The Bilingual Wars

It is time to save tribal languages, despite the English-only movement

In the early 1900s, the Indian wars finally declared dead, the federal government set out to re-educate America’s tribal people. Its motto: “Kill the Indian, save the man.”

The Chippewa people in northern Minnesota endured that cold campaign to extinguish indigenous languages and cultures. My grandmother and many other reservation children went away to government-run boarding schools. My grandfather, on a different reservation, managed to stay home.

Many of these Chippewa old-timers have passed on, and those who are left are slow to reveal much about their sad days. “Later,” they say when asked. Then their hands will brush us kids away as if we’re just another Northwoods mosquito.

We’re sly to their abruptness, though. We know it’s meant to protect us from hearing the horrors and shames the old ones suffered at the hands of our own national government. Better, they think, to shield tender ears from the indignities. Like how the schoolteacher would chop off their long hair and braids. Or how they would be sprayed and beaten down with water hoses — allfor merely uttering our native Ojibwe language.

None of this is unique to Minnesota Indians. The children of tribe after tribe lived through the federal effort to kill the Indian and save the man. As a result, perhaps fewer than two-dozen indigenous languages still are commonly used in households across North America, according to research by the Indian Country Today newspaper. More encouraging is that at least 175 languages remain alive in some form.

Our tribal language falls somewhere in between. The Chippewa people make up one of the largest tribal populations in North America. And villages in several Canadian provinces rely on our native tongue in their everyday life. In this country, reservation schools in several Midwestern states teach it. So do universities.

Thankfully, the federal government has wised up to its past errors. Congress in 1990 passed the Native American Languages Act, which declares it the official policy of the United States “to preserve, protect and promote the rights and freedoms of Native Americans to use, practice and develop native languages.”

There’s urgency to those wonderful words. “Over half of our languages are still with us after all these years of adversity,” Michael Krauss of the Alaska Native Language Center told a Senate committee last fall. But without quick action, “the next 60 years will see the extinction of 155 languages, with but 20 of the 175 remaining.”

Even with the federal government’s enlightened attitude, the path still will be rocky.

Reviving tribal languages collides with the movement to ban bilingual classes in public schools, primarily bankrolled by a Silicon Valley millionaire, Ron Unz. An English-only ballot measure, similar to California’s Proposition 227, passed with his support.

Now the legality of using Navajo and other tribal languages in Arizona schools is unclear. Experts in Indian education say fluency in a native language helps improve the academic success of tribal youth. Zealots plan more of these short-sighted initiatives in other states with significant tribal populations.

Congress could step in to reduce the impact of those campaigns. A start is legislation to establish American Indian “survival schools” to provide an education in tribal and English languages. Federal lawmakers have a moral responsibility to make sure that the history of the last century doesn’t repeat.

NOTES: Travis Armstrong is a Mercury News editorial writer and member of the Pillager and Leech Lake bands of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe.



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