By Sarah Danielzadeh
When colonists forced Indigenous people off their lands to learn English, many Native Americans complied in order to survive, not because they wanted to abandon their languages, says Tasha Hauff, a UCLA scholar of Indigenous languages.
In recent decades, Native communities in North America and around the world have been working to revitalize their ancestral languages, but vestiges of colonialism persist whether it be micro-aggressions, building oil pipelines on Native lands, erasing Native history in textbooks, or a general lack of funding and resources.
Tasha Hauff , a post-doctoral fellow at UCLA, is a Mnikȟowozu Lakȟota scholar, teacher, and language activist.
“When discussing Native American language loss and revitalization, it is irresponsible to not acknowledge and highlight the relationship of linguicide at the hands of settler society and the dispossession of Native lands,” Hauff told a UC Santa Barbara audience last week.
There were once more than 300 Indigenous languages spoken in the United States, and approximately 175 remain today, according to the Indigenous Language Institute. It also estimates that without restoration efforts, there will be at most 20 still spoken in 2050.
In honor of Indigenous Peoples’ Week, UCSB’s Linguistics department hosted Hauff, a Mnikȟowožu Lakȟota scholar, teacher, and language activist. Hauff said that to revitalize Indigenous languages, we must break down the colonial systems and attitudes that continue to subjugate Native peoples.
One way she does this is through community-based research practices that engage researchers and community members equitably in all aspects of the research process.
And she believes an interdisciplinary approach is called for. “As a scholar, I bring together fields of applied linguistics, education and Native American studies in order to document, analyze and push forward processes of Indigenous language revitalization,” Hauff said.
She is currently working on a book titled Speaking Sovereign: Language Revitalization and Education on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. It examines grassroots efforts to revitalize Native language in one rural reservation community.
Hauff helped lead the Lakota Language Capacity Building Initiative at Sitting Bull College in North Dakota. The project offers intense Lakota/Dakota language instruction to adult members of the Standing Rock community.
A ctizenship ritual for Native Americans of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in Fort Yates, North Dakota, on December 18, 1917. Photo by Frank Fiske
Hauff employs what she calls “language ecology,” which studies language in relation to its environment. At Standing Rock, where Hauff works with members of the Sioux Reservation, she says the language ecology is “settler colonialism.” To revitalize languages at Standing Rock and other communities, she probes the relationships of these languages to particular Native lands and their original inhabitants.
An Indigenous child protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016. Photo by Tiffany Baker
Hauff says settler colonialism aimed to eliminate the Native. The boarding school system was a major factor of language loss in communities. “In 1868, boarding schools became a policy in which Native children were taken by colonial powers and shipped to schools where they were taught not to speak their languages,” she said. The end goal was to swap Indigenous languages for English so that Native Americans who held on to their culture would consider themselves as “barbarous savages.”
She views that settler activity as “a structure, not an event,” meaning it is not just something Indigenous people can easily move past, but continues to reverberate in today’s environment. Hauff gave the example of the Dakota Access Pipeline, a modern-day structure that is a direct product of settler colonialism that continues to affect the community today.
Hauff reminded her Zoom audience that the modern-day structure of colonialism only fails when activists keep up their resistance on behalf of Indigenous groups and their Native languages. “We know that it [colonialism] fails because I am here talking to you,” Hauff said.
And she stressed that Indigenous languages connect and strengthen specific Native identities that are unique to particular territories. Non-capitalist, non-patriarchal cultures differ from the white worldview and reinforce claims to land, Hauff said. “Language becomes a very important battleground when it comes to dispossession of land.”
Sarah Danielzadeh is a fourth year English major and Professional Writing minor. She is a Web and Social Media intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.