Sign Language, Indigenous

The United Nations estimates that there are 370 million indigenous people spread across 70 countries around the world possessing cultural traditions, knowledge, and languages that are uniquely distinct from the modern nation-states that they inhabit. The vast range of cultural and linguistic diversity of indigenous peoples makes it difficult to define the term indigenous. Generally, the term is defined as the descendants of those who inhabited a geographical region or country at the time when people of different nations, cultures, or ethnic origins arrived. The new arrivals later became dominant through conquest, colonization, settlement, or a variety of other means. This entry centers on American indigenous communities in which a significant number of Native members (deaf and/or hearing) use a traditional type of sign language that is distinct from the sign language of the larger urban Deaf community (e.g., American Sign Language [ASL]). For example, indigenous sign language is still used among the Blackfeet/Blackfoot, Crow, and Northern Cheyenne of the North American Great Plains cultural area, the Inuit-Nunavut of the Canadian Arctic, and the Maya of western Guatemala and the Yucatán, Chiapas, and Oaxaca states/regions of Mexico.

This entry is based on historical and contemporary evidence that indigenous sign language was used in varying degrees across the major cultural areas of native North America. In contrast to industrialized societies, where sign language is used primarily by members of the Deaf community, in some indigenous communities signing is used by both deaf and hearing community members. In these instances, indigenous sign language has traditionally been used among Native Americans, even when deaf people were not present, as an alternative to spoken language. At the same time, Davis and McKay-Cody learned as a native language by both deaf and hearing members of these indigenous communities.

For more than two decades, Davis has concentrated on documenting and describing the traditional form of indigenous sign language used among the nomadic groups of the historic Great Plains geographic area, known as Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL). Although PISL is classified as an endangered language today, it is still being used within some Native groups in traditional storytelling, rituals, and conversational narratives by both deaf and hearing Indians (e.g., Blackfeet/Blackfoot, Crow, Mandan-Hidatsa, Nakota/Gros Ventre, and Northern Cheyenne). The fact that [Page 784]PISL has survived and continues to be used is remarkable—especially considering the pressures for linguistic and cultural assimilation historically imposed on indigenous peoples (e.g., to acquire and use the dominant spoken or signed languages of the larger society or community). While PISL has been the best-documented American indigenous sign language (AISL) variety, different indigenous sign varieties have been observed among certain Native communities of northwestern Canada, the southwestern United States, and other American indigenous communities from the Arctic to Mesoamerica.

Thus, it has been well documented that indigenous sign language was widely used across the Great Plains geographic area that once spanned over 4.3 million square kilometers (1.5 million square miles), an area comparable to that of the European Union’s 28 member states combined (4.4 million square kilometers or 1.7 million square miles). Indigenous sign language was used at varying levels of discourse within Native American tribes and families—thus spanning most contexts and encompassing many discourse genres among these Native societies. Evidently, a highly conventionalized and linguistically enriched indigenous sign language emerged as a common way of communicating among various Native American nations. In previous times, indigenous sign language was so prevalent and widespread that it was once used among many Native American nations as a lingua franca. By all accounts, the use and transmission of indigenous sign language was widespread and served many sociolinguistic purposes and discourse functions for many generations and to an extent unparalleled by any currently or previously known case of an indigenous or village sign language.

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