Language Planning and Policy in Native America: History, Theory, Praxis

Comprehensive in scope and rich in detail, this book explores language planning, language education, and language policy for diverse Native American peoples across time, space, and place. Based on long-term collaborative and ethnographic work with Native American communities and schools, the book examines the imposition of colonial language policies against the fluorescence of contemporary community-driven efforts to revitalize threatened mother tongues. Here, readers will meet those who are on the frontlines of Native American language revitalization every day. As their efforts show, even languages whose last native speaker is gone can be reclaimed through family-, community-, and school-based language planning. Offering a critical-theory view of language policy, and emphasizing Indigenous sovereignties and the perspectives of revitalizers themselves, the book shows how language regenesis is undertaken in social practice, the role of youth in language reclamation, the challenges posed by dominant language policies, and the prospects for Indigenous language and culture continuance current revitalization efforts hold.

Teresa L. McCarty is the George F. Kneller Chair in Education and Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Alice Wiley Snell Professor Emerita of Education Policy Studies at Arizona State University. An educational anthropologist and applied linguist, she has worked with Indigenous education programs throughout North America. Her books include A Place To Be Navajoâ€＂Rough Rock and the Struggle for Self-Determination in Indigenous Schooling (2002); Language, Literacy, and Power in Schooling (2005); ’To Remain an Indian’€ Lessons in Democracy from a Century of Native American Education (with K. T. Lomawaima, 2006), and Ethnography and Language Policy (Routledge, 2011).