Languagehat has pointed to an extremely interesting article in the New York Times entitled "The Newest Indians", which deals with the growing number of Americans identifying themselves as American Indians. The article explores the tricky issues of ethnicity and race that are being encountered as ostensibly white Americans try to reclaim their lost Native American heritage. Most pleasingly, the article devotes a considerable amount of space to the issue of language and how the revival of Native American languages has become central to the revival of this lost ethnic identity. I was also happy to see that the article mentions Laura Redish and the Native Languages of the Americas organization, which I mentioned myself a while back when I wrote about Tlingit.

The situation with the "new" Native Americans is fascinating in its own right, but it’s equally intriguing to realize that the loss of "stable reservoirs of ethnic identity" and the "rise in ethnic shopping" is not just taking place in America, but all around globe. The article actually intersects in many ways with my (almost finished!) dissertation on Irish, and it touches on the areas of linguistics which interest me the most: endangered languages and the interplay of language, culture and identity. It’s well worth a read.