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The common narrative about signing in North America starts in 1817 when Thomas Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc founded a school for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut, providing the birthplace for American Sign Language. But long before ASL emerged, Indigenous peoples had been signing here for generations. Hand Talk, the collective term for Indigenous signed languages of North America, is used by both deaf and hearing members of Indigenous communities across the continent. The goal of this article is to raise awareness of Hand Talk, and to encourage individuals to share their knowledge of Hand Talk in contexts where they previously did not. By making Hand Talk a part of our shared understanding of signing in North America, we will improve opportunities for language reclamation efforts and repair the history of signing that is rooted in this land.
Abstract
The common narrative about signing in North America starts in 1817 when Thomas Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc founded a school for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut, providing the birthplace for American Sign Language. But long before ASL emerged, Indigenous peoples had been signing here for generations. Hand Talk, the collective term for Indigenous signed languages of North America, is used by both deaf and hearing members of Indigenous communities across the continent. The goal of this article is to raise awareness of Hand Talk, and to encourage individuals to share their knowledge of Hand Talk in contexts where they previously did not. By making Hand Talk a part of our shared understanding of signing in North America, we will improve opportunities for language reclamation efforts and repair the history of signing that is rooted in this land.
JAMES WOODEN LEGS, a Northern Cheyenne deaf man, grew up in Montana signing with his hearing family members who all knew Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL) to varying degrees. At a January 2023 gathering at the University of New Mexico, he shared the story of how he came to learn American Sign Language (ASL; Wooden Legs 2023). When he was eight years old, he was sent to a residential school for the Deaf and was exposed to ASL for the first time. He explained that he was not allowed to use PISL when at school. He would be slapped on his hands for using an "incorrect" sign if he produced one of the signs used in his home. He then learned the "correct" ASL signs. When he returned home and used the new ASL signs, his family could not understand him and asked him to use his tribe's language. He quickly discovered that he needed to switch between sign languages when at school and at home. He did not think of himself as bilingual because he was never allowed to use his home language at school. He learned to hide his home language from a young age. It was not until he was an adult and looked back on these childhood experiences that he understood that the compulsory school system systematically suppressed his Native language.
This story, shared within a circle of students who demonstrated a commitment to building a relationship of trust with the storyteller, is a reminder of how colonization works to erase history. The use of Indigenous signed languages, or Hand Talk, across North America was the norm prior to colonization. The history of Hand Talk is very well documented but is not common knowledge today. Many interpreters and students of ASL express surprise when they learn that ASL was not the first signed language used in North America. Native families of deaf children are excited to learn that Indigenous signs were widely used in their tribal communities decades ago. The goal of this article is to raise awareness of Hand Talk, and to encourage individuals to share their knowledge of Hand Talk in contexts where they previously did not. By making Hand Talk a part of our shared understanding of signing in North America, we will improve opportunities for language reclamation efforts and repair the history of signing that is rooted in this land. We were inspired to write this article by the stories shared by James Wooden Legs and by our discussions with Dr. Melanie McKay-Cody. Without their wisdom and generosity, this article would not exist.
Positionality Statement
The authors all identify as hearing individuals who acquired English as a native language and began learning ASL in high school or college, but differ in their racial identities and experience as interpreters. The first author is white and works as an interpreter full-time. The second and third authors are registered members of the Navajo Nation. They bring an understanding of the marginalization that Native people endure as a group to this work. They are both in training to become interpreters. The second author is a heritage speaker of Navajo. The third author speaks Navajo and is a heritage speaker of Apache. The fourth author is white and grew up in a monolingual English household, but now lives in a German-English bilingual home. She has not completed interpreter training, and interacts with the Deaf community primarily in social and higher education contexts.
What Is Hand Talk?
