Author: Rebecca Lowery
I would like to offer a reflection on the matter of language learning as it relates to Reparation in the wake of a summer program I participated in for the Nahuatl language (nahuatlahtolli).
As part of my research on featherwork in the early modern period, I am studying Nahuatl. Nahuatl is an Uto-Aztecan language that today has about 1.5 million native speakers, primarily living in Mexico. It was the lingua franca of the Mexica/Aztec empire and underwent significant changes following the Spanish conquest in 1521 as well as after the Mexican War of Independence in 1821. The history of the language is complex and not easily summed up. For example, while the Spanish conquest was destructive to Indigenous Mexican way of life, in a somewhat contradictory way, it also supported the preservation of the language. Notably, in 1570 King Philip II issued a decree that essentially made Nahuatl the official language of New Spain. It was really only post-1821 that Nahuatl was no longer used in this capacity and its speakers were actively marginalized. The Spanish conquest also transformed the language in a very fundamental way: for hundreds of years before the Spanish conquest Nahuatl developed as an oral language with a pictorial/glyphic writing system. Post-1521, Nahuatl continued to have a strong oral tradition, but it was converted to a language written in the Latin alphabet, following Spanish orthographic conventions.
This is all to say that while Nahuatl has significant historical value, it is a language that continues to be central to modern communities. The matter of reconciling the language's history, holding space for both moments of continuity and rupture, its past and its present, has been an important aspect of my approach to learning Nahuatl. This is in part a result of the structure of the language program I participated in through the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Utah, in partnership with IDIEZ (Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas, Mexico). In the course of each day, we worked with both modern and older (sometimes referred to as ‘classical’) Nahuatl, wherein native speakers of Huasteca Nahuatl taught the modern class, tutoring sessions, and cultural activities. We learned how the study of modern Nahuatl provides a foundation for the historical study of the language and how one cannot be divorced from the other.
For example, the first document we worked on in our older class was one of the oldest texts written in alphabetic Nahuatl (c. 1540, pictured above). The document was part of a census of the altepetl (city) of Tepoztlan, and we worked through the entry for one household. While in practice we were translating, we were using the document to learn. The document, that is, the Nahuatl speaking scribe, was the charge of this knowledge. We learned various aspects of the grammar, but also aspects of Nahua culture, such as naming conventions and the standard way a house is arranged. We learned about the language from a historical perspective that was consistently attuned to the fact that there are modern-day continuities of the very things we were studying. Throughout all of this, the voices of Nahua people, past and present, were the point of departure and return. As a kind of framing principle, the potential for language learning to be reparative is something that I hope to prioritize as I work with Nahuatl sources in my research.
Image: Census of the Marquesardo del Valle de Oaxaca, Ms. Amer. 3, folio 1r (detail). Biblioteka Jagellońska, Kraków, Poland.