Speaker: Megan Lukaniec (UCSB)

Topic: "Legacy (and the Legacies of) Documentation: Interweaving Linguistics and Language Reclamation"

Reception: All are invited to a reception following the talk

Legacy (and the Legacies of) Documentation:

Interweaving Linguistics and Language Reclamation

Megan Lukaniec

Huron-Wendat Nation

***

Department of Linguistics

University of California, Santa Barbara

For the past ten years, in collaboration with my First Nations community in Wendake, Québec, I have worked to reclaim and revitalize my heritage language Wendat. As such, my research is grounded in my experiences as a linguist and language activist and guided by the needs and values of my community. In this presentation, I will first give an overview of the Wendat language revitalization project, including a description of the legacy archival documentation used for these purposes and then discuss how applying the analytic tools of linguistics led to the development of an online dictionary and the description of grammatical structure. Through these projects, I have developed a working methodology for repurposing archival documentation for language research and reclamation. In conclusion, I will describe how Indigenous languages and their reclamation can and should transform the discipline of linguistics. Specifically, I will discuss my role in a recent collaborative project aiming to improve linguistics through the incorporation of Indigenous epistemologies and values.