“Are you Navajo or Inuit?” Identity, television dialogue, and Indigenizing semiotics

This study analyzes Indigenizing semiotic tactics in television narratives from the United States, combining corpus linguistic methodology with a theoretical framing inspired by linguistic anthropology. Given recent changes in the US television landscape, we analyze two landmark series with First Nations showrunners: Reservation Dogs and Rutherford Falls. Specifically, our dataset consists of all dialogue transcribed from both series' first two seasons. We use generic (e.g., Native, Indian, and tribe) and specific (e.g., Navajo, Lakota, and Oglala) identity labels as a starting point, combining corpus linguistic analysis of these labels with a semiotic analysis of selected scenes. The study identifies not only what identity work is being done by such labels but also how they are leveraged in the creation of an Indigenizing semiotics that disrupts “White” settler colonial frameworks that have traditionally been promoted in the media, enacting semiotic processes that we call overlay, icon-marking, and erasure-marking. A comparison with supplementary data from Australia allows us to show that these Indigenizing tactics are not limited to one country. Finally, the study demonstrates how a semiotic analysis of identity labels is a useful way “into” a larger corpus.