Fifty years after the U.S. Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act (CRA), Native Americans continue to fight for the right "to remain an Indian" (Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006) against a backdrop of test-driven language policies that threaten to destabilize proven bilingual programs and violate hard-fought language rights protections…

This essay updates Dell Hymes's "Report from an Underdeveloped Country" (the USA), positioning our analysis in the New Language Policy Studies. Taking up Hymes's call for comparative, critical studies of language use, we examine three cases, organizing our analysis around Hymes's questions: What "counts" as a language, a language problem, and…

Comprehensive in scope and rich in detail, this book explores language planning, language education, and language policy for diverse Native American peoples across time, space, and place. Based on longterm collaborative and ethnographic work with Native American communities and schools, the book examines the imposition of colonial language…

In this chapter, the authors offer a critical examination of a growing field of educational inquiry and social practice: the reclamation of Indigenous mother tongues. They use the term "reclamation" purposefully to denote that these are languages that have been forcibly subordinated in contexts of colonization. Language reclamation…

In Native American communities, the "global here and now" (Appadurai, 2001) is linked to twin movements for standardization and English supremacy, resulting in the decline of Indigenous languages and persistent educational disparities. This article takes up Appadurai's call to democratize research on globalization, juxtaposing theories that…

In this introduction, we situate the theme issue within a growing body of research on Indigenous youth language practices, communicative repertoires, and ideologies, articulating points of intersection in scholarship on Indigenous and immigrant youth bilingualism. Our geographic focus is North America. Ethnographic studies from the Far North to…

This article offers a grounded view of language shift as experienced by Native American youth across a range of early- to late-shift settings. Drawing on data from a long-term ethnographic study, we demonstrate that the linguistic ecologies in which youth language choices play out are more complex than a unidirectional notion of shift might…

This article examines current efforts to revitalise, stabilise, and maintain Indigenous languages in the USA. Most Native American languages are no longer acquired as a first language by children. They are nonetheless languages of identity and heritage, and in this sense can and should be considered mother tongues. The article begins with a…

This paper examines preliminary findings from an ongoing federally funded study of Native language shift and retention in the US Southwest, focusing on in-depth ethnographic interviews with Navajo youth. We begin with an overview of Native American linguistic ecologies, noting the dynamic, variegated and complex nature of language proficiencies…

Data from three well-documented American Indian language immersion programs (teaching Navajo, Hawaiian, and Keres) and from an ongoing large comparative study of language shift/retention in six Indian school-community sites suggest that immersion schooling can serve the dual roles of promoting students' school success and revitalizing endangered…