The experiences of a community of people learning and teaching Lenape in Pennsylvania provide insights into the complexities of current ways of talking and acting about language reclamation. We illustrate how Native and non-Native... more
The experiences of a community of people learning and teaching Lenape in Pennsylvania provide insights into the complexities of current ways of talking and acting about language reclamation. We illustrate how Native and non-Native participants in a university-based Indigenous language class constructed language, identity and place in nuanced ways that, although influenced by essentializing discourses of language endangerment, are largely pluralist and reflexive. Rather than counting and conserving fixed languages, the actors in this study focus on locally appropriate language education, undertaken with participatory classroom discourses and practices. We argue that locally responsible, participatory educational responses to language endangerment such as this, although still rare in formal higher education, offer a promising direction in which to invest resources.
The experiences of a community of people learning and teaching Lenape in Pennsylvania provide insights into the complexities of current ways of talking and acting about language reclamation. We illustrate how Native and non-Native... more
The experiences of a community of people learning and teaching Lenape in Pennsylvania provide insights into the complexities of current ways of talking and acting about language reclamation. We illustrate how Native and non-Native participants in a university-based Indigenous language class constructed language, identity and place in nuanced ways that, although influenced by essentializing discourses of language endangerment, are largely pluralist and reflexive. Rather than counting and conserving fixed languages, the actors in this study focus on locally appropriate language education, undertaken with participatory classroom discourses and practices. We argue that locally responsible, participatory educational responses to language endangerment such as this, although still rare in formal higher education, offer a promising direction in which to invest resources.
This is the Lenape Talking Dictionary as it looked in 2009. It is a dictionary of Lenape words and sound files so that it is in fact a dictionary that talks. The people who call themselves Lenape, whose name means "The People" are perhaps... more
This is the Lenape Talking Dictionary as it looked in 2009. It is a dictionary of Lenape words and sound files so that it is in fact a dictionary that talks. The people who call themselves Lenape, whose name means "The People" are perhaps better known as the Delaware Indians because at the time of the arrival of the white people they were living along the Delaware River in New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania. Since then they were pushed into western Pennsylvania, then northeastern Ohio, then Central Indiana, Missouri, Kansas, and finally Oklahoma where their tribal headquarters is now located in Bartlesville, a city just about 50 miles north of Tulsa.
