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.”
But football fans who are hearing impaired — roughly 13% of Americans are deaf or hard-of-hearing — will rely on sign language interpreters to fully enjoy the star-laden performances.
Colin Denny, a research assistant for the College of Education at the University of Arizona, is both: He lost his hearing during childhood, eventually found his niche studying native sign language, and now at 32 years old, he’ll use a mix of American Sign Language and North American Indian Sign Language to sign “America the Beautiful” on stage at the televised Super Bowl.
A portrait of Colin Denny, a deaf Navajo man who is working on a project at the University of Arizona aimed at documenting and preserving native sign languages. Denny will also use a mix of American Sign Language and American Indian Sign Language to sign “American the Beautiful” during the 2023 Super Bowl pregame show on Sunday in Glendale.
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.”
There are dozens of tribal sign languages that have been used for centuries, but some of those languages were lost during the government’s subjugation of native people and insistence that they abandon native traditions and assimilate into white American culture. Denny, who was raised in the Navajo Nation in Piñon, remembers hearing his family speak the Navajo language when he was very young.
But he started losing his hearing at age 5 before becoming completely deaf by age 13. At that point his parents, who both taught Navajo language at the schools on the reservation, recognized the need for Denny to attend the Arizona State Schools for the Deaf and the Blind’s Tucson campus.
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. “Often people would recognize and see that I am (Indigenous) and would come to me and ask for vocabulary words or signs for our communities,” Denny recalled. “It would throw me off. I would think, ‘Yes, I am Indigenous. Yes, I am Navajo. But I don’t have that knowledge.’ “
That changed for Denny in 2016, when he enrolled at Gallaudet University, a private university for deaf and hard-of-hearing people in Washington, D.C. It was there that he first learned about Plains Indian Sign Language, one of the ten regional variations of American Indian Sign Language.
“I was learning signs I had never seen before. I always thought that because I wasn’t aware of it, maybe it wasn’t important enough to be researched,” said Denny, who graduated in 2018. “But I realized that there was language here, there always has been language. And ASL was not the first language here. If you look back, historically you can find roots of sign language among native tribes. But there was no documentation.”
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.”
Last summer, Denny started doing just that when the UA hired him as research assistant for a new project that relies on tribal outreach to create a video sign language dictionary that documents and preserves as many indigenous sign languages as possible.
Colin Denny, a deaf Navajo man and research assistant at the University of Arizona, speaks about UA project on preserving native sign languages. Denny used a mix of American Sign Language and American Indian Sign Language to sign "America the Beautiful" during the 2023 Super Bowl pregame show.
“(A) great thing about having Colin involved is he’s from the younger generation,” said Melanie McKay-Cody, an assistant professor of education who is leading the project, in a news release. “We can start teaching people of his age and start this process, and that way, it grows.”
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.
“I want (people) to know that we as an Indigenous community have our spoken and our sign language,” he said. “We are trying to revitalize, reclaim and preserve our language so that others can see that and pass it on to the next generation.”
