| Course Description |
Humans arrived in the Americas no earlier than 30 thousand years ago and perhaps as recently as
13 thousand years ago, yet since that time Native Americans have developed an incredible richness
and diversity of cultures and languages, with well over a thousand distinct indigenous languages.
In this course we will focus on the indigenous languages of the United States and Canada. At the
time of European contact in the sixteenth century, there were around 400 languages spoken across
the territories of these two countries, yet today only around half of these are still spoken, and of
these about 150 are only spoken by elders and in grave danger of not being passed onto younger
generations. It is estimated that only between 20 or so indigenous languages in the United States
and Canada have good prospects of being spoken natively into the twenty second century. In this
course we will survey the variety and diversity of indigenous languages and the cultural values
tied to them in the pre-contact era, and then look into the causes of their current decline in use and
what steps are being taken to reverse this and revitalize them, even languages which no longer
have any first language speakers. We will investigate the amazing diversity in the basic structures
of these languages and the meanings they can express, highlighting the difference between them
and the more familiar patterns of English. We will study how they are used in indigenous contexts,
both traditional and modern, to communicate valued sociocultural and aesthetic ends. Finally, we
will explore three indigenous languages in greater depth, two from New York State, and appreciate
some of the native oral traditions in the original languages. This course will be of interest to any
undergraduate student curious about the prehistory and subsequent Native history and ethnography
of North America.
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