David Treuer's "Rez Life" on Native languages

David Treuer's new book Rez Life isn't about Alaska or even specifically about Native languages, but it's an excellent read and does have many implications for Alaska Native languages.

Much of the book is devoted to discussions of treaty rights and federal Indian policy. The account is very personal, intertwined with the author's own experiences growing up on Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota. Rather than dry legal reading, Treuer gives insights into landmark legal decisions through the eyes of real people. Such as Helen Bryant, whose case against the State of Minnesota arguing a $147 tax bill went all the way to the Supreme Court, which held that states do not have the right to assess tax on Native land. Or Jerry Mueller, a non-Native who was successfully convicted in Red Lake Tribal Court in 2006 for violating tribal fishing regulations. This is not the dry, dusty stuff of history books but rather the real stories of real people.

Language figures into the book only toward the end. Treuer is a speaker of Ojibwe, a language which has more than 50,000 speakers of several dialects in the US and Canada. Perhaps because of those large numbers Treuer at first seems fairly confident about the state of the language. The truth is perhaps more bleak, given that few of those 50,000 speakers are children. On the other hand, as Treuer points out, Ojibwe language revitalization efforts are among the most advanced in North America. Immersion schools such as Waadookodaading in Wisconsin are taking language and culture education into their own hands.

Treuer's writing reveals a gift for language more broadly, not just Native language. In the following passage he ties language to sovereignty:

"To claim that Indian cultures can continue without Indian languages only hastens our end, even if it makes us feel better about ourselves. Our cultures and our languages--as unique, identifiable, and particular entities--are linked to our sovereignty. If we allow our own wishful thinking and complacency to finish what George Armstrong Custer began, we will lose what we've managed to retain: our languages, land, institutions, ceremonies, and finally, ourselves. Cultural death matters because if the culture dies, we will have lost the chance not only to live on our own terms but also to live in our own terms."

The switch of preposition from on to in makes a nice twist. My Linguistics 101 textbook was wrong. Language isn't just about communication. Language is about the ability to live in one's own terms. Treuer continues even more poetically:

"If these words are lost, much will happen, but also very little will happen.... The languages we lose, when we lose them, are always replaced by other languages. And all languages get the job of life done. But something else might be lost and there might be more to the job of life than simply living it."

Well put. Linguists talk a lot about translational equivalence and how easy or not it is to express different thoughts in different languages. But in the end all languages really do "get the job of life done." And if all we want to do is just get it done, then that's fine. What Treuer reminds us is that there's more to it than just getting it done. That "more" is where Native languages come in.


See Treuer's website: http://www.davidtreuer.com/rezlife.html