EPSCOR: Plains Indian Sign Language: Fieldwork and Digital Archive Project

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Plains Indian Sign Language: Fieldwork and Digital Archive ProjectPlains Indian Sign Language (PISL) historically served various social and discourse functions within and between numerous American Indian communities of the Great Plains and cultural groups bordering this geographic area. Classified in the Sign Language family, PISL (also called sign talk) is distinct from American Sign Language (ASL) that is used in Deaf communities of the US and Canada. The use of PISL has dramatically declined from its widespread use as a lingua franca in previous times, due in part to its replacement by English, and ASL in some cases. Although PISL is an endangered language, and the extant number of varieties and users is unknown, it has not vanished; it is still used within some native groups in traditional storytelling, rituals, and conversational narratives by both deaf and hearing American Indians (e.g., Blackfeet, Crow, Mandan-Hidatsa, Nakota/Gros Ventre, and Northern Cheyenne, among others). There is an urgent need to document and provide linguistic descriptions of contemporary PISL varieties, and for sign language linguists to collaborate with deaf and hearing members of American Indian signing communities. With support of the National Science Foundation, sign language linguists Dr. Jeffrey Davis (University of Tennessee) and Melanie McKay-Cody (Chickamauga Cherokee/Choctaw; William Woods University, Fulton, MO) will collect contemporary sign language narratives of American Indians who know and use the PISL variety. The research team will provide comparative linguistic analyses, and integrate these new findings into the digital archive of American Indian sign language documentary materials previously collected in collaboration with the Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archives (with support of a 2006-2007 DEL NSF/NEH fellowship awarded to Davis). The one-year fieldwork and digital project will document the current sociolinguistic status of PISL; illuminate its linguistic nature and structure; produce an inventory of previously unknown materials; provide annotations and captions of various documentary materials and films; contribute to the revitalization of PISL in native communities where it once thrived; and make accessible to broader audiences this important yet often overlooked part of American Indian linguistic and cultural heritage.