Failing American Indian Languages

Abstract

T his article examines the interdiscursive constitutiveness and permeations of a logic of “expectations” in relation to American Indian language practices and American Indian languages. Beginning with a reflection on my own grandfather’s experiences, this article explores popular, everyday, and institutional reflexes of a logic of expectations that mediates and is mediated by concepts of American Indianness and evaluations of linguistic practice. That is, such reflexes emerge through the “bundling” of such normative, conventionalized concepts in the process of evaluation; they become the rationale or justification for the evaluation and, ultimately, reproduce the logic of expectations that mediates everyday judgments of practice.1 Through the lens of my grandfather’s life, the following reflection illustrates the mutual conceptualization of success and failure as a logic of “expectations.” My grandfather, an amazingly gifted yet very stubborn man, spent his life challenging expectations and never wavered in this quest. From driving one hundred miles to attend an Elks Lodge meeting because the one in Madras didn’t allow Indians, to driving several hundreds of miles back to Oklahoma every summer for social gatherings, he engaged in a range of expected and unexpected Indian practices. A product of Haskell, my grandpa also had acquired a range of skills, from baking bread and boxing to playing wood and horn instruments and golf. Playing clarinet every Friday night with the Macy “boys” at Warm Springs, my grandfather was still an “unexpected” Indian, a Comanche surrounded by Wascos, Paiutes, and Warm Springs Indians. This