1 page anthropology discussion

Language revitalization and the (re)constituting of gender: Silence and women

in Native California language revitalization

Jocelyn Ahlers

Abstract

While many authors have investigated the processes by which children are

socialized into gender roles within their communities of practice, and others

have taken up an examination of the ways in which gender is a consideration in

language endangerment and revitalization, the process of gender socialization in

communities working towards language revitalization has been less well examined.

The purpose of this paper is to examine gender role socialization in the context of

Native California language endangerment and revitalization. The goal is to gain a

deeper understanding of the ways in which the ideologies linked to gender roles in

the traditional cultures associated with endangered Native California languages

of heritage are expressed and understood, particularly as they interact with gender

ideologies from a surrounding, dominant society. The particular focus of this paper

is an examination of the impact of those ideologies on the deployment of silence as a

salient attribute of women’s speech in contexts which are framed as traditional and

closely tied to Native California languages of heritage.

keywords: gender, socialization, language revitalization, native california

Gender and Language

G&L (PRINT) ISSN –

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Article

Affiliation California State University, San Marcos, USA email: [email protected]

G&L VOL 6.2 2012 309–337

© 2012, EQUINOX PUBLISHING www.equinoxpub.com doi: 10.1558/genl.v6i2.309

310 JOCELYN AHLERS

Many authors have examined the processes by which children are socialized

into roles, including gender identity, within their communities of practice

(e.g. Garrett and Baquedano-Lopez 2002; Kulick and Schieffelin 2003; Ochs

2000; Paugh 2005; Schieffelin and Ochs 1986), and others have, directly or

indirectly, taken up a consideration of the ways in which gender is a factor

in language endangerment and revitalization (e.g. Cavanaugh 2006; Hinton

1994b; Kroskrity 1992). However, the intersection of these two areas

– socialization into gender roles within the context of language endan-

germent and revitalization – has been less often examined. It is important

to note here that while the term ‘endangered’ has been usefully critiqued

due to the often unexamined connotations which it carries (see, e.g.,

Errington 2003; Hill 2002), it is used in this paper for a number of reasons.

First, and centrally, it is the term most commonly used by members of the

communities with whom the research upon which this paper is founded

took place; my sense from conversations with these community members

is that terms such as ‘endangered’ and ‘threatened’ convey the felt sense of

pressure and threat from dominant English-speaking society, while a term

like ‘contraction’, by contrast, is relatively bloodless and doesn’t invoke

the history of forced assimilation which is central to Native Californians’

understandings of their own linguistic histories. Furthermore, ‘contraction’

and ‘contracting’ imply that the language in question continues to serve

as a language of communication within some domains of use, even as the

numbers of both speakers and domains of use diminish. In the case of

California’s languages, the contraction which restricted the use of these

languages within their historic social settings is of long standing, and in

many cases, there have been no domains of use exclusive to languages

of heritage until the relatively recent inception of language revitalization

programs.1

Communities which are engaged in the revitalization of endangered

languages of heritage are particularly interesting settings for the

examination of processes of gender socialization. Community members,

in the process of reclaiming endangered languages of heritage, are also

involved in the work of recreating those languages in the context of

modern life. Similarly, but often below the level of conscious awareness or

examination, community members are engaged in reclaiming and recon-

stituting the social roles associated with their languages of heritage and the

communities of practice defined by those languages; this includes gender

roles. These projects aren’t separable. Gender roles and their associated

ideologies interact closely with the linguistic resources which are consti-

tutive of those roles in daily life and discourse (see, e.g., Silverstein 1985).

As community members strive to document and analyse features of their

language of heritage and to bring that language into regular use again,

LANGUAGE REVITALIZATION AND THE RECONSTITUTING OF GENDER 311

those features and that usage include those which are deployed in the

expression of social roles, including gender. This process is informed by

ideologies about gender, community membership and, often, ‘authenticity’

(see Bucholtz 2003 for a useful problematization of this term, discussed

further below), which in turn inform community members’ decisions to

take up particular social roles and associated linguistic practices – or not.

The purpose of this paper is to examine gender role socialization in

the context of Native California language endangerment and revital-

ization. The goal is to gain a deeper understanding of the ways in which

the ideologies linked to gender roles in the traditional cultures associated

with endangered Native California languages of heritage are expressed

and understood, particularly as they interact with gender ideologies from

a surrounding, dominant society. The particular focus of this paper is an

examination of the impact of those ideologies on the deployment of silence

as a salient attribute of women’s speech in contexts which are framed as

traditional and closely tied to Native California languages of heritage. This

examination of the iterative (re)constituting of the linguistic practices

associated with gender roles highlights processes which may be general-

izable to gender socialization more broadly.

Silence, as an attribute of women’s speech, has long been a topic

of feminist scholarship. Early research (e.g. Zimmerman and West

1975; Fishman 1978) examined the ‘definite and patterned ways in

which the power and dominance enjoyed by men in other contexts are

exercised in their conversational interaction with women’ (Zimmerman

and West 1975:105), including through mechanisms which silence

women’s voices and choices of topics in conversations. This research

suggested that women’s roles in this process were either to accept and

manage their one-down position, or to exert resistance against it. Later

research, however, illustrates that this one-to-one correlation between

silence and gender identity does not capture the complexity of the

situation. Silence can, in fact, be an index of control in a conversation in

places like the courtroom (e.g. Mendoza-Denton 1995), and silence as

deployed by a holder of knowledge can be interpreted as an extremely

powerful conversational move (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992:477).

Thus, while silence, gender and the exercise of power are intertwined,

‘silence, like any linguistic form, gains different meanings and has different

material effects within specific institutional and cultural contexts’ (Gal

1990:176). Furthermore, linguistic forms and their associated ideologies

are not fixed, nor are they always taken up unquestioningly by members

of a particular speech community, as shown below in the case of Native

Californian women.

312 JOCELYN AHLERS

Silence is, of course, not solely a characteristic of gendered speech. As

a feature of Native American speech, silence has been shown by a number

of researchers to serve different sorts of functions than those described

in the research on silence and gender. For example, Basso (1970; 1979)

suggests that Western Apaches ‘refrain from speaking’ in service to

several social purposes. In one set of circumstances, Western Apaches

refrain from speaking in ‘social situations in which participants perceive

their relationships vis-à-vis one another to be ambiguous and/or unpre-

dictable’ (1970:225). In such instances, silence is conditioned by a speaker’s

relationship to a particular interlocutor, rather than due to the speaker’s

own identity or social role, or the setting within which the conversation

takes place. In a very different set of circumstances, Western Apaches also

refrain from speaking in order to exclude White outsiders (Basso 1979).

The speech and silence of Warm Springs Indian children are conditioned

by speech event participant structures in such a way that they are more

likely to refrain from speaking in exactly those situations in which their

non-Native classmates are most primed to engage in talk (Philips 1970).

