Abstract

Indigenous language reclamation efforts are pushing academic ideas of what language is, in order to be accountable to Indigenous epistemologies. Simultaneously, as our Indigenous languages grow, we (academics) are pushed to grow beyond the boundaries of disciplines. Categories of “language” and “land” have been segregated by this colonial structure. In this study, as we bring them together, we seek to describe what the ontology in play looks like. We argue that as reclamation efforts successfully grow more young speakers, we are able to push against colonial constructs of learning when we witness learning in the context of movement, land, and intergenerational interactions. In this article, we closely examine episodes from three walks taken from a broader corpus of walks (14), to describe how one Elder walking with groups of two children constructed knowledge and joint meaning-making in the Ojibwe language while walking on Ojibwe lands. We take seriously the idea that there is an Indigenous epistemology at work in these cultural ecologies, one that sees humans as a part of the natural world, at play on the walks. Here we describe specifically what this looks like in the moment-to-moment interactions, and how we read these constellations of cultural practices as an apprenticeship into sustaining relationships with land.

摘要

土着语言的复垦努力正在推动关于什么是语言的学术思想，为了对土著认识论负责。同时，随着我们本土语言的发展，我们（学术界）被迫超越学科界限。这种殖民结构将“语言”和“土地”的类别分开了。在这项研究中，当我们将它们放在一起时，我们试图描述游戏中的本体是什么样子的。我们认为，随着开垦工作成功地培养出更多的年轻演讲者，当我们在运动、土地和代际互动的背景下见证学习时，我们能够反对殖民地学习结构。在这篇文章中，我们仔细检查了从更广泛的散步语料库 (14) 中提取的三个散步的情节，描述一名长者如何与两名儿童一起在奥吉布威土地上行走时，如何用奥吉布威语建构知识和共同意义建构。我们认真对待这样一种观点，即在这些文化生态中有一种土著认识论在起作用，这种认识论将人类视为自然世界的一部分，在散步中发挥作用。在这里，我们具体描述了这在即时互动中的样子，以及我们如何将这些文化习俗视为维持与土地关系的学徒。