Vital Language Practices and Attitudes Among the Lumbee

The longstanding interest among linguists and linguistic anthropologists in Indigenous languages has increasingly adopted a Critical Indigenous framework, which has been promoted by Indigenous scholars and community leaders as a means of decolonizing “salvage” collection of Indigenous language materials. An important aspect of Critical Indigenous theory is the framework of vitality—that is, an emphasis in literature and community practice on the everyday living and lived elements of culture. One means of promoting Indigenous language within this Critical framework of vitality that is community-centered is centering vital language practices in community-based archives, which seek not to document the language as it is spoken by some subset of the population but to create resources for people to access the stories, family histories, and practices of their communities, in the voices of community members. This thesis is based on interviews and literature on the Lumbee, an Indigenous group in North Carolina, and seeks to use the existing and prospective future practices of the Lumbee to understand the broader process of community archiving based on vital practices. Certain vital practices, such as pageants and co-narration of family- and community-based stories, are an important part of how Lumbee use language. Archiving is another major concern for many members of the community. This thesis explores historical precursors of vital language practices practiced in Lumbee families and communities and their relationship with often inaccessible means of archiving, and provides a critical analysis of what is available, to whom it is available, and how it is accessed.