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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