Introduction: American Indian Languages in Unexpected Places

Abstract

This special issue of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal brings together a set of essays that integrate two seemingly disparate intellectual trends in the humanities and social sciences. On the one hand, there is Philip Deloria’s work about American Indians in “unexpected places.”1 On the other hand, there is the work of linguistic anthropology. Deloria’s writings have been integral to the growing corpus of critical approaches to the study of Native peoples, including the ways in which representational practices of the past continue to resonate and the ways in which (de)colonization of indigenous histories and structural (in)equities are intertwined.2 We say “seemingly disparate” because this line of scholarship, including Deloria’s work, is concerned with the naturalization of inequalities, the ways in which expectations about Native American peoples have led to a denial of coevalness.3 However, there is also a tradition in linguistic anthropology that has sought to understand the ways in which linguistic inequalities are naturalized and circulated. Our intervention is to place linguistic anthropology in a meaningful dialogue with contemporary indigenous studies. Deloria’s Indians in Unexpected Places challenged the representational “expectations” and “anomalies” of American Indians in history and popular culture. Deloria called for examining why certain imageries and practices have been