Speaking to Community

Kickapoo was the first language of Mosiah Bluecloud ’20, an enrolled member of the Kickapoo Tribe of Oklahoma. Bluecloud received his master’s degree in Native American languages and linguistics from the University of Arizona and is now pursuing his doctorate in linguistics at the university with a focus on revitalizing the Shawnee and Kickapoo languages.

Bluecloud says he “eats, breathes and prays” in his native language. “I believe that language is the glue that holds communities together by connecting past, present and future culture caretakers. Language provides access to identity and ways of being,” he says.

Bluecloud credits the university’s Native American Languages and Linguistics master’s pro-gram, also known as NAMA, with helping him find his voice in academia. The program, housed in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, trains students in linguistics, language documentation and language revitalization. It also aims to broaden the participation of Native American students in language sciences and in graduate school.

Regents Professor of Linguistics Ofelia Zepeda, who co-founded NAMA, says the program advances the objectives of the UNESCO International Decade of Indigenous Languages, or IDIL: the period between 2022 and 2032 established by the United Nations General Assembly to draw global attention to Indigenous languages and the need for their preservation.

One area that Indigenous language communities can focus on during IDIL is access, says Zepeda, who also represents the United States on UNESCO’s IDIL task force. “Training Indigenous people in the field of linguistics is one of the best ways to enable access to research and early documentation of their language.”

Documenting and revitalizing Native American languages

Founded in 1999, NAMA was innovative for its time, Zepeda says.

“Its immediate goal was to provide basic linguistic training to speakers of Indigenous languages so that these individuals could return to their communities and build on the different types of language work that either they or their language programs or their tribes were engaged in,” she says. It is bolstered by a strong U of A linguistics Ph.D. program and collaboration with the university’s American Indian Language Development Institute, or AILDI, which Zepeda directs. AILDI also houses the new federally funded West Region Native American Language Resource Center.

The NAMA program has expanded its student diversity over the years, says Wilson de Lima Silva, director of NAMA and associate professor in the Department of Linguistics.

“Originally, students were often fluent in their native languages,” de Lima Silva says. “In the last decade, however, NAMA has been serving Native students who may not be fluent in their language, but they come into the program as part of their goal to learn and reclaim their Native languages — and often to pursue a doctorate in linguistics.”

Rosalia Badhorse ’23, from the Northern Cheyenne Tribe of Montana, grew up casually hearing the Cheyenne language but wasn’t explicitly taught it because of the political, economic and sociocultural pressures to speak English, she says. She earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration; but when her grandfather, a Cheyenne speaker, passed away, “that’s when it really hit me that I needed to do more with my language and culture,” she says.

Badhorse joined the NAMA program to study the Cheyenne language and now is a Cheyenne language instructor at Chief Dull Knife College in Montana.

“I still have a long way to go, but my fluency is further along because of NAMA, and I’m just so excited that I get to share this with others,” Badhorse says. “My language, like many other Native American languages, is considered an endangered language. … I am a million times grateful to the University of Arizona and the NAMA program for having a space for me to learn the fundamental tools for addressing a need in my community.” 

NAMA also accepts students from Indigenous language communities in Central and South America as well as non-Native students who have been involved in Indigenous language revitalization work.

“Admitting students from these various groups allows us to provide training in language revitalization to far more people, who can then apply this knowledge around the world to help im-prove the health of Indigenous languages,” de Lima Silva says.

The program has also adapted its curriculum to serve students interested in computational approaches to language revitalization and documentation, with some students taking courses in the department’s Human Language Technology program.

NAMA graduate and linguistics doctoral student Zion Smith ’24 is a Chickasaw Nation citizen working on Chickasaw language revitalization and Native American language typology.

“Native American languages can benefit greatly from advancements in computational linguistics,” Smith says. “For example, our tribe has a large number of recordings waiting for manual analysis. If this process can be automated to some degree, which is something we are working on, it would save a lot of time.”

Increasing Native American representation in graduate school

NAMA often serves as a stepping stone for Indigenous students to advance to doctoral programs in linguistics or other disciplines, de Lima Silva says — an important role given the underrepresentation of Indigenous people among doctoral degree holders.

Over the past 25 years, the program has graduated 34 students, 21 of which went on to pursue doctoral degrees in various disciplines, including linguistics, education, anthropology and child development. All but three NAMA graduates have been members of Indigenous communities. The program currently admits three or four students each year.

“When I attend national conferences, I’m often surprised that people know that NAMA is one of the leading programs helping to bring more Native American scholars into the field of linguistics,” de Lima Silva says.

Jeremy Johns ’19, who grew up on the Ak-Chin Indian Community in Southern Arizona, received his NAMA degree and now is a linguistics doctoral candidate at Yale University.

“There’s a common assumption that culture and language are somehow separable. For us as O’odham, they exist within each other,” Johns says. “I’m very interested in coupling the fields of academic linguistic research and community-based language revitalization efforts to ensure the survival of this endangered language.”