Native American tribal communities aren’t the only groups which assign

very different sorts of meanings to the deployment of silence, as seen in

Bauman’s (1983) examination of the linguistic practices of seventeenth-

century Quakers. In fact, collections of research on the uses of silence to

do a range of social and ideological work (e.g. Tannen and Saville-Troike

1985; Jaworski 1997) point to its multivalenced complexity. Silence is

potentially performative of a range of identities, depending on the person

who is refraining (or being restrained) from speaking, the interlocutor and

the setting.

The analysis in this paper is informed by Hymes’ call for an ethnography

of communication (1974) and results in a description of a system in flux;

this analysis uncovers the organization of the use of silence as one of the

verbal means by which gendered identity is done in Native Californian

communities, as well as the ideologies associated with its deployment. This

paper’s particular focus on girls and young women in Native California

tribal communities is driven by an interest in their negotiation of pressures

placed on them by conflicting ideologies associated with the use of silence

as a gendered linguistic attribute. Extant documentation suggests that the

deployment of silence as a gendered discourse form is of long standing within

tribal communities, and it has been extended into the English-dominant

interactions which are typical of modern Native Californian communities

and experience. This transfer of discourse strategies to English creates the

confounding circumstances associated with the use of silence in particular,

due to the ideologies associated with those forms in use as they take place

within dominant English-speaking communities and in English-speaking

LANGUAGE REVITALIZATION AND THE RECONSTITUTING OF GENDER 313

tribal communities. The lens of socialization, as suggested by Kulick and

Schieffelin (2003:4), ‘can generate insight into processes that effect not

only reproduction, but also change’; changes in gendered behaviour are

one result of the negotiations that take place as girls and young women

are socialized into gender roles within their communities of practices. In

effect, tribal communities are engaged in both revitalizing and, to at least

some degree, reinventing language and, by extension, facets of language

use such as gendered linguistic behaviour.

An analysis of this process of socialization must include the connections

(as called for by Silverstein 1979 and Woolard 2008) among linguistic

forms, the social use(s) of those forms, and ‘human reflections on

those forms in use’ (Woolard 2008:436). Thus, this paper begins with a

description of silence as a linguistic form saliently associated with feminine

gendered identity in settings which are modern incarnations of traditional

practice within some Native California tribal communities. This discussion

includes not only a description of the ways in which silence is deployed as a

strategy in interaction, but also ideologies associated with that deployment

by social actors. Gender alone is not determinative of the use of silence;

setting is an important factor, too, in that women will disproportionately

utilize silence as a conversational tool relative to men, but only in certain

circumstances.

This description, however, is not enough in itself to explain the

sometimes conflicting ideologies that some girls and young women

apply to the semiotic use of silence and concomitant social restriction

in certain settings to index womanhood. In order to achieve a deeper

analysis of this phenomenon, it is necessary to take into account the

simultaneous alternate socializations these young women are engaged in.

While discussions of bivalency in the literature (e.g. Woolard 1999) have

suggested that bivalent utterances can be deployed by bilingual speakers as

one approach to negotiating their multiple identities simultaneously, these

discussions to some degree rely on the understanding that the strategies in

question are positively or, at worst, neutrally interpreted by the multiply-

identified audiences at whom they are directed. As I show below, women’s

silence, in the context of Native Californian communities, is multivalenced

and the valences associated with silence can be oppositional. This multiva-

lence is connected both to internal community ideologies associated with

gender roles, and to broader ideologies about women’s speech and access

to social roles. As young women are socialized into their communities of

practice, they must navigate these multiple understandings in developing

their own sense of their positions as women within the context of their

tribal communities.

314 JOCELYN AHLERS

Background

In order to adequately understand the socializing activities described

below, it is important to situate them within the larger picture of language

loss and revitalization which is shared background knowledge for Native

Californians engaged in the revitalization of their languages of heritage.

Of the 6,000 or so languages spoken in the world today, some 95% fall into

the category ‘endangered’ to a greater or lesser degree (Krauss 2007:3; see

also Crystal 2000; Nettle and Romaine 2000). In California, the situation is

worse; of the more than 100 languages spoken in what is now California at

the time of European contact, fewer than 40 currently have speakers (Hinton

1994a; Hinton and Hale 2001; Mithun 1998), and all of those languages are

‘severely’ or ‘critically’ endangered (Krauss 2007:1). Most languages have

fewer than ten speakers, and most of those speakers are elders, often in

their 70s and 80s. In the majority of cases, those speakers have not used

their languages of heritage as languages of daily communication for their

entire adult lives, or even since childhood, which can complicate the

documentation and revitalization efforts of tribal communities.

Most of the data presented in this paper come from my work and

interviews with members of three tribal communities (described briefly

below), and from my documentation and analysis of a number of public

events whose focus is Native California life, languages and communities.

These public events include religious ceremonies, cultural gatherings,

language revitalization workshops, trainings and conferences, and larger

conferences focusing on a number of issues having to do with the health

and well-being of Native communities. This documentation and analysis

was undertaken as part of a long-term project whose goal is to understand

the speech economy of modern Native Californian tribal communities.

The fieldnotes which have come from years of participant observation

within the three tribal communities described briefly below form the heart

of this ethnographic project. As I became more interested in examining

the processes of socialization which surround the adoption of silence as

a gendered discourse feature, I came to realize that the moments where

silence and absence took place, and the explanations that were associated

with those moments, were exactly those moments which were not caught

on video or audiotape as part of the language documentation projects

which accompanied my participant observation in these communities.

Several factors contributed to this documentary gap. First, many of the

conversations in which people comment on the process of language and

culture reclamation take place outside of the context of formal documen-

tation work – in quick phone calls, over dinner, while driving between

work sites, while video- and audiotapes are changed out of recorders (in

LANGUAGE REVITALIZATION AND THE RECONSTITUTING OF GENDER 315

earlier fieldwork), or while the data is burned to CDs and DVDs (in later

years). Second, while I have received permission from tribal members to

describe aspects of certain ceremonies in publications, recordings of most

traditional ceremonial events is prohibited. I therefore sought to engage in

interviews with women from the tribes described below. In doing so, I found

that while women were willing to talk to me about their attitudes towards

their socialization into gendered roles within their tribal communities,

they were not willing to do so on tape, and they wished their anonymity

to be preserved. The reasons for this centre around the problematic nature

of offering critique (or perceived critique) of these practices in a climate

which valorizes authenticity.2 This is especially true for those who are most

likely to feel the ideological tensions described below, often because of

their limnal status as bicultural members of the group, or as neophytes

to cultural practice; it is precisely these group members whose behaviour

and attitudes are most at risk of being labelled ‘non-authentic’, and who

therefore have the greatest vested interest in engaging in the acquisition of

these gendered identities and their concomitant indexical linguistic forms.

Thus, the interviews were not recorded except by permission in fieldnotes

and personal details are heavily protected; given the small population and

intimate connections within most Native California tribal communities,

this includes specific tribal affiliation, but all interviewees were members

of the three tribes described here.

