Q&A: David Bowles & Anton Treuer

Authors David Bowles and Anton Treuer traded questions last fall with a focus on language preservation, the lasting effects of colonization, and centering Native voices.

left: David Bowles; right: Anton Treuer

DAVID: What role (if any) can academia play in the reclaiming, preservation, and popularization of Indigenous languages? Is there a danger of too much of this work being done by non-­Indigenous folks?

ANTON: Native people should lead in the revitalization of their own languages. Otherwise we are just window dressing to non-­Native academics’ careers. Our languages are living—we need dictionaries, literature, software, and data of all kinds. Academics are good at that. We just need to be sure that Natives are in charge of their own cultures and languages while we do it. And that means more Natives in academia as well as every other front in the battle to keep our languages alive.

DAVID: Continuing with that thought, where does one draw the line between the promotion of Indigenous languages / culture for the collective and individual benefit of the heirs of those traditions, and fascination—whether academic or otherwise—of outsiders?

“Colonization is violence and violence dehumanizes everyone, both victors and victims.”

ANTON: Colonization is violence and violence dehumanizes everyone, both victors and victims. And reconnecting to our indigenous roots is healing. We have more than a vestigial remnant of totally different world views and ways of solving problems in Native America, which should pollinate the garden we are all trying to harvest from. But here is the distinction and boundary from my view. All humans are indigenous to somewhere. True healing means each of us reconnecting to that. It does not mean appropriating someone else’s indigeneity or customs or culture. It means relearning our own.

DAVID: What role should pre-­contact or colonial variants of Indigenous languages play in efforts to sustain and spread knowledge / use of those languages in the present day? In other words, can modern dialects be enhanced by "folding in" elements of the older varieties?

ANTON: This has to be explored on a case-­by-­case basis. All languages change over time and Native people do not need to be frozen with theirs; we can be both modern and ancient, recognizable to our ancestors and making history right now. So each tribal language community needs to make important decisions about language change and revitalization. The Hawaiians have a long literary tradition and tomes of untapped resources, which are great for lexical expansion and dealing with dialect variance. Others, like Ojibwe, have a lot of speakers with deep morphological knowledge of the language, and reconstructive work with older verb forms or vocabulary is interesting but better fruit for a linguistic article on proto-­Algonquian than teaching Ojibwe today. For more depleted languages, such efforts may be deeply helpful.

ANTON: Why do you think it’s so important to center indigenous voices in your work?

DAVID: It’s connected with why I’ve de­-centered European heritage in my own identity and life. For too long, Native languages, and culture have been erased from the conversation in the Americas. Mexican Americans and other Latin Americans arising through “mestizaje” (the historical blend of European and Indigenous) can have more nuanced, balanced, and satisfying lives when they stop allowing / participating in this erasure. It’s why I write books that explore the connections between Mexican Americans and Indigenous nations of modern Mexico, and why I translate ancestral texts from around the time of the Spanish conquest.

ANTON: How does language encapsulate the unique worldview of a people? Are some things lost in translation?

DAVID: As someone who grew up bilingual and has now studied a dozen other languages, I feel confident that the cultural specifics of a people do indeed impact the way they use language to describe the world around them. So, particular lexical items or syntactic structures make maximum sense to people within the culture that speaks a given language. Now, people are profoundly similar across the globe. As a translator, I feel certain there is no concept, feeling, or saying that I cannot translate from one language to another. But something will indeed be lost.

ANTON: What does the connection between a living language and culture mean to you?

DAVID: It’s hard to overstate the importance of the connection between a culture and the living, responsive language. And, of course, that creates a tension between elders and the youth, between those who want to preserve language in a more ancestral form and those who want it to evolve as the need arises. Modern varieties of Nahuatl, for example, have integrated Spanish words and syntax so deeply that it would be nearly impossible to “revert” to a “purer” version of the language without doing damage to its speakers.