Framing Indigenous Languages as Secondary to Matrix Languages

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Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Vol. 38, Issue 2, pp. 99–118, ISSN 0161-7761, online ISSN 1548-1492.© 2007 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests forpermission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rightsand Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/aeq.2007.38.2.99.

Framing Indigenous Languages as Secondary to Matrix Languages

BARBRA A. MEEK

University of Michigan

JACQUELINE MESSING

University of South Florida

Reversing language shift has proven to be difficult for many reasons. Although much of theliterature has focused on educational practices, little research has attended to the visual pres-entation of language used in educational texts aimed at reversing shift. In this article, we com-pare language materials developed for two different language situations, finding that for bothsituations the minority languages continue to be framed by the matrix languages such thatpractices meant to interrupt matrix-language dominance continue to reinforce currenthierarchies. [indigenous language education, language revitalization, Mexicano/Nahuatl,Kaska, texts]

Practitioners in the emerging field of reversing language shift (RLS) confront a dauntinghistory of failure, gauged by the fact that very few RLS programs have resulted in theproduction of enough new speakers or first-language learners to cover the loss ofolder speakers (Crystal 2000:129; see also Grenoble and Whaley 2006).1 With very fewexceptions—for instance, reports of success by students in immersion programs inCalifornia, Hawaii, and New Zealand (cf. Hinton 2001; Kamana and Wilson 1996;Slaughter 1993)—success in the acquisition of subordinate and minority languages,even by young children, has proven to be elusive. This contrasts sharply with the easewith which both adults and children seem to acquire dominant languages both inand out of school (de Swaan 1998a, 1998b). Edelsky (1996) and Edelsky and Hudelson(1979, 1980), examining reasons for such failures in bilingual programs in an elemen-tary school in the U.S. Southwest, point out the asymmetrical “intrusion” of Englishinto Spanish. Even on “Spanish days” English was used pervasively in the school andwas constantly available as a resource (Smith 2000). In “power struggles” betweenthe two languages, local inappropriate use of Spanish was always more censurablethan that of English. Edelsky and Hudelson, borrowing from Fishman (1976), pointout that English always retained its status as an “unmarked,” taken-for-granted lan-guage, whereas Spanish was “marked.” One challenge for educators, they argue, wasto accomplish at least a partial reversal of this marking. Reflecting on our own expe-riences as researchers of and participants in the development of minority-languagematerials, we concur that this should be an important goal in the RLS curriculum,and it is one that current practice often overlooks.

This article focuses on the ways that a dominant language can show up in contextsthat are intended to be heritage-language events and the ways that such appearances

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can shift and complicate their meanings in undesirable ways. We consider this phe-nomenon through an analysis of school-based written materials and samples of oralpractices from two RLS contexts. The first examples are from Meek’s fieldwork in proj-ects that aim to teach Kaska, an Athabaskan language spoken in the Yukon Territory,Canada. The second examples are from Messing’s fieldwork in primary school pro-grams that aim to teach Nahuatl, an Uto-Aztecan language of central Mexico.Underscoring and motivating this analysis is our position that formal educational con-texts can be favorable for RLS work and, moreover, that literacy work matters. Weagree with those advocates (e.g., Charles 2005; Hinton and Hale 2001; Hornberger 1997;McCarty 2002; Morgan 2005) of the more general use of literacy and educational insti-tutions in the continual struggle to revive, revitalize, or re-create indigenous languages.Not all scholars or community advocates agree with this position (Brandt 1982; Pecosand Blum-Martinez 2001; Sims 1998, 2005), arguing that literacy is epistemologicallyantithetical to indigenous practice and is an ongoing aspect of colonization. However,it is only through the incorporation of indigenous languages and approaches that theideological legacy of schools can be interrupted and transformed (see also Harrisonand Papa 2005; Henze and Davis 1999; House 2005; Manuelito 2005; McCarty 2002).

It is also necessary to point out that we are not attempting to scrutinize theprogress or accomplishments of indigenous peoples (cf. Dementi-Leonard andGilmore 1999). Rather, our goal is to elucidate ways in which we as languageresearchers, advocates, and teachers can “interrupt” the unintended power dimen-sions of heritage language educational practices and thus disrupt the dominance ofcolonial languages (see also Hermes 2005).2

Social Indexicality and Reversing Language Shift

Both written and oral RLS practices and materials in an endangered language arealmost invariably embedded in or framed by materials from the unmarked language,which then functions as a “matrix” (Myers-Scotton 1998) for the endangered language.Such framing sends an unspoken message about the inferior and marked status of theendangered language that is so powerful that it can override and reverse almost anyamount of overt support for it. This unspoken message is conveyed through the semi-otic function of “indexicality.” This concept of indexicality helps us to understand howlanguage choice refers to, or indexes, social context—both presupposing and creatingthis context—and how this indexing of context reinforces the dominant position of thematrix language and the subordination of the endangered language. Indexicality is partof a broader theory of semiotics in which Silverstein (1976) distinguishes three func-tional aspects of meaning: (1) the purely semantic-referential aspect, (2) the “shifter” orindexical-referential aspect, and (3) the “purely indexical aspect” (see also Hanks 1999).Historically, second-language programs, including RLS programs, primarily attendedto the semantic-referential aspects of meaning; pedagogical focus was on vocabularyand grammatical structure (Spolsky 1999, 2002), with teachers often emphasizing therote memorization of word lists (see also Tollefson and Tsui 2004).

