Do You See What I Mean?: Plains Indian Sign Talk and the Embodiment of Action Book

Plains Indian Sign Talk (PST), a complex system of hand signs, once served as the lingua franca among many Native American tribes of the Great Plains who spoke differing languages. Some researchers thought it had disappeared following the establishment of reservations and the adoption of English, but in this study Brenda Farnell documents that PST is still an integral component of the storytelling tradition in contemporary Assiniboine (Nakota) culture. Farnell's research challenges the Euro-American view of language as a matter of words only. In Nakota language practices, she asserts, words and gestures are equal partners in the creation of meaning. Drawing on Nakota narratives videotaped during field research at the Fort Belknap Reservation, northern Montana, she uses the movement script Labanotation to create texts of the movement content of these performances. Using them to analyze both spoken and gestural components, she builds an action-centered theory of "deixis" and spatial orientation that reveals unexpected semantic depth in both the storytelling tradition and everyday interaction.Read More