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Native Language Schools Are Taking Back Education
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More than a century ago, the last fluent speakers of
Wôpanâak passed away. Now this school is working to revive the language.
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<span class="gmail-author" rel="author"><a class="gmail-articleAuthor" href="http://www.yesmagazine.org/@@also-by?author=Abaki+Beck">Abaki Beck</a></span>
<time class="gmail-published gmail-updated" datetime="2014-02-16" title="February 16, 2014">posted Apr 19, 2018</time>
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<p>For more than 150 years, the Wôpanâak language was silent. With no
fluent speakers alive, the language of the Mashpee Wampanoag people
existed only in historical documents. It was by all measures extinct.
But a recently established language school on the Mashpee Wampanoag
Tribe’s reservation in Massachusetts is working to bring back the
language.</p>
<p>The threat of extinction that faces the Wôpanâak language is not
uncommon for indigenous languages in the United States. Calculated
federal policy, not happenstance, led to the destruction of Native
American languages such as Wôpanâak.</p>
<p>But today, Native language schools are working to change that by
revitalizing languages that have been threatened with extinction.</p>
<p>In the 19th century, federal policy shifted from a policy of extermination and displacement to assimilation. The passage of the <a href="http://legisworks.org/congress/15/session-2/chap-85.pdf"> Civilization Fund Act </a>
in 1819 allocated federal funds directly to education for the purpose
of assimilation, and that led to the formation of many government-run
boarding schools. Boarding schools were not meant to educate, but to
assimilate.</p>
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<p>Tribal communities continue to be haunted by this history. As of April, UNESCO’s <a href="http://www.unesco.org/languages-atlas/"> Atlas of the World’s Endangered Languages </a>
listed 191 Native American languages as “in danger” in the United
States. Of these, some languages are vulnerable—meaning that children
speak the language, but only in certain contexts—to critically
endangered—meaning the youngest generation of speakers are elderly.</p>
<p>Today, the education system in the United States fails Native American students. Native students have the <a href="https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2017/2017144.pdf"> lowest high school graduation rat</a><a href="https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2017/2017144.pdf">e</a> of any racial group nationally, according to the 2017 Condition of Education Report. And a <a href="https://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/school-dropouts/the-dropout-graduation-crisis-among-american-indian-and-alaska-native-students-failure-to-respond-places-the-future-of-native-peoples-at-risk"> 2010 report </a>
shows that in the 12 states with the highest Native American
population, less than 50 percent of Native students graduate from high
school per year.</p>
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<p>By founding schools that teach in Native languages and center tribal
history and beliefs, tribal language schools are taking education back
into their own hands.</p>
<h4>Mukayuhsak Weekuw: Reviving a silent language</h4>
<p>On the Massachusetts coast just two hours south of Boston is Mukayuhsak Weekuw, a Wôpanâak language preschool and kindergarten <a href="http://www.wlrp.org/project-history.html">founded in 2015</a>.
The school is working to revitalize the Wôpanâak language. As one of
the first tribes to encounter colonists, the Mashpee Wampanoag faced
nearly four centuries of violence and assimilation attempts; by the <a href="http://www.wlrp.org/project-history.html">mid 19th century</a>, the last fluent speakers of Wôpanâak had died.</p>
<p>In the 1990s, Wampanoag social worker Jessie Little Doe Baird began
to work to bring the language back to her people. It began like this:
More than 20 years ago, Baird had a series of dreams in which her
ancestors spoke to her in Wôpanâak. She says they instructed her to ask
her community whether they were ready to welcome the language home.</p>
<p>She listened, and in 1993 she sought the help of linguists and
community elders to begin to revitalize the language—elders like Helen
Manning from the Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribe, with whom she would later
co-found the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project.</p>
<blockquote class="gmail-pullquote">“Our languages embody our ancestors’ relationships to our homelands and to one another across millennia.”</blockquote>
<p>Baird found a lot of resources. To translate the Bible, colonists had
transcribed Wôpanâak to the Roman alphabet in the 1600s, which the
Wampanoag used to write letters, wills, deeds, and petitions to the
colonial government. With these texts, Baird and MIT linguist Kenneth
Hale established rules for Wôpanâak orthography and grammar, and created
a <a href="http://www.wlrp.org/project-history.html">dictionary</a> of 11,000 words.</p>
<p>In 2015, the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project was ready to open
the Mukayuhsak Weekuw preschool. According to the school’s Project
Director Jennifer Weston, 10 students attended in the first year it
opened, growing to 20 in the current school year. As part of the
language program, parents or grandparents of students at the school are
required to attend a weekly language class to ensure that the youth can
continue speaking the language at home.</p>
<p>The curriculum is taught entirely in the Wôpanâak language, and it is
also grounded in tribal history and connection to the land. “Our
languages embody our ancestors’ relationships to our homelands and to
one another across millennia,” Weston says. “They explain to us to the
significance of all the places for our most important ceremonies and
medicines. They tell us who we are and how to be good relatives.”</p>
<p>In addition to language learning, the children also learn about