Prior to colonization, signed languages were used across North America by both deaf and hearing Indigenous peoples. These languages are known collectively as Hand Talk. The term Hand Talk is an English translation of the sign for sign language in PISL, which is the best documented of the North American signed languages referred to collectively as Hand Talk. The exact age and origins of Hand Talk are not entirely clear; however, historical accounts indicate that by the time Europeans arrived in North America, PISL and other signed languages were used by Indigenous peoples for long enough that most signers could not say where it had come from. West (1960 Part 2, 61a-61b) compiled a geographic schematic of historical accounts of Hand Talk that illustrates the reach of these signed languages across the North American continent, a reach unparalleled by accounts of signed language usage on any other continent. Hand Talk was the primary language of Native Deaf peoples and was also used by hearing people for various purposes. In a 1956 survey, West (1960 Part 2, 76) asked 108 signers to film themselves using Hand Talk "to say anything at all." The resulting films displayed a wide range of functions of Hand Talk, including, "14 involved conversations between two informants, generally on secular matters; 35 comprised short statements about diverse matters from hunting to reservation gripes; 38 contained longer statements or short lectures, generally concerning the mistreatment of Indians by the whiteman or comments upon the sign language survey and the field workers; 19 comprised folk-tales, generally about hunting, fishing, supernatural occurrences or anecdotes involving animals" (Part 2, 76). Many historical accounts emphasize the importance of Hand Talk for ceremonial purposes and for communication between tribes that used different spoken languages. The function of Hand Talk as a lingua franca was largely replaced by colonial languages over the course of colonization and the forced relocation of tribes onto reservations (McKay-Cody 1996).
James Wooden Legs explained that everyone in his family was familiar with Hand Talk, but that his hearing grandparents were the ones who taught him to sign. His parents were busy with their responsibilities working their land and maintaining their home. He often helped with the work around their farm, but his grandparents were his teachers. This tradition of children being reared by grandparents meant that he sometimes knew traditional stories that his parents were not familiar with. When he was honored by being named an Elder of his tribe, Wooden Legs felt that his knowledge of Hand Talk was one reason his community looked to him as a leader and someone who would revere and uphold the tribal wisdom passed down over generations. He feels the strong responsibility of the wisdom shared with him by his grandparents.
Present Efforts to Advocate for Indigenous Signed Languages
Present efforts to document and revitalize Indigenous signed languages in North America are seen within the Native Deaf and Native hearing communities. Among the most persistent Indigenous scholars and activists are Dr. Melanie McKay-Cody, Floyd Favel, and Dr. Lanny Real Bird. Floyd Favel, a hearing Cree tribal member, hosts the annual PoundMaker Indigenous Performance Festival on behalf of Miyawata Culture Inc. in Saskatchewan, Canada. The festival often includes a PISL camp/workshop with Dr. Lanny Real Bird of Crow Nation to provide participants an opportunity to become familiar with some PISL signs.
Dr. Melanie McKay-Cody, a Cherokee Deaf scholar, has been a leader in documenting, studying, researching, advocating, and aiding in the preservation and reclamation of tribal signing. Since 1994, she has contributed greatly to revitalization efforts of Hand Talk. She is a cofounder of Turtle Island Hand Talk, a group that promotes community engagement, education, and empowerment of Indigenous Deaf, Hard of Hearing, Deaf Blind, and hearing peoples. In her 1996 master's thesis, titled Comparison of Primary and Alternate Users of PISL. Dr. McKay-Cody identifies several weaknesses of historical studies on PISL. Early studies of PISL typically assumed that it was not a full language, possibly due to biases against signing. Some studies relied on translations of signs into English for analysis, ignoring the morphological and narrative structure of the original signed discourse. Indigenous Deaf signers' use of PISL was often overlooked, which contributed to a failure to distinguish features of Hand Talk as used by primary, compared to alternate, signers who use PISL in alternation or combination with spoken languages. McKay-Cody corrected the record by eliciting a narrative and an interview from a primary signer of PISL and comparing it to the signing of an alternate signer whose telling of the story "Buffalo Hunting" was recorded in 1930. Her analysis reveals differences between the two narratives, such as a much denser and more detailed account of buffalo hunting by the primary signer than the alternate signer despite a comparable narrative duration, as well as more lexical types and more tokens of complex morphological verb forms (i.e., classifier constructions) in the primary signer's narrative. Nevertheless, the narratives demonstrate similarities in narrative structure, comparable phonological sign types (cf. Battison and Baird 1978), and a similar range of classifier types. She concludes that whether used as a primary or alternate system, PISL should be compared to other signed languages and not to co-speech gesture. PISL exhibits phonological, lexical, and grammatical patterns. She emphasized the need to preserve and document North American Indian Sign Language (NAISL) due to the decline in its use as English becomes the dominant language used by many younger individuals.
