Northern Arapaho language shift is examined in its local, sociocultural context with specific attention to: Arapaho views of language change; shifts in the multiple functions of ways of speaking and knowing; the broader shift in knowledge and space-time resulting from Euro-American imposed forms; and Arapaho strategies for negotiating the contradictions generated by knowledge and language shift. Emphasis is on the parallactic view afforded by an ethnolinguistic and ethnohistorical orientation that considers the multiplicity of local views, language as practice, and relations to other historical dimensions of sociocultural change heretofore residual to previous linguistic and sociolinguistic models of language shift.