[LINK] "The Newest Indians"

[rfmcdonald]

Language Hat obligingly links to the article of the same name by Jack Hitt in the most recent New York Times Magazine, exploring the reidentification of many people of partly Native ancestry with Native culture. Hitt's article concerns the situation facing Native Americans, but similar trends are partly responsible for the rapid recent population growth among Canada's First Nations as well.

[T]he demographic spike in population is a symptom of what sociologists call ''ethnic shifting'' or ''ethnic shopping.'' This phenomenon reflects the way more and more Americans have come to feel comfortable changing out of the identities they were born into and donning new ethnicities in which they feel more at home. There is almost no group in this hemisphere immune to the dramas accompanying so much ethnic innovation. Last year in Montreal, for example, the selection of Tara Hecksher as Irish-Canadian parade queen seemed to many to be inspired. While the young woman's father is Irish, her mother is Nigerian. To look at her face and hair, most people would instinctively categorize her as ''black.'' Certainly the thug that interrupted the parade by tossing a white liquid at her seemed to think that way.

Native peoples have long had traditions of exogamy, but there remains the question of just what it is to be native. The decision to engage with and even revivify tradition seems to be key in the 21st century.

Just where in that spectrum, between land-based tribes in the West and playful hobbyists, you might locate a bright dividing line of authenticity is an open question. It is territory that is currently being remapped. It is why the population of Indians is surging and why there is such fervent debate among Indians as to just who should be able to make the claim. It becomes a kind of nature-versus-nurture argument. Do genetics make you Indian or does culture? Or can either one?

It is in the context of such continued questions that the renewed interest in language takes on more urgent meaning. According to Laura Redish, the director of a resource clearinghouse for language revival called Native Languages of the Americas, there are roughly 150 native languages that are currently spoken in North America or that have disappeared recently enough that they could still be revived. She estimates that in the last 10 years, some 80 to 90 percent of the tribes associated with these languages have put together some kind of program of revival.

"Language has a different kind of importance now than it did only 20 or 30 years ago,'' says Ofelia Zepeda, the director of the American Indian Language Development Institute in Arizona, whose program in revitalizing languages works with about 20 tribes each year. ''Language is one of those things that you take for granted, but now it has a different dimension. It is a conscious act.''

This brings us back to Renan's Qu'est-ce qu'un nation? (English-language excerpt here): "L'existence d'une nation est (pardonnez-moi cette métaphore) un plébiscite de tous les jours, comme l'existence de l'individu est une affirmation perpétuelle de vie."