Anti-Colonial Science: A Course Journal. Vol. 2, 2024. https://ojs.library.dal.ca/acs/

Linguistics is Colonialism

Jessica Casey

The written word, the printing press, and the speed at which text is disseminated in the 21st century are each massive technological shifts. Along with many benefits, there are detriments when language becomes so widespread that it cannot have the same connection to place and context as more intimate forms of communication. Max Liboiron explores the relations of place and context bound up in written language in their 2021 book Pollution is Colonialism.

This book outlines many bad relations of plastic pollution, from the apparent violence of assuming access to Indigenous lands for corporate profits, to the less obvious violence associated with defining "pollution" using the threshold theory.1 This book critiques colonial structures in pollution science and delves deeply into the methodology of anti-colonial science. The author constantly reminds the reader of the relations of writing as a form of knowledge transfer, drawing attention to its peculiarities and limitations by dwelling in specificity and nuance.

Linguistics is a field that studies language and linguistic structures, including semantics, etymology, and orthography. Sociolinguistics situates language as impacted by cultural norms and contexts. Even though written academic text is structured to conceal connection to place and context, Liboiron twists the form to draw out these relations, demonstrating their determination to engage in anti-colonial science in a colonial landscape with colonial tools, even when doing this perfectly is impossible.

As a child, I remember teachers introducing linguistics to me as if it were a rulebook, allowing me to divide what is correct from what is incorrect. Grammar books helped us make fewer embarrassing mistakes (not "less mistakes," for instance) and signal intellect. Studying linguistics taught me to avoid my uncles' phonology and grammar. Their thick Newfoundland and Labrador accents might have caused my teacher's head to spin. But every quirk of my uncles' so-called incorrect way of speaking such as "where ya to?" or "whad'a'ya'at?" or "it's some cold out there b'y, right froze," has a place and a story. Language, down to semantics and spelling, is intimately bound up with social context and history. Liboiron is sensitive to this and refuses to let the relations of place and context fade into the background. For instance, Liboiron writes that the word "promiscious" comes from Plato and that Plato's use of the word has a story.22 My uncles, some of whom have European/Irish ancestry and others Indigenous, have a unique way of speaking that holds many stories. Their unique syntheses of linguistic quirks often relate to the relative historical isolation of their home communities and proximity to the "Irish Loop,” the ancestral territory of the Beothuk and home to many Irish settlers. When my uncle on my father's side says that it is "right foggy out," his usage of "right" may derive from the Welsh word "reit," meaning "very.” Even though the word would likely be written down as the anglicized “right foggy,” Welsh is still part of that word's story. Language is not neutral. It is implicated in history and culture and power relations. The fact that my schools taught me to speak like my family is from Ottawa and not rural Newfoundland is less about “correctness” than with social relations.

There are social and political reasons why certain dialects migrate, become adopted by different people; why some are spread and others destroyed. No word is socially, historically or morally

neutral. It is easy to recognize certain words, such as "decolonization," as loaded and storied:3 the weight of the word's obligations shine through. But Liboiron rips at the roots of grammar and syntax for words that may seem insignificant even to a dedicated reader. They footnote the spelling of words like 'centre': "Perhaps you've noticed Canadian spellings in the text even though Duke University Press is based in the United States. This is a constant, possibly annoying, reminder that these words come from a place. Spelling is method."4 Liboiron is interested in finding the relations of “place” and the stories of unnoticed words, much like the imperceptible difference between “right/reit.”

The nature of written text makes it challenging to convey connection and place, as opposed to verbal communication which is necessarily grounded in a place and a personal connection. In “Appropriation,” a chapter from Conversations with Canadians, Maracle describes the theft that occurs when non-Indigenous people appropriate knowledge and Stories that do not belong to them for their gain. She explains that the European legal tradition of viewing oral communication as “folk knowledge [that] so belongs to the public, which rationalizes the theft of our national intellectual knowledge base,” ensures that written knowledge is protected property, while much of Indigenous knowledge is free to be stolen.5 Further, when the written word becomes mass published and profited off of, its knowledge gets shared indiscriminately: the person who writes, where they are writing from, and whom they write to become arbitrary, making it easier to appropriate and misuse knowledge as it becomes extricable from its contextual relationships. Though it is a mass published text, Liboiron tries to make the relations in their book, especially land relations, as present as possible. In Liboiron's book, "L/land" itself does not have a uniform meaning. In a footnote, they explain the difference between the capitalized use of "Land" versus "land." They explain that when they capitalize Land, this refers to "the unique entity that is the combined living spirit of plants, animals, air, water, humans, histories, and events recognized by many Indigenous communities."6 Lower-case land refers to the colonial conception where "landscapes are common, universal, and everywhere, even with great variation.”7 Liboiron's use of proper versus common nouns for a single word visually distinguishes viewing L/land as a relational entity specific to a particular context or a universalized, generalizable object. This difference reveals that two actors could hold a lengthy conversation (or debate or legal battle) using the same word and not realize they have entirely different understandings of the object of discussion. Liboiron's perpetual emphasis on linguistic difference and the positionality of the author establishes the writer as a political subject, not an anonymous or arbitrary producer of neutral or anonymous knowledge.

The way Liboiron frequently, even tediously, draws out the specific relations of story and place through metalinguistics despite inherent limitations demonstrates a dedication towards good relations in academic work, even if working with imperfect tools and in troubled translations. Their capitalization of L/land brings out the inherent limitations of the inadequacy of our hermeneutical tools during intercultural communication. Rather than acknowledging this limitation and refusing to engage with notions of land that do not view it as Sacred, Liboiron's meta-linguistics weaves between worldviews. In a way, this makes this text almost bilingual.

Working amidst this hybridity, one gets a sense that there is no neutral, perfect or innocent solution to scientific problems in a post-colonial world. There is no perfect way to give “land back” in St. John's, Newfoundland, the primary site of CLEAR Labs, because the Beothuk are culturally extinct. There is no perfect way to return to the pre-colonial era, just as there is no way to talk about “pollution” in English that is innocent of the resonances of Christian moralization.8 Yet, Liboiron still works towards good relations. Pollution is Colonialism is a methodological feat, not in spite of the limitations of producing anti-colonial scientific work in written text within a colonial landscape, but because it engages so deeply with these limitations. This produces a methodology of writing that is disinterested with perfect solutions, and instead works tirelessly to ground the text in place and story as much as possible.

Bibliography

Liboiron, Max. Pollution Is Colonialism. Duke University Press, 2021.

Maracle. Lee, "Appropriation," in My Conversations with Canadians (Toronto: BookThug, 2017) pp. 99–122.

Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society, no. 1, (2012), pp. 1–40.

Endnotes

  1. Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism, 2021, pp. 5.↩︎

  2. Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism, p. 30.↩︎

  3. Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society, 2012, pp. 1.↩︎

  4. Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism, p. 17.↩︎

  5. Maracle, Lee. “Appropriation,” in My Conversations with Canadians, p. 111.↩︎

  6. Liboiron , Pollution is Colonialism, p. 17.↩︎

  7. Liboiron , Pollution is Colonialism, p. 7.↩︎

  8. Liboiron , Pollution is Colonialism, p. 19.↩︎

Copyright (c) 2024 Jessica Casey

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