OAXACA

I started my career in public education in the fall of 1978 in the town of Chinle, Arizona on the Navajo Reservation.  Back then, all of the Navajo children spoke their tribal tongue and I was hired to teach them English.  If you had told me that, within a generation, the Navajo language would be at risk, I would have dismissed you with a cavalier wave of the hand:  “No way, John Wayne!  That’ll never happen.” 

Twenty years later I was serving as the director of ESL/Bilingual Education for the Flagstaff Unified School District,which included over 4,000 American Indian students, mostly Navajo.  One of our schools—Leupp Public School--was located on the Navajo Reservation.  There was an assumption that all of the students at Leupp could speak Navajo.  However, when we tested them, we were shocked to find that less than 10% could speak the language proficiently.  I personally found this devastating because, during my six year stay on the Navajo Reservation, the Navajo people had taught me far more about life, land, language, traditions, and community than I could ever hope to teach them about hum-drum English. 

Then I had to confront some chilling data:  in 1980, when I was living on the Navajo Reservation, there were 150,000 fluent speakers of Navajo.  A generation later, that number had dwindled to fewer than 15,000.  “No way, John Wayne?”  I was eating my words and bitterly spitting them out. 

I soon learned that language loss wasn’t just a Navajo problem but endemic to indigenous populations throughout the world. Fifty percent (50%) of the world’s languages are at risk.  Eighty percent (80%) of the indigenous languages in North America are moribund.  Ninety percent (90%) of the world’s languages will be extinct within 100 years.  Unless, of course, we do something to preserve and revitalize them.

At that point I became passionately committed to saving languages.  I started and directed two Navajo language revitalization programs, and I currently work as a consultant for indigenous schools and communities interested in language preservation. In the spring of 2005, I was awarded a nine month Fulbright Fellowship to work with indigenous educators in Oaxaca, Mexico who are trying to save their endangered languages.  As you will see from these essays and letters, it was an eye and heart-opening experience.