The majority of the data come from work completed between 2002 and

2009 during an ongoing project of linguistic documentation and revital-

ization with the Elem Pomo (often referred to as the Southeastern Pomo in

extant documentation). This tribe has a 50-acre reservation in Lake County

on the banks of Clear Lake in northern California. The Elem Pomo language

had two dialects (extant documentation is cited in the references). There

is currently one speaker of the Sulphur Bank dialect of Elem Pomo, Mrs

Loretta Kelsey, a woman in her sixties who used the language as a language

of regular communication with her mother, with whom she lived until she

was in her thirties, when her mother passed away. When we began our

work together, she had not used the language regularly since that time.

For much of the project, she was engaged in teaching the language to her

nephew, who is a leader, in the effort to revive his language of heritage.

He has used the knowledge acquired in his work with his aunt to teach

the language to tribal youth, both boys and girls. He is also a leader in

the effort to revive other cultural practices, including religious ceremonies,

songs and the making of regalia for ceremonies.

I have also had the opportunity to talk with members of several bands

of Luiseño Indians regarding their participation in projects whose focus is

the documentation and revitalization of the Luiseño language. There are

316 JOCELYN AHLERS

six bands of Luiseño Indians whose territories exist in the eastern part of

San Diego county; these bands are the Pechanga, Soboba, Pauma, Rincon,

La Jolla and Pala. The general sense in these interviews is that there are

no longer any speakers of the language who learned it as children in the

home, although interviewees do mention a number of adult speakers and

semi-speakers, some of whom have learned Luiseño as a second language.

The most commonly cited speaker is Dr Eric Elliot, a non-tribal member

who learned the language while engaged in a language documentation

project, working with two elders who are women; his work in curriculum

development forms a strong component of ongoing language revital-

ization programmes in several bands, but particularly Pechanga, which

has developed a very successful immersion elementary school which is

accessible to all children who are members of that band. Furthermore,

there are a number of active projects involving the revitalization of cultural

practices outside the realm of language among the bands, some associated

with the school and language revitalization and some led by other groups

within these communities.

Finally, data also come from an ongoing project of documentation and

revitalization among the Kawaiisu, a non-federally-recognized tribe whose

traditional homelands are in the western Mohave and Tehachapi region of

California. There are currently three speakers of this Uto-Aztecan language,

all actively engaged in language revitalization work in family groups of

at least three generations. These speakers, Mrs Lucille Hicks, Mrs Betty

Hernandez and Mr Luther Girado, are siblings. As in the groups described

above, cross-gender language teaching/learning pairs are common.

In these tribal communities, as in others, opportunities for gender social-

ization arise that differ from the usual pattern in several ways. For example,

the language is being acquired by adults in almost all Native California

communities. Furthermore, in a number of instances, language learners

may never have access to an exemplar of the speech variety associated with

their gendered identity, given the relative paucity of fluent speakers of any

gender. This experience is by no means uncommon in situations of extreme

language endangerment where, as suggested by the descriptions above,

both linguistic and temporal resources are limited. In such cases, elders

who can and wish to teach their languages of heritage work with youth who

are interested in learning those languages; the gender roles of the teacher

and learner are, typically, minor considerations given the driving need to

extend the speaking community of such languages by at least a generation.

However, this does raise the question of how and when opportunities arise

for language learners to be socialized into the culturally appropriate use of

gendered linguistic attributes.

LANGUAGE REVITALIZATION AND THE RECONSTITUTING OF GENDER 317

Socializing gender

Clearly, in situations such as these, socialization into a particular gendered

role is not straightforward, and is complicated by number of additional

factors. Key among these is the fact that most Native Californian youth

do not learn their languages of heritage as first languages in the home,

and that for many, engagement with traditional cultural practice begins in

later childhood or even young adulthood. Furthermore, regardless of when

exposure to traditional cultural practice and concomitant socialization

into participation in such practice begins, young tribal members are

engaged in simultaneous processes of socialization into dominant Western

gendered practice, linguistic and otherwise. These multiple processes are

further complicated and entangled due to the linguistic situation within

Native California communities; that is, English is the language associated

both with dominant Western and with tribal cultural practice in a modern

setting. In all of the cases examined below, traditional tribal gendered

linguistic practice takes place in English as the encoding language. This

multivalenced use of English can be and is, in other circumstances,

employed profitably to index multiple identities within the context of a

single speech event (Ahlers 2006); in the case of the particular gendered

linguistic strategy that is the focus of this paper – silence – such positively

valenced simultaneities are not as readily available.

I turn now to a presentation of some of the kinds of gendered linguistic

and social practices in evidence at these socializing events, pointing to the

links which exist between these linguistic signs and other, non-linguistic

gendered behaviours that are saliently associated with such spaces. Included

are some of the key elements of the broader sociocultural context within

which these speech events take place; central among these is the role of

menstruation as a defining attribute of womanhood traditionally, and to a

large extent, currently. This central role underpins the indexical relationship

which exists between the discourse practices associated with menstruation

and the discourse practices of girls and women more generally. This sets

the stage for an analysis of the attitudes of young women towards their

own socialization into the gendered linguistic and social behaviours that

they observe. Below I describe specific instances that are representative of

broader patterns.

Ceremonies and traditional gatherings

Traditional ceremonies are a central location for socialization for a

number of reasons. Ceremonies, by their nature as modern incarnations

of traditional practice, index a host of values associated with modern

318 JOCELYN AHLERS

tribal communities. By contrast with other potential opportunities for

socialization as described below, the activities and roles associated with

ceremonial gatherings can be assumed to be those most closely tied to tribal

identity. Thus, participants have the opportunity to observe, practice and

acquire semiotic resources which are clearly indexes of their roles within

their tribal communities of practice. I focus here on one semi-annual

world-renewal ceremony that I have attended on a number of occasions

and have described elsewhere (Ahlers 2006). This ceremony is fairly repre-

sentative of the types of traditional events which are the focus of modern

revitalization efforts in tribal communities in California. Such events tend

to be public, attended by multiple unrelated families and, often, members

of other tribes and non-tribal members; they also tend to privilege male

leadership roles. The particular ceremony described here takes place over

a four-day period and involves two main groups of ceremony participants:

the men performing the ceremony, who are engaged in that performance

for the entire four-day period without sleep and with minimal rest; and the

ceremony’s observers, who frequently stay for most of the four-day period

themselves. These observers consist mostly of members of the hosting

and neighbouring tribes, whose members are often also involved in the

performance of the ceremony. Some non-tribal members also attend the

ceremony, by invitation from the particular family who takes the lead in

hosting the event.