McKay-Cody's (2019) dissertation is an incredible resource that covers a wide range of issues, including a historical perspective on Hand Talk and its relationship to ancient rock panels, the complex identities of Indigenous Deaf people, and how language is a part of that identity, including how it is reflected in the expression of kinship taxonomies. Importantly, she discusses the idea of Indigeneity, a contested term used to address the complex intersection of identity with Indigenous values and experience. McKay-Cody considers how this term applies to Indigenous Deaf identity. She argues for the necessity of the "preservation and protection of Indigenous Deaf languages, history, and culture" (24) and outlines evidence of signing use in North America that predates European colonization. She also makes several proposals that grew out of the research process of working with Indigenous Deaf informants to imagine a more inclusive future. Those proposals include training Indigenous Deaf professionals to work in Deaf residential schools, developing a curriculum to teach Indigenous Deaf children about their tribal cultures, and developing a training program focused particularly on preparing Indigenous students to become interpreters.
In 2020, McKay-Cody published a video-article Multiply Marginalized: Indigenous Deaf Students' Experiences in Higher Education in which she identifies the types of marginalization that Indigenous Deaf people endure within higher education settings, where there is a lack of resources, inclusion, and connection to their Indigenous roots. The reinforcement of stereotypes about Indigenous people by non-Indigenous peoples is a form of ongoing oppression, creating a barrier to participation in higher education for Indigenous Deaf people. Practical solutions proposed are involvement of educators and community members, providing appropriate interpreters, having an institution for Indigenous Deaf scholars, and reciprocity. Importantly, all efforts to acknowledge and support reclamation efforts of Hand Talk contribute to these solutions.
Indigenous Ways of Knowing
Wilson (2008) coined the term Indigenous ways of knowing, which refers to how Indigenous communities conceptualize and navigate their world, culture, traditions, environment, and relationships. Indigenous knowledge systems comprise the shared understandings that motivate Indigenous ways of being and are acquired through participation in community activities, traditions, and practices (Rosado-May et al. 2020). Indigenous ways of learning are not often understood by the non-Indigenous population and can be discounted as a form of learning in public education settings. According to Rosado-May et al. (2020), Indigenous learning "emphasizes observing, listening, and contributing to activities in social and cultural context" (81). Importantly, Indigenous children learn through their inclusion in community events and through their roles as contributors to their family and community needs.
Indigenous communities pass their stories, culture, traditions, and knowledge down over generations through face-to-face rather than written communication. Although this sharing is typically referred to as the "oral tradition," studies of Hand Talk indicate that signing and speaking share the floor during acts of storytelling. Wilson (2008) identified three levels of Indigenous storytelling, which vary based upon the listeners' initiation into the culture. The first level is the sacred level, where people have been trained to be storytellers within their tribal communities and vetted by elders. Second-level storytelling consists of Indigenous stories that contain lessons, morals, events, and experiences. These stories often remain the same. The third level is first-person experience or another's experience (98). Across these different types of storytelling, the accumulated wisdom and worldview of a community are shared with subsequent generations as collective and dynamic forms of knowing. Hand Talk is not only a language, but also a part of the collective wisdom of Indigenous communities of North America. As such, it will not be documented, analyzed, or taught in the same way that ASL or LSM (Lengua de Señas Mexicana; Mexican Sign Language) are currently the object of study and instruction in US, Canadian, and Mexican public education settings.
Indigenous Deaf Ways of Knowing
The loss of Hand Talk across many tribal communities has impacted the inclusion of Indigenous Deaf people in their home communities. As a result, intergenerational transmission of Indigenous ways of knowing is not as consistent and linear for Indigenous Deaf people as for Indigenous hearing people. According to Dively (2001), Native Deaf individuals face barriers to participation in community events, affecting their ability to develop and maintain a Native identity. At the same time, Indigenous Deaf people experience trauma when they attend residential schools for the Deaf, as they are marginalized in these settings on account of their Native heritage (Dively 2001). Dively proposes that the basic needs of the Native Deaf community have not been met in Native or Deaf settings. These include communication in natural signed languages; deaf education programs with other Native Deaf people; learning other cultures, values, and ways of life; and opportunities to participate in Native activities and have these activities interpreted.