RLS curricula do not usually attend specifically to the other dimensions of mean-ing. However, this does not mean that they are not present. Indexical-referentialmeaning emerges from the context of utterance, as when reference is assigned to agrammatical element like a pronoun. In a sense, some second-language (L2) learningmethods are similar to learning a system of referential indexes, in that the novice

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hearer will depend on the first-language (L1) context for interpretation of the L2word or phrase, available through the L1 translation. This may unfortunately repre-sent the second, minority language as semantically “less full.”

The purely indexical aspect of meaning emerges through the social contextualiza-tion of these linguistic elements, as in the ways in which heritage languages areplaced in physical relation to matrix languages in RLS materials and routines.Framing the second language within the matrix language, by word order in transla-tion or within matrix-language book covers and section titles, can be an icon for itssubordination in the larger world, especially in the domain of education. This rein-forces precisely the hierarchy that RLS attempts to interrupt. As Tove Skutnabb-Kangas (1999) has pointed out for minority populations in general, such practiceshave important implications for the reinforcement of negative ideologies towardindigenous peoples and for their access to and conceptualization of institutionalizededucation, including language.

Kaska

People who still speak Kaska (Dene k’éh) today primarily live in the YukonTerritory, Canada, and northern parts of British Columbia. These speakers are pri-marily elders, whereas the parents of school-aged children predominantly speakEnglish at work and at home. Today’s schoolchildren are growing up with a very lim-ited competency in Kaska; they understand little of their ancestral language andspeak even less. As with much of Native North America, this shift from the heritagelanguage to English has been attributed largely to boarding, or residential, schools.In partial recognition of this, public schools now incorporate native language classesinto their curriculum and develop broader and adult-targeted RLS programming.

This situation exists throughout the Yukon Territory. Because of this, the territorialand federal governments have set aside funds to support any language projects thatthe territory’s eight officially recognized First Nations should wish to undertake.These funds are distributed through Aboriginal Language Services, a department inthe Yukon Territorial Government. Another avenue of support is the Yukon NativeLanguage Centre (YNLC), run by the Council of Yukon First Nations. The center’smission is to preserve and revitalize the territory’s aboriginal languages. Individualsand organizations can purchase language learning materials, ranging from lessonbooks with cassette tapes to short stories on CD, for each of the territory’s eight recog-nized aboriginal languages. The center also has been in charge of training aboriginal-language teachers through the Yukon Native Language Teachers Training Program, acertificate-granting program within Yukon College.

The Kaska First Nations themselves have begun to work at re-creating and pre-serving their heritage language in a number of ways. These ways include transpos-ing oral texts into written texts; sponsoring language workshops; financiallysupporting Kaska-language teacher and translator training; demanding Kaska-language instruction in the public schools; and sponsoring an Aboriginal Head Startprogram for preschoolers that aims to promote and reinforce “Kaska language andculture,” that is, historic practices associated with the children’s grandparents andancestors. The materials used for these various RLS events vary. Many of the materi-als were produced by YNLC. Other materials were created locally. The materials pre-sented below come from several of these sources.

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The YNLC texts, children’s booklets, and language lesson books have covers, titlepages, and copyright information all in English. The first example comes from a Kaska-language lesson book used for individual and, at times, classroom language instructionand has an accompanying cassette tape (see Figure 1). The materials are extrapolatedfrom the curriculum guides developed for Yukon native-language teachers. The frontcover of this book displays no Kaska-language text. The title, authors’ names, anddialect are all in English. Several of the subsequent pages within this book are also inEnglish: the inside cover, which provides publication and sponsor information andbrief biographical sketches of the authors; and the title page, the introduction, and thesection on the Kaska alphabet. The body of the text is written in English and Kaska,with English phrases appearing before corresponding Kaska phrases. There is no


Figure 1.Page from a Kaska-Language Lesson Book

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word-by-word or morpheme-by-morpheme gloss provided. Following monthly les-sons, the back cover of the book returns to English-only text, providing the pub-lisher’s contact information and the sponsor’s name (Yukon Native LanguageCentre) in large, bold letters. The lessons themselves are organized by month, witheach page addressing a different topic for that month. For example, October lessonshave phrases like Ná’ (Here, take it) and Bes dé’ (Hand me the knife), coordinatedwith the theme of hunting. The month of September has five lessons, focusing ongreetings, people, picking berries, fishing, and weather. This September lesson showsthe typical page layout for the lessons (Mercier and Wolftail 1994:2).

