SOCIO- AND STYLOLINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVES ON AMERICAN INDIAN ENGLISH TEXTS Guillermo Bartelt Native American Studies Volume 8 The Edwin Mellen Press Lewiston•Queenston•Lampeter Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bartelt, Guillermo. Socio- and stylolinguistic perspectives on American Indian English texts / Guillermo Bartelt. p. cm. — (Native American studies ; v. 8) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7734-7346-7 1. Indians of North America—Languages. 2. English language—United States—Foreign elements—Indian. 3. Indians of North America—Languages—Influence on English. 4. English language—United States—Discourse analysis. 5. English language—Written English—United States. 6. English language—Social aspects—United States. 7. Languages in contact--United States. 8. Americanisms. I. Title. II. Series. PE3102.155 B37 2001 420'.9'08997--dc2I 2001031604 This is volume 8 in the continuing series Native American Studies Volume 8 ISBN 0-7734-7346-7 NAS Series ISBN 0-88946-482-0 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2001 Guillermo Bartelt All rights reserved. For information contact (cid:9) The Edwin Mellen Press The Edwin Mellen Press (cid:9) Box 450 (cid:9) Box 67 Lewiston, New York Queenston, Ontario (cid:9) USA 14092-0450 CANADA LOS ILO The Edwin Mellen Press, Ltd. Lampeter, Ceredigion, Wales UNITED KINGDOM SA48 8LT Printed in the United States of America To Lupe and the kids Contents Page Preface Foreword(cid:9) iii Acknowledgements Introduction(cid:9) 1 Part One: The Ethnography of Speaking I. Syncretism in Cognitive Perspective(cid:9) 7 II. The Discourse of Intertribalism(cid:9) 23 III. Invocative Discourse(cid:9) 35 IV. Rhetorical Processes(cid:9) 45 V. Cultural Constraints on Metacognition(cid:9) 57 Part Two: The Ethnography of Writing VI. Discourses of Assimilationism(cid:9) 69 VII. Interlingual Productions as Ethnolect (cid:9) 89 VIII. Indian English in the Native American Novel(cid:9) 101 IX. The Discourse of Geopiety(cid:9) 113 Conclusions(cid:9) 131 Appendix 1(cid:9) 135 Appendix 2(cid:9) 136 Appendix 3(cid:9) 137 Appendix 4(cid:9) 138 Appendix 5(cid:9) 140 Appendix 6(cid:9) 141 Appendix 7(cid:9) 142 References(cid:9) 143 Index(cid:9) 157 Preface The relative neglect of research on American Indian English linguistics and literature is quite surprising in view of early research by American anthropology and linguistics. In the early 1900s, anthropological linguists such as Boas, Bloomfield, and Sapir were fascinated with describing Native American languages. In his introduction to the Handbook of American Indian Languages (1911), for example, Boas emphasized the diversity of these languages and pointed out the need for their independent linguistic analysis. For too long researchers had artificially grouped unrelated Indian languages together, or (worse still), attempted to describe them based on grammatical categories within European languages. The emerging field of world Englishes has also paid little attention to the use of English by American Indian tribes. Discussion of the "nativization" of English by American Indians is inadequate, and Kachru's model of concentric circles fails to account for the unique relationship that has existed between American Indians and speakers of a variety of colonial languages for the past four hundred years. Guillermo Bartelt's perspectives in this volume address the linguistic and cultural systems employed by American Indians living in English-dominant North America. This work focuses on the ethnography of speaking as well as writing. Bartelt grapples with real-world challenges involved in American Indian sociolinguistics, and thus his study is a fascinating example of the use of linguistics as a critical tool used to analyze spoken and written discourse. Bartelt has a unique perspective on American Indian communities. His interest and contact with Indian tribes range from the Shoshone in Wyoming, to the Sioux in South Dakota, to the Navajo and Apache in Arizona. Bartelt's previous work on American Indian English linguistics and literatures considers a range of topics: tense, aspect. and mood in Apachean English; Apachean English interlanguage; boarding school language policy and the spread of English among Indians of the American Southwest; American intertribal discourse; and linguistic features of American Indian writers such as Scott Momaday. This text incorporates Bartelt's research of the past twenty years. Bartelt views his research as an "attempt to demystify cultural practices that utilize language as a vehicle to legitimize particular sociocultural partialities." I am particularly intrigued by Bartelt's treatment of the intertribal Indian powwow in southern California within a cultural and linguistic framework. His research reveals the potential of linguistics to describe and analyze spoken discourse. Bartelt sees the powwow as an attempt by Indians to come to terms with bicultural pressures. At the same time, he acknowledges that such intertribal ceremonies risk threatening traditional tribal practices and may, in fact, further threaten the remaining vestiges of Indian culture. In my teaching at the university, I often point out examples of significant contributions in applied and sociolinguistic research. Bartelt's study of American Indian powwows or journalistic and literary documents is exemplary, for it reveals numerous possibilities in analyzing spoken and written discourse independently and collectively, it connects linguistics to real occurrences; and it considers the inextricable link between language and culture. John Battenburg, Professor Coordinator Graduate Program TESL Certificate Program English Department California Polytechnic State University ii Foreword The study of American Indian English has been central to my work as a sociolinguist. In the 1970s, I found myself teaching English to American Indian college students on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota and in northern Arizona to students from the Navajo and White Mountain Apache reservations. These initial teaching experiences prompted me to look beyond Pedagogical issues and to pursue the wider picture through additional graduate work at the University of Arizona, where I was fortunate to have as a teacher the anthropological linguist Keith Basso. In subsequent years, my research led me to a number of Indian English topics involving both spoken and written texts. The present volume brings together some of that work, previous versions of which have either been strewn about the sea of journal literature or have remained unpublished conference papers. Guillermo Bartelt Simi Valley, California Christmas, 2000 iii Acknowledgements I wish to thank the following publishers for permission to use in revised form some of my previously published material: The National Museum of Ethnography (Sweden): A cognitive semantic framework for syncretism: The case of the southern California powwow. Ethnos, 56, 53-66. 1991. California Folklore Society: Amerindian English invocative discourse layers. Western Folklore, 51, 189-197. 1992. John Benjamins Publishing Company: Urban American Indian intertribal discourse. English World-Wide, 14, 57-70. 1992. Gunter Nan Verlag: Cultural constraints in L2 rhetorical processes. In G. Bartelt (Ed.), The dynamics of language processes: Essays in honor of Hans W. Dechert (pp. 161-172). 1994. Trinity University: Interlingual productions in American Indian creative writing. Language and Literature, 16, 1-12. 1991. American Indian discourses of assimilationism. Language and Literature, 17, 59-75. 1991. American Indian English in Momaday's House Made of Dawn. Language and Literature, 19, 37-53. 1994. American Indian geopiety in Scott Ivlomaday's discourse of the mora landscape. Language and Literature, 23, 19-31. 1998.