Similar themes are addressed in chapter 6 of McKay-Cody's (2019) dissertation titled Memory Comes Before Knowledge. The title of her dissertation comes from the common experience of Indigenous Deaf people of learning through observation and participation but without the benefit of the language or explanations that are shared among hearing members of their communities. Indigenous Deaf people have memories of their tribal practices and traditions which they can describe, but they may not know the names or meanings of the events or sacred objects and personae. Later, they ask for the names to describe these experiences, which is why McKay-Cody argues that "memory comes before knowledge." In addition, McKay-Cody notes that some Indigenous Deaf people were not taught about their spirituality by their families but had to learn about it for themselves by helping each other (182). She explains that the "spiritual connection to the land and environment" is rooted in visual experiences of Indigenous Deaf people, but that Indigenous Deaf people also learn through sharing their knowledge with each other. This pattern of learning about spirituality and the environment through visual observation and then by sharing that knowledge with other Indigenous Deaf people parallels Wilson's (2008) Indigenous Ways of Knowing which "is inclusive of all" (54). McKay-Cody concludes, "Everything we see is from our memories" (182).
Another pattern identified by both Dively and McKay-Cody is the cultural deprivation experienced by Indigenous Deaf people. "Indigenous Deaf people are culturally deprived, because their Indigenous cultures, signed languages, histories, customs, and other pieces of who they are were removed from them at Deaf residential schools and public mainstream schools" (McKay-Cody 2019, 180). In the context of a sharing circle organized by McKay-Cody, Indigenous Deaf participants explained that there was little to no sharing of tribal stories between themselves and their tribal leaders. Only three of the thirty-seven participants knew their tribal Creation stories. Related to this, some of the participants' parents attended boarding schools that disrupted the parents' access to tribal knowledge and thus created an additional barrier to their Deaf children learning about their tribal customs and history. Given this dynamic, Indigenous Deaf people must manage being both an insider and outsider with respect to various Deaf and Indigenous communities. They may feel hesitant to participate in tribal events due to communication barriers and uncertainty around their roles, becoming bystanders instead of participants. But relative to each other, Indigenous Deaf people nevertheless hold the insider perspective that they can interact, have "interdependence of shared knowledge, teach others, mentor others, and conduct [. . .] ceremonies in visual ways different than how ceremonies are performed in hearing Indigenous communities" (McKay-Cody 2019, 69-72).
Parallels in the Oppression of Indigenous and Deaf People
Due to colonization, Indigenous peoples have faced various forms of oppression, including forced removal from their land and relocation onto reservations, enduring military occupation and the destruction of the natural environment necessary for Indigenous ways of life, the forced removal of their children to boarding schools, and even mass murder. Among other forms of oppression of Indigenous peoples, there has been a refusal to acknowledge Indigenous languages, which extends to Indigenous signing as well. Bone and colleagues (2022) point out the many parallels between the experiences of Indigenous and Deaf communities due to policies that attempt to enforce assimilation into colonial structures. Both Indigenous and Deaf children have been removed from their homes and families and educated in government-run schools, suffering an erosion of their home culture and identity. There is a history of restrictions on language use in educational settings that have resulted in the loss and/or marginalization of both Indigenous and signed languages. Colonial systems have produced laws affecting reproductive rights, including forced steril ization, and laws prohibiting marriage between Indigenous people or between Deaf people. The negative consequences of these forms of oppression include internalization of prejudice, distrust of medical or educational institutions, higher rates of civil rights violations, and poorer health outcomes and underrepresentation of Indigenous and Deaf people in many service sectors of society, including health, finance, and education. These effects are amplified in the experiences of Indigenous Deaf people (McKay-Cody 2019).
