Learning our Native Languages: Addressing Legacies of Destruction

The purpose of this course is to support learning Indigenous languages. Course content is differentiated to each student according to their needs, with guiding questions: How will you learn your language? What aspects of your language (reading, writing, listening, speaking, cultural context) will you focus on, and why? What resources will be most helpful and what challenges of learning your language exist? How will they benefit your academic study and professional trajectory? The scholarly context of this course emerges from a need to address the legacies of destruction to Indigenous peoples. Given the history of cultural and linguistic genocide, Native voices and ways of knowing will be centered, using community resources, oral histories, and Native scholars as a support network for study, guided by principles such as relationships to heritage languages, Indigenous epistemologies, land relations, music, and gender.