50(0) Years Out and Counting: Native American Language Education and the Four Rs

Abstract

Fifty years after the U.S. Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act (CRA), Native Americans continue to fight for the right “to remain an Indian” (Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006) against a backdrop of test-driven language policies that threaten to destabilize proven bilingual programs and violate hard-fought language rights protections such as the Native American Languages Act of 1990/1992. In this article we focus on the “four Rs” of Indigenous language education—rights, resources, responsibilities, and reclamation—forefronting the inherent sovereignty of Indigenous peoples in language education decision making. Drawing on our work together and our individual long-term ethnographic work with Native American communities, we present three case studies that illuminate larger issues of language rights, resources, responsibilities, and reclamation as they are realized in these communities. We conclude by “reflecting forward” (Winn, 2014) on language education possibilities and tensions, 50 years out from passage of the CRA and more than 500 years out from the original Indigenous-colonial encounter.

Keywords:

• Indigenous education
• Indigenous language reclamation
• language planning and policy
• language rights

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Dr. Django Paris for inviting us to present an earlier version of this article at the 2014 Meeting of the American Educational Research Association and for his long-term support of our work. We also thank Drs. Mary Eunice Romero-Little and Vincent Werito for their generous, thoughtful, and valuable feedback on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

¹ For an excellent in-depth account of Native American activism during this period, including in education, see Cobb (2008).

² The other dissenting votes on UNDRIP came from Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. All have subsequently been reversed.

³ The Hopi oral tradition is comprised of the historical accounts and teachings about the Hopi way of life, a chosen way of life to undertake the life-sustaining practices associated with the growing of qaa’o, corn, by hand in a desolate but destined land … [in] fulfillment of a covenant of reciprocity with Maasaw … accepted at the time of Emergence symbolized … [by] the short, blue-ear of corn (Nicholas, 2008, p. 303).

⁴ The multiple definitions of the Hopi term, makiwa, include to be given, receive, inherit, birthright, duty, entitlement (Hopi Dictionary Project, 1998, p. 223).

⁵ During the time discussed here, Title I of the ESEA supported a host of supportive educational services for underserved students, particularly in English reading and mathematics; Title IV was the Indian Education Act amendment to the ESEA, which supported Native language and culture instruction, parental involvement, and teacher preparation. The 1934 Johnson-O’Malley Act provides funds for supplemental educational services for Indian students. The EOA was designed to involve “the poor … in planning, policy making, and operation” of local economic development programs (Bennett, Pearson, & Plummer, 1967, p. 188). The EOA provided significant funding for the early Rough Rock School and other Navajo education and economic development programs, including adult education and preschool centers.