“It’s the language of the colonizer” – An interview with jarral Boyd about indigeneity and language
jarral Boyd grew up on Turtle Island and is the child of Indigenous and Black parents. Since they have lived in Berlin, jarral has worked in schools, created community structures for diversity and inclusion, given workshops as an allyship trainer at conferences and festivals, and led inclusion initiatives in sports. She is a linguist and teaches indigenous healing practices for communities.
Can you introduce yourself and your work as a linguist and educator? Why did you choose this path?
I studied linguistics because I’ve always been fascinated with language, starting with English as a child, it being my first language. I entered a spelling bee in the eighth grade and won, and the prize was a dictionary. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life.
I went to school with a lot of children who were first-generation immigrants from various countries in Asia. In the part of town where I’m from, which is a very segregated city in the US, are also a lot of native Spanish speakers. I grew up around foreign languages and saw firsthand that there were folks who had to take extra classes as children because English wasn’t their first language. The whole idea of communication was around me from the very beginning. How the brain works and how we learn language as children and from when we’re born was always very fascinating.
In terms of my work, I moved to Berlin 18 years ago. I wanted to observe firsthand how children learned a language, so became an English teacher and an Erzieherin.
In 2018 I started playing a sport called Roller Derby. It’s a very white sport, mostly because it costs a lot of money – for gear – and there’s no representation, no outreach, etc. I tried to encourage racial and ethnic diversity in my league, and then was asked to do a workshop. I did the workshop and saw: “Oh, there’s a need for this, and I’m very good at this, so this is what I’m going to do with my life now.”
How does your work differ, depending on the context in Germany and other places?
I’ve done a few workshops in the US, but mostly, they’ve all been Berlin-based. Usually, the level of engagement differs. There’s a big difference if I’m working with a German company, but it’s an international company. There’s always a higher level of base understanding about microaggressions and basic language around these things. If I’m working with an all-German company, it’s different, not only the level of understanding, but also the extreme pushback on concepts and ideas that are new to them.
In general, a lot of the language is not translatable into German, or it’s just the exact same word. The US tends to be the forefront in this work, probably because of its more diverse demographic. The use of English terms allows Germans to distance themselves from the concepts. They might believe: “Oh, these are things that don’t happen here. This is a US problem.”
In Germany, also the German word for race is avoided with the excuse that it means something different than it does in English. No, it means the same exact thing. Based on history, you’ve decided now you don’t want to use this word, but then that allows you to do this mental trick where you’re like: “Oh, no race, no racism.” Voilà. There’s a lot of distancing and denial that is intrinsic to German culture and it is language-based.
In how far is your work connected to language? Do you address certain terms in your sessions?
Yes, always. Any workshop or training always has a bunch of terminology. This is necessary for establishing the same pageness of where everyone’s basic understanding of certain concepts is. I tend to quote Kimberlé Crenshaw, – in one of her explanations of why and how she coined the term intersectionality, she says: “If you don’t have a name for a problem, you can’t see a problem, and when you can’t see a problem, you can’t solve it.”
Are there any linguistic strategies that you teach in your workshops?
All of the work that I do is interactive because simply listening to someone talk about something doesn’t maximize how much you’re going to internalize. There has to be a self-reflection and a connection to it. So, I would say it’s a linguistic strategy to get folks to talk about themselves, to get people to define terms based on what their understanding is. In general, conversation-based learning is one of my number one strategies, along with question asking. I recommend this instead of focusing on facts and statistics, et cetera. To engage in a conversation with someone and not trying to speak authoritatively. We were taught to make statements instead of asking questions and that shuts down conversations and makes the other person defensive.
I have learned that it is important to respect the name by which a group chooses to refer to its own identity or social positioning. Can you tell me and our readers why this matters?
Because if it is left to anyone else other than that group, then where is the accountability? Where is the understanding? How can you tell me who I am? How can you tell me how I like to be called? That’s giving an authority where there’s no authority. That’s a hierarchical and white supremacist mentality that there is anyone else who can hand something down to me as a group, regardless if it’s ableism or gender identity or classism, even. Only those folks who are living that experience get to name it.
Can you tell me a little bit about the term Indigenous? I’ve heard people use it as ‘politically correct’ term, but there are also voices who criticize it for just substituting an earlier, clearly racist term. What is your take on this?
I’m slightly distracted by the term politically correct because that’s something that I hate, but we’ll get into that later, maybe.
When I was a child, my grandmother was Indigenous, but she was stolen, kidnapped, and was raised by white people from a residential school, and then ‘adopted’. Since my mother did not get a lot of her Indigenous culture, she made sure that I did. Once a month, I was taken out of my regular school classes. Me and the other Indigenous children were brought to learn about our culture, what the gustoweh, our “head dresses” look like, what our traditional clothing, food and everything would be. That included language, what we call ourselves.
First of all, no community has one opinion or one mindset when it comes to anything. There’s a lot of folks who still use Indian, and that’s completely normal and makes perfect sense to them, and that’s also fine. But a lot of folks generally say: “Yeah, Indian is fine, Indigenous is fine. It’s not our language anyway, so why do I care? It’s the language of the colonizer.” So, you use whatever words you think you need to understand but our words for us are something completely different anyways.
