Indigenous Voice: Language and Identity in America's Native Nations

Indigenous Voice:Language and Identity in America's Native Nations1 Anton Treuer, Professor of Ojibwe I was told to keep it short, a 20-minute talk, but they didn't say anything about using a foreign language like English.2 How strange that with the tens of thousands of years of documented human history in this part of the world we so often begin with the arrival of the first white guy. When you look at all the documented human history all the white guy stuff is statistically insignificant. I'm really happy to be here today. Where I come from people smarter, older, and wiser than me say, "When you go somewhere new you use our language first and foremost. You tell them your name and your clan and where you're from." So, I was just giving you a little Ojibwe introduction. My Native name is Waagosh, which means "Fox from the Eagle clan," and I'm from Leech Lake, which is in northern Minnesota. I am one of the very lucky people who gets to live and work around my home community. My family members have been buried in the very same plot of land longer than the American Philosophical Society has been in existence, and I get to live there and be there at the same time that I'm connected to the broader world and publish books and travel and so forth. I think this is one of the struggles that a lot of Indigenous communities are facing now. Of course, we are ancient and modern. We have struggles about everything, from economic vitality to political independence to even substance abuse, and at the same time we have to navigate the broader world and we have to code-switch to do it. At what point does the code-switching become assimilation? How much can a people change and still be the same people? And there's no such thing as the Native experience; there are many different Native experiences. There are some communities where Ojibwe is the language used in the population of speakers and it grows as the population grows, such as the southern region in Canada. And there are other communities where there are no living speakers of that given tribal language. There's [End Page 220] such a variety of experiences, historical and contemporary linguistic ones, that there's no way to encapsulate it all in a short talk like this. But I thought I'd give you a few thoughts about what's happening on the ground in some of these Native communities and how that really intersects, I think quite deeply, with the work of the APS. One of my elders back home passed away a few years ago. His name was Tom Stillday, and he was the first person named chaplain for the Minnesota State Senate who was not from a Judeo-Christian background. He would open up the State Senate with a feather war bonnet and his pipe, and he was a great hoot, too, because he'd say, "I'm praying for politicians, and boy do they need it more than ever these days." One time we brought him to Bemidji State University to give the graduation banquet speech, for which he broke all the rules for a graduation banquet speech, because those are to be short—a couple good jokes, focus on the students, etc. I think he was about an hour and a half into his remarks before he said his first words in English, which were, "All you people who study Indians, study that," and he went and sat down. I of course was highly entertained, but he had some really good points. So often the books that have been written about Native people have been written by non-Native people who have hardly talked to one. And then the sources that were used were usually from the army chaplain writing in his journal or something like that. They really don't have a lot of Native voices or perspectives. And from everything from the academic enterprise, to our contemporary efforts to develop anything from a suicide prevention plan to an economic development...

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