The LaCrosse Tribune in Wis. just published a series about indigenous language revitalization.

• Tribes work to reverse corrosive effects of boarding schools
• Tribes on their own when it comes to saving languages
• Nearly lost, Indian languages struggling to make comeback
• ‘Through love, we lost the language’
• Languages offer window into human mind

One of the challenges is funding for immersion schools. Most schools are funded through a combination of federal and private grants, tribal funding and sometimes state funding. In the second article, “Tribes on their own…”, Justin Stein writes:

“Several federal agencies together provided roughly $850,000 in
grant money this year to native groups in the state to help fund a
tribal immersion school, train tribal language teachers and digitally
record their languages. That sum, though significant, is much less than
the money the government once spent on Indian boarding schools that
sought to kill off those languages.

The state received
$168.5 million in payments from tribal gambling casinos over the two
most recent years, but spends none of that on tribal language programs.
In contrast, not counting federal money, the state is expected to spend
$2.6 million this year to protect threatened wildlife such as the
trumpeter swan and the Karner blue butterfly.”

The third article in the series, “Nearly lost, Indian languages struggling to make a comeback,” our fellow cohort member Lisa Clemens was quoted as a teacher at Waadookodaading Ojibwe immersion school. Kudos to you Lisa for all the hard work you do.

One Response to “Lack of resources hamper language revitalization effort”

1. Chad Says:
   June 9th, 2008 at 7:36 pm

   Funny how a wolf or butterfly can garner more state dollars than us. Well, not funny but it is very telling.

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