In the thick of the summer, 10 high school and college students sat in the empty library of Maȟpíya Lúta — Red Cloud — High School in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. There, they recited everyday phrases in Lakota, the language spoken by the Oglala Sioux Tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation, one of the nation’s largest.

Taŋyáŋ ništíŋma he? Did you sleep well? 

Okóihaŋke k’uŋ heháŋ tȟabwaškate. Last weekend I played basketball.

Táku wičhókaŋ wótapi he? What’s for lunch?

The students were paid participants in the school’s annual summer language internship program, learning the language and culture to teach others — and posting videos of themselves speaking, translating and describing everyday activities in Lakota.

It’s part of Maȟpíya Lúta’s mission to preserve the 1,000-year-old language, which is in danger of being erased because it is to younger generations.

Opened in 1888, Maȟpíya Lúta (mah-PEE-yah loo-tah) was one of many boarding schools the U.S. government created to culturally assimilate and “” Native Americans. Roughly 19,000 children were taken from their families and forced to attend. The schools made the children use English names, cut their hair and prohibited them from speaking their language, according to a 2022 federal .

“Boarding school rules were often enforced through punishment, including corporal punishment such as solitary confinement; flogging; withholding food; whipping; slapping; and cuffing,” the report said. as a result of abuse and inhumane conditions.

While the Lakota population is more than 170,000 strong, there are fewer than , according to the Lakota Language Consortium. Most are in their 70s.

Ashlan Carlow-Blount, 17, didn’t grow up speaking Lakota, but discovered a passion for it in high school. She joined the internship to improve her speaking skills and share the language with other young people.

“Our ancestors couldn’t speak it — if they spoke it, it was like a punishment for them,” Ashlan said. “That’s why we lost our language, because they were so afraid to speak it and they didn’t pass it down. That’s why it’s important to us to [do this], because we have the opportunity to speak it freely now and then keep it going.”

The summer internship is the next step toward fluency for students who have completed other Lakota classes. For two months, they learn through singing, activities, group conversations and lectures. This year’s group began to — sometimes receiving thousands of views.

Learn some Lakota sentences with us!!

“Our summer interns kind of put [the program] on the map, and it was a good outlet for them to showcase what they’re learning and also showcase how language could be used in the day-to-day,” said Jennifer Irving, Maȟpíya Lúta’s communications director. 

Mya Mills, 17, said a lot of teens know basic Lakota words and speak some at home but aren’t fluent. The internship has helped her speak the language outside of school, and older adults have told her how much they appreciate students trying to bring Lakota back.

“That’s the point — for us still to try to keep it going,” she said. “Even when we’re around people who don’t speak it.”

Maȟpíya Lúta’s internship is only one piece of its mission to increase Lakota fluency, Irving said. The school of 500 students created a dual language immersion program in 2019 that has since expanded from kindergarten through eighth grade. About 90% of classes are taught in Lakota, so students can become fluent early on instead of catching up in later years.

The movement to revitalize and preserve native languages in schools has boomed in recent decades, Irving said. Immersion schools and language preservation programs have increased in and other states like , and . In December, the Biden administration published a 10-year , which called for action to address the U.S. government’s role in the loss of Native American languages. The program’s future is unclear under the Trump administration.

“I think 40 years ago, our education system in this country was very different — very much reading, writing, arithmetic,” Irving said. “We all see now, not just with tribal languages or Lakota language, but we see the benefits for students that are in immersion classrooms and in immersion schools.”

Researchers that Native American students in bilingual programs scored higher on English language standardized tests than those who received education in an English-only program. Including indigenous languages and culture in school curriculum have also been identified as ways to improve chronic absenteeism for Native American students, according to a from the national nonprofit Attendance Works.

The Minneapolis American Indian Center, which serves more than 35,000 Native Americans in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, created a in 2019 that teaches youth the Dakota and Ojibwe languages. Coordinator Memegwesi Sutherland said he’s seen students have “life-changing experiences” after being exposed to their language and culture for the first time.

“Most schools don’t offer much for a Native education,” he said. “Students who do take my class end up learning a lot — they want to reconnect with their people, relearn their language and culture, and sometimes their [college] majors change and they ask me how they can keep learning it.”  

Kiana Richards, a 2017 Maȟpíya Lúta graduate, became so passionate about Lakota while in high school that she earned an associate degree in the language. She joined AmeriCorps and worked as a Maȟpíya Lúta employee from 2018 to 2020. But she stopped speaking Lakota when the pandemic struck, and after several years realized her fluency had “completely faded away.”

Last year, she rejoined AmeriCorps to refresh her Lakota skills and teach students about the language and culture.

