Beyond Sociolinguistics: Joshua Fishman's Influence on Students in Native American Studies

Abstract

6 J O U R N A L O F A M E R I C A N I N D I A N E D U C A T I O N — 5 4 , I S S U E 2 Beyond Sociolinguistics: Joshua Fishman’s Influence on Students in Native American Studies tiffany s. lee Imet dr. fishman while I was a graduate student at Stanford University , and he spent the winter months there teaching for the School of Education. Of course, I knew of him prior to this time, not just because of his prolific work on heritage-language issues but because of his impact on my family. My uncle, Wayne Holm, and my late aunt Agnes Holm, both former educators at Rock Point Community School on the Navajo Nation, would tell me stories of his visit to Rock Point and the impact of his work on American Indian language education. So I felt very honored and excited to have the opportunity to take courses with Dr. Fishman at Stanford. I learned about language maintenance, connections to identity, language shift, and the politics of language across linguistic contexts worldwide . Having the eternally inquisitive mind, Dr. Fishman would call on me to personally discuss with him the language politics, change, shift, and connections to identity among Navajo people and communities . He challenged me to think deeply and critically about various theories and experiences related to language change and revitalization. I cannot express in words the level of impact he had on my research, thinking, learning, and personal connection to language revitalization research. I have tried to extend the influence Dr. Fishman had on my learning to my students in Native American Studies (NAS) at the University of New Mexico (UNM). I teach a course titled Language Recovery, Revitalization, and Renewal in Native American Communities. It is a popular course among Native students at UNM because of the close relationship students feel between language and identity and because of the language change and shift they observe and experience in their own communities. Dr. Fishman understood that connection and J O U R N A L O F A M E R I C A N I N D I A N E D U C A T I O N — 5 4 , I S S U E 2 7 wrote about it. Although he was a Jewish man of another generation and experienced the world from a completely different place than my students, his academic and personal writings have personally and meaningfully connected with my students, their learning, and the connections they make to their own communities’ linguistic situations. For example, I have had students read the speeches he gave at the Stabilizing Indigenous Languages conferences (e.g., Cantoni, 1996). His speeches are personal essays imbued with academic content and humor . In one essay titled “What Do You Lose When You Lose Your Language?,” he discussed the relationship between language and culture and how those who study language (outsiders) examine this relationship and what the people of the language (insiders) think about it. He said of this relationship: It is not a perfect relationship. Every language grows; every culture changes. Some words hang on after they are no longer culturally active. “Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet eating her curds and whey.” Well, who knows what a tuffet is any more, and you cannot find anybody who knows what curds and whey are any more without doing research. Those are frozen traces. Even if there is often a good relationship between the words of the language and the concerns of the culture, there are more important relationships between language and culture than the indexical one. (Fishman, 1996, p. 81) His speech continued to share how people talk about this relationship in different terms when asked about it. He said people talk about their language in terms of its sanctity, its importance for kinship , and their sense of moral responsibility to it. These ideas fall completely in line with what NAS students have shared regarding the relationship of language and culture in Native contexts. In our class discussions, students relay their familial experiences with language...