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Racing Indian Language, Languaging an Indian Race

This chapter is an exploration of how race and language become entangled in representations and ideas about what it means to be seen and recognized as Native American. Most conceptions of Indianness derive from scholarly European-derived representations and evaluations and from popular narrative media, the one often bootstrapping the other. In tandem, these public manifestations perpetuate the racialization of Indian languages and of Indianness, most ubiquitously in and through a discourse of “blood.” Several ideologies configure the racial logic that determines Indianness: purism (percentage of “Indian blood”), visibility (racialized—and cultural—manifestations of “blood”), continuity (maintenance of a pre-contact “bloodline”), and primitivism (expression of indigenous “blood” in and through language). I argue that this “ideological assemblage” (Kroskrity 2018) undergirds the processes of “racing Indian language(s)” and “languaging an Indian race” (H. Samy Alim 2016) that has resulted in propagating conflicts over and denials of Native American heritage.