Meet our Keynote speaker, Dr. Sheilah Nicholas
Sheilah E. Nicholas is a member of the Hopi community in the Black Mesa region of Arizona. Dr. Nicholas is a professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Sociocultural Studies (TLSS), faculty instructor for the American Indian Language Development Institute (AILDI), and Director of a US Department of Education funded West Regional Language Resource Center at the University of Arizona (UAZ), Tucson. Her TLSS courses include Indigenous Culture-Based Education, Language and Culture, Oral Traditions, Language Minority Education, and
Teacher Research. Her AILDI summer courses focus on Indigenous language revitalization, the Oral Immersion approach to Indigenous language revitalization as well as outreach language teacher preparation professional development to tribal efforts in community and school-based language programs. Additionally, she provides Indigenous language immersion workshops on best practices for developing speaking competencies for community languages to tribal communities for the Indigenous Language Institute (ILI), Santa Fe, NM. Her work with the Hopi Tribe’s Hopilavayi Summer Institute for Hopi language teachers (2004-2010) continues to
inform her research and teaching trajectories.
Her research focus on Indigenous/Hopi language maintenance and reclamation, the intersection of language, culture and identity, and Indigenous language teacher education have been published in Journal of Language, Identity & Education, Native Studies Review Journal, and co-edited volume (2019), A World of Indigenous Languages: Politics, Pedagogies, and Prospects for Language Reclamation, Multilingual Matters. She is the UAZ Co-PI of a multi-university (UCLA and UNM) Spencer funded national study, “Indigenous-Language Immersion (ILI) and Native American Student Achievement” which will establish a national database of ILI programs and provide an in-depth comparison of immersion and nonimmersion schools to identify the conditions under which ILI is beneficial as an innovative education practice. Preliminary findings have been published in Comparative Education Review, Journal of Language, Identity & Education, and Wicazo Sa Review (forthcoming).
Keynote abstract
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Revitalizing Indigenous Languages as Indigenous Pedagogies of Hope
“Our languages are dynamic and adaptive” (2009). The words of the late Blackfeet language revitalization pioneer, Darrell Robes Kipp, continue to remind us that it is in our hands to cultivate language ideologies and practices that shape language use in revitalization/reclamation efforts in constantly changing and complex contexts of Indigenous communities. More urgently, in the midst of both natural and socially recurring chaotic events moving us toward global crisis fatigue underscores the ontological need to reset the course toward survival, healing, resurgence, and rebirth. Since time immemorial, Indigenous language work has been an incessant response and prayer to maintain and forward the Hopi concept of loloma—a good life, a peaceful way of life of balance and harmony. In this presentation, I engage in storying the multifaceted, multidimensional Indigenous language work as an active and dynamic movement in the present, and, as “a mobilization of a collective resurgence that we have embraced as our responsibility to enact in our time of Indigenous history. We all carry a responsibility for restoring balance and harmony” (Chew et. al, 2021, p. 369).
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