Clark, William P. The Indian Sign Language. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.
The introduction to this books is really rich actually. I feel like Clark was ahead of his time and yet deeply involved in it with all the complexity of empires, contact zones, and the frictions of Westward expansion of European American settlers. The book/report was actually originally published in 1885, and he was commissioned to research the sign language used by people living in North America before Europeans arrived by the US army. I was struck by the amount of explanation he provided to justify to readers (reviewers) why he has been perceived to portray the Indians he worked with in a positive light.
Clark gives examples of language practices as evidence of historical, conceptual, and social processes and identifies necessary research methodology in eliciting words/signs as asking his language resource person to first give him a sign, rather than provide a sign from another group and ask for a translation since his participants have what we would call today a "translingual" or "rhetorically attuned" disposition and would often take up the sign that had been established during their interaction.
Interestingly, he defines language by saying, "Broadly, the term language may be applied to whatever means social beings employ to communicate passion or sentiment, or to influence one another; whatever is made a vehicle of intelligence, ideographic or phonetic, is language, and the object of language is to arrive by skillful combinations of known signs at the expression of something unknown to one of the parties; i.e., the idea to be conveyed."
#translingual #multimodal #semiotics #race #empire #language_ideology #rhetorical_attunement #research_methodology
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