address the question of how indigenous art and performance culture(s) can contribute to institutionalized language revitalization efforts in Canada, through their use of threatened indigenous languages. Drawing from a wide range of sources published between 1988 and 2014 by scholars, the Assembly of First Nations, departments and agencies of the Canadian government, and artistic practitioners, I illustrate the absence of performance from the available literature on language revitalization. By analyzing these documents thematically, I argue that a substantial shift occurred in the public discourse surrounding language revitalization between the 1980s and 1990s, and the mid- to late-2000s. Whereas scholarship and policy proposals published during the 1980s and 1990s were strongly influenced by Joshua Fishman’s research on language revitalization, public discourse a decade later framed language revitalization in the language of land claims. Following Glen Coulthard, I suggest that this shift should be understood as part of the broader emergence of a “politics of recognition” in Canadian discourse. At the level of Canadian and Aboriginal government policy, this discursive shift has left even less room for performance and theatre within the wider project of language revitalization. Insofar as the arts are a rich source of pedagogical material, my aim is to undermine the discursive impediments to their use by language educators and policy makers in the field of language revitalization.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".