At.óow OR l s'aatí át?: Language revitalization, cultural creation, and the tlingit Macbeth

Abstract

This essay considers a production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, produced by Alaska’s Perseverance Theatre at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in March 2007, in which the construction of a new cultural product—a Macbeth translated into the social and linguistic setting of a pre-contact Tlingit society—was claimed as part of a process of language revitalization for the endangered Tlingit language. Perseverance’s Macbeth demonstrated that language recovery might be attainable through importing an iconic text from an hegemonic language and culture and claiming it for the threatened language. At the same time, Perseverance had to confront the possibility that their project could be viewed as a colonizing activity. This inquiry examines several translational tactics the production employed, with the goal of considering the project as one potential methodology for generating linguistic life for an endangered language and reversing language shift. In addition, the study considers how translational comparison at the cultural level demonstrates how the Tlingit Macbeth operated as a two-way force in cultural creation, informing the source as much as the target.