ABSTRACT
As a settler society, the United States relies upon specific narratives of Indigenous deficiency to rationalize its false claims to land. One such narrative can be found in assumptions that the English language does not, and cannot, belong to Indigenous Peoples. This narrative elides the very real and violent history of the settler “civilizing” process whereby government-sanctioned (cultural) genocide in the form of residential schools attempted to erase Indigenous languages. Such an elision occludes the possibility that the very language used in their oppression can be taken back and otherwise mobilized toward variegated processes of decolonization and resurgence. Joining scholars such as Simon Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo) in asserting that English has become an Indigenous language, this chapter illuminates some of the ways in which Indigenous Englishes are essential to longstanding processes of self-determination. Resultantly, this chapter reads David Treuer’s (Leech Lake Ojibwe) The Translation of Dr. Apelles through Billy-Ray Belcourt’s (Driftpile Cree) concept of self-sovereignty – the pursuit of which is an ongoing promise to live, regain control of the body, and be vulnerable to (self-)love. Translation ultimately becomes a multi-faceted metaphor with specific implications for Apelles’s pursuit of a self-sovereignty that is mirrored in his own indigenization of English.