“I wanted to continue to keep doing this for the sake of my own self, my identity, my Lakota identity, and for the sake of me wanting to be an immersion teacher,” she said. “I want to encourage the [students] so much, because it is a part of who we are.”

Tylia Mad Plume, a 2023 Maȟpíya Lúta graduate, said she initially cared only about getting a decent grade in high school Lakota classes. But after an educator encouraged her to work with children, she joined AmeriCorps to help teach while taking language classes herself.

Both Mad Plume and Richards were fired from AmeriCorps this spring, when the Trump administration from the national service organization. The school used its own budget to hire them as staff for the summer internship.

Many Maȟpíya Lúta staff come from AmeriCorps. Funding has since been reinstated to Democratic-led states that sued, but the school is still waiting for a solution as a named plaintiff in a lawsuit that seeks a in every state. 

“I think it’s important to keep going, to keep the Lakota Nation sovereign, because it’s really scary with everything going on right now,” Mad Plume said. “You have to keep that because in history, for the people who didn’t keep it or the tribes who weren’t as strong in their language and culture, it’s gone.”

Richards said she’s excited for the future because while Lakota wasn’t passed down through generations in the past, she believes the current generation will bring it back. 

This is foretold in the Lakotas’ seventh generation prophecy, she said — a made in the 1800s by Lakota holy man that after generations of great suffering, the Lakota of the seventh generation — the current generation — will take back what little culture and rights remain to spur positive change for the future.

“Here we are in that moment,” Richards said. “I feel like it’s coming full circle, because now we’re teaching the [children] how to speak Lakota and some of them are more fluent than I am. It’s amazing to see, and that’s what encourages me and inspires me. It’s so important because it connects us to who we are, in our spirits, our knowledge.”

Correction: The name of the Twin Cities cultural center is the Minneapolis American Indian Center.

Lawmakers are trying once again to create a trust fund that would give New Mexico tribes more money and control to run their own .

The proposed legislation is sponsored by Rep. Derrick Lente (D-Sandia Pueblo). It would create a $100 million  that would disburse money directly to tribes over time to help build sustainable programs.

Randall Vicente, governor of the Pueblo of Acoma, said this proposed bill can help sustain the Keres language in his community.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

“During COVID, we lost a lot of our elderly, our fluent speakers, and our community members which were teaching the Acoma Keres language,” he said.

Vicente said the funds could help pay community members to teach Keres.

“To teach as an elder or as an uncle or an aunt, or maybe as a mentor into classrooms to the students,” he said.

The problem is finding a way to certify them as licensed language teachers.

“How do we qualify our Keres teachers?” said Vicente. “So while they speak Keres, yeah, they’re from the college of hard knocks. They learned from our elders, they know they can speak our language.”

The Pueblo of Acoma has a variety of schools that fall under Bureau of Indian Education, Grants/Cibola County schools and private schools, all of which have limited funds.

Vicente said additional funds could help bring more teachers and tutors to help aid students. The need for transportation is also crucial for students living in rural areas who stay behind for after school programs.

Rep. Lente and advocates pulled back on a similar effort last year to push for more money in this session.

The Legislative Finance Committee’s  has $50 million set aside for the fund. The proposed bill must pass both chambers and be signed by the governor to become law.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Source New Mexico maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Shaun Griswold for questions: info@sourcenm.com. Follow Source New Mexico on and .

The state Board of Education unanimously voted Wednesday to adopt a  —a piece of legislation from the  that will ensure families understand they are entitled to enroll their child in public education, regardless of immigration status, and receive translation services and important documents in their native language. 

The law, which ultimately became part of the omnibus education legislation, , garnered overwhelming  last year, after advocates, many of whom were parents who only speak Spanish,  about their inability to communicate with school officials or receive updates about their children’s education. 

“This will ensure that other parents don’t have to go through the frustrating experience that I have been through,” Flor Galindo, a Manchester resident and parent of two, said in Spanish at the board meeting Wednesday morning. “For me, it has been a big challenge to simply be able to speak with any teacher or know about the services that schools provide to our children. For years, I watched as other children participated in extracurricular activities and my children were excluded because their first language is Spanish.”

After passage in the state legislature, the state Board of Education was responsible for drafting a document to “organize and elevate the rights that parents have related to language access through translation and interpretation and to clarify and affirm the access that children identified as [English Learners] have to grade-level content area instruction, language instruction programs and interventions,” according to the bill. 

The state’s Department of Education plans to provide the document to districts already translated, and starting in July, parents will receive a copy of the bill of rights in their native language. 

Additional copies will be available online on the website of local boards of education. 

