Tribal Colleges Revive Native American Languages

American Indian College Fund
Monday, 15 March 1999

Fort Belknap Agency, Montana (March 15, 1999) --"It really made me see how endangered our Gros Ventre language is," said Adrian Main.

Last summer, the 22-year-old student helped do a survey of the two American Indian languages spoken on the Fort Belknap Reservation in northern Montana. What Main discovered shocked him.

Of 300 people he interviewed on the Fort Belknap Reservation, only a couple people could speak more than a few words of Gros Ventre or Assiniboine.

"The language isn't entirely lost," he said, "but it's dormant."

The survey was sponsored by the Learning Lodge Institute, a coalition of seven Montana tribal colleges working together to increase fluency in 11 Indian languages. From Blackfeet to Salish, some of the languages are at the "brink of extinction," according to college instructors.

"The Learning Lodge Institute is resulting in a 'wake-up call' to save our sacred languages," said Rachel Grant, Native Studies coordinator at Fort Belknap College.

To revitalize languages used on Montana's Indian reservations, Learning Lodge colleges are collaborating on research and developing curriculum to best teach Native students. Creating everything from flash cards to audio catalogs of tribal oral histories, the Institute was established with a four-year $850,000 grant by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation of Battle Creek, Michigan.

"Language is critical to American Indian tribes," said Dr. Lanny Real Bird, the Institute's coordinator who is a Crow tribal member. "Without a language to speak, there is no culture. Our language is who we are."

BATTLING THE NUMBERS

"Nobody under 30 years of age speaks with the fluency I do," said Dr. Richard Littlebear, a Cheyenne language expert at Dull Knife Memorial College. Of some 4,000 tribal members living on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, only five elders are believed to speak and write Cheyenne fluently.

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