Each topic category identified, the month, and the title of the book on the bottomof each page is in English. Text in Kaska is minimized by the preponderance ofEnglish as well as the fact that the English text precedes the corresponding Kaskatext. One additional opportunity for English to invade this heritage-language eventis through the lesson topics. Although such topics are intended to be relevant to thestudents’ everyday experiences, instructional topics such as weather appear to reflector index an educational genre derived from an Anglo-based curriculum rather thana Kaska-based one. Such “shadow routines” are not necessarily relevant to the socio-cultural milieu of Kaska people or reflective of their topics of conversation. Weather,for example, is not a conversational piece itself; nor is it a means for opening a con-versation and determining how your interlocutor is feeling at that moment. Weatheris usually discussed in relation to its impact on particular activities, like travel orhunting. Although this example illustrates the erasure of the social or “purely index-ical” aspect of language, other meaningful dimensions are also being eliminated.

Along with the monthly topics, students at the elementary school level learnweather terms and phrases in the same way that they learn noun phrases, that is, aslexical tokens associated with a particular flash card illustration. A flash card is heldup, a finger points to the picture, and the students identify (“name”) the picture. Forexample, to elicit the phrase sa gúlın, students are shown a picture of a smiling sun,to which they respond accordingly. The grammatical structure of this phrase is givenbelow, showing the subject-object-verb word order and basic verb structure:

[sa: gú-li:n] It is sunny.sun prefixal unit- verb stem

Although the language lesson books represent such phrases and others as of bothEnglish and the aboriginal language, some younger learners who do not have accessto these books appear to reduce these phrases to one-word English glosses. For exam-ple, the phrase above was glossed by several five- and six-year-old students simply assun. The instructional routines seldom, if ever, explicitly inform students about thegrammatical structure of the Kaska language. The entextualized phrase (sa gúlın) cor-responds with the subject-object-verb ordering of syntactic elements, but neither theroutine nor the text identifies the morphological dimensions of the verb. The flash cardimage also reinforces a one-to-one correspondence between utterance and meaning,perhaps encouraging students to imagine the prosodic unit as a lexical word. In suchcases, the morphological and syntactic components of languages are overlooked orentirely erased, such that students may parse entire phrases as a single lexical item,reducing a complicated, minimally tripartite referential system of meaning into asemantico-referential one. This grammatical erasure again reinforces the dominance of


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the matrix language by equating Kaska grammar with the morphologically impover-ished matrix language, English. That is, one may risk indexically reasserting the matrixlanguage when using the matrix language’s grammar as a template for teaching theminority language.

The next textual sample is a schedule handout from a locally sponsored Kaska lan-guage workshop that was organized by a longtime resident, linguist Patrick Moore.Along with Moore, Marie Skidmore, Leda Jules, and I (Meek) contributed in variousways to these workshops. In particular, I helped to create the House of Languagenotebooks and the schedule page in particular (see Figure 2). Although participantsspoke more Kaska at these events than at other language events (in part becausemany were fluent speakers of Kaska, as opposed to the elementary school students,most of whom were not), English continued to be used frequently for translation,instruction, personal conversations, and, most prominently, in the House ofLanguage notebooks. The notebooks were loosely bound collections of various lan-guage exercises covered during the four-day workshop. They included a title pageand the schedule. The House of Language schedule illustrates the disparity betweenKaska and English; very little Kaska text is present on this page.

This again shows the dominance of English as the unmarked framing language in acontext where Kaska-language literacy and cultural re-creation were the most impor-tant foci. One way to diminish the role of English here would be to provide corre-sponding Kaska text for everything presented in English or Kaska-only text, as timeslots would be given numerically. Although these language re-creation endeavorsshould prioritize, rather than demote, the presence and use of Kaska-only texts, par-ticipants often requested these English “intrusions” because English was the language


Figure 2.Kaska House of Language Workshop Schedule

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they associated, through socialization, with literacy and education. Most of the partic-ipants read, wrote, and were schooled in English, and some even considered speakingand storytelling—not the production of texts—as the more appropriate methods forrevitalizing Kaska. English’s prominence would be unproblematic in such contexts thenbecause it would reinforce, or “purely index,” the Anglo-centered nature of the event.

One final textual example is a children’s alphabet book. The creation of this textwas motivated by the House of Language workshop participants to stimulate chil-dren’s interest in learning Kaska as well as to provide an opportunity for caregiversand younger children to read and speak Kaska together. The title of the book, cen-tered in large white letters against a red background, is a mix of English and Kaska(Kaska Alphabet K’úgé’), with a corresponding English version (Kaska Alphabet Book)provided at the top margin of the front cover page (see Figure 3; Meek et al. 2002).


Figure 3.Kaska Alphabet Book

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Within the text, Kaska phrases are highlighted in red with English glosses under-neath. They are also accompanied by illustrations that were drawn by a local Kaskaartist. The letters themselves are in a large font, but the representative nouns are bold,with English translations located below.