The public events of these four days take place in two locations: in the

roundhouse, which is the sacred space of the tribe, and in an arbour just

outside the roundhouse. Behaviour within the roundhouse is fairly circum-

scribed and private, and is described here only briefly. The purpose of

these two dances, generally, is for purification and to call down blessings

on the tribe; these dances are referred to by tribal members as world-

renewal ceremonies. During the ceremony, one man leads the singing

while another man drums. A group of men accompanies them with both

singing and clapper sticks. The men take turns dancing in regalia, in pairs,

towards each of the four directions. Women, children and men who are

not filling official roles in the ceremony are the audience, and they stand

outside the circle of dancing; they also dance during each of the singing

stages. Many stay in the roundhouse for most of the ceremony and sleep

outside the circle when they are tired. These audience/participants do not

wear regalia. Many of the adult audience members also strive to stay awake

during the entire dance period, in order to strengthen the ceremony. The

other location of public events during this time is the arbour which stands

just outside the roundhouse. This arbour serves as a cover for several long

tables laid end to end. The arbour is the location for the group meals which

occur three times a day: late breakfast, early dinner and midnight snack.

LANGUAGE REVITALIZATION AND THE RECONSTITUTING OF GENDER 319

Gender is key in defining the roles played by participants in the

ceremony. The central roles during the ceremony itself – dancers, singers,

drummers, fire-tenders – are filled only and always by men and boys;

the ability to assume the role of dancer is an important indication that

a boy is passing into young adulthood, and his first dance is special and

marked in a number of ways. Girls and women, on the other hand, have as

a central responsibility during the four-day ceremony the task of cooking

and delivering the three meals each day that feed the dancers and other

participants. Women associated with the hosting family are also tasked to

some degree with ensuring that there will be enough food at each meal.

Outwardly-directed public speaking during the ceremony is almost always

entirely performed by men. These speeches occur at various times during

the four days, but perhaps the most consistent times are at the beginning

and end of the entire four-day cycle, and before and after each meal. This

central speaking role is associated with the roles of men as ceremonial

leaders and as central players in the ceremony itself. Women’s speech takes

place in the peripheral spaces, both within the roundhouse and around

the table, and often takes the form of commentary on singing, dancing

and attendance by and behaviour of other families and tribal members.

(This correlation between social roles and spatial location, as well as the

peripheral roles of women in public ceremonial contexts, occurs in other

communities, as well; e.g. Duranti 1994.)

Women’s speech is further restricted by their ability to fulfill their roles

in the ceremony at all. Menstrual taboos prohibit menstruating women

from entering the roundhouse, interacting with ceremonial dancers or

cooking for the ceremony. These taboos are understood to be modern

incarnations of traditional practices associated with menstruation, a

defining attribute of womanhood in many, if not most, Native California

cultures. Historically, Native Californian cultural constructs surrounding

menstruation have typically involved a restriction of the activities of the

menstruating woman. Some, but not all, tribes had special ceremonies for

girls at menarche; of the tribal communities that are the focus of these data,

the Luiseño did, but the Elem did not. Subsequent restriction of activities

generally focused on two areas of life: food preparation and ceremonies.

Women who were menstruating were not allowed to enter sacred spaces,

to touch regalia or musical instruments used in ceremonies or other

people participating in ceremonies, and were not allowed, themselves, to

participate in ceremonies. Furthermore, they were not allowed to prepare

food for others during that part of their cycle nor to eat with them. In many

cases, food gathering was also restricted and sometimes a woman’s husband

was banned from hunting for that period of time (see, e.g., Kroeber 1976;

Powers 1976).

320 JOCELYN AHLERS

The modern incarnations of these practices vary, but are generally

more limited in scope. Typically women may not enter sacred spaces while

menstruating, nor touch regalia, nor cook for ceremonial gatherings. As

these major gatherings may occur only once or twice during the year, the

result of such restrictions is that a girl or woman could miss opportunities

to participate in these central modern cultural events, depending on their

timing. However, restrictions on cooking on a monthly basis have not been

revived in any tribal community that I know of. Thus, these absences do

not take the form of a monthly hiatus from everyday work, but rather a

potential restriction of access to a major community celebration. While the

policing of these boundaries may appear loose and mostly self-managed

(e.g. in the non-communal-living context of modern life), one interviewee

described her youthful observation of a female elder in her community

who claimed she could identify a menstruating woman by smell; this elder

pointed out such women loudly and publicly at ceremonies and tribal

gatherings if she perceived them to be in violation any of these restrictions.

Such public policing of these gender restrictions socialize young women

into understanding not only the potential spiritual risks of violating the

rules, but the social and emotional risks as well.

Conversations with elders

Another key venue for socialization occurs in circumstances in which

tribal youth and tribal elders or other community leaders interact with the

specific goal of discussing tribal history and traditional cultural practice;

such socializing situations are also useful for field linguists, who are able to

piggyback to some degree on the role of cultural neophyte played by tribal

youth (see, e.g., Ahlers 2009). Note that these situations are distinct from

those involving language documentation – a non-traditional activity – in

which the deployment of silence described here would be considered inappro-

priately uncommunicative. Conversational interactions in these situations

often take the form of question and answer, with neophytes framing and

posing questions of interest to them, and elders answering, often at length;

these answers themselves are important in socialization, in that the kinds

of associations made by elders in longer answers provide questioners with

information not only about the question at hand, but also about the kinds of

cultural associations that are linked to the topic they have raised.

Another important form of socialization which takes place in these

circumstances has to do with the acquisition of knowledge about which

kinds of questions are appropriate to ask or to even voice out loud, and

which are not. (See Briggs 1986 for a detailed analysis of the many facets

of this issue in using ‘the interview’ as part of fieldwork.) When tribal

LANGUAGE REVITALIZATION AND THE RECONSTITUTING OF GENDER 321

youth – or other neophytes such as field linguists – ask questions which

are considered to be inappropriate or importunate, elders’ responses differ

in important ways which are drawn along gender lines. Elders who are men

are likely to respond to such questions by explaining why the question is

inappropriate, for example because it touches on topics which are taboo,

or because it is phrased in such a way that the question does not reflect an

adequate understanding of tribal culture or worldview. They may also help

the questioner to either restate or reframe the question, or to find a more

appropriate question to ask instead. In the course of such explanation and

redirection, the questioner often obtains a great deal of information about

tribal culture and cultural practice, and may even end up with an answer

to the original question, embedded within the concomitant discussion.

At a metalevel, the questioner also obtains data about appropriate topics

for questions, often including associated ideologies regarding the reasons

why such questions touch on inappropriate topics and about how such

questions are handled and deflected.

Elders who are women, by contrast, are far more likely to simply fall

silent when asked such questions, and to wait for the questioner to either

offer a reframed question, or to change the subject. This response tactic

offers to the neophyte data which are less clear; the questioner must

attempt to interpret the silence for herself, based on her extant cultural

knowledge, developing her own sense of whether it is the topic itself that

is not available for explicit discussion and why that might be, or whether it

was her framing of the question that is the site of the conversational gaffe.

