[Linganth] 2nd CFP AAA 2025 Language, Environment, and Changing Climates: New Approaches to Language Reclamation

Tue Apr 1 18:01:35 UTC 2025

Dear all, We are looking for 1-2 more people for our panel. Please see the
details below.

Best,
Jacqueline & Georgia

--
Jacqueline Messing, Ph.D.
Lecturer, Department of Anthropology
University of Maryland-College Park
https://umcp.academia.edu/JacquelineMessing
X/Blsky @jacqmessing <https://twitter.com/>

On Mon, Mar 24, 2025 at 9:04 AM Georgia Ennis <gennis at email.wcu.edu> wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
> Jacqueline Messing and I are co-organizing a panel at the intersection of
> language reclamation and the environment, broadly understood, for AAA 2025
> (abstract below). If you are working on related topics, please email us an
> abstract of no more than 1500 characters (inclusive of spaces) by April 5,
> 2025.
>
> Very best,
>
> Georgia and Jacqueline
>
>
> Language, Environment, and Changing Climates: New Approaches to Language
> Reclamation
> Organizers: Georgia Ennis (Western Carolina University, *gennis at wcu.edu
> <gennis at wcu.edu>*) and Jacqueline Messing (University of Maryland-College
> Park, *jmessing at umd.edu <jmessing at umd.edu>**)*
>
> “Ñukanchi versianchi pishkugunara uyasha kushiyasha. [...] Chimi kuna
> uraskunaga, tukuy kasna llaktama wawauna yachasha, chita mana riksinun.” … *Before,
> when we heard the birds, we sang with happiness. Today, our children don’t
> know those things because they study in town. * -M.A. Shiguango (Napo
> Kichwa, 2016)
> *
> Tlaoltzintli: “…Tehuatzin, titlamatiliztli, teotlahtoltzin,
> titetlapohualiz, tixochitlahtoltzin.”* Maize: You (hon.) are myth,
> prayer, legend, you are poetry*. -Ethel Xochitiotzin Pérez (Tlaxcalan
> Nahuatl) * “No quiero que muera nunca el lenguaje del maíz y de la milpa”*I
> don’t ever want the death of the language of maize and the cornfield…*(Youth
> award-winner, Tlaxcala, 2022).
>
> Around the world, linguistic and environmental knowledge are intimately
> bound. Through language people apprehend the material world, communicate
> with animate places, beings, and spirits, and transmit stories that capture
> underlying environmental ontologies. The transformation of natural
> ecologies can have profound effects on a community’s vocabulary and
> ethnoecological learning opportunities, as well as other forms of engaging
> and understanding the nature of the world. In many colonial and
> postcolonial settings, the attempted separation of Indigenous peoples from
> their lifeways has included theft of local knowledge, land, and the
> languages through which that land was named and known. Agricultural
> systems, food ways, ethnobotanical knowledge, medicinal practices, and
> spiritual and philosophical systems are found at the intersection of
> linguistic and environmental knowledge. Interruption of Indigenous language
> transmission has also involved interruption of land-based relationships and
> knowledge.
>
> Indigenous activists and language promoters have increasingly linked
> reclamation of land and language in the pursuit of recognition and
> sovereignty. As Mel Engman and Mary Hermes have suggested, “local land is
> central to ways of knowing and being, thus it is also central to learning”
> (Engman and Hermes 2021). Yet, language revitalization practices and
> materials are often haunted by colonial language ideologies and ways of
> knowing that focus almost entirely on reconstructing a grammar. In some
> cases, language is reduced to code, rather than being viewed as a complex,
> embodied means of knowing and engaging. In contrast, in the Americas and
> elsewhere, language promoters and local culture revivalists alike are
> increasingly connecting their activism to broad environmental and climate
> change concerns. They are reclaiming and reanimating environmental and
> linguistic practice as shared goals. Such activities surface in narratives,
> conversations, meeting data, and contemporary media production, pointing
> towards more expansive approaches to reclaiming language and culture, based
> on community needs and perspectives (Leonard 2012).
>
> In this panel we seek to open a conversation among linguistic and other
> anthropological colleagues who are exploring:
>
>
>    - The interface of environmental and linguistic change.
>    -  The reclamation of traditional ecological knowledge adjacent to
>    language practices.
>    - (Socio)linguistic data within an environmental context.
>    - Indigenizing and/or decolonial perspectives on environmental,
>    communication and/or semiotic patterns.
>    - Emerging and preliminary studies of embodied linguistic and
>    environmental practices, including culinary health and gendered knowledge.
>    - Indigenous/Native worldviews on healing and environment.
>    - Cultural and heritage-based framings for sustainable agricultural
