The Shasta Language: A One-Hundred Year Conversation

This dissertation argues that indigenous language revitalization and reclamation projects are best understood as multigenerational and multi-participant conversations, which I will frame as language conversations. Language revitalization and reclamation relies on relationships, access, and accountability within indigenous frameworks. This model of a language conversation fits within broader indigenous scholarship. Such language conversations enable ancestors and contemporary communities to communicate through time as well as through real and perceived social restrictions. They can also act as a focal point for developing and grounding engaged indigenous scholarship. A language conversation will: (1) use academic and community intermediaries to introduce speakers and language learners to language materials; (2) assemble a broad range of language materials from multiple points in time from one or more individuals; (3) act with community engagement as an end goal. Language conversations blur the boundaries between formal linguistic scholarship and indigenous scholarship. Because language conversations link the past and present, previous generations of linguists, ethnographers, anthropologists, and historians who studied an indigenous community invariably become part of the conversation. In the early 1900s, ethnographer and linguist Roland B. Dixon (1875-1934) collected field notes about the Shasta, an indigenous group in northern California. During his fieldwork he consulted with Sargent Sambo or Ik?ya·hampik (1865-1963), who became one of the most prominent figures in Shasta linguistics and ethnography. While conducting her dissertation field research on the Shasta language in 1958, Shirley Silver also worked with Ik?ya·hampik. Staring in 2007, the present author worked with Silver on updating transcriptions of texts collected in the late 1950s (presented in an appendix to this dissertation) and over the past decade has begun sharing information about the language with the broader community of Shasta people as preliminary steps towards Shasta language reclamation. This multi-generational collaboration involving multiple nodes of transmission -- Dixon- Ik?ya·hampik, Silver-Ik?ya·hampik, Silver-Sarmento and Sarmento-Shasta community -- becomes a case study of a language conversation for this dissertation. These conversations represent a continuous discussion of linguistic field methods, and indigenous ideologies. In the present, this dissertation creates new testimony for how indigenous communities can engage in multi-generational and multi-participant language conversations that span time. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]