The roots of audism, the belief that the ability to hear or the ability to act like hearing people makes one superior (Humphries 1977, 12), is older than the colonization of North America. Ancient Hebrew law restricted the rights of deaf people to own property and to marry. Aristotle's writings about the relationship between hearing and speaking, as well as hearing and knowledge, were interpreted over centuries to imply that deaf people could not learn. Ferreri (1906, 469), over a century ago, explained
The truth is that if Aristotle believed deaf-mutes incapable of education, it was because he had perceived that the sense of hearing is the one for the acquisition of knowledge, and hence concluded that education was impossible for persons deprived of that sense by nature or accident. . . . all physicians down to the sixteenth century, seem to have accepted the ideas of the ancients without reflecting that the instruction of the deaf might have been possible, as it was, through the substitution of other sensorial stimuli.
Discrimination against Deaf people was exacerbated by the rise of the eugenics movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The push to homogenize humanity was made manifest in the 1880 Milan Conference in which an overwhelming majority of educators voted to abandon manualism (the use of signed languages and manually coded systems) in favor of oralism (teaching deaf people to speak and read lips). These attitudes had a lasting impact on society at large as well as in the field of linguistics specifically. Prior to 1960, most people viewed signed languages as mere systems of gestures without the characteristics of human language (Baynton 1996). It was not until William Stokoe's 1960 publication on ASL, Sign Language Structure:An Outline of theVisual Communication Systems of the American Deaf, that signed languages began to attract the interest of linguists.
The most thorough examination of Hand Talk to date appeared in the same year as Stokoe's Sign Language Structure. Anthropologist La Mont West's 1960 dissertation, The Sign Language, An Analysis, provides a detailed phonemic (in his terminology, kinemic) and syntactic analysis of PISL, as well as an expansive annotated bibliography of all source works prior to 1960 documenting various forms of North American Indigenous signing. The data for his phonemic and grammatical analyses was sourced from interviews conducted over the winter of 1956-57 with William Shakespeare, an Arapaho informant from Wind River, Wyoming. Wests's analysis of PISL is similar to Stokoe's (1960) analysis of ASL, identifying kinemes of handshape, direction (including elements of palm orientation, location, and path), motion, referent (similar to location), and dynamics (parallel to stress, tone, and length in spoken languages). He even developed his own notation system for representing PISL signs using the Latin alphabet, IPA symbols, and a series of diacritics. However, Stokoe (2005) criticized West's reliance on individual signs because there were few examples of fluent discourse in his data. While West's work was a huge step forward in documenting PISL, his work did not achieve wide circulation among either anthropologists or linguists, in contrast to Stokoe's publication from the same year, which is now part of the canon of signed language research.
One reason that linguists may have assumed Hand Talk was not equivalent to ASL is that Hand Talk is used by both hearing and deaf members of tribal communities. For example, Stokoe (1960, 8) asked, "Was it [e]ver a language in a strict sense or was it from the beginning a trade and treaty code?" The assumption that alternate sign systems in use by hearing communities are not comparable to the primary signed languages of Deaf communities and draw their linguistic structure from spoken languages continues to gain traction today. West challenged the notion that the linguistic structure of PISL must be based on spoken language because the languages of the Plains are far too varied for PISL to accommodate all of their grammar systems in one signed system. Therefore, PISL is more likely to be independent of these spoken languages altogether. He compares PISL to Chinese writing "which can be read in terms of many different spoken dialects of Chinese" (West 1960). The use of a language for different functions by different speakers is not unique to Hand Talk. While a distinction is often made between primary and alternate signed languages, this distinction is more accurately made between signers rather than between languages themselves (McKay-Cody 1996). A hearing signer of PISL may use it as an alternate language, while a deaf signer may use the same language as their primary language.
