Editor’s note: Check back later for an audio version of this story.
In 1996, Jeanette Allen, a member of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, surveyed her tribe to see how many reservation members spoke the tribe’s ancestral language. She found 76 fluent speakers, with just one under the age of 50. Today, she estimates that there are fewer than 10 elders who can speak it.
In 1996, Jeanette Allen, a member of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, surveyed her tribe to see how many reservation members spoke the tribe’s ancestral language. She found 76 fluent speakers, with just one under the age of 50. Today, she estimates that there are fewer than 10 elders who can speak it.
“We’re at a critical point right now with the language,” she says.
It’s a problem that extends beyond the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe reservation and goes all the way back to the residential school system. This year marks almost 30 years since the last federally run Indian boarding school closed in Canada; in the U.S., many such schools remain open but have changed hands into Native ownership. Closer to home, Nevada’s Stewart Indian School closed in 1980.
These schools had a pattern: The U.S. government took Native children from their homes to send them to militaristic, government-funded institutions. Advocates say it was an effort to punish Native children for not properly assimilating to an Anglo-American lifestyle.
“They were forced to go to boarding school, and so they couldn’t speak their language,” Allen says. Every Paiute, Shoshone, and Washoe from the Silver State has some connection to the boarding school era, according to Josh Bonde, a member of the
Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone.
The schools’ stated purpose was to “Kill the Indian, save the man.” This was what Richard Henry Pratt, a U.S. Army officer and the founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, said of one of the most infamous boarding schools in the U.S.
Abuse ran rampant; death was common.
Survivors didn’t want their children to experience the unspeakable harm they faced, so many didn’t pass down their traditional ways of life — including their Native languages.
“My grandmother went to boarding school. My grandfather went to boarding school. My grandfather never spoke. He was a Shoshone. And my grandmother never lost the language,” Allen recalls. “She raised her children in the language, so when they went to boarding school, they would come home and get right back into the language, so they didn’t lose it.”
But that’s not the case for every family. There are roughly 175 Native languages that have been preserved and are spoken around the nation. Linguists estimate that there were once more than 300.
In Nevada there would have been at least six dialects.
“(The language), it’s our culture. It’s who we are. We’re the Cui-ui Ticutta people,” Allen says. “And if we don’t have the language, how do we identify ourselves?”
This has pushed tribes to develop language-learning programs on most reservations within Nevada. The Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe has implemented classes for both youth and elders. Allen substituted for one of those classes for about a dozen elders, who spend mornings gathered in an office building.
They start the class with a prayer in Northern Paiute and later practice their introductions. The new materials for this class are the names of the tribe’s important animals.
On the other side of the state, down along the Colorado River, is the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe’s reservation, which offers similar language-learning programs for its elders. This augments an existing state-of-the-art elementary school that opened in 2019, which incorporates the Mojave language into its own curriculum. Kids will often have a block of their day solely dedicated to speaking the language.
The curriculum came to be after leadership within the Fort Mojave Tribe realized they were close to losing their language entirely. That’s when the conversation within the tribal council began a decade ago.
“(The tribe) wanted the parents, the community members, (everybody) wanted their students to learn the language,” says April Barrackman, the lead teacher for the language program at Anya itpak Elementary School.
Barrackman grew up understanding the Mojave (Hamakhav) language but did not speak it. With the initiative to get back their language, Barrackman and others met with elders who did speak the language to record and learn from them.
“I think my grandmother thought that it would help her children to learn the white man world way. She just thought they would get further in life if they didn’t speak (Hamakhav),” she says.
Now a decade into the program, Barrackman is seeing the language spoken naturally among the youth.
“A lot of our students go home and the parents are like, ‘We don’t know what they’re saying. Could you tell us what he said?’ Or, ‘He’s always singing. We don’t know what this means,’” she says.
This creates age gaps in the native speakers, between the remaining elders and the youngest members of the reservation. To solve this, Fort Mojave has opened classes to any member who wishes to learn the language.
These steps bring Indigenous children and adults closer to full immersion, which Allen believes is crucial to becoming fluent in Indigenous languages. She recommends at least five years of it, which can be a long time for many.
“That’s the scary part,” Allen says. “The scary part is our little ones are learning it, but they don’t have anyone to talk to.”