Like previous publications produced by the Kaska First Nations, such as DeneGudeji: Kaska Narratives (Moore 1999) and a two-volume noun dictionary, the aestheticarrangement of the alphabet book and the prominence of Kaska within it illustrateanother step toward relocating control of the linguistic image within the Kaska lan-guage community as well as transforming the image itself. As Beth Dementi-Leonardand Perry Gilmore (1999:38) have pointed out, such community events are opportu-nities for resistance, self-determination, and collaboration. Even though English haslong been the language of literacy and media, making it widely available and “valuable”(Spolsky 2002; see also de Swaan 1998a, 1998b) and therefore difficult to erase com-pletely from indigenous-language texts, collaborative community-based languageinitiatives go further in challenging matrix-language dominance and in assertingtheir authority. Such initiatives effectively diminish the indexical hold of the matrixlanguage.

As with the textual imagery, oral language lessons are also embedded inEnglish. Teachers often frame their Kaska expressions with English directives andtranslations. Recorded in 1999, the dialogue in Table 1 was an exchange between aKaska-language teacher (“Ann”), an elder (“Rose”), Meek, and two children(“Flora,” age three years, ten months; and “Lisa,” age two years, six months) at thelocal Aboriginal Head Start program.3 The goal of the interaction was to encour-age the novices—the two children and Meek—to learn and speak Kaska, eventhough the instructions were given in English, as with the repeated use of theEnglish directive “say.”

Examples of Kaska utterances followed by English translations, orKaska–English translation pairs, are found in lines 20 and 24, 36 and 38, and 55and 57, foregrounding the Kaska utterances. However, the reverse pattern, wherethe English phrase precedes the Kaska one, is found as well, as in lines 41 and 42and lines 57 and 58. This reverse pattern corresponds with the arrangement foundin the lesson books, backgrounding the heritage language. In addition to this useof English translations, the directive “say” is also prominent in the interaction(lines 3, 12, 16, 22, 24, 36, 42, 45, 55, 64). Throughout the exchange, the teacher’sKaska utterances are framed by English ones. The interaction ends with a repeatedseries of Kaska phrases, but the final pronouncement ending the exchange is againan English phrase with a Kaska French borrowing, “mussi say.” Although thedirective of this preschool and kindergarten program is Kaska language and cul-ture, the lessons and routines are framed by English instructions and subjected tonational programming expectations. This indexical recursiveness then perpetuatesthe symbolic domination of Kaska speakers and learners, reinforcing the socialhierarchy within which indigenous-language teachers already struggle for control.Furthermore, these educational practices tacitly work against the goal of revital-ization through the erasure of other meaningful (social and grammatical) aspectsof the Kaska language.


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Table 1.Teaching Kaska at the Kaska

Aboriginal Head Start Transcribed Excerpt

20. Ann: Okay, endzí’ duya? Okay, what’s your name?21. Flora: [sedni du:ya]22. Ann: Say Flora gúye’.23. Flora: hunh?24. Ann: I’m asking you what’s your

name, say Flora gúye’.25. Flora: Flora [guya].26. Ann: //mhm//27. Rose: //mhm//28. Ann: Neni hi? And you?29. Amy: Amy gúye’.30. Ann: Etie. Good.31. Neni hi? Endzí duya? And you? What’s your name?32. Lisa: [unintelligible]33. Ann: Lisa gúye’?34. Eszí Ann gúye’. Dedi Elder Rose lat’a. My name is Ann. This is Elder

Rose there.35. Say, say, [unintelligible].36. Say essu. . Say grandma37. Flora: [Isu:]38. Ann: Mhm, it means your grandma.39. Lisa: [unintelligible]40. Ann: Oh, good41. Mrs. Rose, she sews, she’s She’s sewing.

sewing beadwork, nenehtsek.42. Say nenehtsek.43. Flora: Nenehtsek. She’s sewing.44. Ann: Ooh, ane etie. Ooh, very good.45. Neni hi? Say nenehtsek. And you? Say she’s sewing.46. Lisa: unh, unh, unh

{The children become distracted here. The exchange then resumes in the same manner.}

55. Ann: Okay, say tak’atl.56. Flora: [Ka:t’a:tal]57. Ann: Means needle, you sew with

needle58. Tak’atl eh nenehtsek. With a needle she’s sewing.59. With a needle she’s sewing.60. Tak’atl eh nenehtsek, With a needle she’s sewing,

[unintelligible], ke’enhdi’. [unintelligible], you say it like that.61. Tak’atl. Needle.62. Flora: [ta:k’a:tel]63. Ann: Nenehtsek, hadi. She’s sewing, hurry.64. Okay, kula. Mussi say. Okay, enough. Thank you say.

Note. A high tone diacritic is missing over the orthographic u symbol in duya.

