SSILA Statement on Solidarity and Accountability

Statement: December 19th, 2021

In the last months, discoveries of unmarked graves in Kamloops, BC, and Saskatchewan, both in Canada, reminded the world of the atrocities and horror that settler-colonialist institutions have inflicted upon members of Indigenous nations of Canada, the US and across the Americas as part of a systematic campaign of cultural, linguistic and physical genocide. The resulting loss for communities, whose trauma continues until this day, is aggravated by the fact that contemporary institutions within nation-states continue to inflict violence and discrimination against Indigenous peoples across the Americas and elsewhere in the world.

The SSILA Executive committee stands in solidarity with Indigenous linguists and language scholars and all who seek to make fundamental and lasting change to the institutions that we represent and that represent us. As a scholarly Society that is devoted to the study of Indigenous languages of the Americas, we have the responsibility to contribute to dismantling the methodological practices and academic incentive structures which have upheld and perpetuated colonialism and white supremacy within our field (cf. Charity Hudley, Mallinson, & Bucholtz 2020). We acknowledge and thank our colleagues from Natives4Linguistics for their leadership in charting a path forward and their call for action. While each one of us reflects individually on our practices as language scholars working with members of sovereign Indigenous nations across the continent, we have the responsibility to assess what we can do collectively as a Society in order to incorporate greater accountability in our research practices and implement structural changes that expand the intellectual scope of our field in order to create a better environment for Indigenous colleagues to participate in it and shape the future of our field (https://natives4linguistics.wordpress.com/). 

One way in which our Society can make progress towards these goals is through increasing our accountability as scholars about the broader social significance of our work and our engagement with members of Indigenous speech communities across the Americas. Since 2019, SSILA has asked members to state the social outcomes and implications of the work presented at our Annual Meeting, whether positive, neutral or negative, whether immediate or potential. While there is broad support for having this as a requirement, there have also been calls to improve its implementation. An ad-hoc committee developed an initial set of resources for members in order to better implement this requirement for the 2023 Annual Meeting and beyond. These resources for implementation can be found on the Annual Meetings pages.