Native Languages: Te Kohanga Reo

The last century was a time of revival for American Indians in the United States. After four hundred years of decline, native populations began to rise around 1900 and, according to the U.S. Census doubled between 1970 and 1990 from nearly one million to almost two million.

Past efforts to "save" American Indians focused on assimilating their children into mainstream culture in schools by converting them to Christianity and teaching them English. Nothing of value was seen in their traditional languages and cultures. These efforts at assimilation had parallels in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and throughout Latin America. But, despite over a century of these policies, the now English-speaking American Indians continue to face a host of social and educational problems. Government schools worked at cross purposes with Indian communities that valued their languages and traditions, and students received negative messages in schools about the value of their cultural heritage and themselves as "Indians."

The dramatic population gains of the last quarter century have been accompanied by a cultural renaissance among indigenous peoples in the U.S. Attempts to revive American Indian languages started with the passage of the Bilingual Education Act of 1968 (also known as "Title VII"). But these efforts focused on minimal use of tribal languages in schools and they usually had little effect beyond teaching students how to count and learning the names of colors and animals in their native language. The main focus of the Bilingual Education Act was to teach English, and hastily recruited indigenous language teachers lacked training and materials. They usually patterned their indigenous language teaching after the generally ineffective methods used to teach foreign languages in high schools and colleges.

The Maori Model
In New Zealand, English was rapidly replacing the Maori language to the point where few children or young adults spoke it by the 1960s. Despite the promise of assimilation, English-speaking Maoris continued to be plagued by social and educational problems. In the 70s, the Maoris hit upon the idea of "language nests" or Te Kohanga Reo to preserve their language and culture. Language nests are preschool daycare centers staffed by Maori speaking elders who immerse their charges in Maori language and culture. The metaphor of a "nest" was not chosen haphazardly. The idea is to provide a warm, protected, nurturing environment for Maori children, some of whom come from dysfunctional homes. The success of the language nests led first to a demand for Maori immersion elementary schools, then secondary schools, and today one can go to a university and take teacher education courses in Maori to become a Maori immersion teacher.

The Maoris' success was not lost on Native Hawaiians whose traditional language and culture was suffering similar setbacks. Hawaiian language nests, or Punana Lao in Hawaiian, were established in the 1980s. Elementary, secondary, and university education in the Hawaiian language followed in succession. Repressive English-only state laws were removed through political effort, and teachers were recruited and trained to teach the "language nest" graduates.
Immersion language teaching

In recent years attempts have been made in the continental U.S. to combine the New Zealand and Hawaiian models with the theories of Stephen Krashen and other second language acquisition theorists. In Wyoming Stephen Greymorning of the University of Montana has worked with local Indians to improve the teaching of Arapaho. Various immersion language teaching methods were employed to achieve this goal.

Immersion language teaching methods differ from traditional second language teaching methods because teachers speak only in the language being taught and focus on developing students' "conversational proficiency," rather than learning points of grammar or how to read and write. Initially, "Total Physical Response" (TPR) type teaching methods, most often associated with the psychologist James Asher, are used where students demonstrate their understanding by following simple oral instructions that teachers give without translation. Teachers model the required movements as they give the instructions to "sit down," "stand up," and so forth. More advanced students can act out simple stories in what has been called TPR-Storytelling. As immersion students advance, academic content is combined with language instruction so that students are learning math, science, social studies, and other school subjects along with their new language.

Beyond School
School-based efforts at language revival, even at the elementary level, come too late in the day for most children. Native societies taught children through traditional stories and other child rearing practices values of respect, generosity, and hospitality. Dr. Greymorning advocates the Maori philosophy of "language from the breast" that emphasizes intergenerational language transmission in the home. The Maoris have started language classes for mothers with children 16 to 24 months old. Mothers learn Maori while their babies also learn the sounds and rhythms of language spoken around them.
Indigenous language revival efforts are part of a larger effort to heal native communities that have been shattered by the onslaught of the dominant culture. These communities lost their traditional roots and often acquired only the more superficial elements of the dominant culture evident in Hollywood films and on television.

Today, even on remote Indian reservations, there is youth gang activity. Dr. Richard Littlebear, president of Dull Knife Community College and Northern Cheyenne language activist, comments, "Our youth are apparently looking to urban gangs for those things that will give them a sense of identity, importance, and belongingness. A characteristic that really makes a gang distinctive is the language they speak. If we could transfer the young people's loyalty back to our own tribes and families, we could restore the frayed social fabric of our reservations."

Back To School
While the face-to-face "primary discourse" provided in language nests is vital for emotional and social well being, children also need to be introduced to a "secondary discourse" of stories and other knowledge from outside of their local community. Today, these stories can be delivered via tape and video recordings. But they are commonly delivered through reading and writing – in schools.
Indigenous students have not performed well in schools that treated their lack of mainstream cultural and linguistic background as a deficit to be overcome. Despite the good intentions of the "War on Poverty" programs like Headstart, Chapter 1, and special education, large numbers of indigenous students continue to fail in our increasingly test driven schools.

Language activists say that indigenous languages and cultures are not deficits to be overcome but rather are strengths to be maintained or revived and built on. They are asking in the words of Jerry Lipka and Alaskan Native teachers to "negotiate" the curriculum of the school so that it reflects native as well as mainstream culture.
Sometimes efforts at language revival go too far where, in a reaction against English-only schooling, schools institute indigenous-language-only education that ill prepares students for most higher education in the United States. However, the prominence of English language media means that even in such situations students do learn to speak English. More thoughtful indigenous language activists tend to promote bilingual education that maintains the native language while adding English or teaches the native language as a second language while maintaining English.

Proponents of English-only legislation claim that language assimilation will end ethnic divisiveness. Measures like California’s Prop. 227 not only divide white America from minority America but also divide the minorities themselves between those who want to be "good Americans" and assimilate and those that want to retain their traditional cultural values. My experience with American Indian education and bilingual education supports the contention of Dr. Littlebear that language and cultural revival movements are generally healthy for America. The civil unrest that Ron Unz, the author of Prop. 227, and others fear is a product of loss of traditional values and poverty. Assimilation, especially in regard to America's popular culture, will cure neither of these ills.