The rights include:

• The right for students to attend a public school in the state, regardless of the students’ or parents’ immigration status and without the need to submit immigration documents.
• The right for parents to have translation services provided during “critical interactions,” including parent-teacher conferences and meetings with administrators.
• The right for students to participate in a bilingual education program provided by the local or regional board of education.
• The right for parents to receive written notice in both English and their native language that their child will participate in a bilingual program.

• The right for students and parents to receive a “high-quality orientation session” in their native language.
• The right for parents to receive progress reports and meet with school staff to discuss the child’s English language development.
• The right for students to have “equal access to all grade-level programming” and core subject matter.
• The right for a student to receive yearly language proficiency testing.
• The right for a student to receive support services “aligned with any intervention plan” that districts provide to all students.
• The right for parents to contact the state’s Department of Education with any questions or concerns regarding these rights and accommodations.

On behalf of the state’s Department of Education, Irene Parisi, the chief academic officer, told board members that the state “will continue this work.”

“It doesn’t stop with just today,” Parisi said.

The department said its next steps will include offering information sessions to stakeholder groups, creating a new page on its website to easily access information regarding the bill and the development of processes to monitor district implementation, as well as a way for families to reach out with concerns.

This was originally published in CT Mirror.

The class assignment was to write a letter to anyone they wanted. In Lingít. Eechdaa Dave Ketah chose his late grandmother, the person who spoke Lingít to him when he was growing up in Ketchikan.

“And I was telling her that it’s hard learning the language at this point in my life, and one thing that makes it even harder is that I have to pay for it,” Ketah said, describing what he wrote. “White people took the language from us and now they’re charging us to get it back.”

Or: “Sgóon ḵaa sháade náḵx’i dleitx kaa sitee. Tlél has ushk’é ka Lingít yoo x̱ʼatángi has aawatáw. Yeedát Lingít x̱ʼatángi natoo.eich,” he wrote in the letter.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

Ketah is a high school teacher in Portland, Oregon. He’s been taking online Lingít language classes at the University of Alaska Southeast since 2020. He started out as a beginner and is now in advanced Lingít learning the language his family spoke for thousands of years, but that he didn’t grow up speaking.

Ketah initially wanted to learn the language as a way to connect with his culture; he had felt detached from it living outside Southeast Alaska for so long. But it’s turned into so much more. Learning to speak Lingít is a way to connect to his ancestors, including his late grandmother, who had been taught to hide her culture and her language.

“Having the opportunity to learn the language has been so powerful in my journey,” Ketah said.

School, which forbade his grandmother from speaking Lingít, is now a place that’s making this type of personal journey even more accessible. A few months after that letter writing assignment, UAS announced over the summer it would be offering Alaska Native language classes tuition-free. It’s an effort that had been in the works for a few years. Funding from Sealaska Heritage Institute is making it possible.

Students currently taking non-credit classes in Lingít, Xaat Kíl or Smʼalgya̱x – traditional languages of Southeast Alaska – are no longer required to pay any tuition or fees.

“The University of Alaska Southeast is committed to recognizing and acknowledging historical wrongs endured by Alaska Native Communities. We are making sure Indigenous people don’t have to pay to learn their own language. It’s so important in the work towards language revitalization and overall healing,” UAS Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences Carin Silkaitis said in.

X̱’unei Lance Twitchell, professor of Alaska Native languages at UAS, has been part of the multi-year effort to make the language classes tuition-free. In finding a way to make it happen, he said the conversations would “come back to historical accountability on the part of governments and education as a system for playing a role in the attempted elimination of Indigenous languages.”

When it comes to endangered languages, Twitchell said, it’s not equitable to get money out of the population of people who have been oppressed.

“There’s so much trauma involved with language learning and recovery as Indigenous peoples that it just didn’t make sense to look at things from this sort of financial perspective,” he said.

Taking down the barrier of cost is working. UAS language professors say enrollment has gone up for both non-credit classes and for-credit classes. UAS still charges tuition and fees for for-credit classes. When Twitchell first joined UAS in 2011, enrollment was in the 30s or 40s. They were happy when it reached 70. “And I remember when we got up to 100,” he said.

Now, enrollment is nearing 300. More than 130 language students are taking for-credit classes and about 150 are taking the non-credit option.

Éedaa Heather Burge, assistant professor of Alaska Native languages at UAS, said classes usually capped at 30 students in previous semesters. This semester, one of her beginning Lingít classes has 70 students. Higher demand and bigger classes come with its own challenges, but it’s a fantastic problem to have, she said.

“To have your classes be in such high demand that we’re struggling to keep up, it’s an exciting problem,” she said. “I do think long term, we need to hire more people to be able to teach these classes if the demand continues to be this high.”

Ketah, who’s seeing this growth and revitalization from outside Alaska, is amazed.

