This article critically examines the mediating role of scholarly expectations and the unexpected in the management--and transcendence--of failure/success as these concepts relate to language revitalization. Deloria remarks that, "expectations tend to assume a status quo defined around failure, the result of some innate limitation on the part of…

While American Indian language reclamation efforts are often motivated by a desire to learn and embrace traditional culture, they generally occur within multicultural populations in which community members speak the dominant group's language(s), practice its ways, and use contemporary technologies. For this and related reasons, some mixture of the…

It is known that for Louise Erdrich the "old language" is Ojibwe, sometimes called Anishinaabe or Ojibwemowin, a language that is still spoken, but that, like most Native American languages, is losing ground to English or, more rarely, Spanish. Erdrich has been learning the Ojibwe language for some years, and she is increasingly macaronic in her…