Description
Book SynopsisLessons from Fort Apache is an ethnography of Indigenous language dynamics on the Fort Apache reservation in Arizona that reveals important implications for both North American and global concerns about language endangerment.
Trade Review“
Lessons from Fort Apache is an important book for people, both Native and non-Native, who are involved with language preservation, maintenance, and strengthening programs. Those working for language and culture revitalization will recognize many of the issues, problems, and glimmers of hope described. Those seeking to establish or become involved with such processes may find the insights of this work a welcome buffer against the first onslaughts of angst and self-doubt.”—Judith M. Maxwell,
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology“This is a beautifully crafted ethnography that tells the reader much about the complicated terrain upon which contemporary Indigenous language practices subsist. It challenges the reader to question her everyday assumptions about language, American Indianness, and survival. It also demands that the reader reconsider ideas of advantage and salvation that underscore mainstream, institutionally driven interventions and to ask, what are we saving and for whom?”—Barbra A. Meek,
Language in Society“Nevins argues persuasively that linguists who hope to propagate an endangered language through documentation and the creation of teaching materials must find ways of partnering with centers of linguistic and pedagogical authority that already exist inside the community, and not expect to replace those voices with their own. . . . This realistic, thoughtful study should be regarded as obligatory reading for any linguist genuinely concerned with endangered language maintenance and revitalization.”—Edward Vajda,
Choice“[Nevins] brings renewed relevance to Apache texts collected in an earlier era by Harry Hoijer. . . . [This is] an extended ethnographic analysis of Apache interactions with non-Apache people and practices that has implications for cultural interventions of any kind in Apache communities. At its highest level, the book is a demonstration of ‘the generativity of otherness.’”—Lise Dobrin, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Virginia
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Indigenous Languages and the Mediation of Communities
3. Learning to Listen: Coming to Terms with Conflicting Meanings of Language Loss
4. They Live in Lonesome Dove: English in Indigenous Places
5. Stories in the Moment of Encounter: Documentation Boundary Work
6. What No Coyote Story Means: The Borderland Genre of Traditional Storytelling
7. "Some 'No No' and Some 'Yes'": Silence, Agency, and Traditionalist Words
8. Sustainability: Possible Socialities of Documentation and Maintenance
Appendix A: Lawrence Mithlo
Appendix B: Eva Lupe on Her Early Life
Index
