Decolonizing the language/matter divide in new materialism and posthumanism: Lessons from linguistic history

In an 1816 letter, Peter Stephen Du Ponceau expressed his enthusiasm for a feature of many American Indigenous languages, coining the term polysynthesis to describe it. He failed to recognize that the people he called “savage” had their own philosophies of language, ideas that would incite provocative challenges to the limitations of Enlightenment humanism. So too does Euro-Western posthumanism and new materialism, in ignoring Indigenous ontologies of language, remain trapped in the worldview that language is separate from matter. Using a new approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to analyze Du Ponceau’s correspondence allows for both an exacting critique of colonizing worldviews and a method for “unearthing” the desires that emerge, through language, from matter. This innovative method offers a space for non-Indigenous philosophies to consider, without appropriation and with respect for the incommensurability of Indigenous ways of knowing, the possibility that even settler languages emerge from the Earth itself.