Biases against Hand Talk have persisted up to the present. Player (2023) carried out a perceptual dialectology study in New Mexico and reported that Deaf adults recalled being told by teachers that signers from the northwestern part of the state, where the Navajo Nation is located, are "slow" and "lack fluency." Similar biases are expressed toward signers perceived to use LSM, who informants describe as using more gesture than ASL signers (Player 2023). ASL enjoys more social prestige than other signed languages, due, in part, to general American hegemony and the specific predominance of ASL in representations of Deaf people worldwide. The relatively low prestige of Hand Talk varieties, by contrast, contributes to the lack of recognition of Hand Talk in academic discourse and the associated societal assumption that tribal forms of signing are inferior to ASL. This can also be one outcome of what McKay-Cody (2019, 181) calls the "gravity of oppression," where the effects of audism, racism, and colonialism intersect to have maximum impact on Indigenous Deaf people. One effect of this multifaceted oppression was that "the hegemonic White Deaf 'colonizers' continued to uphold the belief that their signed languages are better than Indigenous signed languages. The attitude has not changed, even today" (McKay-Cody 2019, 181).
Historical Research and Documentation of Hand Talk
Most of the early historical documentation of Indigenous forms of signing in North America does not come from linguists. Oddly, it comes primarily from individuals engaged in campaigns to overtake the homelands of Indigenous peoples. Colonizers such as Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Hernán Cortés, and Francisco Vázquez de Coronado documented their ability to communicate with peoples across North America from modern-day Florida and Mexico to Texas and Kansas through the use of signs (McKay-Cody 1996; Wurtzburg and Campbell 1995). While their records mention using this signed language, they did not appear to record any individual words or phrases, nor any information on the grammatical structure of the language.
The earliest attempts to include drawings or descriptions of signs appeared in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from U.S. military men whose assignments brought them near users of Hand Talk. One of the most prolific writers was Garrick Mallery, who served in the Army during the Civil War and oversaw the military occupation of Virginia. He worked with the Signal Corps, briefly stationed at Fort Rice in Dakota Territory where he took note of Indigenous signing. After retiring from the Army, he was appointed as an ethnologist with the Bureau of American Ethnology where he documented individual signs used by dozens of tribes, including Apache, Cheyenne, Comanche, Dakota, and Ojibwe (Mallery 1881). He published some of his research in the earliest issues of the American Annals of the Deaf (Mallery 1880, 1882).
There is evidence that Hand Talk continued to survive in a time and place where spoken Indigenous languages were being actively suppressed. In 1882, Stephen K. White Bear was a student at the notorious Carlisle Indian School, which was established in 1879 by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in one of the earliest attempts by the U.S. government at forced assimilation of Native Americans. White Bear wrote an editorial entitled "Speak Only English." The opening lines suggest that this article was written as a punishment for "talking Indian": "I hear every body talk Indian. So I suppose that is the reason I have been talking my own language . . ." He said that some students use signs to communicate. Signing was not recognized as a language by teachers, so they mostly ignored it. This offered hearing students a way to communicate covertly, maintaining their identity and connections to their communities while also avoiding punishment that would be incurred if they were caught speaking their Native spoken languages (Klotz 2019).
In 1890, missionary Lewis Hadley carried out a census to determine the number of signers of PISL. He reported that over 100,000 signers existed at that time, but West (1960) questions the accuracy of his estimate as he includes the entire population of some tribes. McKay-Cody (1996) reminds readers that the function of PISL changed dramatically when the U.S. government forced tribes onto reservations where they had little opportunity to interact with other tribes. The maintenance of PISL after the forced isolation is consistent with reports of its use for ceremonial and storytelling purposes.
Major General Hugh Lenox Scott was also in the Army and was actively involved in wars against Indigenous nations such as the Nez Perce War and the Bluff War. He personally oversaw the suppression of the Ghost Dance movement among various Native nations. Scott was the commander of Troop L, 7th Calvary which consisted exclusively of Native American soldiers. One of these men, I-see-o, is described as a friend of Scott's who communicated exclusively in PISL with him (Bakker 2016). In 1930, Scott organized a PISL council meeting in which leaders of several Plains nations were gathered to discuss the status of their signed language and to film it for posterity. Scott states in the film that the young people were not learning Hand Talk (Grande Polpo Deaf 2012). Scott began the work of creating a dictionary of PISL by filming himself producing signs but died before completing it (Chechulin 2022). Scott's war injuries, including losing the ring finger of his right hand and dexterity in his left hand make the exact phonological form of the signs he produced difficult to discern. All signs are produced in isolation without reference to grammatical features of the language.
