Together, we thought: My, how times have changed. Our 21 st Century jaws all hit the floor in silence. If a hearing Frenchman couldn’t sign, he was considered "incomplete” as a human. Our sign language was considered a gift to the hearing folks. In hearing peoples’ eyes, we were global citizens. Between the 1770s and 1850s, we flourished as educators, writers, statesmen, lawyers, and artists. If, in Ladd’s words, you’ve ever “used your deaf skills of visual thinking” while trying to sign with a deaf local in Athens, Tibet, or Perth … then you know exactly what he’s talking about.įor juxtaposition, he revealed a historical shocker: Once upon a time, we were actually free of colonialism. None of this local dialect rubbish, where Ladd is concerned. In seeing his BSL translated by two ASL interpreters, we are reminded of one of his central tenets: We are truly an International Deaf Community. So how can someone so dystopian also be so … uplifting? Because you feel the evangelical hope and energy in Ladd’s BSL (British Sign Language) gestures, and upbeat constructive wording of his PowerPoint slides. Not in 14 days, but 14 years or 140 years from now. If we’re not vigilant, ours could be next. “Every 14 days a language dies,” reports the National Geographic’s Enduring Languages. Ever heard Chulym, Yuchi, or Murinh-Patha? Probably not, but these languages are going extinct. Nor does he mince words: He warns us that colonialism can trigger our cultural extinction. To say he geeks out a bit is putting it mildly. His watershed book “ Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood” (2003) lines the bookshelves of many a ASL professor, student, and deaf culture scholar. The friendly, lanky Brit is an activist, researcher, and international deaf scholar hailing from the University of Bristol's Centre for Deaf Studies. This is the dystopian picture that Paddy Ladd painted in his “Deafhood and Pedagogy” lecture hosted by the ASL Program in the University of Washington Department of Linguistics. We now also know its antithesis: “Colonialism”. But on September 24, we – an audience of 200+ - got the inside scoop straight from the hands of the British guy who invented the term. It literally gets on some peoples’ skin, in the form of tattoos and printed sweatshirts, and under the skin as our consciousness.
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