Teelamal//every word in our language is a little prayer : weaving together indigenous philosophies of language

Analytic philosophy of language, as a subdiscipline of academic philosophy in the Western tradition, predominantly centers an abstract, disembodied, and decontextualized conception of language removed from communities and land. While the work of traditional philosophers of language is fascinating and important, I noticed that my training as an analytic philosopher of language did not prove to be as helpful as I had anticipated in my work as an Indigenous language activist. After working with several Indigenous communities on language reclamation work, including my own community's work on 'ataaxum pomteela//the Luiseno language, it became clear to me that Indigenous language activists are continuously offering nuanced conceptions of language embedded with insights on tribally-specific, land-based onto-epistemologies and cosmologies, and co-creating decolonial and liberatory strategies for language reclamation and cultural resurgence. Though linguists and anthropologists have dedicated many decades of scholarship to the documentation, preservation, and revitalization of Indigenous languages, the world-views encapsulated and expressed in Indigenous languages are given little attention in the scholarship, and Indigenous communities distinct philosophies of language are often only characterized as mere "language ideologies" (Iyengar 2014; Leonard 2017). The political projects and goals of language reclamation activists are also often sanitized from academic endeavors that focus solely on grammar, lexicons, and fluency (Leonard 2017). It is my attempt in the following chapters to show that philosophy of language can benefit immensely from the philosophizing being done within Indigenous communities regarding the nature of language and the just avenues for achieving language and cultural reclamation. Each of the essays in this dissertation stand alone as individual and independent articles, but share several lines of argumentation and methodologies. In a departure from top-down theorizing about language in which universal theories of language and grammar inform philosophizing about language, each of these essays begins from a community context in which Indigenous peoples work to reclaim their languages and cultures, and then gathers and offers theories and recommendations about the nature of language as well as practical applications for language reclamation, language policy, language research, and coalition-building in activist spaces. Though each chapter stands alone as an independent essay, I have used similar materials and methodologies in each to offer up, from community contexts, a tradition of politically-informed Indigenous philosophies of language. I have also attempted to argue several connected points in each essay, including but not limited to: Each essay 1. centers or promotes linguistic sovereignty; 2. illustrates that incommensurability is a site for coalition-building across political contexts; 3. shows that commitments to ontological pluralism in decolonial and liberatory strategizing aid the flourishing of language reclamation projects; 4. depicts politically-informed Indigenous philosophy of language as community-centered in that many reclamation projects uplift the voices of elders, youth, Two-Spirit, and non-binary community members.