April 24, 2024 (Updated July 21, 2024)
America–the United States–is a very complicated and messy country when it comes to culture and language, both in the discipline of linguistics and in my personal opinion. I love America’s culture but I hate what it has done to so many cultures. I love the melding of cultures that it—like no other nation on earth—uniquely affords, but I also love studying those cultures on their own and investigating what they are like before they are brought into the American mainstream and lose some (a lot) of their “old country” character. I have at various times in my life renounced America or embraced it, but I always return to it in some way. My favorite book of all time, Blood Meridian, tells the story of an America with an almost indelibly barbarous history, that nevertheless is an endless source of fascination for author and reader alike.
In the winter of my senior year of high school, right before I got into college, I visited the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City, a recently renamed museum center celebrating the original peoples of that state as well as the original peoples who had been forcibly moved by whites to Oklahoma (with exhibits focusing on tribes located outside the state as well). It intended to spearhead a movement of name change from the controversial labels “American Indian” and “Native American” to the simple “First Americans”. Perhaps I thought that this movement was very widespread or I was just thinking a lot about First Americans, because one of the first college courses I signed up for focused largely on the original languages of the Americas.
Truthfully, I did not grow up with any language other than English in a significant capacity, and the sounds of my other “heritage” languages are alien to me. The most recent ancestor I have who spoke any other language natively was in fact my great-great-grandmother, who spoke Cherokee as her first language. My great-grandmother or “Oma” (she married an Austrian-American man), who I grew up with, spoke the language in her youth and retained a little bit of it, or at least some of the accent, until her death. One tricky thing about my heritage is the fact that a large fraction of people believe misconceptions that all self-identified Cherokees are lying about their heritage, and assume that a white individual like myself is incapable of having ties to a “nonwhite” culture like the Cherokees. I understand why these misconceptions exist, given the number of people who falsely claim Cherokee heritage. In fact, this is actually one of the biggest problems that has historically affected the Cherokee Nation. The Dawes Act gave all American Indians individual parcels of land, but it did not take this land from whites or the government.
No, this land was carved up out of communal land that had formerly belonged to the First American nations located in Indian Territory—what is now Oklahoma—in the late 1800s, and much of it was taken by people falsifying records. The first “Pretendians” were whites who, desperate for land and familiar with the mixed culture of Cherokees, passed themselves off as tribal citizens in order to benefit from the Dawes act. The phenomenon has been recognized ever since. Unlike these popularly-mocked faux natives, I have relatively recent Cherokee ancestry and my heritage has affected my life in tangible ways. My Oma was visibly mixed-race and I grew up hearing—from her and from her son, my grandfather—firsthand accounts of the toxicity of racism and especially of culturalism. I learned about how her mother repressed her own native language and raised my Oma to speak only English, and how my Oma wished so much that she could’ve gone back and learned the language when her mother was still alive. It makes me sad that the cultural continuity of Cherokee in my family has been severed, but hope is still alive for so many languages. California languages like Karuk have made strides in revitalization, and the Karuk people still own their ancestral lands. While Cherokees are generally very assimilated and often very “white” by blood (myself not excepted), there is still so much potential for Cherokee cultural preservation and language revitalization.
It is endlessly fascinating but also disturbing to me how there is such a disconnect between some popular perceptions of varieties like African-American English (AAE) as simply “broken English” or “slang”, and the linguistic, descriptivist understanding that AAE has rules to it that make it its own language variety, rather than just a modification of SAE. This disconnect often leads to people who speak commonly-stereotyped varieties of English being insecure about their own accents. My own mother has dealt with this linguistic insecurity, being from Oklahoma. “Regionalism” when it comes to linguistic prescriptivism is still in fashion. While it may be unfashionable among the majority of Americans to poke fun at AAE or foreign accents, it seems generally Southern accents are still fair game to mock. My mother has been cruelly insulted over her way of speaking, especially by the prototypical linguistically-secure, almost linguistically-smug Californian. I had always had some resentment for how hubristic some Californians are about the English they speak, with a common claim among these types being that they lack an accent completely. I think the simple truth that everyone has an accent is one that surprisingly few people get.
My great-great-grandmother grew up in benighted times, and she was taught by life to resent her own Cherokee culture. She took pains to pass as white or mixed, married a white man, suppressed her own Cherokee accent in English, and refused to teach the language to her many children. This is a story that many descendants of the first peoples of this continent understand and can relate to. Others are members of more isolationist peoples who never really mingled with colonial descendants—closer-knit tribes that often have strict blood quantum requirements—and lead lifestyles that still prioritize ancestral foodways and cultural practices. Despite popular perceptions of their cultures as extinct, First American nations are still very much around.