(See, e.g., Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2003:199 for a similar point with

regard to the difficulties inherent in the interpretation of silence as a conver-

sational turn.) Such responses also, as with the more verbose responses

described above, lead to the development of associated language ideologies

and offer data at a metalevel with regard to ways and means for handling

and deflecting such questions. Interestingly, while language revitalization

conferences appear to condition different sorts of linguistic behaviours on

the part of women (as discussed further below), in language teaching and

learning situations which privilege a more traditional relationship between

teacher and learner (such as the Master-Apprentice Program in California)

female elders and female apprentices still refrain from speaking, which in

turn has unexpected benefits for learning outcomes (Hinton 1994a).

Gendered speech in non-traditional settings

By contrast, there are other settings in which women do a great deal of

speaking, often even dominating conversation. The sites which form the

context of the gendered language use discussed in this section are less

322 JOCELYN AHLERS

clearly delineated than those analysed above, and have more overlap with

socializing sites associated with Western, or at least non-tribally specific,

conversational practice; this overlap contributes to the development of

multiple interpretations of gendered linguistic behaviour.

As one example, I describe here a videotaped group interview that I

and a research partner conducted in the home of one of our interviewees

on her tribe’s reservation. It was attended by a group which was fairly

evenly divided both by gender and by age. Given my earlier observations

of gendered conversational behaviours among this group at public events,

I had expected that the men in the group would do most of the on-camera

talking, and that women would engage in the usual sideline speaking and

commentary. By contrast, women did the vast majority of the speaking.

Of 91 conversational turns in the interview (this number does not include

interviewer questions), 78 responses came from women and 13 from men;

of those 13, almost all of them were the responses of one elder who is a

central figure in the issue that was the focus of the interview. In general

these turns were of approximately the same length.

At one point during the interview, as we were changing out discs in

our recorder, I turned to another one of the men in the room, an adult of

approximately 40 years of age, and told him that we would be glad to hear

any input that he might have on the interview topic; he demurred, telling

me that we were in a home and that the women should therefore do the

talking. I discuss below some of the implications of this indication that

conversational space is divided by gender, as well as some indications that

such a division is of long standing.

In such circumstances, context plays an important role in signifying

to socializing neophytes the identity with which they should associate a

particular linguistic practice. Woolard states that ‘[y]oung people take

up the elements of style right along with, and as inherent parts of, the

situation, the genre, and the stance or identity that they index’ (2008:445),

but this adoption of both style elements and concomitant links to identity

relies on the ability of neophytes to categorize a particular situation as

belonging to a more general class. From the perspective of youth who are

engaged in the process of socialization into gendered roles within their

tribal communities, the particular setting ‘home’ might be difficult to easily

categorize as belonging to a specifically tribal, or traditional, context. That

is to say, many of the families engaged in the interview have some members

who are enrolled in the tribe and some who are not; this is by no means

atypical, even for families who reside on the reservation. This means that

socializing events which take place within homes and within the context

of ‘family’ cannot always be easily categorized as input associated with a

tribal identity, as opposed to another available identity such as a broader

LANGUAGE REVITALIZATION AND THE RECONSTITUTING OF GENDER 323

pan-Indian or even Anglo identity, depending on the ethnic identification

of a parent or sibling. Thus, the dominance of women’s speech in the

home could be linked for neophytes not with tribal language ideologies,

but rather with contrasting language ideologies acquired through simulta-

neous socialization into other communities of practice.

There is one other context within which women speak in ways and

amounts that are equal to men. This is within the context of public events

whose focus is modern tribal life and language and cultural revival,

such as conferences, workshops and trainings. Women are often central

organizers of and speakers at such events, and participate equally with men

in both outwardly-directed public speaking (including the use of languages

of heritage as a way of marking out speech events in terms of social

orientation, see, e.g., Ahlers 2006), and in the kinds of sideline commentary

described above. However, as with the female-dominated speaking space

of the interview, these events are not easily categorized as contexts for

socialization into specific tribal gendered practice. These events are often

organized in ways that are associated with Western public events, and

include audience members, speakers and organizers who are non-Native.

Furthermore, these are not traditional activities – in fact, they are clearly

understood by participants to be necessary only because traditional ways

have been disrupted. Thus, it could be difficult for a neophyte to determine

whether the gendered linguistic behaviours displayed in such contexts are

to be associated with identity as a tribal member, a conference-goer or with

some other broader identity. In fact, due to its similarities to classrooms

and conferences, rather than to more traditional tribal events, the social-

ization associated with, for example, classroom discourse is likely to be

triggered for participants. Given an early and ongoing exposure to, and

socialization into, praxis associated with dominant English language use,

coupled with early gender socialization linked to language socialization,

the dominant language ideologies indexed by women’s silence may be

‘louder’ and more available for access in these settings than subaltern

interpretations. In the context of these multiple ongoing and simultaneous

processes, the potential for a particular linguistic feature such as silence to

be multivalent is high.

Thus, to summarize, Native Californian women’s silence is most

predictable in settings which are co-indexical with ‘traditional’ and

‘authentic’ tribal activities. In those situations, women’s voices are less

prominent, either because they do not partake of roles associated with

public speech or because they are not present due to restrictions associated

with their sex. There is a dichotomy between those settings which are

conceptualized as ‘traditional’ – that is, as being activities which are ‘the

same’ as those engaged in by past members of a tribal community, and

324 JOCELYN AHLERS

therefore intertextually linked to those past practices – and those which

are not interpreted through those same intertextual links (Briggs and

Bauman 1992). Traditional activities include events such as ceremonies

(often reclaimed after a hiatus in practice) and more commonplace

pursuits such as elders instructing youth. Activities which are not concep-

tualized as being strictly traditional, but which are nevertheless important

in the current construction of Native California life, include events such

as language revitalization conferences, language documentation, group

interviews, and so on.

In the context of ceremonies, there are two kinds of roles – those which

involve public, outward-facing speaking and singing, and those which do

not. Both men and women fill the not-speaking role, but only men fill the

public, outward-facing speaking/singing role. Within the not-speaking

role, women are subject to further restrictions which can prohibit their

presence; men are not subject to such restrictions. In the context of elders’

instruction of youth, both men and women fulfill that role; women refrain

from speaking as part of that role much more often than men do. Note

that in both settings, the absence of both male and female individuals can

also be (and often is) taken as an index of disinterest in the reclamation

of language and culture. In ‘non-traditional’ activities (language revital-

ization conferences, for example, or group interviews with researchers),

both men and women can fill any of the available roles, no prohibition

exists on participation for either, and neither is more likely to refrain from

speaking than the other. Absence here can also be taken as indexical of a

lack of interest in language/culture reclamation. The result is that silence

is predictably associated with women in settings which are understood by

community members to be linked to tradition. These settings in turn are

linked to ideologies which valorize tradition and the authentic reclamation

of traditional language, activities and concomitant social roles.

