A new center at the University of Arizona is one of only four designated by the U.S. Department of Education to lead a collaborative effort to help tribal communities across the country revitalize and preserve their languages. A five-year, $1.7 million grant from the Department of Education began funding the new West Region Native American Language Resource Center in the fall. The new center, administratively housed in the university’s American Indian Language Development Institute, is one of four new centers doing similar work. The others are a national center at the University of Hawai’i and two regional centers at the University of Oregon and Little Priest Tribal College in Winnebago, Nebraska. The center at the U of A will primarily serve indigenous communities in Arizona, California, Nevada and Utah.
A track record in revitalizing tribal languages
The new center will largely be an extension of what the university’s American Indian Language Development Institute (AILDI) has been doing for decades. Founded in 1978, AILDI’s core program involves bringing tribal members to campus for workshops to encourage the use of tribal languages as a key aspect of revitalization efforts. Ofelia Zepeda, Regents Professor of Linguistics in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and director of AILDI, is co-principal investigator of the new center. Sheilah E. Nicholas, professor in the College of Education and AILDI faculty member, will direct the center. Zepeda and Nicholas have decades of experience helping tribal communities revitalize and promote use of their languages, making AILDI the perfect location for the new center.
“When we looked at the solicitation for the grant, the things that were listed there were things that we have been doing for years,” said Zepeda, a renowned Tohono O’odham linguist who wrote the first grammar book in the Tohono O’odham language. The grant will also fund much of the training for tribal communities. The new center will more formally establish the network of partnerships between tribal communities and other institutions that have applied the AILDI model in service of local tribal community language revitalization efforts: the University of Oregon’s Northwest Indigenous Language Institute and the Hopilavayi Summer Institute from 2004 to 2010 in the Hopi community of northeastern Arizona, Nicholas said.
Partnerships with tribes that tailor Indigenous language instruction to each community will be at the core of the center’s work, Zepeda and Nicholas said, adding that each community has unique language needs that are closely tied to geographic location. The Western U.S. is the most linguistically diverse region in the country, with more than 100 Indigenous languages spoken in California alone, Nicholas said. Much of the center’s programming will involve a teaching technique known as Indigenous language immersion, which Nicholas has been teaching to tribal educators since the 1990s. Indigenous language immersion involves developing teaching methods that use the language as the language of instruction 50 to 100 percent of the time.
These techniques, influenced by French instruction in Canada, were first used by the indigenous Mohawk community in North America and later evolved into a movement for immersion schools for the Hawaiian language and Māori, the language of the Polynesian natives of New Zealand. AILDI has helped introduce Indigenous language immersion education in communities across the U.S., and the new center will allow the institute to expand support of community language revitalization efforts to the education systems that serve Indigenous communities, Zepeda and Nicholas said.
One challenge for Indigenous language teachers, who are often very busy with classroom work, is finding enough time and resources to evaluate their curricula and demonstrate their effectiveness.
Recent research, she added, confirmed that Indigenous language immersion had an additive rather than a subtractive effect: students not only excelled academically, but also learned the language of their ancestors and developed a strong cultural identity and a desire to give back.
An expert network for tribal linguists
Ronald Geronimo grew up among the Tohono O’odham people, learned O’odham as his first language, and uses it daily.
Many O’odham children today do not speak the language fluently and know few vocabulary words, Geronimo said.
“Today, children think of the language as something only adults know or use,” Geronimo said. “Some of them think that you don’t learn the language until you’re older because they only see older people speaking it.” As co-director of the O’odham Ñi’okǐ Ki (O’odham Language Center) at Tohono O’odham Community College, Geronimo is helping lead a mission to “reclaim” the O’odham language – to bring back its use in everyday life. To that end, Geronimo and his colleagues at the center have developed programs to teach O’odham in schools and introduce students to the language.
Geronimo has worked with AILDI for years to develop the center’s programs, which include pairing O’odham language experts with elementary school teachers to help them conduct language classes and teaching parents who may not be fluent in the language how to use the language more often at home in the presence of their children.
“We try to take a comprehensive approach, not just in the school but with parents and in the communities, with the overall goal of the child growing up with the language,” he said. The federal grant used to establish the new center, Geronimo said, will create a valuable network where he and other tribal linguists can connect and share resources to support the shared goal of revitalizing Indigenous languages.
“We will have a lot more resources to do what we want to do. Maybe we don’t have the financial means to do it, but maybe they can help us in this way,” Geronimo said.
Ultimately, Zepeda said, the center’s functioning depends largely on the tribal communities that use its resources.
“We will have our own ideas to meet the obligations of the grant,” Zepeda said. “But we will also listen to the communities and tell them what they want and what they need.”
Kyle MittanUniversity of Arizona, Communication
