In the 19th and 20th centuries, the American education system was used as a tool for cultural genocide. Hundreds of thousands of Indigenous youth were forced to attend one of over 523 boarding schools located around the country. They were physically punished for speaking their Native language, underwent forced head shavings, and were stripped of their cultural identity. In a recently released Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report, the government acknowledged that many students experienced emotional, physical, sexual, and spiritual abuse, and over 500 students died while attending these schools.

While many of these schools are now non-operational, they have left a devastating impact on Indigenous communities, including implanting transgenerational trauma and language loss. Many Indigenous youth no longer grow up in Indigenous-language-speaking families, and, as such, 41% of the world’s languages are considered endangered. According to the popular language-learning resource Babbel, the US is home to about 175 Indigenous languages, but only twenty of them are predicted to survive past 2050 without intervention.

This is where schools can come in. There have been outstanding efforts and successes by grassroots activists to keep Indigenous languages alive, but developing a system to teach Indigenous languages in public schools would help reach even more students and further prevent language extinction.

There have already been several programs initiated around the country. Hawai’i has had immersion schools for the past forty years, ever since Larry Kimura, an advocate for the Hawaiian language, pressured the Hawai’i Department of Education into approving the plan. At immersion schools such as Ke Kula ‘o ‘Ehunuikaimalino, students are taught in Hawaiian; they are given an education that teaches the endangered language and helps connect Indigenous students to their roots. One teacher, Līhau Godden, was interviewed by the organization Teach for America and shared that she includes traditional culture studies alongside language practice. For example, she teaches science, so she includes information about traditional Hawaiian medicine and the use of the star compass for navigation. In this way, students are actively working to preserve a language, but they are also helping to prevent the loss of an entire culture. This is especially beneficial for Indigenous students, who have been shown to experience a longer and happier life when they have a stronger sense of identity. 

Many public schools in the US offer languages such as Spanish, French, Japanese, and Mandarin, all of which are useful languages to know in order to communicate with a large number of people and expand your business internationally. Statistically speaking, the number of people who speak an Indigenous language is, in many cases, much lower; however, the value of learning a language cannot be determined solely based on the quantity of people who speak it. Keeping Indigenous languages alive is essential in the process of atoning for past cultural genocide and transitioning autonomy back to Indigenous communities. 

In theory, creating specialized curriculum for different regions of the US in which different Indigenous languages are spoken is a daunting task. However, not only is it necessary, but it is entirely feasible given the sheer number of Indigenous activists who are already working to save their Native languages. 

The American education system needs to act now in order to join the movement to prevent language extinction. Only then can it begin to reverse its long history of oppressing Indigenous peoples.