Language Education Planning and Policy by and for Indigenous Peoples

Abstract

The world's 370 million Indigenous peoples represent 5% of the world's population , but they speak more than two-thirds of the world's known spoken languages. Shared histories of genocide, settler colonialism, and concomitant economic, political, and social disenfranchisement have placed virtually all Indigenous languages at risk. Thus, for Indigenous peoples, language revival, revitalization, and reversal of language shift are key language planning and policy (LPP) goals. Central to current circumstances of language endangerment is historic and ongoing raciolinguistic discrimination and medium-of-instruction policies that deny Indigenous children the right to an education in their heritage mother tongue. Thus, Indigenous struggles for language rights have been waged in tandem with the fight for cultural survival, self-determination, and social justice. This chapter begins by describing de facto precolonial policies of multilingualism among Indigenous communities around the world, then discusses dominant de jure policies designed to eradicate Indigenous languages and life-ways that have only recently begun to be redressed through local, national, and international interventions. Major contributions include policy documents, historical-descriptive accounts, ethnographic studies, and recent work that engages the social justice dimensions of research and the perspectives of Indigenous scholars and practitioners. Work in progress is organized around three common LPP rubrics: status planning, acquisition planning, and corpus planning. 155 Finally, the chapter addresses challenges, difficulties, and future directions, including the generative ways in which Indigenous peoples are refusing hege-monic metaphors of language death and reconfiguring power relations to open new spaces for language reclamation in and out of schools.