Wolastokwi Intertextuality

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Journeys in Spirited Landscapes

Bernard C. Perley
University of Wisconsin Milwaukee Union Art Gallery 2008

This collection of paintings and drawings reflect different experiences in my journeys through American Indian “spirited” landscapes; homage amidst the effigy mounds, spirits of place in the southwest, and primordiality in the Maliseet homeland.

In this current era of “progress” the Maliseet language, culture, and oral traditions have been continuously undermined and are now on the verge of extinction. I produce these landscapes so that we may never forget how we came from this earth and how we are important participants in not only a “spirited” landscape, but a spiritual landscape as well. Some photographs, texts and presentations associated with this exhibit are archived here.

Selected publications

Silence Before the Void: Maliseet Storytelling, Language Death and the Semiotics of Survival. 2012. In Telling Stories in the Face of Danger: Language Renewal in Native American Commuities. Paul V. Kroskrity, ed. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.

Last Words, Final Thoughts: Collateral Extinctions in Maliseet Language Death. 2012. In The Anthropology of Extinction: Essays of Culture and Species Death. Genese Sodikoff, ed. University of Indiana Press, Bloomington.

Defying Maliseet Language Death: Emergent Vitalities of Language, Culture, and Identity in Eastern Canada. 2011. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.

Language as an Integrated Cultural Resource. 2011. In A Companion to Cultural Resource Management. Thomas F. King, ed. Blackwell, Malden

Contingencies of Emergence: Planning Maliseet Language Ideologies. 2009. In Native American Language Ideologies: Language Beliefs, Practices and Struggles in Indian Country. Paul V. Kroskrity and Margaret Field, eds. University of Arizona, Tucson.

Aboriginality at Large: Varieties of Resistance in Maliseet Language Instruction. 2006. IDENTITIES: Global Studies in Culture and Power 13:187–208

Selected presentations

Last Words, Final Thoughts: Collateral Damage in Maliseet Language Death. Extinction Encounters: Vanishing Forms, Human Rights, and the Ethics of Retrieval. Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, Rutgers University October 30 2008 link to program

Tempus Profundus: Warning from the Village of the Dammed. From Magna Carta to the Sky Trust: The Historical Arc of the Commons. Symposium at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee sponsored by the Center for 21st Century Studies and the Tomales Bay Institute.
link to onthecommons.org