The extensive documentation of Hand Talk through the late nine-teenth and early twentieth centuries, culminating in West's (1960) dissertation with a full phonetic analysis of PISL, is rarely mentioned in introductory courses on ASL and historical accounts of signing in North America. Likewise, the more recent work by Indigenous Deaf scholars such as McKay-Cody (1996, 2019, 2020) are not systematically included in standard ASL or interpreting curricula. We propose that this oversight may reflect the impact of colonialism on language ideologies and ignores an essential part of the sociolinguistic ecology in which ASL emerged (cf. Hou and de Vos 2022; Kusters and Sahasrabudhe 2018).
Disrupting the Traditional Story of Signing in North America
Any introductory ASL class is likely to include the story of ASL's origin. Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, a hearing man, met his neighbor's nine-year-old daughter, Alice Cogswell, and discovered she was deaf. He spent a good deal of time writing to her in the dirt and found she was quite receptive. Her father, a doctor, saw this and asked Gallaudet to teach her. He sponsored a trip to Europe where Gallaudet was to learn about the most current European pedagogies in deaf education. In London, Gallaudet met a deaf man named Laurent Clerc who taught at the Institut National de Jeunes Sourds de Paris. Gallaudet convinced Clerc to come with him to the United States to establish a deaf school. They founded what would come to be known as the American School for the Deaf (ASD) in Hartford, Connecticut (DawnSignPress 2016). The school provided a social context for the mingling of French Sign Language (LSF), home sign systems, and rural community signed languages like Martha's Vineyard Sign Language (MVSL), though the influence from Martha's Vineyard may be overstated (Power and Meier 2023, 2024). Nevertheless, it is widely assumed that the use of signing brought by students with various backgrounds resulted in the emergence of ASL as a unique language in its own right. This history lesson rarely, if ever, mentions the presence of signing in North America prior to the arrival of European settlers. Deaf historian Harry Lang (2007) urges readers to resist the impulse to accept a simple explanation of the origins of signing in North America as beginning in 1817. He provides accounts of the many deaf individuals who populated the continent before Clerc's arrival.
There is a long history of the lack of acknowledgment of Indigenous people's cultures and languages, and even the existence of Indigenous people in North America. Colonial frameworks devalue the histories and contributions of Indigenous peoples, seeking to, at best, assimilate them into the dominant colonial cultural narrative, and at worst, completely eradicate them from the past, present, and future. Indigenous Deaf people face intersectional oppression based on their Indigeneity and their hearing status (McKay-Cody 2019). The erasure of their languages is no small part of this. When people face oppression on multiple fronts, even a cherished language may be lost to history as people assimilate in some aspects of life in order to preserve themselves and others. Without a serious and concerted effort to disrupt the dominant narrative, there is no reason to think this pattern will change. As Supalla (2020, slide 11) points out, despite the fact that the collective memory passed down over generations by Deaf signers to one another is constantly undergoing change, just like signed languages themselves are changing, "one thing I haven't seen discussed much is a stewardship plan or infrastructure for how we can strengthen and sustain our collective memory to preserve it for future generations."
The lack of acknowledgment of Hand Talk in the origin story of ASL exhibits similarities to the lack of acknowledgement of Black ASL. In an article by Glenn B. Anderson and Frank G. Bowe (1972), titled "Racism Within the Deaf Community," they point to what Black Deaf students lack in schools for the Deaf. "Black students learn very little about themselves, the problems of their people, or the contributions of their ancestors" (545). They also explain that the history of these students' ancestors is taught in a manner that lacks detail, or their history is omitted all together. The Indigenous Deaf population faces a very similar situation. Anderson and Bowe suggest it is due to the lack of perspectives of minority groups within the Deaf community. A possible way of facing this issue is to take the beginning steps of giving credit where credit is due and acknowledging what should be included in the narrative (Anderson and Bowe 1972).
