There was an interesting article in the New York Times this past Thursday regarding the struggle of one Native American tribe to preserve its language from becoming extinct. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/17/us/17arapaho.html?_r=1&sq=arapaho&st=cse&oref=slogin&scp=1&pagewanted=all The Northern Arapaho are a tribe of 8,791 who live on a reservation called Wind River, the only Native-American reservation in the state of Wyoming. For more than half a century the speaking of the Northern Arapaho native language was actively discouraged. Students caught speaking their native Arapaho language while at school would be struck with rulers by their teachers or otherwise punished. This was part of an effort by the United States government to use the schools which they created on Native American reservations to “Americanize” Native American children.

The policy designed to eradicate the Northern Arapaho’s native language was largely  successful. The majority of the members of the tribe did not pass on their native language to the next generation. Today only about 200 speakers of the Arapaho language are still alive and none of them are younger than 55 so there is a very narrow window of time to preserve the language from extinction. Concerned that an integral part of their culture could be lost forever if the language is not preserved, the tribe has just opened a new Arapaho language immersion school with 22 children ranging from pre-kindergarten to first grade. The plan is to add a grade a year until the school eventually goes up to 12th grade.

The triggering event which led to the creation of the immersion school was when several years ago, Helen Cedar Tree, 96 years old today and the oldest living member of the Northern Arapaho tribe made a plea to the tribe’s council of elders, “Look at all of you guys taking English, and you know your own language. It’s like the white man has conquered us.”  Ms. Cedar Tree’s message compelled the tribe to take action, originally making CD Rom’s and using dictionaries with the Arapaho language, teaching night classes and adopting a more limited pre-school program until the tribe eventually realized that immersion was the only real option they had if they were going to save their language.

The Northern Arapaho hopes that its focus on preventing its language from becoming extinct by creating a language-immersion school for its youth will also help combat other social ills such as crime, unemployment and drug and alcohol abuse which have plagued the tribe.  The tribe’s goal is to use the school as a tool to create an over-all environment that nurtures the roots of the young Arapaho tribe-members, creates pride in their heritage and by so doing attacks the roots of the social problems affecting the reservation.  The tribe realizes that if they lose this battle and their language becomes extinct, they will lose the essence of who they are. We as a country will also lose something as well if the Northern Arapaho’s language is lost forever. A language represents a unique way of thinking about, interpreting and ordering the world which surrounds us. Once such language becomes extinct, the possibility that it represented to help us to see the world, our own country and its problems and virtues through a different prism and perspective is irretrievably lost.