>    projects and community-tourism initiatives; the various collaborations
>    between Indigenous and environmental activists.
>    - The (linguistic) responses of Indigenous and other oppressed
>    communities to settings of environment injustice.
>
>
> *Selected References*
>
> Chiblow, Susan, and Paul J. Meighan. 2022. “Language Is Land, Land Is
> Language: The Importance of Indigenous Languages.” *Human Geography* 15
> (2): 206–10. <https://doi.org/10.1177/19427786211022899>*https://doi.org/10.1177/19427786211022899
> <https://doi.org/10.1177/19427786211022899>*.
>
> Engman, Mel M., and Mary Hermes. 2021. “Land as Interlocutor: A Study of
> Ojibwe Learner Language in Interaction on and With Naturally Occurring
> ‘Materials.’” *The Modern Language Journal* 105 (S1): 86–105.
> <https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12685>*https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12685
> <https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12685>*.
>
> Ennis, Georgia. 2025. “Reweaving Language and Lifeways in the Western
> Amazon.” * American Indian Culture and Research Journal* 48 (1).
> <https://doi.org/10.17953/A3.2584>*https://doi.org/10.17953/A3.2584
> <https://doi.org/10.17953/A3.2584>*.
>
> Kroskrity, P. V. 2023. Multilingual Language Ideological Assemblages:
> Language Contact, Documentation and Revitalization. *Journal of Language
> Contact*, *15*(2), 271-301. *https://doi.org/10.1163/19552629-15020002
> <https://doi.org/10.1163/19552629-15020002>*
>
> Leonard, Wesley. 2012. “Framing Language Reclamation Programmes for
> Everybody’s Empowerment.” *Gender and Language* 6 (2): 339–67.
> <https://doi.org/doi:%2010.1558/genl.v6i2.339>*https://doi.org/doi:
> 10.1558/genl.v6i2.339 <https://doi.org/doi:%2010.1558/genl.v6i2.339>*.
>
> Meek, Barbra A. 2017. “Native American Languages and Linguistic
> Anthropology:  From the Legacy of Salvage Anthropology to the Promise of
> Linguistic Self-Determination” IN Engaging Native American Publics:
> Linguistic Anthropology in a Collaborative Key. Edited by Paul V.
> Kroskrity, Barbra A. Meek. London: Routledge.
>
> Messing, Jacqueline and Refugio Nava Nava. 2016. “Language Acquisition,
> Shift, and Revitalization in Latin America and the Caribbean In Indigenous
> Language Revitalization in the Americas”, 76-96, edited by T. McCarty and
> S.Coronel-Molina. London: Routledge.
>
> Muehlmann, Shaylih Ryan. 2016. “‘Languages Die like River’s: Entangled
> Endangerments in the Colorado Delta.” In *Endangerment, Biodiversity and
> Culture*, edited by Fernando Vidal and Nélia Dias, 41–61. London:
> Routledge.
>
> Perley, Bernard. 2013. “Remembering Ancestral Voices: Emergent Vitalities
> and the Future of Indigenous Languages.” In *Studies in Language
> Companion Series*, edited by Elena Mihas, Bernard Perley, Gabriel
> Rei-Doval, and Kathleen Wheatley, 142:243–70. Amsterdam: John Benjamins
> Publishing Company. <https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.142.13per>*https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.142.13per
> <https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.142.13per>*.
> Shulist, Sarah. 2023. “Ideology and Practice in Academic Approaches to
> Language Revitalization.” *Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology.* *https://oxfordre.com/anthropology/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190854584.001.0001/acrefore-9780190854584-e-601
> <https://oxfordre.com/anthropology/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190854584.001.0001/acrefore-9780190854584-e-601>*
> .
> Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2017. “Land as Pedagogy.” In *As We Have
> Always Done*, 145–74. Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance.
> University of Minnesota Press. <https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt1pwt77c.12>*https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt1pwt77c.12
> <https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt1pwt77c.12>*.
>
> Wildcat, Matthew, Mandee McDonald, Stephanie Irlbacher-Fox, and Glen
> Coulthard. 2014. “Learning from the Land: Indigenous Land Based Pedagogy
> and Decolonization.” *Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society* 3
> (3).
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Georgia Ennis (she/her/hers)
> Assistant Professor
> Department of Anthropology and Sociology
> Western Carolina University
> http://georgiaennis.com
>
> New book: *Rainforest Radio
> <https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/rainforest-radio>*
> <https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/rainforest-radio>(April 2025,
> University of Arizona Press)
> New special issue: "Language Lives in Unexpected Places
> <https://escholarship.org/uc/aicrj/48/1>" (co-edited with Erin
> Debenport), *American Indian Culture and Research Journal *(48,1)
>
>
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