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Nahuatl/Mexicano

Now we turn to materials from the Messing’s fieldwork in Nahuatl/Mexicano-speaking areas of the Malinche volcano (cf. Hill and Hill 1986), in Tlaxcala, Mexico.4

Ethnographic fieldwork was undertaken in two communities in several periodsbetween 1996 and 2006 (Messing 2003), with a partial focus on attempts to teachNahuatl in local schools as part of the elementary indigenous education program ofthe Dirección General de Educación Indígena (DGEI [General Directorate forIndigenous Education]) through the Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP [Secretariatof Public Education]) of the State of Tlaxcala (Messing and Rockwell 2006).

Since the 1930s postrevolutionary process of state formation led to the creation of acentralized educational bureaucracy (Rockwell 1994), Spanish has been both the officiallanguage and the language of schooling. Bilingual schools came about in the early 1990s;now there are a dozen in both Mexicano and Otomí linguistic regions. Several teacherstrained in this program, and also community people affiliated with the Casa de Cultura(House of Culture), have produced a variety of texts and curricular materials, which areintended to promote the use and understanding of Nahuatl/Mexicano and are in localcirculation. The Spanish-language SEP textbooks, for grades one through six in Mexico,are free to all students across the country. Some language teaching materials are pro-duced by the DGEI, which is bureaucratically a division of the SEP. However, funds arerestricted on the national and state levels, and, therefore, materials are produced irregu-larly and do not exist for each language (and variety of language) spoken in Mexico.Several official Nahuatl textbooks exist for the states of Puebla, Veracruz, and Guerrerobut not yet for Tlaxcala, although efforts are under way to create such an officially sanc-tioned text. During my fieldwork, I (Messing) documented three concurrent projects forwriting that would eventually be chosen as the official state Nahuatl text.5

Here we analyze several Nahuatl textual and curricular materials. The first are textsproduced by the DGEI. These texts were intended in the past to serve as transitionalbilingual education materials—as a first step in an effort to “Castilianize” speakers ofindigenous languages—but have since shifted toward native-language maintenance.A second category of texts includes booklets, pamphlets, and small books producedby nongovernmental organizations such as the Summer Institute of Linguistics or, forinstance, Mexico City Danzante groups (these groups undertake elaborate reconstruc-tions of Aztec rituals, especially including song and dance, and also produce pub-lished materials sold at their performances and at urban book fairs.). A third categoryis libros caseros, “homemade books,” namely, grassroots efforts to produce simplebooks or booklets for use in the DGEI classrooms. The libros caseros are produced bydedicated teachers and school principals involved in bilingual education when gov-ernment agencies do not provide materials to support the local variety of Nahuatl.This has been the case in Tlaxcala. A fourth category is print materials (not illustratedhere) produced with the assistance of anthropologists and linguists.

The first example for analysis is the framing material of a SEP–DGEI-produced ele-mentary school–level textbook, Nauatlatoli (Nahuatl Language). These textbooks aredistributed gratis to students, as are all SEP- and DGEI-produced materials.However, because it is of a markedly different linguistic variety of Mexicano, this textis rarely used in Tlaxcala. The cover of Nauatlatoli is shown in Figure 4.

This front cover illustrates the overt framing of Nahuatl between Spanish head-ings. Only the main title is in Nahuatl. All framing material is in Spanish, including


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the indication that the book is for the Lengua Náhuatl del Norte de Puebla (NahuatlLanguage of Northern Puebla), a variety different from that spoken on the Malinche,and the administrative notation that the book is Parte 1 (Part 1) of a textbook seriesfor the Primer Ciclo (First Cycle). The excellent production values of SEP textbooks areevident here. Note also the attractive, colorful, and artistic cover. It is printed on high-quality card stock and represents one of the great eras of Mexican art, a source ofnational pride, and a text appropriate for students.

The following pages begin a section devoted to administrative framing that, as withthe Kaska examples, is entirely in the dominant language, in this case, Spanish. Thetitle page of Nauatlatoli shows the title in Nahuatl with the remaining information inSpanish. The first few pages of the textbook include a section intended to be filled outby the student and is entirely in Spanish. This additional material indicates that thebook has been produced by the government and provided gratis to students; it alsoinvites comments from users to be sent to the address given. Finally, the copyrightpage and the bibliography page at the end are primarily, if not exclusively, in Spanish.

The next example is from a Danzante booklet (see Figure 5), which is an exampleof our second type of material. Danzante groups are hierarchically structured socialgroups in urban areas, such as Mexico City, who re-create their versions of Aztec rit-uals dances; Tezozomoc of the Danza Azteca describes the movement as “an organicindigenous spiritual expression” (1997:62) that seeks the “revernacularization” ofClassical Nahuatl (as spoken in Tenochtitlán/Mexico City at the time of the Spanishconquest). These dancers perform interpretive re-creations of Aztec dancing rituals in


Figure 4.Cover of the Official Nahuatl Text, State of Puebla

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Figure 5.Page from a Danzante Booklet.

public squares in Mexico (and the United States) and also produce materials aboutthe Aztec and Classical Nahuatl, in the form of xeroxed packets that they sell to thepublic in Mexico. These materials can often be found at outdoor book markets andare the most readily accessible printed descriptions of Nahuatl to be found in MexicoCity. Figure 5, entitled “In Tlapalli” (The Colors), shows Spanish as a matrix for aword list in Nahuatl (believed to be the Classical period variant), with the Spanishtranslation of the color terms.

