The Power of ASL
A Society Supporting Language, Literacy, and
Performing Arts in the Signed Modality
Winter 2017
A Newsletter of the Society for American Sign Language
Issue 8
The Library of Congress (LoC) inducted Preservation of the Sign Language (Preservation) to its
National Film Registry in 2010. The registry, established in 1988, is tasked by Congress with collecting
and preserving films considered “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" that “reflect who we
are as a people and as a nation (LoC).” Preservation’s inclusion on the list cements deaf culture as an
important part of U.S. heritage. Listed alongside canonical films familiar to many: Wizard of Oz,
Casablanca, and Citizen Kane, the 2010 class included Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Malcolm
X, and Saturday Night Fever (NAD Mailing List). Twenty-five films are selected every year.
Preservation is a film recording of speech in American Sign Language (ASL) orated by George
Veditz in 1913. President of the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) from 1910 through 1913,
Veditz was considered a master signer and powerful orator by his contemporaries. He delivered a
passionate speech in which he extolled the virtues of sign language, argued for its role in advancing
deaf people’s status as citizens, offered a staunch defense for the place of sign language in deaf
education, and most important, instilled hope in his audience that sign language would survive the
onslaught of attacks from those who wished to see sign language eradicated. Defiantly, Veditz asserts
sign language would remain on earth as long as deaf people existed, and he ends the speech by
declaring “sign language as the noblest gift God has given to deaf people” (Padden, 2004, p. 245).
The film captures an important movement in deaf history.
As early as the eighteenth century, deaf people across the globe participated in campaigns to
protect sign language from a global drive to eradicate sign language and deaf communities (Baynton
1996; Burch, 2004). Established in 1880, the NAD took part in those campaigns from its inception, with
impassioned speeches in favor of sign language dominating the association’s national conferences. In
the early twentieth century, film emerged as a new technology for capturing motion and a natural
medium for recording ASL. The membership of the NAD passed a resolution in 1910 to take
advantage of this new technology as another front in their battle against oralism. Deaf elites were also
grumbling about the deterioration of sign language caused by oral education and generational change,
(Continue on page 4)
The Power of ASL
1
Winter 2017 – Issue 8