Opening plenary: Enacting relational acountability to indigenous languages and their peoples, communities, and lifeways

Acknowledging that extractive and non-relational language work have occurred and continue, it is imperative to understand that language is more than a system of communication that can be dissected. Language is culture – an embodiment of past histories, current realities, and imagined futures that is not void of people, land, and ancestral wisdom. Throughout the world, Indigenous communities are reasserting their sovereignty, self-determination, and inherent rights to protect their knowledges and languages from further desecration, misuse, exploitation, commodification, and self-promotional gain by academia (e.g., academic publications and recognition, promotion and tenure). When invited into community, it is necessary to approach our invitation with humility, to be fully cognizant of the privilege that allows us, as academics and researchers, to enter a foreign domain of learning. What may seem an insignificant invitation is in fact a relational response that trusts that our actions and engagement with language will be held to the highest standard – a standard that respects the community in which the language resides, along with the knowledges and wisdom, which we, as academics, may in/directly gain. This relational awareness and thinking extends outward from the language to the speaker, community, lifeways, lands, and beings that are present (e.g., mountains, rivers, ocean, animals, rocks). Although this may be unsettling, recognizing and nurturing relationships – connections to the human and the more-than-human – hold us accountable and responsible to all who are present in the work we do. By transforming our practice, we enact relational accountability that provides a pathway for genuine, deep-rooted, and honored relationships that are reciprocated through our ways of knowing, being, and doing