The U.S. has spent more money erasing Native languages than saving them

High Country News
Nov 5 · 3 min read

As tribes fight to save their languages from extinction, has the government done enough?

Students practice counting to ten in Quapaw. Their teacher, Ardina Moore, is the last living speaker of the language. | Laurie Sisk/The Joplin Globe

Ricky Duvall’s first language was Cherokee. His mom spoke Cherokee; his grandparents spoke Cherokee; his siblings and cousins all spoke Cherokee. When he was growing up in Lyons Switch, Oklahoma, everyone around him spoke Cherokee.

But when Duvall went to kindergarten in the mid-1970s, everyone spoke English. As one of the few Cherokee-speaking kids in his class, he was told by his teachers to stop. At the time, he says, they believed Cherokee bilingual students weren’t as smart and would fall behind students who spoke only English — a theory that research has since proven unfounded. When Duvall spoke his own language, his teacher kept him inside for recess. He remembers being 6 years old, watching the other kids play through the window.

So Duvall worked hard to be a good student and speak English, and only English. First at school, then at home, and eventually everywhere. And like thousands of other Cherokee-first language speakers of his generation, he lost his language.

“Speakers under the age of 40 are few and far between,” Duvall says today. “It was everywhere when I was a kid. … We’re losing it.”

There are roughly 2,000 fluent Cherokee speakers alive today, and most are over the age of 60. In 2018, the Cherokee Nation allocated nearly $6.2 million to its language programs, including child and adult immersion programs, translation, online classes, a radio show and more. Last month, Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. announced that an additional $1.5 million would be dedicated to language-program operating costs annually over the next five years, along with a $5 million capital investment in a new language center. That funding boost was signed into law last week. (Disclosure: I serve as an apprentice in the Nation’s Cherokee Language Master Apprentice Program.) Despite this effort, the tribe is losing fluent speakers at a rate more than 10 times higher than it produces second-language learners.

According to Ethnologue, of the 115 Indigenous languages spoken in the U.S. today, two are healthy, 34 are in danger, and 79 will go extinct within a generation without serious intervention. In other words, 99% of the Native American languages spoken today are in danger. Despite the Cherokee Nation’s efforts, the Cherokee language (ᏣᎳᎩ ᎦᏬᏂᎯᏍᏗ) is on that list.

There are 573 federally recognized tribes in the United States, and most are battling language extinction. Since 2008, thanks in part to the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act, the Administration for Native Americans (ANA), through a competitive grant process, has allocated approximately $12 million annually to tribes working to preserve their languages. In 2018, only 47 language projects received funding — just 29% of all requests, leaving more than two-thirds of applicants without funding, according to ANA. The Bureau of Indian Education, the Department of Education’s Department of Indian Education and the National Science Foundation allocated an estimated additional $5.4 million in language funding in 2018, bringing the grand total of federal dollars for Indigenous language revitalization last year to approximately $17.4 million. Compared to how much the United States spent on exterminating Native languages, that sum is a pittance.

Read more: https://www.hcn.org/articles/indigenous-affairs-the-u-s-has-spent-more-money-erasing-native-languages-than-saving-them

High Country News

The nation’s leading source of reporting on the American West.

High Country News

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Working to inform and inspire people — through in-depth journalism — to act on behalf of the West’s diverse natural and human communities.

High Country News

The nation’s leading source of reporting on the American West.

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