Meet our Keynote speaker, Dr. Sheilah Nicholas
Sheilah E. Nicholas is a member of the Hopi Tribe located in Arizona. She is a Professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Sociocultural Studies (TLSS) at the University of Arizona (UA). She teaches courses in Indigenous Culture-Based Education, Language and Culture, Oral Traditions, Language Minority Education, and Teacher Research. She is also a Faculty Instructor for the American Indian Language Development Institute (AILDI) and Immersion Instructor-Consultant for the Indigenous Language Institute, Sante Fe, NM. Her scholarship and research focus includes: Indigenous/Hopi language maintenance and reclamation, Indigenous language ideologies and epistemologies, the intersection of language, culture and identity, and Indigenous language teacher education. Her publications draw on her dissertation, “Becoming ‘Fully’ Hopi: The Role of the Hopi Language in the Contemporary Lives of Hopi Youth—A Hopi Case Study of Language Shift and Vitality” and her work with the Hopi Tribe’s Hopilavayi Summer Institute for Hopi language teachers (2004-2010). Along with colleagues Dr. Teresa McCarty and Dr. Michael Seltzer at UCLA and Dr. Tiffany Lee at UNM, she is the UA Co-PI of a national study, “Indigenous-Language Immersion and Native American Student Achievement” funded by the Spencer Foundation. Her own upcoming research will engage a Hopi community school in a self-study regarding the role of schools in language reclamation efforts.
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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