How can we disrupt the traditional narrative and update our collective memory to include the experiences and wisdom of Indigenous peoples of North America? To begin, we propose that educators have immense potential to change common knowledge about signing in North America by giving due respect to Indigenous peoples and their languages. From teachers in schools for the Deaf to university faculty, inclusion of an accurate historical record encourages a more nuanced understanding of the linguistic ecology in which ASL emerged as a language and the continuing linguistic diversity of signing in North America. Linguists can also contribute to changing common knowledge about Hand Talk. In the same way early spoken language linguists made sweeping generalizations about the nature of language based almost entirely on European languages and especially Latin, sign linguists often rely on studies of ASL and BANZL (British, Australian and New Zealand Sign Language) to support generalizations about signed languages. Including less commonly used signed languages will allow linguists to develop more wholistic understandings of the nature of signed languages and signed language communities more broadly.
Conclusion
The ongoing work by researchers like Dr. Melanie McKay-Cody and community members like Floyd Favel and Dr. Lanny Real Bird has laid the groundwork for the preservation and reclamation of North American Indigenous signed languages. Continued investment of time and resources into these efforts is essential. Teachers of ASL, teachers working in Deaf education, and interpreter trainers can help disrupt the narrative of ASL being the only signed language of North America by teaching their students about the history and present linguistic situation of Hand Talk.
ASL teachers can incorporate information about Hand Talk in a variety of ways. A common misconception of the general public is that signed language is universal. An effective way to help dispel that misconception is by teaching students about another, unrelated, signed language that has been used in North America long before ASL. If there are any users of Hand Talk in one's local area, teachers could reach out and ask them to give a presentation to their classes. If this is not viable in a particular area, the Vox video The Hidden History of HandTalk is available for free on YouTube and could easily accompany a lecture on the diversity of signed languages.
For teachers of the Deaf, acknowledging and celebrating signed language diversity in the classroom can be promoted by the inclusion of a discussion of Hand Talk and the history of signing in North America. Teachers should also examine their own linguistic biases and work to encourage discussion of linguistic variation rather than teaching children there is a "right" or "wrong" way to sign. A child-friendly resource about Hand Talk is Indian Sign Language, by Robert Hofsinde.
One excellent resource for current interpreters and interpreter trainers is a chapter in the book Interpreting in Multilingual, Multicultural Contexts titled "Signed Languages of American Indian Communities: Considerations for Interpreting Work and Research" (McKay-Cody and Davis 2010). The chapter includes information on appropriate terminology, cultural practices related to eye contact, single-gender spaces, clothing choices, and more. McKay-Cody's (2019) dissertation also includes an appendix which provides helpful diagrams and descriptions of spatial setups and how an interpreter can successfully navigate sightlines while not disrupting culturally important events such as powwows, sweat lodges, ceremonies, and other meetings (McKay-Cody 2019, 312-17). Interpreters also need to know about how dialects of Hand Talk are used today by Indigenous Deaf and hearing people in their local communities.
Deaf farmer and activist Cassandra Perez (2020) explains how life choices function to perpetuate colonial structures in society, including within the Deaf community. For example, she argues that higher education licenses the replacement of Indigenous ways of knowing with knowledge systems that are rooted in colonialism. A comparison of farming practices used on commercial farms vs. on small family farms in the United States reveals that small family farms are more likely to use methods that regenerate the earth rather than being focused on extraction and profit. By resisting participation in colonial structures, Perez explains that it is possible to decolonize one's mind and reverse effects of colonization (cf. Wilson and Yellow Bird 2005). Likewise, we can apply this model to how we conceptualize and share knowledge about signing in North America to promote multiple signing traditions and to avoid perpetuating colonial views that privilege some signed languages or signed language varieties over others. By welcoming and acknowledging variation across signing communities, the rich linguistic diversity of North America will contribute to a greater understanding of the linguistic ecology of signed languages (Hou and de Vos 2022) and bring new attention to signed language documentation and reclamation efforts.
Acknowledgments
We thank Dr. Melanie McKay-Cody and James Wooden Legs for their guidance and support of the writing of this article. This work was funded, in part, by grants from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, the McCune Foundation, and by the ADVANCE at UNM Faculty Professional Development Assistance program (NSF #1628471). Questions and comments can be sent to the corresponding author Rikki Farrell at [email protected].
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