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

[Georgia Ennis]

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<mailto:gennis at wcu.edu>) and Jacqueline Messing (University of Maryland-College Park, jmessing at umd.edu<mailto: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.
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 The reclamation of traditional ecological knowledge adjacent to language practices.
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(Socio)linguistic data within an environmental context.
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Indigenizing and/or decolonial perspectives on environmental, communication and/or semiotic patterns.
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Emerging and preliminary studies of embodied linguistic and environmental practices, including culinary health and gendered knowledge.
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Indigenous/Native worldviews on healing and environment.
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Cultural and heritage-based framings for sustainable agricultural projects and community-tourism initiatives; the various collaborations between Indigenous and environmental activists.
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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.

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.

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.

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

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.
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.
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.

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).





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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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