American Indians distinguish America, yet American Indian languages do not. This course is a critical examination of how Indigenous languages and speakers have been documented, exoticized, and silenced across a range of social and cultural contexts. We’ll examine how linguistic knowledge gets expressed and shared, how situations of contact affect language change (from words to institutions), and how different styles of ethnolinguistic representation (current & past) mediate conceptions of difference and perpetuate negative acts of discrimination.