Thus, silence carries with it ‘added indexical baggage’ (Silverstein

1985:253), as shown in Table 1 below:

Table 1: The ‘added indexical baggage’ associated with silence

silence/refraining women in traditional, = knowing how to be

from speaking = public, ceremonial settings ‘authentic’

non-presence/absence = menstruation (which in turn =

knowing how to be ‘authentic’)

(women);

OR

= non-active in cultural

reclamation (women or men)

men in private traditional

settings (?)

LANGUAGE REVITALIZATION AND THE RECONSTITUTING OF GENDER 325

When deployed by women in a public setting, silence is multiva-

lenced, and these valences are not just neutral, but are, or at least carry

the possibility of being, oppositional – a silent woman can simultaneously

be a woman who knows how to deploy linguistic resources as a traditional

woman, and/or a woman who is not an active participant in linguistic and

cultural reclamation.

Conflicting ideologies

The situation is further complicated by the simultaneous socialization of

Native Californian girls and young women into ideologies associated with

their gendered behaviour both in their tribal communities and in dominant

society. In order to adequately understand how girls and young women

interpret these socializing acts and take up the gendered linguistic and

social behaviours suggested by them, it is necessary to further explore the

‘human reflections’ (Woolard 2008:436) on these gendered behaviours in

use. This in turn illuminates the conflict perceived by some young women

in negotiating their gender roles within their communities of practice.

Of particular interest here is ways in which cultural knowledge has, and

has not, been transmitted, and the consequences for socialization into

gendered cultural practice.

The endangered status of Native California languages has a number

of ramifications that must be taken into account when examining social-

ization into gender roles within tribal communities in the modern

context. The first of these is the shared understanding by tribal members

of the importance of language to the cultural futures of tribes, and the

concomitant sense of pressure, associated with the threat of loss, to acquire

and maintain ‘authentic’ linguistic and cultural practices. While ‘authen-

ticity’ as a concept has been usefully examined and problematized (e.g.

Bucholtz 2003), it nevertheless retains ideological weight in situations of

extreme language contraction, and is often invoked as a goal of revival

projects, even as it is sometimes expressed as an unreachable or idealistic

goal. Such desires for ‘authenticity’ intrinsically reach back in history even

as, at least in some cases, modern ideologies are applied to the interpre-

tation and revitalization of past practices (this phenomenon can be seen in

all of the papers in this volume).

Given this valorization of authenticity, the question of authority

becomes crucial in socialization. Generally speaking, elders are preferred

sources of both socializing acts and associated ideologies. However, this is

not unproblematic. Elders often express fears that the knowledge that they

share widely could be misused or disseminated inappropriately; these fears

lead some elders to limit the extent to which they share cultural knowledge

326 JOCELYN AHLERS

or can lead to requests that dissemination of, for example, published

materials, be limited. On a more practical level, many tribal communities

are widely scattered, on and off traditional tribal lands, which constrains

opportunities for access to elders by younger tribal members who are

interested in learning their languages and cultures of heritage.

One result of this situation is that documentation typically forms an

important source of data, linguistic and cultural. This documentation

includes, for example, anthropological and linguistic publications and

archived fieldnotes, historical records, and newspaper articles. Most of the

older records were created by people – trained fieldworkers and members

of the public more generally – who were not members of the tribal

communities they were describing. There are fears among tribal members

that documentation is not always accurate, flawed either due to misun-

derstandings on the part of documenting linguists and anthropologists, or

due to tribal members who deliberately provided misleading information.

More subtle is the question of the information that is lacking; there were

(and still are) topics which tribal members were likely to avoid explicitly

discussing with outsiders, who may not even have seen the lacunae that

resulted from those silences. Furthermore, researchers have sometimes

misinterpreted data, assigning gender significance where there is none,

or missing gender associations where they do exist (see Kimball 1987 for

an excellent example of such a misinterpretation and later reanalysis).

Documentation of gendered practice, linguistic and otherwise, is likely to

have gaps for all of these reasons. As a result, it is often necessary, in the

context of linguistic and cultural revitalization, for community members

to fill in these documentary blanks by creating intertextual links between

modern incarnations of gender and gendered roles and salient discourse

features associated with those roles, in order to create generalizations

about ‘how women speak’.

One specific example of this process is the connection between the

gendered use of silence, as described above, and historic and modern social

practices surrounding menstruation, as a clearly gendered phenomenon.

Not only is this one of the areas of women’s practice that is regularly

mentioned in extant documentation (even when detail is lacking), but it is

also one of the conditions which triggers limitations of women’s presence

– and therefore women’s voices – in many of the traditional ceremonial

events being revived today. Thus, practices, discourses and ideologies

surrounding menstruation become a body of knowledge to which women’s

discourse features, especially silence, can be linked, and, through processes

of intertextuality, interpreted.

Menstruation as an index of womanhood, and as one key definer of

women’s activities in traditional cultural practice, leads to the semiotic use of

LANGUAGE REVITALIZATION AND THE RECONSTITUTING OF GENDER 327

discourse practices surrounding menstruation as indexical of womanhood

as well. The discourse practices associated with menstruation emphasize

the socialization of young women into the practice of refraining from

speech, and into associated ideologies of limitation and restriction. First, as

described above, restriction of access to certain spaces and activities in turn

restricts the potential for speech in those places. Furthermore, discussion

about menstruation is itself full of lacunae and silences. The most common

way to talk about menstruation and practices associated with it is to avoid

explicit discussion at all. One example of a typical socializing statement,

which could be made by either a man or a woman, is: ‘A woman can’t go

into the roundhouse at certain times’, accompanied by a significant look.

‘A woman can’t touch that [usually regalia] when she’s on her thing’, is

the most explicit such a statement might be; a phrase such as ‘her moon’

might be substituted instead of ‘her thing’. Note here the similarity of such

circumlocutions to the kinds of euphemisms deployed in public contexts in

the United States more broadly; phrases such as ‘monthly visitor’, ‘that time

of the month’ and so on bear enough resemblance to ‘her thing’ and ‘her

moon’ that the ideologies associated with the use of such phrases can easily

be transferred from one cultural context to another. Given the lacunae in

past documentation with regard to traditional ways of discussing menstru-

ation and menstrual practices, it is not possible to determine whether these

discourse styles are convergently or causally related from a diachronic

perspective, but the synchronic overlap is clear.

Such silences are often reinforced by modern attitudes and practices

which can place social sanctions on people, particularly women, who talk

about the wrong things at the wrong times. One example of this arose

during an interview I conducted with a woman in her thirties who is a

teacher in a language programme for her tribe; she is a latecomer to tribal

practice, as she was raised without close ties to her tribal community and

began socialization into community practice in early adulthood. During

our interview (which she asked not to be recorded), she was very careful as

she answered my questions to point me towards elders and other cultural

experts with regard to many topics, and expressed great trepidation about

discussing any cultural traditions with anyone at all. She described a time

when, having learned new information about her culture, she excitedly

shared it with other tribal members, and was chastised strongly by tribal

elders for doing so. In our interview, she stated that she was not sure

exactly what had made her actions inappropriate, and said that she was

therefore not sure when or how she could share that knowledge, so she

felt it was safer, culturally, not to take the chance. Such socialization is not

uncommon, and appears to be a result of a historic break in the trans-

mission not only of linguistic and cultural knowledge per se, but also the

328 JOCELYN AHLERS

more subtle knowledge related to when and how to share information; this

has a particular impact in cases such as this, when a person whose task it

is to teach tribal youth feels such a restriction with regard to the sharing of

knowledge, without the concomitant understanding of when and where it

is appropriate to do so.