gardening, hunting, and fishing. They practice tribal ceremonies,
traditional food preservation, and traditional hunting and fishing
practices. At Native American language schools like Mukayuhsak Weekuw,
students experience their culture in the curriculum in a deeply personal
and empowering way.</p>
<h4>‘Aha Pūnana Leo: Overcoming policy barriers</h4>
<p>Considering the violent history of America’s education system towards
Native Americans, it is perhaps unsurprising that policy barriers
continue to hinder contemporary language revitalization schools.</p>
<p>Federal policies are often misaligned with the reality of tribal
communities and language revitalization schools. Leslie Harper,
president of the advocacy group National Coalition of Native American
Language Schools and Programs, says schools often risk losing funding
because they lack qualified teachers who meet federal standards. But
these standards are paternalistic, notes Harper, who says that fluent
language teachers at Native schools are often trained outside of
accredited teaching colleges, which don’t offer relevant Native language
teaching programs. These teaching colleges don’t “respond to our needs
for teachers in Indian communities,” she says.</p>
<p>In Hawai’i, ‘Aha Pūnana Leo schools have had some success in
overcoming policy barriers like these. The schools have led the way for
statewide and national policy change in Native language education.</p>
<p>When the first preschool was founded in 1984, activists estimated that <a href="http://www.ahapunanaleo.org/images/files/Nawahi_Hawaiian_Lab_School.pdf">fewer than 50 children </a>
spoke Hawaiian statewide. Today, ‘Aha Pūnana Leo runs 21 language
medium schools serving thousands of students throughout the state, from
preschool through high school. Because of this success, emerging
revitalization schools and researchers alike look to ‘Aha Pūnana Leo as a
model.</p>
<blockquote class="gmail-pullquote">“We are beginning to see the long-term benefits of language revitalization.”</blockquote>
<p>Nāmaka Rawlins is the director of strategic collaborations at ‘Aha
Pūnana Leo. Like Harper, she says that required academic credentialing
burdened the language preschools, which relied on fluent elders. This
became an issue in 2012 when kindergarten was made compulsory in
Hawai’i, and teachers and directors of preschools were required to be
accredited. But she, along with other Hawaiian language advocates,
advocated for changes to these state regulations to exclude Hawaiian
preschools from the requirement and instead accredit their own teachers
as local, indigenous experts. And they succeeded. “We got a lot of flack
from the preschool community,” she says. “Today, we provide our own
training and professional development.”</p>
<p>One of the early successes of ‘Aha Pūnana Leo was <a href="http://www.ahapunanaleo.org/images/files/HuliliVol3_Wilson.pdf"> removing the ban </a>
on the use of Hawaiian language in schools, which had been illegal for
nearly a century. Four years later, in 1990, the passage of the <span>Native American Language Act </span>affirmed
that Native American children across the nation have the right to be
educated, express themselves, and be assessed in their tribal language.</p>
<p>But according to Harper, progress still needs to be made before NALA is fully implemented by the Education Department. <span>Since 2016, Native American language medium schools </span><a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/34/200.6" target="_blank">have been able to assess students</a><span> in
their language. This took years of advocacy by people like Harper, who
served on the U.S. Department of Education's Every Student Succeeds Act
Implementation Committee and pushed for the change. </span></p>
<p>While this is an important first step, Harper is concerned that
because language medium school assessments must be peer reviewed, low
capacity schools—or those that lack the technical expertise of
developing assessments that align with federal standards—will be
burdened. And the exemption doesn’t apply to high schools.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.ahapunanaleo.org/images/files/ECE_White_Paper.pdf"> S</a><a href="http://www.ahapunanaleo.org/images/files/ECE_White_Paper.pdf">tudies </a>
from multiple language revitalization schools have found that students
who attend these schools have greater academic achievement than those
who attend English-speaking schools, including scoring significantly
higher on standardized tests. “We are beginning to see the long-term
benefits of language revitalization and language-medium education in our
kids,” Harper says. “But the public education system and laws are still
reticent about us developing programs of instruction for our students.”</p>
<h4>Looking back, looking forward</h4>
<p>A movement to revitalize tribal languages is underway. The success of
‘Aha Pūnana Leo and promise of Mukayuhsak Weekuw are examples of
communities taking education into their own hands. When Native American
students are taught in their own language and culture, they succeed.</p>
<p>Weston says parents are eager for Mukayuhsak Weekuw to expand into an
elementary school, and in fall 2018, the school will include first
grade in addition to pre-school and kindergarten. It is a testament to
the work and vision of the Wampanoag that just two decades ago, their
language was silent, and today, they have a school that expands in size
each year. “All of our tribal communities have the capacity to maintain
and revitalize our mother tongues,” Weston says—no matter how daunting
it may seem.</p>
<p><em>Editor’s note: <i><span>A previous version of this article said
that Native American language medium schools were not able to assess
students in their own language. Grades 3-8 have been able to do so since
2016</span></i></em></p></div></div></div></div>
<br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com" target="_blank">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/" target="_blank">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br><br>-------------------------------------------------</div>
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