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LING Circle ProSeminar

Dr. Wesley Y. Leonard

Miami Tribe of Oklahoma;Ìý Associate Professor, University of California, Riverside

Wednesday, September 18, 2024

4:00 - 6:00 pm.Ìý

ECCS 1B12Ìý

or join via Zoom:Ìý

Despite the increasing focus on Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) in the discipline of Linguistics, members of Native American and other Indigenous communities remain underrepresented––and often report feeling unwelcome. A recurring concern is that Linguistics is not accountable to Indigenous histories, protocols, and ways of engaging with language communities and linguistic data. A wider issue is that colonization is endemic, and academic norms have developed accordingly.

What changes when Native American and other Indigenous intellectual approaches serve as the baseline from which linguistic research and pedagogy are approached? Drawing from my professional experiences as a linguist, Miami tribal member engaged in community language efforts, and co-founder of the Natives4Linguistics project, which aims to reimagine Linguistics through Native American ways of knowing, I engage with this question and offer several interventions.

ÌýWesley Y. Leonard is a citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and an associate professor of Native American Studies in the Ethnic Studies department at the University of California, Riverside. Drawing from his PhD in Linguistics (University of California, Berkeley, 2007) and experience as an additional language learner and practitioner in myaamia and other community-based language programs, his research aims to build language reclamation capacity in Native American and other Indigenous communities by cultivating language reclamation praxis, which centers community needs, values, and definitions of language, while also changing the norms of language sciences to facilitate such work. As part of this, he co-developed the Natives4Linguistics project, which promotes Native American needs, research and ethical protocols, and intellectual tools as a basis for doing linguistics. His scholarship appears in a variety of outlets such as Gender and Language, Language Documentation and Description, ¶Ùæ»å²¹±ô³Ü²õ, Language, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, and Language Learning.