Comments on: Indigenous scholar resists language hegemony

By: Zoe Todd

Zoe Todd — Tue, 02 Jun 2015 04:24:32 +0000

These are all really good questions, ones being tangled with in various Universities and departments across Canada. I have a colleague who is pursuing her PhD research in nehiyawewin (Plains Cree), which fills me with immense joy. It really will depend on how we are able and willing to shift the systems of evaluation within the Canadian academy (and beyond). There are robust Indigenous language programs here in my hometown at the University of Alberta, run by Dorothy Thunder. Many people are studying nehiyawewin as part of their University studies at the University of Alberta as a result of this. And the CILLDI program (http://www.cilldi.ualberta.ca/) at the University of Alberta does immense amounts of work to revitalize Indigenous languages.

I don’t have the answers, but I’m incredibly interested in how we address the myriad issues you have identified above, and which scholars like Patrick Stewart have provoked us to address through their own approach to the form and presentation of the dissertation itself.

By: Zoe Todd

Zoe Todd — Tue, 02 Jun 2015 04:20:08 +0000

excellent–thanks for adding this clarification. And for adding the link to the dissertation itself. The National Post should know better…oh well.

By: Chad Nilep

Chad Nilep — Mon, 01 Jun 2015 01:01:56 +0000

Issues raised by this story are important and certainly worth discussing. The National Post story, however, turns out to be incorrect on some crucial details.

The dissertation never was written in Nisga’a. Stewart writes, “It was never my intention to write the dissertation in Nisga’a, though it may have been interesting to have done so, not unlike Fred Metallic (2010), who wrote and defended his dissertation in his Mi’gmaw language” (vii).

He also notes, “Though I cannot be considered in any way fluent in Nisga’a, I attempted to use the language in order to acknowledge my heritage and, more importantly, to strengthen the use of Nisga’a in the academy” (vi).

The dissertation is written in English, with key Nisga’a terms included in the text and then glossed in square brackets. It generally omits capital letters and periods, and uses some stylized type-setting in places, but it is entirely legible to English readers (at least, I’ve had no great difficulty with the parts I’ve read).

A PDF is available here: https://circle.ubc.ca/bitstream/handle/2429/52998/ubc_2015_september_stewart_patrick.pdf

By: Nancy M. Dammann

Nancy M. Dammann — Wed, 27 May 2015 08:09:49 +0000

I deeply appreciate this, love the principle of it, have no expertise on the matter, and yet, I do, however, have a practical question or two. If one submits their dissertation in only one language, say English, French, or the Nisga’a language, are we then going to run into a similar practical and pedagogical set of problems. Can we find enough people who will meet university//academy standards to evaluate the dissertation and who represent a diverse enough breadth of expertise to do so? Are there enough academics (indigenous or not) fluent in the diversity of indigenous languages to allow them to comment or evaluate dissertations if they start being written in a greater diversity of languages? Are there enough places to learn the proper grammar, writing, etc so that a non-native speaker could serve on a committee or would committee’s become segregated? Or should the standards be changed? Is being able to read the dissertation important, both in terms of evaluation and in terms of sharing knowledge? To some extent, it seems as if the question is about how much of a dissertation is about self-determination versus how much is about sharing of knowledge. I can imagine that there are plenty of architects who might find this dissertation quite interesting. However, if they can’t read it, they won’t be able to interact with it. That would be equally true across indigenous groups and between an indigenous language writer and someone whose native language is English, or Spanish, or French, or Japanese, or … I am honestly curious how we build this. Maybe a starting point is bilingual publication of all dissertations? Author’s native language + common language of broader geographic area. So someone who was born speaking french but works with a Bora community in Peru, might publish in French, Bora, and Spanish?

I hope your article leads to some discussion as to how we can open up the academy to these issues. If there are resources you would suggest I look into–please, share. Besides my personal interests, the university where I am about to begin a new job is teaching in multiple indigenous languages.

By: jlmccreery

jlmccreery — Tue, 26 May 2015 09:39:03 +0000

Zoe, we agree on so much, it pains me to disagree. The point of writing a dissertation is a contribution to knowledge. Writing a dissertation in an indigenous language and, when forced to translate it into English omitting punctuation, is a dramatic gesture. It is, however, one that virtually ensures that no one not forced to read it ever will. No publisher will touch it. Even if it is put online and made Open Access, the number of those who will take the trouble required to read it will be vanishingly small.

By: Barbara Piper

Barbara Piper — Mon, 25 May 2015 13:02:43 +0000

Forgive me for offering a trivial anecdote on a serious topic, but your note reminded me of the story Louis Leakey told about his Cambridge years (in his autobiography White African), when he found that he had to pass examinations in two “major” languages. He asked what constituted a major language — apparently a question no one had bothered to ask before — and got the glib answer: any language spoken by more than a million people. OK, Leakey said, I’ll do French and Kikuyu, the latter a language he had grown up speaking in Kenya. Cambridge frowned, but ultimately had to allow it, via the mechanism of Leakey teaching sufficient Kikuyu to a linguist that the linguist was able to examine him on it. Plenty of lessons there for North Atlantic arrogance about what languages are “major” or important.