Dr. Jenny Davis
Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois

In Native American communities, language is closely intertwined with individual and community identity, and in discussions of language revitalization in Indigenous North America, strong distinctions are often made between heritage and non-heritage participants, where non-heritage language learners are assumed to be rare and a product only of contemporary colonial relations. In this paper, I draw on over a decade of research on Indigenous language revitalization within the United States to demonstrate that the emphasis on such distinctions may not be representative of indigenous language use, past or present.