Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,3, Free University of Berlin (John-F. Kennedy Institut für Nordamerikastudien), course: Linguistic Varieties and Language Practices in the USA, language: English, abstract: When the first Europeans came to America, there existed more than 500 different Native American and Alaska Native languages. Through the contact with the English language and Euro-American cultures, the usage of indigenous languages started to decline. But it had an influence on the way Native Americans started speaking English.

The last "Indian War" was fought against Native American children in the dormitories and classrooms of government boarding schools. Only by removing Indian children from their homes for extended periods of time, policymakers reasoned, could white "civilization" take root while childhood memories of "savagism" gradually faded to the point of extinction. In the words of one official: "Kill the Indian and save the man." Education for Extinction offers the first comprehensive account of this dispiriting effort. Much more than a study of federal Indian policy, this book vividly details the day-to-day experiences of Indian youth living in a "total institution" designed to reconstruct them both psychologically and culturally. The assault on identity came in many forms: the shearing off of braids, the assignment of new names, uniformed drill routines, humiliating punishments, relentless attacks on native religious beliefs, patriotic indoctrinations, suppression of tribal languages, Victorian gender rituals, football contests, and industrial training. Especially poignant is Adams's description of the ways in which students resisted or accommodated themselves to forced assimilation. Many converted to varying degrees, but others plotted escapes, committed arson, and devised ingenious strategies of passive resistance. Adams also argues that many of those who seemingly cooperated with the system were more than passive players in this drama, that the response of accommodation was not synonymous with cultural surrender. This is especially apparent in his analysis of students who returned to the reservation. He reveals the various ways in which graduates struggled to make sense of their lives and selectively drew upon their school experience in negotiating personal and tribal survival in a world increasingly dominated by white men. The discussion comes full circle when Adams reviews the government's gradual retreat from the assimilationist vision. Partly because of persistent student resistance, but also partly because of a complex and sometimes contradictory set of progressive, humanitarian, and racist motivations, policymakers did eventually come to view boarding schools less enthusiastically. Based upon extensive use of government archives, Indian and teacher autobiographies, and school newspapers, Adams's moving account is essential reading for scholars and general readers alike interested in Western history, Native American studies, American race relations, education history, and multiculturalism.

American Indian English documents and examines the diversity of English in American Indian speech communities. It presents a convincing case for the fundamental influence of ancestral American Indian languages and cultures on spoken and written expression in different Indian English codes. A distillation of over twenty years' research, this pioneering work explores the linguistic and sociolinguistic characteristics of English language use among members of Navajo, Hopi, Mojave, Ute, Tsimshian, Kotzebue, Ponca, Pima, Lakota, Cheyenne, Laguna, Santa Ana, Isleta, Chilcotin, Seminole, Cherokee, and other American Indian tribes. American Indian English fills numerous gaps in existing studies of language histories, Indian student school experience, Indian-white contact, and "acculturation." Unlike contemporary studies on schooling, ethnicity, empowerment, and educational failure, American Indian English avoids postmodernist jargon and discourse strategies in favor of direct description and commentary. Data are derived from conditions of real-life experience faced by speakers of Indian English in various English-speaking settings. This practical focus enhances the book's accessibility to Indian educators and community-based teachers, as well as non-Indian academics.

The recent multilingual turn involves various different implicit and explicit language policies, urging pressure and resistance with regard to the spread of English and its dominant relationships with other national languages. As such, this book considers the social value of communication as the basis of multilingualism and of the evolution of language systems. The data presented here show English as being in the middle of the double “listening” of cultural mediation and the imperfect “magnifying” glass of translation, with worldwide Standard English being but one of the many other related varieties which enjoy prestige on a large scale. These varieties may be identified according to different features which make the plural “world Englishes” an umbrella term with blurred edges. New approaches to dialects study have been developed in recent decades, and cartographic mapping has overlapped with the emergence of a new dialectology which deals with the description of language phenomena as complex concepts, where “complexity” provides a challenging framework for investigation and research of languages as dynamic systems made up of variables which mutually influence each other. Thus, dialectometry, dialectology and standardization become interesting tools for measuring linguistic differences, establishing language typologies and endorsing the systemic characteristics which can be formalized. Comprehensive and well-informed, this volume will appeal to anyone interested in the spread of English, from researchers and teachers to students, providing them with a greater understanding of some examples of world Englishes analysed under the light of complexity as a product of global society.

New York Times Bestseller Now part of the HBO docuseries "Exterminate All the Brutes," written and directed by Raoul Peck Recipient of the American Book Award The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire. With growing support for movements such as the campaign to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day and the Dakota Access Pipeline protest led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is an essential resource providing historical threads that are crucial for understanding the present. In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: “The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them.” Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative. An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is a 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature.

In this comprehensive history of American Indian education in the United States from colonial times to the present, historians and educators Jon Reyhner and Jeanne Eder explore the broad spectrum of Native experiences in missionary, government, and tribal boarding and day schools. This up-to-date survey is the first one-volume source for those interested in educational reform policies and missionary and government efforts to Christianize and “civilize” American Indian children. Drawing on firsthand accounts from teachers and students, American Indian Education considers and analyzes shifting educational policies and philosophies, paying special attention to the passage of the Native American Languages Act and current efforts to revitalize Native American cultures.

Native American literature has always been uniquely embattled. It is marked by divergent opinions about what constitutes authenticity, sovereignty, and even literature. It announces a culture beset by paradox: simultaneously primordial and postmodern; oral and inscribed; outmoded and novel. Its texts are a site of political struggle, shifting to meet external and internal expectations. This Cambridge History endeavors to capture and question the contested character of Indigenous texts and the way they are evaluated. It delineates significant periods of literary and cultural development in four sections: “Traces & Removals” (pre-1870s); “Assimilation and Modernity” (1879-1967); “Native American Renaissance” (post-1960s); and “Visions & Revisions” (21st century). These rubrics highlight how Native literatures have evolved alongside major transitions in federal policy toward the Indian, and via contact with broader cultural phenomena such, as the American Civil Rights movement. There is a balance between a history of canonical authors and traditions, introducing less-studied works and themes, and foregrounding critical discussions, approaches, and controversies.