Outside of their home in Bernalillo, N.M., 11-year-old Mililani Suina and her 8-year-old brother Marshall talk about some of their favorite foods from their tribal communities: the Pueblos of Cochiti, San Felipe and Santo Domingo."Tortillas are the biggest from Santo Domingo," Marshall says, stretching his arms out wide."And from Cochiti, they're kind of, like, medium.
Christine Sims, a citizen of the Acoma Pueblo and director of the American Indian Language Policy Research and Teacher Training Center, says it's the legacy of those policies that makes revitalizing Indigenous languages so difficult, time consuming and expensive. During the pandemic, Sims says language learning ground to a halt in communities where the financial and technological barriers of moving classes online were too high. Many Indigenous communities also saw COVID-19 take the lives of fluent and native speakers.
He says the most reliable federal support of children's Indigenous language learning comes through Bureau of Indian Education schools, where students may be lucky to receive an hour of language instruction per day. Chavez says KCLC is funded primarily through private donations and grants. He believes the federal government has a responsibility to support the school as well.For families like the Suinas, attending the school and keeping if viable is about breaking a cycle of cultural dispossession. Mililani and Marshall say one of their favorite parts of learning Keres is sharing the language with their parents.
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