Going Beyond Words: The Arapaho Immersion Program [Steve Greymorning]

“Throughout Indian Country efforts to teach Native languages to non-Native speakers usually results with non-Native speakers only acquiring a limited number of words and phrases. Thus the teaching of Native languages has had little or no effect upon reversing the steady decline of the number of speakers of indigenous languages. A problem that has consistently plagued Native efforts to teach Native languages to successive generations is not having well defined examples and a clear understanding of methods that can actually yield successful speakers. To provide one such example, this paper examines the growth and development of the Arapaho language immersion program and discusses language revitalization strategies and methods and levels of success that the Arapaho Language Lodge staff have achieved as they have steadily worked to establish a new generation of Arapaho speaking children on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming.”