In this paper, I will consider two questions for global Indigenous peoples like myself: What identities are currently available, adopted and valorized by Indigenous language speakers globally? How are positions like Indigenous language speaker, academic, activist and teacher altering in response to available neoliberal subject positions?
I am an Indigenous Amami person, in a sense both an insider and an outsider to Indigenous language reclamation on my island of Tokunoshima in Japan. In this paper, I will consider two questions for global Indigenous peoples like myself: What identities are currently available, adopted and valorized by Indigenous language speakers globally? How are positions like Indigenous language speaker, academic, activist and teacher altering in response to available neoliberal subject positions? I suggest that because Indigenous languages, ideologies and identities are based on local environments, any shift, decay, or alteration of the environment (e.g., destructive technologies rooted in market forces) results in changes to local ideologies (e.g., neoliberal education), to local languages, and to identity. One consequence has been widespread Indigenous language shift leading to language death. While some researchers have suggested that neoliberal paradigms allow access to funding for Indigenous language teaching, the resulting commodification of Indigenous languages re-asserts beliefs that Indigenous languages are not valuable in their own rights, but only as things to be captured, analyzed, pedagogized, and eventually sold back to Indigenous peoples. At the same time, neoliberal discursive regimes position Indigenous language speakers as “victims needing recognition and redress” (Dean, 2009, p. 5) setting up a Catch 22 situation; to present a case for Indigenous language reclamation, we speakers must demonstrate that we are weak, losing our autonomy. The result is that we become trapped in those colonizer ideologies that see Indigenous peoples as unfit to govern ourselves.Because the idealneoliberal subject is “a resilient, humble, and disempowered being that lives a life of permanent ignorance and insecurity” (Chandler & Reid, 2016, p. 3), Indigenous language speakers within a neoliberal regime are forced to adopt identities of resignation, of disempowered humility, rather than linguistic identities of refusal and confrontation.
