https://www.fcd-us.org/gifting-our-core-values-to-our-children/
Language is a gift. It is the means through which we find understanding and meaning of our place and purpose in this world. It holds instructions of how to be, how to live, how to care, how to love, how to respect, how to nurture our connection to spirit.
For Pueblo people, language allows us to be meaningful participants in our way of life. It is the vehicle for prayers to be communicated for the conscious connections to all things. It is central to the maintenance of Indigenous customs and laws that call for balance and harmony among the people, giving rise to the forgiveness that brings people out of conflict and back into good standing to restore their well-being and that of the community.
Language is the way that we pass these core values to our children.
Language has a spirit and it must be nurtured to fulfill its purpose, to thrive in its existence, to flourish in its role, to be vibrant in its contribution. When language dies, the old people say, it will be the end of deep understanding and of knowing. Our ancestors’ voices will call out for us and we will be unable to respond.
So it is devastating that so many of our children are expected to leave behind our language — the expression of our values, the most precious gift from our Creator — when they enter public school.
We learned the hard way that federal and state education policies and programs extract a high price from us: they facilitate the death of our languages.
Education as Assimilation
The first U.S. policy on Indian education, introduced in the late 19th century, was built on the doctrine of killing Indigenous languages and cultures by removing children from their families and communities. Forcing Native children into boarding schools was a violently efficient way of denying them their languages and cultures. Education became weaponized as a tool of forced assimilation, purposefully disrupting the covenants of Pueblo society. This was deemed more humane than the extermination policy of the Indian wars and genocide that had just ended.
In the mid-20th century, Head Start, the federal program begun to help build the Great Society, was extended to Indigenous communities. It became a classic example of an institutional mechanism perpetuating systemic racism. Why did we, as tribal community members, not ask where Head Start was a head start to? Was it not a start to an early acquisition of and proficiency in English? Why did we not ask at what cost English language learning would come? We know that it was at the expense of our own Indigenous languages.
By embracing Head Start, we unwittingly participated in our own cultural demise. Was this really so different from the first Indian education policy, when we had our mouths washed out with soap for speaking our language in school?
Education conceived by and for the dominant society was never intended to benefit Indigenous peoples.
A Promise and a Possibility
Once this became clear, tribes across the country vehemently advocated for changing federal policies and laws. At our most fragile point in history, following the policies of relocation and termination, we secured a new policy framework designed to help us regain control of our destiny. The Indian Self-Determination and Indian Education Assistance Act of 1975 provided new pathways, including in education, to effectuating Indian sovereignty. In 1990, the same government whose policy was to kill Indigenous languages and cultures nearly 100 years later passed the Native American Languages Act “to protect, promote, and preserve the rights of Native Americans to use, practice, and develop their languages.”
A balanced education for our children became a promise and a possibility.
We are now at the half-century mark of the so-called era of self-determination. Have its promises come to pass? The vast majority of Native children attend public schools, where curriculum, instruction, and testing are dictated by state and federal policy. Our youngest children are sent to early childhood centers that must meet federal and state standards. “English first” continues to be the mantra. Pueblo languages are listed as endangered by the United Nations.
That is why Indigenous leaders in New Mexico are pushing back against continued assimilation. Our children cannot be expected to leave behind our values, expressed through language and culture, when they enter public school.
Our children deserve a balanced education that nourishes their Indigenous identity while teaching the skills needed in Western society.
In the wake of a watershed ruling that found the state of New Mexico in violation of Native and other marginalized students’ constitutional right to education, Tribes joined together and developed a framework for realizing Indigenous education sovereignty at the state level.
Step by step, we are making progress, as illustrated by the Tribes’ campaign to shape New Mexico’s early childhood education policy. The state’s recent investments in early childhood education have been exemplary, but they once again exposed Native children to the risk of being shunted into culturally inappropriate programs and subjected to pressures to assimilate. Last year, tribal advocates succeeded in amending the law to ensure that Tribes themselves can develop and deliver early childhood education programs, with state funding but without state interference.
The rights of Tribes to use their own culturally and linguistically relevant education standards and assessments for early childhood education are now enshrined in state law. This new law will help keep Native languages alive.
Indigenous leaders and advocates remain committed to achieving education sovereignty for the benefit of all Native children, from birth to college. To fulfill our responsibilities toward our children, all tribal communities must be able to shape their education, guided by Indigenous values. These values are expressed through our languages. We pass the gift of language to our children, just as we received this gift from our elders. We need an education system that makes this possible as a fundamental human right.
If we fail in fulfilling our responsibilities in this time of self-determination, it would be the ultimate irony.
When the last speakers pass on, we would witness the death of our languages. Our religion, our way of life, our ceremonies cannot survive without our languages. Our governments, governance systems, and institutions — older than the United States — cannot survive without our languages. This nation’s cruel intent, expressed 150 years ago in the name of Manifest Destiny, would become a reality.
We must not allow that to happen. As Indigenous people, we call upon all people from all walks of life to support our efforts. This is our shared history; it is part of our human ecosystem. The seventh generation must be able to inherit their ancestors’ language gifted to us by our Creator. After all, we are all related. When we die, a part of you dies.
What will be your contribution?
This is the 11th blog in the Foundation’s Social Justice for Young Children Conversation Series exploring what it means to pursue social justice for young children and their families.
About the Author
Hon. Regis Pecos is a citizen of the Pueblo de Cochiti. He is currently Co-Director of the Leadership Institute at Santa Fe Indian School, which he co-founded. He has served as Councilor and Former Governor, Lt. Governor (three terms), and is a lifetime member of the Tribal Council of the Pueblo de Cochiti. Pecos was most recently Chief of Staff to the Speaker of the House, New Mexico House of Representatives. Pecos previously served as Senior Policy and Legislative Analyst to the Speaker, New Mexico House of Representatives; and for 16 years, as Executive Director of the New Mexico Office of Indian Affairs under four administrations.
Pecos is a graduate of Princeton University and is completing his doctorate degree at the University of California, Berkeley. Pecos is actively involved in many organizations and was a former trustee at Princeton University and currently is Chairman of the Board of Governors for the Honoring Nations program at Harvard University. He is the co-founder of the Summer Junior Policy Institute at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University.