Although the header is in Nahuatl on this particular page, the other framing termsare in Spanish; the rest of this booklet alternates between uses of both languages toframe the content. Although Danzante groups are well known in Mexico for espous-ing a strong ideology of indigenous identity, this text also shows Spanish as a fram-ing matrix for the Nahuatl text.

The next example (see Figure 6) is a libro casero, a homemade text, produced by twoTlaxcaltecan teachers who are dedicated to the promotion of the language and directa weekly bilingual show on a public radio station (Flores Vásquez and RomanoMorales 1999). With the exception of a few lines of Spanish in the introduction, thistext is entirely in Nahuatl. Figure 6 shows the cover page.

The cover and table of contents pages are in Nahuatl, not Spanish. There isgreater use of Nahuatl-as-matrix, as noted in similar texts produced by local teachers


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or language promoters. However, even in this text, with its strong sense of localism,there are framing materials in Spanish and inexact translations of Nahuatl. The maintitle, as with the SEP textbook Nauatlatoli, is in Nahuatl: Nahuatlajtoltzintle(Dear/Respected/Beloved Nahuatl Language), a construction that strongly evokes local waysof speaking and is a more accurate reflection of the phonological structure of the wordsthan the spelling in the SEP text; the inclusion of the honorific tzintle marks respecttoward the language, as dictated by local sociolinguistic custom, and is absent from thetitle of the SEP text. However, as with the SEP textbook, the indication of which varietythe text will treat is in Spanish: Lengua Náhuatl de Tlaxcala (Nahuatl Language ofTlaxcala); and the administrative framing material is also in Spanish: Documento de tra-bajo (Working document) and Unidad de Radio Bilingüe (Bilingual Radio Group).

This working copy of an unpublished text was reproduced and distributed to ahandful of schools in the Tlaxcalan indigenous education system. The first page con-sists of a cover sheet on the letterhead of the Bilingual Radio program; this page intro-duces the text as having been created under the auspices of the official stateeducation system (Unidad de Servicios Educativos de Tlaxcala), in particular the sub-division of indigenous education in which the two teacher-authors are employed.The fact that Spanish is the official default language and the necessity of identifyingthe educational unit that employs the authors supersede any attention to a use ofNahuatl as matrix language on the first page. Note that none of the rest of the bookof 26 pages, with the exception of the bibliography, is in Spanish, which shows con-scious awareness of the issue we discuss here. Page 2 consists of an introduction tothe text in Nahuatl, with different information than the cover sheet in Spanish.

In the libros caseros, Nahuatl is valorized through its use and its presentation sim-ply by appearing in print. It should be noted that throughout the Mexican indigenousworld, and no less so in the Nahuatl-speaking communities of the Malinche region,


Figure 6.Cover of a Homemade Tlaxcalan Textbook

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speakers are conscious of an ideology of devaluation that contrasts idiomas (lan-guages)—like Spanish, that appear in print—with dialectos (unwritten languages). Inthis context, the presence of printed text in Nahuatl sends a powerful positive mes-sage. However, users inevitably compare the low production values of the black-and-white libros caseros with the sophisticated full-color productions by SEP. This iscertainly one deciding factor in determining whether materials will actually be used;teachers remarked that children will not like to use books printed in black and whiteand in monotonous typefaces because they are “boring.” Indeed, not all DGEI publi-cations are as attractive as the example shown in Figures 4 and 5. In an academicpresentation in Mexico City regarding DGEI and education in Mexico, a presenterasked: “Why are the DGEI books so ugly?” In our opinion, the poor appearance of apublication itself devalorizes the content, especially when it is compared with thehigh-quality appearance of the other free textbooks that are used for the core Spanish-language curriculum. The contrast in production values is a powerful social index,with the attractive texts for Spanish-language materials signaling the prestige andsocial value of that language, whereas the plain black and white of this text forNahuatl sends the opposite message. This visual contrast may override the attemptby the authors of libros caseros to valorize Nahuatl by showing it in a print contextwith minimal Spanish framing.

We turn now to the specific context of the classroom itself. In the two Tlaxcalanbilingual schools it was common for teachers and students to use Spanish as the lan-guage of general classroom communication (as will be shown in the example below),whereas Nahuatl was only the content of the lesson. In the schools the teacherstaught mainly Nahuatl nouns, numbers, and colors and occasional brief phrases suchas greetings and introductions. Otherwise Nahuatl was seldom heard in the class-room, even in the bilingual school in San Isidro where most children were bilingualnative speakers. The message to students in a classroom comes across loud and clear:the matrix language here is Spanish.

