Colin Denny, 32, is part of a small group of people in his generation who knows how to communicate in American Indian Sign Language, but he's working on documenting and preserving the language before it's lost to time.
When millions of Americans tune in Sunday evening to watch the 2023 Super Bowl in Glendale, they’ll get to see more than a football game. Rihanna will perform at half-time, and before the game, audiences will hear Chris Stapleton sing the National Anthem, Sheryl Lee Ralph sing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and Babyface sing “America the Beautiful.”
People are also reading… For Denny, who is Navajo, Sunday’s performance is about representing both deaf people and Indigenous culture. “It’s a huge honor,” he said through a sign language interpreter at a news conference Wednesday. “I want to show the community — especially deaf students — that yes, we are Indigenous and we have our language, too. We are still here, we’ve been here for many years and we are not planning to go away.
Listen now and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS Feed | Omny Studio There, students and faculty communicated in American Sign Language, which Denny learned and used to make friends. There were other Indigenous students at the school, too, but they all only knew how to use American Sign Language and did not speak Indigenous sign languages.
Denny realized that if he wanted to preserve native sign languages, someone needed to take up the charge of documenting and teaching it to others. “As our elders pass on, many in our middle generations like myself don’t use the language. But we need to have it preserved to guide our future generations.”
Although Denny, McKay-Cody and the rest of the research team have a lot of work ahead of them, Denny’s interpretation performance on Super Bowl Sunday is a step toward increased visibility of native sign languages and the deaf community.
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