All Intimate Grammars Leak: Reflections on "Indian Languages in Unexpected Places"

Abstract

I want to begin by thanking the editors for inviting me to comment on these thoughtful and thought-provoking articles and to thank the American Indian Culture and Research Journal for publishing a special issue on Native American languages in which the authors took inspiration from the trope of Philip Deloria’s pathbreaking book, Indians in Unexpected Places, and its imaginative reframing here to focus on the important but neglected topic of American Indian languages.1 As a commentator, I enjoy the delightful yet difficult task of exploring these articles in a manner that somehow does some descriptive and analytical justice to each while recognizing a collective pattern or two. Allow me to begin by briefly mentioning two cross-cutting patterns and move on to some more particular observations, leaving it in part to you, dear readers, to weave this warp and weft together more securely than I can do in these brief remarks. The first, a kind of an appropriation of a venerable W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1903 concept, is the relevance of something like a “double consciousness”