This point is vividly illustrated in the following discourse sample, which wasrecorded in 1999 in a Tlaxcalan classroom in which the teacher had tried, despite theexternal constraints of a standardized, required national curriculum in Spanish, toinsert teaching modules in Nahuatl. Observations had been undertaken in this par-ticular classroom before, but this passage was taped without the presence of the field-worker; the teacher was given a tape recorder for the purpose of recording anyclasses or meetings of the teacher’s choosing; the tape was then given to Messingwith permission to use it for scholarly analysis.

The classroom was a fourth grade class with 24 students, each sitting at a desk. Thestudents are accustomed in Tlaxcalan schools to call out responses in unison; such“call-and-response” speaking style is commonplace.6 In the excerpt in Table 2, theteacher, who is a fluent Mexicano speaker, asked the students to recall their lastNahuatl lesson. Note that, as with the Kaska example of interaction between eldersand children, the matrix language is the dominant language, which frames instancesof Nahuatl usage that exhibit a very narrow function of providing the second pair-partin response to a teacher’s elicitation. Also in congruence with the Kaska example, theusage of the local language in this classroom discourse is purely semantic-referential,using translations of a number of simple conversational phrases.

In this discourse sample, just as in the Kaska example of an interaction betweenteachers and children where the directive “say” appears in English, the directives to


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Table 2.Teaching Nahuatl at a Tlaxcalan School Transcribed Excerpt

1. Teacher: Entonces, ¿ya se acordaron So, ¿do you remember this?, repeat:de esto?, repitan: ¿Canin timochantia? Where do you live? I live in Contla.Nimochantia [??] Contla.

2. Students: Nimochantia [??] Contla. I live in Contla.3. Teacher: De acuerdo, ahora . . . ¿ Okay, now . . . you all remember

Ustedes recuerdan los números? the numbers, now let’s count.Ahora vamos a contar.

4. Students: Ce. Ome. Yeyi. Nahui. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Makhuil. Chikhuasen. Chicome. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.Chichueyi. Chiknahui. Maktlatl.

5. Teacher: ¿Hasta ahí nada más? Up until there, that’s it? You all Se han acordado hasta ahí porque remembered up until there because esos números los repasamos ya those numbers we went over them una y una y otra vez, pero más already one and another and anotherallá no se acuerdan ¿verdad? time, but beyond that you don’t

remember, is that right?6. Student 1: Yo sí. I do.7. Teacher: A ver. . Let’s see8. Student 1: Ce. Ome. Yeyi. Nahui. Makhuil. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.

Chikhuasen. Chicome. Chichueyi. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Chiknahui. Maktlatl. Maktlatl huan ce. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. . . .Maktlatl huan ome. Maktlatl huan yeyi. [Voice trails off.]Maktlatl huan nahui . . .

9. Teacher: Caxtol. Caxtol es quince, caxtol Caxtol, fifteen. Caxto huan ce, it’s like es quince, caxtol huan ce, es como decir saying fifteen plus one, Sixteen,quince más uno. Caxtol huan ce, caxtol eighteen nineteen and twenty.huan ome, caxtol huan yeyi, caxtolhuan nahui, y cemphualli.

10. Student 2 [repeats]: Cemphualli. Twenty11. Teacher: Cemphualli12. Students: Cemphualli13. Teacher [amidst student noise]: Do you all know a flower that is called

¿Ustedes conocen una flor que “Cemphuaxochitl”?se llama “Cemphuaxochitl”?

14. Students’ chorus: ¡Sí! Yes15. Teacher: ¿Conocen una flor del Do you know a flower that during the

día de muertos, se vende mucho, Days of the dead is sold a lot, that is que se llama “Cempua-xochitl.” called “Cempuaxochitl.”

16. Student: [Unintelligible utterance]17. Teacher: CEMP-HUAL- (Writes the word on the board)18. Student [completing word]: Xochitl!19. Students: ¡Maestro! Teacher!20. Student: Maestro, ¿Qué significa esto de . . . ? Teacher, what does this mean to . . . ?21. Teacher: Cemphual—ya dijimos que Cemphual—we said that cemphual is

cemphual es veinte. Xochitl—¿ Qué es twenty. Xochitl—What is xochitl?xochitl?

22. Students: [Several respond at once.]23. Teacher: Flor, xochitl es “flor.” ¿Ustedes Flower, xochitl is ‘flower.’ Have you

han escuchado por allí algunos nombres all heard [around town] of some de algunas personas que se llaman names of some people who are called [pause] Xochitl? [pause] Xochitl?

