The prediction for most Indigenous languages has been extinction. However, many Indigenous languages are still with us today, including some presumed to be gone. This means that someone somewhere has imagined a future for these languages, for current language users, and for future audiences. But, as with ideas of “success,” not all Indigenous language futures are unfolding in identical ways and not all paths lead to the same end or even to their own intended end. This talk is a reflection on the various efforts that have been imagined and implemented in order to predict and project a future for the Kaska (Dene/Athabaskan) language and some of the unexpected possible futures that have emerged along the way.
This event took place on March 2, 2016 in the First Nations Longhouse.
Speaker Biography
Barbra A. Meek is Associate Professor of Anthropology, Linguistics, and Native American Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and a Comanche citizen. Her research focuses on representations and performances of American Indian languages and speech, practically and theoretically. Much of her scholarship has focused on language endangerment and revitalization, having worked with First Nations in the Yukon Territory, Canada, on various aboriginal language projects since 1998. Her book, We Are Our Language: An Ethnography of Language Revitalization in a Northern Athabaskan Community (2010, University of Arizona Press) details this research and offers a socially grounded model for language revitalization. She continues to work with Kaska language teachers and advocates in their efforts to envision a future for the Kaska language. Her current book project is an edited volume with Paul Kroskrity on Native American publics and linguistic futures under contract with Routledge.
“Future Speakers” highlights both the struggles and the successes of Indigenous language revitalization and looks to a future where these languages are not only spoken, but thrive. The Museum of Anthropology, the First Nations and Indigenous Studies Program, the First Nations and Endangered Languages Program, the Department of Linguistics, and the Department of Anthropology present a new lecture series supported by the Dean of Arts, and in partnership with the First Nations House of Learning and the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, to spark a conversation about the futures of Indigenous languages in the 21st century.
Catherine took up the Deanship of the Peter A. Allard School of Law in July 2015. Professor Dauvergne has been working in the area of refugee, immigration, and citizenship law for twenty years. She has written three books that take a broad perspective on the theoretical underpinnings of these areas of law, including considering how human rights principles and discourses fit into a migration and citizenship framework. Dauvergne has recently held a major research grant examining the failure of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms to protect non-citizens. She is currently working on an Australian Research Council grant analyzing gendered aspects of refugee determination. From 2013 to 2015, Dauvergne was the Research Director for the Michigan Colloquium on Challenges to International Refugee Law. In 2012, Catherine Dauvergne was made a Fellow of the Trudeau Foundation in recognition of her contributions to public discourse in Canada. Her book The New Politics of Immigration and the End of Settler Societies will be published by Cambridge University Press early in 2016.
Dan Hiebert has two main research interests. The first, and most important to him, is international migration. At the broadest scale, this includes the issue of policy and regulatory systems and how they shape migration, and also how people become mobile, with or without the consent of states. Hiebert tries to understand Canadian immigration policy within this wider context, and consider it in relation to the policies of other countries, especially in Europe and Australasia. At the local scale he studies the consequences of immigration in Canadian cities, highlighting Vancouver’s situation (with a foreign-born population approaching one million). More specifically, he looks at the integration of newcomers in the labour and housing markets of cities, and how this changes their residential structure and social relations. This work is highly integrated with public policy, and Hiebert participates in advisory roles at the local and national level in Canada, and also has regular interaction with government agencies in several other countries. Second, he is working with a large network of scholars on the issue of national security and its relationship with human rights and is particularly interested in the way this relationship evolves in a society like Canada’s, with a high degree of ethno-cultural diversity and strong transnational connections.
Abstract