Thus, in the same way that menstruation saliently indexes womanhood

in tribal culture and plays a key part in defining roles and responsibilities

for women in traditional activities, the silence associated with discourse

surrounding menstruation indexes feminine discourse within the modern

context. This is reinforced by lacunae in documentation and in the current

emphasis in language reclamation on the revitalization of larger, relatively

public ceremonies and events, which is precisely the place where traditional

women’s discourse genres did not occur.

The many roles of language ideologies in situations of language

contraction have been explored by a number of authors (e.g. Dorian 1989;

Grenoble and Whaley 1998; and Schieffelin et al. 1998, among others). Such

studies suggest that community-internal language ideologies can interact

with ideologies held by external, dominant communities of practice (e.g.

Cavanaugh 2004; McCarty et al. 2006; Meek 2007; Trechter 2001). Even

within a single community, language ideologies can be complex, interacting

with and reifying broader social structures (e.g. Kroskrity 1998), and the

same language ideologies which serve to support and promote language

revitalization efforts can also create community-internal conflicts which

have a negative impact on language use, as in the case of the eventual

termination of the White Mountain Apache language maintenance

programme due to community-internal conflicts (Nevins 2004). This

research points out just how crucial an understanding of such ideologies

can be within the context of language contraction and revitalization.

Analysis of interviews with young women engaged in the process

of entering into adult participation in their tribal communities, and of

documentation of the kinds of socializing events described above, provide

evidence of two conflicting ideologies linked to the association between

female gendered identity and silence; these dichotomous ideologies could

be labelled, in an oversimplified fashion, as silence as power and silence

as shame. Explicating these two ideologies serves to lay out the ‘human

reflections’ on the form of silence in use within the contexts, both narrow

and broad, described above. This analysis of ‘the total linguistic fact’

(Silverstein 1985:220) sheds light on these conflicting ideologies as they

coexist in an uneasy tension. It also forms the heart of understanding some

of the conflicts felt by young women as they attempt to engage with their

identities within their multiple communities of practice. These internal

conflicts and their negotiation by young women in turn offer a window

LANGUAGE REVITALIZATION AND THE RECONSTITUTING OF GENDER 329

into the processes by which individuals engage and grapple with gendered

identity and associated ideologies, particularly when those identities are in

flux and are being both reclaimed and reinvented by community members

as part of broader processes associated with language and social change.

As girls and young women acquire linguistic and social resources to

deploy in the performance of their gendered identities, their interpreta-

tions of those resources are acquired simultaneously; as they engage in the

performance of identity, they must negotiate not only their own multiple

understandings of their actions, but also their assumptions regarding

the ways in which their audience will interpret their performance. The

inherently multicultural nature of most audiences in the public performance

of identity for Native Californians means that any given deployment of

silence is bivalent. Members of these communities are relying on links to

very different (or at least to potentially very different) texts as they work to

understand the deployment of silence as performative of a certain gendered

identity. What makes this situation so potentially difficult for girls is that

the valencies are so polarized; it is difficult to frame an utterance which is

performative of ideal womanhood for the majority of an audience.

On the one hand, there is a strong suggestion that traditional expla-

nations for the restrictions surrounding menstruation were linked to the

life-giving and cleansing power of menstruation. For example, women do

not play central roles in the dancing during the world-renewal ceremony

described above. A number of tribal members explained to me that one

purpose of this dance is to allow dancers to cleanse themselves by ridding

themselves of negative influences through sweating during the four days of

continuous dancing; women, by contrast, are cleansed through menstru-

ation on a monthly basis, and therefore are not in need of such ritual oppor-

tunities to rid themselves of negativity. Furthermore, the stated reason for

women’s restriction from touching sacred objects during the time they are

menstruating, and from cooking for ceremonies while menstruating, is

because their power might disrupt the power inherent in the sacred objects

and in the sacred act of dancing (see Basso 1970 for a similar point about

power and ceremonies). These ideologies are understood to be directly

linked to past ideologies surrounding menstruation and menstrual taboos.

Such ideologies suggest a respect for women’s menstrual cycles.

There are also hints both within the anthropological record and in the

observations described above that, traditionally, the public ceremonies

whose central roles were filled by men were complemented by more

private ceremonies and settings where central roles were filled by women,

including post-partum rituals and ceremonies associated with menarche.

Documentation also suggests that some Native California languages had

traditionally female-associated gendered vocabulary used for indicating an

330 JOCELYN AHLERS

interest in a particular man, while there is no mention of a concomitant

lexicon for men to express such an interest in women (Kroeber 1976).

This suggests that the role of initiator in such relationships may have been

associated with women in at least some tribal communities. Such an inter-

pretation is reinforced by the fact that many of those communities were

loosely matrilineal and matrilocal. In some cases, this matrifocus has had

an influence on kinship terminology, such that the word for ‘father’ and

‘mother’s brother’ were the same, pointing to the role that a maternal

uncle would take in the absence of a father. These cultural facts, often

only hinted at in the documentation for reasons discussed above, suggest

cultural praxis which balances male-dominated speech events with female-

dominated ones.

On the other hand, there is a strong undercurrent of shame associated

with modern practices surrounding menstruation and a powerful framing

of those restrictions as limitations. When I first met one young man engaged

in language and culture revival projects with his tribe, he apologetically

explained to me that he was sorry, but his tribe was one of those in which

women had to ‘go away’ during certain times every month. His apology

was clearly oriented toward my assumed Western stance of gender egali-

tarianism which would disapprove of treating menstruation as something

to be ashamed of, and of restricting the actions of menstruating women

in order to avoid their polluting influence. Several years later, this same

man announced to me that his oldest daughter had ‘become a woman’, a

common euphemism for menarche, and that he was upset and sad for her.

He continued by telling me that it was because she would now live the

rest of her life with these limitations on her actions; he further compared

menstruation to a chronic illness like diabetes that could be lived with, but

that had to be a constant negative presence in one’s consideration of one’s

actions.

