CARING FOR OUR PEOPLE: INDIGENOUS RESPONSES TO COVID-19 ERA INFORMATIC COLONIALISM

Based on qualitative and quantitative analyses, activist work and HCI approaches, these papers show how organizations formed partnerships to curate information resources, and deploy community Wi-Fi and Internet infrastructure across southwest US Indigenous communities during the most challenging months of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. For Native Americans this means ideating while navigating colonial inequality. Through an investigation of sociotechnical interdependencies across a broadband network cooperative, tribes, and university labs, an HCI team reflects on how relational stability sustains fragile Internet ecologies stretched to capacity by the needs of users deeply affected by COVID-19 in New Mexico and Arizona. Through an autoethnography of community-centered digital solutions for Navajo Nation, a member of the Nation considers how the role of K’é informs a system of infrastructural care in a nation struggling with high rates of infection and systemic lack of adequate infrastructure. Through an advocacy-oriented analysis of social media content, a Diné and Lakota social media scholar discerns the relationship between community enforcement of social distancing, the loss of interpersonal interaction, mutual aid, and the impact of public health memes for the Navajo Nation. Through radical librarianship practices, a Tohono O’odham librarian and artist counteracts the values of ‘information neutrality’ shaping whiteness-centering American librarianship by generating a community-curated solution to actionable information about COVID-19 for Indigenous communities. This panel models decolonial liberation rooted in responsiveness across mediated layers of Indigenous belonging. The authors express Indigenous interpretations of collective autonomy vis-a-vis strategic Internet assemblages, and particularly, how an Indigenous ethics of care intersects with the dream of an Internet for social good.

Second and first position in Tohono O’odham auxiliaries

The Uto-Aztecan language, Tohono O’odham (formerly Papago), has very free word order, along with a systematic requirement that the auxiliary should surface in second position. The contexts in which this requirement is suspended are argued to open a crucial window on its nature. The chapter contends that prosody and morphophonological considerations that determine the auxiliary placement reflect preferences for consonant-initial and trochaic patterns at the beginnings of clauses. Evidence comes from a class of vowel-initial particles that robustly resist moving to clause-initial position, and the so- called g-determiner, which otherwise occurs with all nouns, including proper nouns, in all other positions is barred where a noun surfaces in clause-initial position. The analysis of prefixed auxiliaries as second position can also be called into question, as they arguably fill the first position and first syllable of the clause. This, then, may be a genuine case of a phonologically conditioned second-position phenomenon.

Rethinking Verb Second

This volume provides the most exhaustive and comprehensive treatment available of the Verb Second property, which has been a central topic in formal syntax for decades. While Verb Second has traditionally been considered a feature primarily of the Germanic languages, this book shows that it is much more widely attested cross-linguistically than previously thought, and explores the multiple empirical, theoretical, and experimental puzzles that remain in developing an account of the phenomenon. Uniquely, formal theoretical work appears alongside studies of psycholinguistics, language production, and language acquisition. The range of languages investigated is also broader than in previous work: while novel issues are explored through the lens of the more familiar Germanic data, chapters also cover Verb Second effects in languages such as Armenian, Dinka, Tohono O’odham, and in the Celtic, Romance, and Slavonic families. The analyses have wide-ranging consequences for our understanding of the language faculty, and will be of interest to researchers and students from advanced undergraduate level upwards in the fields of syntax, historical linguistics, and language acquisition.

The Tohono O’odham “Attack” on El Plomo: A Study in Sovereignty, Survivance, Security, and National Identity at the Dawn of the American Century

Having inhabited the Sonoran Desert since time immemorial, the Tohono O’odham had been moving their herds of cattle across the U.S-Mexico border since they began ranching. But in 1898, within the context of the Spanish-American War, their migrations and subsequent local conflicts became national news, inciting the intervention of four government agencies.