24. Students: ¡Yo sí! ¡yo sí! I have. I have!

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say something are always in Spanish, such as the form of the Spanish directives repitan(repeat) and vamos a contar (let’s count). Other framing devices used by this teacherare the Spanish-language questions ¿Ya se acordaron . . . ? (Do you remember . . . ?lines 1 and 3), ¿Conocen . . . ? (Do you know . . . ? lines 13 and 15, and ¿Hanescuchado . . . ? (Have you heard of . . . ? line 23), designed to call on students’ existingknowledge of common Nahuatl terms, used in everyday local speech (be it Nahuatl,Spanish, or syncretic speech [cf. Hill and Hill 1986]). The relationship between the useof Nahuatl in this discourse and the framing by Spanish as the matrix language par-allels the associations in the textual examples previously analyzed.

Conclusions and Recommendations

We have shown a variety of examples where a dominant language is a matrix foran endangered indigenous language in materials and routines intended to valorize thelatter. However, this attempt at valorization is interrupted by the fact that the framingreasserts the unequal power relationships between the languages and their speakers.We are not alone in this observation. As Bernard Spolsky has pointed out, “Foreign-and second-language teachers have been challenged to recognize the political effectsof their customary work. Whereas they had thought they were neutral and academi-cally objective, they found their professional occupation supporting the spread ofimperial and world languages and contributing to the demise of powerless lan-guages” (1999:182; see also Spolsky 2002). Our analysis and reflection on the languagematerials and routines that we observed, used, and developed in our field sites aresuch a challenge.

What are the lessons here for language educators involved in the production ofminority-language materials and routines? First, language educators must pay care-ful attention to what will and will not work with their students, in terms of both whatthe students are learning and what they are interested in learning. Second, we urgethat educational consultants, such as anthropologists and linguists, attend to localstandards for the attractiveness of materials and seek resources that will help ensurethat materials in endangered languages do not reassert a condition of oppression by“look and feel.” Third, we must pay attention to the use of materials, ascertaining insuch educational situations which materials are preferred (and by whom), how theyare used, and how they are responded to. We hypothesize here that matrix-languageframing works indexically to reassert the dominance of the colonial language, butbecause these situations are dynamic and complex, there may certainly be cases inwhich such framings enhance and empower the minority language. For instance, itmay be that framing that indicates the prestigious institutional source, like theSecretaría de Educación Pública or the Yukon Native Language Centre, actually ele-vates the endangered-language content by virtue of its publication of the materials.Finally, we must create awareness of the indexical messages conveyed by dominant-language materials and routines and work to minimize the matrix-language problem,limiting the presence of the dominant language to contexts where there is no alter-native. By calling attention to dimensions of power entextualized within minority-language educational practices, we urge educators to more carefully attend to theproblem of matrix-language framing and to work with communities and publishersto be sure that decisions about language use support, rather than undercut, efforts toempower minority communities and reverse language shift.

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Barbra A. Meek is an assistant professor of anthropology and a faculty affiliate of the NativeAmerican Studies program at the University of Michigan. Jacqueline Messing is an assistantprofessor of anthropology at the University of South Florida.

Notes

Acknowledgments. For research support, Meek thanks the National Institute of GeneralMedical Sciences, Wenner-Gren, the University of Arizona, the University of Michigan, and theWoodrow Wilson Foundation; Messing thanks the Fulbright Commission, the SpencerFoundation, the University of Arizona, and the University of South Florida. For commentaryand encouragement, we wish to thank Gerald Carr, Megan Crowhurst, Robin Danzak, KellyFayard, Douglas E. Foley, J. A. Flores Farfán, Keren Rice, E. Rockwell, R. Rosales Flores, D.Lopez Marcos, University of Michigan linguistic anthropology lab participants, and especiallyJane H. Hill, Teresa McCarty, and two anonymous reviewers. All errors are our own.

1. For these RLS practitioners see, for example, Bradley and Bradley 2002; Cantoni 1996;Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer 1998; Dorian 1987; Fishman 1976, 1991, 2001; Flores Farfán 2001;Gegeo and Watson-Gegeo 1999; Hinton 2003; Hinton and Hale 2001; McCarty 2003; Sims 1998.

2. This article is based on a presentation at the Linguistic Society of America AnnualMeetings in Chicago in 2000.

3. All names have been changed.4. Mexicano is the term that local Tlaxcalan and Pueblan speakers have used to describe this

Uto-Aztecan language (Hill and Hill 1986).5. The issue of bilingual education in Mexico is itself very controversial (Messing 2003).

Nationally, officials produce much discourse proclaiming the virtues of a bilingual, intercul-tural education. The reality I (Messing) observed is complicated, for example, Nahuatl studyonly happens in isolated instances within a highly regimented school schedule and at certainsymbolic events during the school year. There are, however, teachers who compile their owntextbooks and, in some cases, vie with each other for publication by the national SEP.

6. Note that the classroom talk is organized through a participant structure (Philips 1972) inwhich talk, that is, the control of the floor, is negotiated between teacher and students (con-stantly alternating between teacher-dominant and student-dominant dialogue).

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Framing Indigenous Languages as Secondary to Matrix Languages

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