PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH FOR INDIGENOUS LINGUISTICS IN THE DIGITAL AGE

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PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH FOR INDIGENOUS LINGUISTICS IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Introduction In this paper, I reflect on my journey as a linguist exploring new methodologies when working with speakers of endangered languages in the era of digital technologies. I show that adopting a participatory action research framework can lead to unexpected positive developments. I also show how information technologies have allowed us to reach and engage a large community of speakers. Asking questions like “how do I make my intervention as a linguist in a language community support the maintenance of this language and empower its speakers?” led to the creation of several collaborative websites for Cree and Innu languages (see below), to an Algonquian Linguistic Atlas (www.atlasling.ca) and to our current collaborative project entitled: A digital infrastructure for Algonquian Languages: Dictionaries and Linguistic Atlas. This project now includes 11 participating dictionary teams and many communities of speakers sustaining each other. 1. Participatory Action Research in Linguistics Life journeys are often guided by a question and end up being more about the path taken than the answer found. As a new graduate in Linguistics, I joined an * I am grateful to the many individuals, community language activists, and kindred-spirits across disciplines who have made my Participatory Action Research journey possible. The list of names would be too long to include here, but can be found on the Credits sections of the various websites cited. Writing of this paper was partially funded by the Social Sciences and Humanity Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) grants # 35-2014-1199, 611-2016-0077 and 890-2013-0022. Thanks to Claire Owen for proofreading my non-native English and to two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. interdisciplinary group exploring Participatory Action Research (henceforth PAR) (Manoukian, 1990; Smith, 1999; Morris & Muzychka, 2002; Chevalier & Buckles, 2013a), in my post-doc year in 1992 at Carleton University. PAR seeks to understand the world by trying to change it, collaboratively (see Fig. 1 below). PAR was very new to me, and some of its key ideas seemed the opposite of what I had been taught: the focus was on the research process, and this process was more important than the goal. The research “subjects” were partners and could define the topic(s) of research. This paradigm challenged how I had learned to set goals, define results, and publish them. It questioned scientific neutrality and impartiality. I was the only linguist; all the others were psychologists, medical doctors, anthropologists, or international development experts. They were considering mental health patients, Indigenous people, or illiterate women in the Congo as valid research partners, capable of formulating and answering valid research questions that would positively impact their lives. I quickly learned that Linguistics had not been on the PAR agenda and vice-versa. 1 See Junker (2002) and Czaykowska-Higgins (2009, this volume). Like Benedicto (this volume), I do not make a strong distinction between PAR and CBR, except perhaps that PAR’s focus on action goes a little bit further in calling you to the Gandhian stance: “Be the change that you wish to see in the world”. This “activist” dimension challenges the culture, practices, power and role of Academia itself, as seen clearly in Benedicto’s paper. It can also challenge the governing cultures of partner organisations. Fig. 1: Participatory Action Research (from Chevalier & Buckles, 2013b: p.2). This led me to formulate the following question for myself and my field: “How do I make my intervention as a linguist in a language community support the maintenance of this language and empower its speakers?” I did not know how, I just started paying attention. At the time I was working on noble theoretical questions like quantification in natural language. I had ventured outside most commonly-known languages on which most theories were based, and was curious to see if our findings held up in lesser-known or lesser-documented languages. I started listening to my elicitation sessions, paying attention to what the speakers were really saying, those little hesitations, comments, sighs, and moments of waning or waxing interest. I started sharing my hypotheses, and getting the speakers’ insights. I started commenting on what I found beautiful in the language, and paid attention to how a speaker felt after a work session with me. I focused more on the quality of the experience for them (which was not always successful, of course) and started looking for what speakers thought would be useful to them and their community. I had entered the PAR framework and was practising it. After I became an associate professor, I decided I would follow my heart and not worry about promotion anymore. This changed my life. 2. A Journey into Information and Communication Technologies 2.1 The eastcree.org website and research with East Cree communities By the mid-1990s, the Crees in Quebec, who had obtained their own school board, had made Cree the official language of instruction from kindergarten to grade three. There was a great need for teaching resources in the Cree language, with the challenge of serving nine different communities separated by hundreds of kilometers (Fig.2). 2 One of my first attempts included publishing a linguistic paper in Cree, co-written with my East Cree language consultant. I am grateful to John Nichols, editor of the Papers of the Algonquian Conference to have being open to the idea, despite the technical challenges of the syllabics at the time. See Blacksmith and Junker (2001). Louise Blacksmith’s name appears first on the Cree version, mine on the English version. The exercise of writing linguistic description in Cree in such a non-traditional genre for Cree, gave us very interesting insights into the language itself and forced us to be simple and clear in English. It was also the start of developing grammatical terminology in Cree for the teachers. See Benedicto (this volume) on the hegemony of English as an academic language. 3 As a PAR practicioner, I have chosen to write this chapter as a personal narrative, so that it could be read by the Indigeneous language speakers I work with. For that I am using a genre that can easily be translated into Cree, Innu or Atikamekw, known as tipâchimuwin. 4 The James Bay And Northern Quebec Agreement (in French: La Convention de la Baie James et du Nord québécois), signed in November 1975, provided for the establishment of the Cree School Board and the Cree Board of Health and Social Services of James Bay serving Cree communities in Quebec. Fig. 2: Map of Cree communities in Quebec, Canada. One of these needs was for an East Cree grammar, which I started working on, guided by the PAR framework, trying to co-write it with Cree speakers in a way that would be accessible. Information technology and the internet were quickly developing, and although internet connections were slow and unreliable, the Canadian government had made it a priority to network the North. I bet on them keeping their promises, and launched in 2000 the eastcree.org website with Louise Blacksmith, a Cree speaker with whom I was working. Our goal was to offer an online grammar and other language resources needed for the Cree teachers and students. The idea (new at the time) was that the grammar could be interactive, contain oral material and be modified as we discovered more. The Cree Programs department of the School Board joined us right away as official partner, and we went on developing online resources together ever since. In 2004, we launched an online dictionary (Junker et al. 2004-present). We graduated from simple 5 The online dictionary has had many editorial team members over the years. We reference it as (Junker et al. 2012), date of the last major revisions. It also includes the Cree thematic dictionaries (Visitor et al., 2013) and has integrated links to grammatical resources (Junker (Ed.), 2000-present). HTML pages to web database design. The success of the online dictionary surprised us. The first year, about 5000 words were looked up, but we soon reached an average of over 1000 words per week (>55,000 annually), which is remarkable for a language of 12,000 speakers. Despite the limited number of speakers who know how to write the language, the number of searches in Cree is very high. It is facilitated by search engines that we developed to allow for various orthographies (Junker & Stewart, 2008), taking into account our targeted users’ abilities and difficulties. One of the most beautiful aspects of PAR is that you do not know in advance what will happen. You go from academic researcher to group facilitator, to coordinator, and you end up teaching things you just learned a few months before, as needed – not what you learned during your PhD years. The Oral stories database is such an example. I had toured most Cree communities in the summer of 2002, meeting with language specialists, from one of these discussions arose the concern that copies of old recordings of elders left behind by anthropologists would be lost. It had struck me that, while the traditional mode of transmission was mainly oral, writing the language and teaching the writing system was the primary focus of instruction. At that time, I was grappling with the question of how information technology could be of service to predominantly oral cultures. From our discussion came the idea that stories had to be available to teachers in a way that would support traditional oral transmission, and perhaps allow new developments like doing comparative oral literature. For that, we digitized the recordings and I ran a series of sound editing workshops in which we developed Cree-based categories to tag the stories.

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