WASHINGTON — A Native American coalition is asking Congress to designate $3 million in existing education money for a native language immersion program to help save the Lakota language.
The National Alliance to Save Native Languages proposed that the Bureau of Indian Affairs redirect education funds to create the programs in two South Dakota schools. A study done by the organization estimates the Lakota language will be extinct in 25 years.
“What we’re saying is it’s a treaty right,” Ryan Wilson, president of the Alliance, said Monday at a House Interior Department appropriations subcommittee hearing. “It’s also our right to control our educational resources and determine the educational future so it’s a sovereignty issue as well.”
The new immersion schools would include the Wounded Knee and Little Wound schools on the Pine Ridge Reservation in southwest South Dakota.
Bryan Brewer, president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe whose members live on the Pine Ridge Reservation, said his tribe is losing fluent native speakers every day as members age.
“One of our problems is that so many of our young parents don’t speak the language so we’d like to get our day care centers when our babies are born that they are with fluent speakers, so they start hearing and understanding the language when they’re babies,” Brewer said. “Then when they get to schools we’ll have a curriculum ready for them to continue.”
Two schools in Arizona, the Rough Rock Community School in Chinle and the Rock Point Community School in Rock Point, serve as Navajo language immersion schools within the Bureau of Indian Education.
The Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig School on the Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota was established as an Ojibwe language immersion school in 2003.
“Those schools have received budget cuts as well, there’s been rollbacks on what they’ve been doing and we’re trying to protect that, but also expand,” Wilson said. “This is a new genre of educational venues so we’re still working this through and fleshing it out but it’s a promising practice, and therefore it’s very deserving of a federal investment.”
A report on a Fort Defiance elementary school Navajo immersion program by the National Indian Education Association found that students performed at or above their non-immersion peers academically.
Wilson said Congress could draw money for the new program from excess Bureau of Indian Education management positions or through its Division of Performance and Accountability.
“It is a shame that we would lose the native languages of not only just for the first Americans, but to lose the languages that saved lives during World War II,” Rep. Betty McCollum, DFL-Minn., said at the House appropriations subcommittee hearing.