Thus, evidence from the anthropological record, field observations and

interviews suggest that within a historical, and to some degree modern,

tribal context women’s relative public silence was matched by control of

other conversational spaces and carried at the very least a neutral valence

and in some circumstances a positive, or at least, powerful one. By contrast,

in Western culture, silence as associated with women is often assumed to be

an index of powerlessness, something imposed rather than chosen. In spite

of the academic research problematizing simplistic one-to-one correlations

between linguistic behaviour and gender roles, lay understandings of the

relationships among language, gender and power reflect the experiences

documented in studies such as those of Susan Herring (e.g. 1995) and Dale

Spender (1980), which suggest that in public spaces, women talk far less

than men and that when they do talk, their talk is perceived as taking a

LANGUAGE REVITALIZATION AND THE RECONSTITUTING OF GENDER 331

disproportionate amount of the discourse space relative to the actual

length or number of conversational turns. Furthermore, the acquisition

of silence concomitant with socialization into attitudes of body shame

is associated with girls’ adolescence (Romaine 1999:205) in a number of

settings, including educational, which is one location of language social-

ization associated with an English-speaking gendered identity for Native

girls. Girls and women must therefore negotiate these differences as they

are socialized into both Western and tribal gendered cultural and linguistic

practice, and they must decide for themselves how and when to deploy

silence and speech in order to meet the expectations associated with their

various communities of practice. This deployment is particularly fraught in

those many situations where their communities overlap, making multiple

interpretations accessible within the same discourse space.

Navigating conflict

How, then, do young women navigate among these ideologies in their

socialization into their gendered identities? Such ideological conflict

associated with gendered identity is not something faced by their male

counterparts, as the gendered language practices into which young men

are socialized are not associated with such powerfully bivalent interpreta-

tions within the contexts in which they are deployed. Do young women

find themselves interested in maintaining such practices as they negotiate

the multiple socialization processes that they find themselves party to? My

observations and discussions with some young women suggest that while

they are not interested in critiquing the gender roles available to them per

se, they are seeking strategies which will allow them to reconcile these

ideologies. And it is not only young women. In one interview with a tribal

elder in which I asked her about her experiences as a woman participating

in both traditional tribal activities and in language revitalization and tribal

politics, she said, ‘I have my [Indian] life. And I have my American life.

It’s a thin line.’ The women with whom I have spoken are well aware of

these conflicting ideologies and the difficulties they pose for their social-

ization into, and performance of, gendered behaviour and they use various

strategies in their attempts to reconcile these ideologies with one another,

or to reconcile themselves to these ideologies.

One the one hand, it is possible for girls and young women to focus

on involvement in the kinds of community activities which allow and

even encourage women to take on speaking roles, or to engage in a

negotiation with past practice which privileges other ways of being a ‘good’

community member, resulting in the adoption of more active and vocal

roles in traditional events. Young women are often leaders and/or active

332 JOCELYN AHLERS

participants in movements to reclaim languages of heritage, a project which

not only allows but requires active public participation. Feminine discourse

practices in these non-traditional activities do not privilege silence; in fact,

active engagement is seen as an index of one’s commitment to tribal values.

In many cases, these roles require women to work with non-community

members, including linguists, granting agencies, educators, etc.; these

allies in the language documentation and revitalization process have often

themselves been socialized in dominant Western linguistic practice, and to

some degree can therefore be counted on to interpret public speaking as

a positive practice. Participation in the reclamation of female-dominated

traditional Native California practices, for example basketweaving, serve

the same sort of purpose (although I have not yet had a chance to closely

examine discourse practices associated with these activities; this is an

important next step in this research).

It is also possible to engage in negotiations to bring women into more

central roles in traditional practices that were not dominated by, or often

even associated with, women. I spoke with several young women from a

tribe that has been working to revive the practice of a gambling game in

which two teams attempt to guess at the locations of marked sticks held

in an opponent’s hand. Traditionally, men play the game while women

stand behind them and sing songs to distract the opposing team. However,

a number of young women in this community expressed an interest

in learning and playing the game. When they were told by elder family

members that it was not traditional for women to play these games and

that they could therefore not participate, these young women successfully

argued that they should nevertheless be allowed to do so by pointing out

that, if they were ever single mothers of sons or had sons with husbands

who were not tribal members, they would need to be able to teach their

sons to participate in such an important cultural activity. This negotiation,

with its privileging of important cultural values having to do with family

and continuity of cultural practice, was accepted by elders within the

community, and young women were allowed to participate. This attempt

to adjust traditional gender roles to allow for their greater participation in

the revival of cultural practice suggests that young women are interested

in finding ways to negotiate with tradition in order to make a place for

themselves in those older practices which have become part of modern life,

especially when female-focused traditions are not revived.

On the other hand, it is also possible to adopt a strategy of acceptance

of the status quo which involves an active deployment of silence and role

restriction as performative of an authentic feminine identity in the context

of traditional activities after reworking their own associated ideologies.

One young women told me that she was angry about the restrictions which

LANGUAGE REVITALIZATION AND THE RECONSTITUTING OF GENDER 333

prevented her from touching drums when she is menstruating, until the

ideologies which link menstruation with power were presented to her.

Her altered understanding of the cultural interpretation of that restriction

changed her attitude toward it. As she put it, ‘it’s hard to be offended

when I’m seen as powerful’. On the other hand, the same young woman

described to me a situation in which she was standing idle at a gathering

after finishing the tasks generally associated with women at such events,

and offered to help some young men from her tribe dismantle a structure

which was no longer in use. She told me that she was informed, quite firmly,

that she should not make such an offer to do men’s work, even though she

had nothing else to do at the time. As a strong and active young woman,

a self-identified feminist, she said that it was difficult for her to stand by

without helping when she had nothing else to do. When I asked her what

she thought this meant for her as a member of her tribe, and as a woman in

her tribe, she said, ‘This is my culture. I’m not sure if it can be my religion.’

Conclusions

This examination of ‘the total linguistic fact’, taking into account as it

does the linguistic form of silence, its use by particular social actors

within specific contexts, and the ideologies associated with those uses,

sheds light on the ways in which gender roles within Native Californian

communities are expressed and understood, particularly as they interact

with dominant gender ideologies. At a broader level, this examination of

the particular situation of socialization into gender identity and associated

linguistic practice within communities which are engaged in the process

of reclaiming their endangered languages of heritage sheds light on a

system in flux. Native Californian communities, as they work to reclaim

their languages and cultural practices, are also reinventing those practices

within the context of a surrounding dominant culture. Gender roles are

part of that process, and are reclaimed, reworked and understood in light

of both traditional and dominant practice and ideologies. Such iterative

(re)constituting of gender roles, though, cannot be unique to language

endangerment situations, highlighted as the process is in these settings;

this analysis, then, points to processes which may be generalizable to

gender socialization more broadly.

About the author

Jocelyn Ahlers is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the Department of

Liberal Studies, California State University, San Marcos.

334 JOCELYN AHLERS

Notes

1 This paper would not have been possible without the boundless patience of

the many members of tribal communities who have shared their thoughts

and experiences with me during our work together. I would also like to thank

the anonymous reviewers of this paper for their thoughtful and detailed

comments.

2 Leonard’s paper (this volume), written as it is by an insider to this process,

addresses this issue in far greater detail.

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