Why you should care

The problem

For more than 50 years, ending only in the 1950s, the United States government operated a program of boarding schools expressly designed to destroy Native Americans' language and culture, to turn Native children into white children. By removing Native children from their families and elders, these schools aimed to break the cycle of language transmission. If children dared to speak their language at school, they were severely punished, often beaten or worse. When these children grew up, they chose not to speak their language to their own children for fear that they would suffer the same fate, and the language began to die. Now these languages are spoken only by a handful of very elderly people, the remaining graduates of these schools. Unless we all support these communities to pass these languages to their children while there is still time, they will disappear, taking with them tens of thousands of years of accumulated cultural heritage, sophisticated environmental understanding, spiritual traditions, and a unique aspect of humanity.

The Solution

Fortunately, there are techniques that work to teach language: immersion schools, master-apprentice systems, and "language nests," in which an elder speaker works with a group of adult learners. And when language is revived, it tends to lift whole communities. Children's performance in school improves dramatically, and they tend to graduate and go on to college at much higher rates. But these programs are all underfunded, often isolated, and lack essential resources and training. That's where Cultural Survival comes in.