Fifty (500) Years Out and Counting: Decolonizing Language Education in 21st-Century Native America

• In Event: Heritage Language Education as a Civil Right: Policy and Practice in Indigenous, Latina/o, Asian American, and African American Communities

Abstract

As the US Civil Rights Act went into effect, Native American communities began a quiet but radical experiment to reverse 500 years of colonization by taking control of local schools. Incorporation in the curriculum of historically banned heritage languages has been a hallmark of that movement. Today, more than 500 years into the Indigenous-European encounter and 50 years post-CRA, Native Americans continue to fight for the right "to remain an Indian" (Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006) against a backdrop of de facto, test-driven language policies (Menken, 2008) that threaten to destabilize proven bilingual programs and violate hard-fought language rights protections such as the Native American Languages Act of 1990/1992 (Romero-Little et al., 2007; Wilson, 2012; Wyman et al., 2010). In this presentation we discuss a rising new movement to reclaim Indigenous languages in the face of these state-level challenges and a broader context of language endangerment. Drawing on praxis-based ethnographic research with youth (McCarty & Wyman, 2009; Wyman, McCarty & Nicholas, 2014), and collaborative action research with Indigenous educators (described in McCarty, Nicholas, & Wyman, 2012), we explore the potential of heritage language education to support multigenerational language reclamation, intergenerational learning, and educational improvement.

Authors

• Sheilah E. Nicholas, The University of Arizona

• Teresa L. McCarty, University of California - Los Angeles

• Leisy Thornton Wyman, The University of Arizona