“It might be being a little bit hyperbolic, but it’s like everybody wants to learn, whereas back in my youth, it just wasn’t something that people were excited about,” Ketah said.

‘Trained to do that’

As a kid in Ketchikan, Ketah used to visit his grandmother, Eva Ketah, a couple times a week.

“I spent an awful lot of time with my grandmother. I loved going over to her house. Every time I would visit with her it felt like she was trying to immerse me in the culture,” he said.

When the two of them were together, “we picked berries, she would feed me traditional foods and speak Lingít to me,” he described. “It would be all of this stuff that was about her youth, where she came from.”

But Ketah remembers a peculiar thing that his grandmother would do.

“Things would abruptly change. Food would be put away, she’d go back to speaking English, and then there’d be a knock at the door. It didn’t matter who it was. It could be another Lingít person. It could be a family friend, an acquaintance, whoever, but as soon as somebody else would come, it was hidden,” he said.

Ketah’s grandmother lived on a hillside that was accessible by a long staircase, which allowed her to see someone coming from a long distance.

The peculiar thing happened a few more times before Ketah asked his grandmother about it.

“I asked her, ‘Grandma, when other people come by, why do you stop doing anything that’s Lingít?’” Ketah said, thinking back 40 years.

“She said, ‘Because we were trained to do that.’”

Ketah, 10 years old at the time, was bewildered by her answer, but he didn’t know how to ask what she meant. Decades later, though, he’s been able to piece that memory with other memories and stories his grandmother told him.

“‘Trained to do that’ was a euphemism for: It was beaten out of her.” Ketah said.

His grandmother’s home

Ketah said his grandmother’s family is originally from Sʼeek Heení, Warm Chuck Inlet on Heceta Island on the northwestern side of Prince of Wales Island, before they moved to Klawock.

“The reason why she left Warm Chuck Inlet to go to Klawock was because government agents came and told her mother and all of the other mothers of children, ‘You need to put your kids in school,’” he recounted.  “They would say, ‘If you don’t put your kids in school, we’ll put you in jail. And then after you’re in jail, we’ll put your kids in school anyway.’ And so, there was no choice in the matter.”

The school in Klawock, Ketah said, had a mix of kids who stayed there all the time and kids who had family in the community and went home on the weekends, like his grandmother.

“Teachers would say, ‘Now, when you kids go home, if anybody is breaking the rules – and that’s the school rules – if they’re speaking the Lingít language, or wearing Lingít clothes, or participating in any of these cultural things, then you tell us when you come back to school,’” he said.

The kids were taught to inform on each other. Even a kid who had not broken the rules but failed to turn in another kid who had would get punished.

“And the penalties were physical beatings. So that happened to my grandma and all of her contemporaries,” he said.

Ketah said those wounds echoed into his dad’s childhood and into his own.

In addition to learning the language as an adult, Ketah has also been establishing himself as a and Alaska Native artist. This past summer, he did a residency at the Sheldon Jackson Museum in Sitka and his work was recently part of an exhibit at the Washington State History Museum.

Within the past couple of years, as Ketah has embarked in this expanded learning of his culture, he asked his dad, “‘Why didn’t you ever teach me any of this stuff?’”

His dad said, “‘Because my parents never taught us. We asked, but they wouldn’t.’”

Ketah knows now that by not teaching about their language or their culture, his grandparents were trying to protect their children.

“They were convinced that the way forward was to completely adopt the white way.”

‘I can speak my language in my school’

When Ketah learned enough Lingít, he went into the high school in Portland where he teaches and started his class saying yakʼéi tsʼootaat, or good morning.

“I was able to speak the Lingít language in, what my grandmother would call, a white man school and I’m not punished. As a matter of fact, they can’t touch me for anything that I do that’s related to my culture. And that’s incredible to me that we are able to overcome all that dark history and I can speak my language in my school,” Ketah said.

Each time he speaks Lingít in a school setting, he feels like he’s redeeming what his grandmother and other relatives endured. Despite everything they went through, Ketah said, the language lives on and he gets to be a part of it.

“I don’t think of it only as a privilege, I think of it as a responsibility because I have that freedom,” he said. “My ancestors didn’t do it because they couldn’t. And that’s why I should do it. Because I can.”

When Ketah was a kid and his grandmother spoke Lingít to him, he could only understand a few words, which is “heartbreaking” to him. He was never able to speak to her in their language.

But there are a couple video recordings from the 1990s that his uncle made of his grandmother and grandfather. “There is an awful lot of Lingít being spoken,” Ketah said, “that I understand completely now.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alaska Beacon maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Andrew Kitchenman for questions: info@alaskabeacon.com. Follow Alaska Beacon on and .