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"Perley, Bernard C"
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Climate & Language
Rising ocean levels threaten entire communities with relocation. The continued erosion of Arctic coastlines due to melting ice sheets and thawing permafrost has forced Inuit communities to move to more secure locations. Each move dislodges Indigenous peoples and their languages from ancestral landscapes and ways of knowing, obligating communities to adopt colonial or majority languages. Scholars and activists have documented the intersections of climate change and language endangerment, with special focus paid to their compounding consequences. We consider the relationship between language and environmental ideologies, synthesizing previous research on how metaphors and communicative norms in Indigenous and colonial languages and cultures influence environmental beliefs and actions. We note that these academic discourses – as well as similar discourses in nonprofit and policy-making spheres – rightly acknowledge the importance of Indigenous thought to environmental and climate action. Sadly, they often fall short of acknowledging both the colonial drivers of Indigenous language “loss” and Indigenous ownership of Indigenous language and environmental knowledge. We propose alternative framings that emphasize colonial responsibility and Indigenous sovereignty. Finally, we reflect on emergent vitalities and radical hope in Indigenous language movements and climate justice movements.
Journal Article
Perplexities of Settler Colonial Folklore: Stripping for the Holidays
Folklore studies has a distinguished history that also includes unintended harms due to past practices. Folklorists have learned lessons from past practices and are actively engaged in meaningful and purposive methodologies of understanding and shared knowledge. A Native American perspective offers insights into past harms but does so in the service of respectful and responsive folklore studies. This essay introduces “Indian humor” via comic strips as a means for highlighting cross-cultural perplexities to promote mutual respect and understanding between settler colonial society and Native American communities.
Journal Article
Defying Maliseet Language Death
Published through theRecovering Languages and Literacies of the Americasinitiative, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Today, indigenous communities throughout North America are grappling with the dual issues of language loss and revitalization. While many communities are making efforts to bring their traditional languages back through educational programs, for some communities these efforts are not enough or have come too late to stem the tide of language death, which occurs when there are no remaining fluent speakers and the language is no longer used in regular communication. The Maliseet language, as spoken in the Tobique First Nation of New Brunswick, Canada, is one such endangered language that will either be revitalized and survive or will die off.
Defying Maliseet Language Deathis an ethnographic study by Bernard C. Perley, a member of this First Nation, that examines the role of the Maliseet language and its survival in Maliseet identity processes. Perley examines what is being done to keep the Maliseet language alive, who is actively involved in these processes, and how these two factors combine to promote Maliseet language survival. He also explores questions of identity, asking the important question: \"If Maliseet is no longer spoken, are we still Maliseet?\" This timely volume joins the dual issues of language survival and indigenous identity to present a unique perspective on the place of language within culture.
eBook
Indigenous Translocality: Emergent Cosmogonies in the New World Order
Indigenous peoples have endured the transformative processes of colonization that resulted in varying degrees of eradication, relocation, and transformation of their communities, ecosystems, and cosmogonies. Settler-colonial erasing of Indigenous worlds has initiated over 500 years of Indigenous translocalizing strategies that enabled surviving Indigenous communities to reconfigure ancestral worlds into contemporary emergent cosmogonies. These survival strategies offer the world's populations a hopeful model of adaptation to the looming catastrophes of global warming and environmental disasters. This article reconceptualizes translocality in order to offer a corrective imaginary to remediate the slow violence of colonial imaginaries of progress and to promote hopeful futures.
Journal Article
Responses to language endangerment : in honor of Mickey Noonan : new directions in language documentation and language revitalization
Language endangerment is a global tragedy that has prompted a surge in research and advocacy on behalf of those communities whose languages have been diagnosed as endangered. Indigenous languages in the Americas and Australia are the most at risk of becoming extinct by the end of this century. Graded scales from \"safe\" to \"extinct\" present diagnostic frames of reference that influence the kinds of approaches toward documentation and revitalization that community activists/advocates and language experts develop and initiate. Those languages deemed \"extinct\" and/or \"severely endangered\" are hampered by the prevailing metaphors that unduly constrain possible actions for language vitality. This paper offers a re-conceptualization of the metaphors regarding language endangerment away from \"death\" and \"extinct\" to \"sleeping\" and from documentation toward \"emergent vitalities\". This is especially critical for indigenous communities living in their ancestral homelands where remembering ancestral voices plays a significant role in possible futures for indigenous languages.
eBook
From Spoken Maliseet to Text
One day I watched students at Mah-Sos School come into their Maliseet language class carrying pencils because they had just come out of the French class. Sue asked why they had pencils, and they responded by saying that they were told they would need pencils “because they needed them for French. Sue replied that they did not need them for her class” (Perley fieldnotes, September 16, 1994).
Needing pencils for French class and their uselessness in Maliseet suggests more than just a literacy-orality dichotomy. French has been standardized, institutionalized, codified, and propagated through text for centuries. Maliseet, on the other
Book Chapter