Chapter 11: Indigenous Language Use in Native American Education: Opening Spaces for Indigenous Ethnographies of Communication¹

It is well known that most Native American languages are threatened with extinction, due to a diverse set of historical causes, ranging from outright physical and cultural genocide to gradual shifts toward a dominant European language that is perceived to offer greater economic, social, and educational opportunities (see Goddard 1997: 3). The Northern Arapaho Tribe, who live on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, underwent the same cycle of education-based language repression experienced by most reservation-based tribes in the United States in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries: children were sent off-reservation to boarding schools or on-reservation to mission schools, and they were severely punished for using their native language. Instruction in or about Arapaho was completely lacking.³ The tribe also has participated in the shift that has occurred since the late 1960s and early 1970s toward revalorizing native languages in the educational setting. The Northern Arapaho formed their own school district during the 1970s, and built their own elementary, junior, and senior high schools. A key reason cited by Arapahos today for this initiative was to gain control of their own educational process, and to bring language and culture back into the classroom. Teaching of the Arapaho language began in these schools in the late 1970s and early 1980s. During this same time period linguist Zdenek Salzmann, who had worked with the Tribe in the 1940s and 1950s, was brought in to produce a standard orthography, a dictionary, and curricular materials to get the language-teaching program started. Even in the Catholic mission school on the reservation, a new openness toward Arapaho language appeared at this time, and teaching of the language began there as well.