And for me, Indigeneity in and of itself is an extremely important term because it is not limited to one political land area. It is not limited to one nation or one people. It is not limited to racial identity. African people are indigenous. All humans, in some way, are indigenous to their land of origin. It is that aspect that has been stolen through colonial mentality that has resulted in so much harm. And again, this detachment from the earth, from our relations, which is what we call things that white folks would call environment or nature. The word nature only exists to create a separation between us and it, but we are nature. So therefore, Indigenous does not describe any type of persons, but rather a whole concept and way of being.
Would you say that probably also counts for the German term indigen? Or do you think there’s any difference in the language?
Yes, I didn’t start hearing anyone use indigen until the last few years when it became clear that “Indianer” was not acceptable. I just assumed that it was taking the lead. I believe the etymology of Indigenous is Latin in origin, so I assumed it was that influence.
You mentioned that already when it comes to Indigeneity or also race, there are big differences in the German and the US discourse and language use. What do you think are the most significant differences?
I think a major factor certainly is, again, this distancing oneself. I think in German culture, there’s still very much a mindset that Indigenous people don’t exist anymore. That it’s a thing of the past, and then it’s all the same anyways. There’s a lot of arrogance in German culture.
For example, you have the history of Karl May and Winnetou, and this bizarre fantasy and idealization that is just mind-blowing to me. It’s cosplay, basically. I believe some of the folks involved in these events that take place in Germany certainly are Indigenous in origin. God forbid, I would never criticize them for making money in a capitalist society the best way they can. But the fact that there’s even any wish for it at all, I feel, is really attached to the German identity that is based on not wanting to be German and wanting to distance yourself from Germaness and German things. That allowed people to grasp on to Karl May and Winnetou and just go into this fantasy world.
I’ve lived in this country for 18 years. I’ve met folks, Germans, who upon finding out that I’m Indigenous, never ask me questions or seem interested in knowing what that actually means. There’s this weird childlike excitement because it sparks this fantasy in their head, but there’s no interest in knowledge about what the name of my nation is. It’s just “Indianer”. It’s all the same.
The big difference for me is that the distance of that allows for painting this broad, colorful picture that has nothing to do with the reality. And there’s also an arrogance where there’s no interest in the reality.
You mentioned that you don’t like the term political correctness. Could you tell us why you don’t like it?
It’s colored by my experience as a US-citizen. It was a term that almost as soon as it was coined, became a backlash to dismiss things that are essentially asking folks to just be decent people. Asking folks to be respectful of other people’s self-identifiers, of other people’s language, of not being harmful. It became a way to put everything in this term of political correctness that was just immediately mocked.
How would we deal with indigeneity and language in an ideal world?
In an ideal world, instead of land acknowledgment, there would be giving the land back, for example. It’s something that started off with potentially great intentions when someone says they acknowledge the nation that originally lived on that land. I won’t say belong because land belongs to no one. There’s a thing that happens in the brain also linguistically that makes us complacent. After a time, saying things becomes as good as doing things. At some point, folks started to confuse land acknowledgement with an action.
Also, the extinction of Indigenous languages is something that breaks my heart. The handing over of resources to Indigenous nations to adequately support their first languages to thrive, to teach them, to make sure that there are folks in the future who can speak them so that they do not cease to exist. That would be essential.
The thing that a lot of folks don’t acknowledge about genocide is that it’s not a simply a matter of bodies. It is the erasure of a people from the face of the Earth, from history. That includes culture, which is art, which is knowledge, and which is language.
Is there anything else you would like our readers to know you haven’t mentioned yet?
Something that has come up for me over and over since October 7th of last year is the cherry picking of which struggles to pay attention to. Every day, for as long as anyone who is currently alive on this planet has been alive, there has been an ongoing genocide and wars where there are Black and Brown people involved. We tend to only focus on certain ones, and also only for a certain time period, especially in the day and age of smartphones and social media. It’s certainly changed everything about our brain chemistry and how we engage in the world. There’s also going to be a limited amount of things that we’re able to handle and process and think about. But at any given time, when your focus is on the struggles of a people in any particular part of the world, there’s also a large and similar struggle going on right next door. But those folks are Black or darker skinned, and therefore, they’re not getting the attention. So for example, something a lot of folks don’t know is there are a lot of Black Palestinians. We never see them. And then also what is currently going on in Congo and Sudan. Most folks are not getting this in their social media feed.
What I would like people to think about is: Don’t pick and choose or put human suffering into some hierarchy. You don’t have to commit yourself fully to every single cause. That’s impossible. But any time you are reposting something or paying attention to something or feeling something for folks in a part of the world who are going through something, maybe just have a look around and see where else that something similar is going on and give somebody else that attention. Donate your money also to a Black or Brown cause. Just try to zoom out and know that colorism very much helps play its part in this system of pitting us all against each other. And it’s hard to build trust if we’re talking about allyship. It’s hard to build trust if one doesn’t even feel that one is seen or being taken this seriously because you only have so much capacity for acknowledging human suffering.