Documentation, Reclamation and the Place of the Settler Linguist

Abstract

The present work analyses a series of its author's published reports of research into information and intonation structure, and of activities in community-based language reclamation and repatriation, in "Siouan" languages and language communities, particularly Umóⁿhoⁿ and to a lesser extent Póⁿka and Báxoje, and the work out of which these reports have emerged, as interventions in and through settler colonial documentary linguistics. Tension between settler-guided and community-guided interventions can be fruitful for language-reclamation and -repatriation agendas, but the needed clarification of authority has not yet found its way into the ethical literature of documentary linguists or linguistic anthropologists working in these agendas.