A LANGUAGE IS NOT A MUSEUM EXHIBIT. IT IS A PEOPLE SPEAKING.

VAULT · 07 · SELF DETERMINATION

Published by Langhorne P. Breedlove

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2026 · 2:32 AM ET

Tags: Indigenous Sovereignty · Native Languages · Tribal Schools · Boarding Schools · Historical Education

Dear fellow American proletariat: Imagine a government sending children away from their families, punishing them for speaking the language of their grandparents, and then announcing a hundred years later that it would like to celebrate cultural diversity. Lovely. Shall we begin by returning the family photographs, opening the archives, and asking the people concerned what they actually want?

Indigenous language and education policy is not a project for federal officials to collect attractive vocabulary words for a brochure. It involves living nations, family authority, teaching capacity, land and historical records, and control over what knowledge is shared or protected. The question is not whether Washington can preserve cultures in glass cases. It is whether the United States can meet its obligations while respecting the nations responsible for their own futures.

ROOTS · THE SCHOOLHOUSE WAS SOMETIMES AN INSTRUMENT OF REMOVAL

Federal Indian boarding-school policy separated Indigenous children from their families and communities in an effort to assimilate them. The Department of the Interior's 2024 final investigation identified 417 federal Indian boarding schools across 37 states or then-territories, and documented at least 973 child deaths within its defined 1819–1969 study period. The Department expressly warned that its records are incomplete. The count is a documented minimum, not a claim that all deaths or all schools have been identified. (Source 01)

Those institutions varied in operation and funding, and the history includes federal, religious, and other administrators. The relevant evidence includes enrollment records, discipline rules, letters, burial information, budgets, and accounts from descendants and survivors. Historical truth requires care with each record and the community's consent around sensitive testimony, images, and burial sites. Making children disappear into a convenient national narrative would repeat the disrespect that makes the history so urgent.

The policy direction eventually changed. Congress enacted the Native American Languages Act in 1990, declaring a federal policy to preserve, protect, and promote Native Americans' rights to use, practice, and develop their languages. The statute also supports Native languages as a medium of instruction and recognizes the need for flexibility when conventional teacher-credential requirements obstruct qualified language instructors. This is a statutory commitment, not a guarantee that every community already has enough teachers, funding, or teaching materials. (Source 02)

TODAY · SCHOOLS EXIST, BUT THE SYSTEM IS NOT THE WHOLE COUNTRY

The Bureau of Indian Education reports 183 federally funded elementary and secondary schools on 64 reservations in 23 states, with 55 operated by BIE and 128 tribally controlled. Its materials report approximately 40,000 to 42,000 K–12 students, depending on reporting context. These are a defined school network, not the total population of American Indian and Alaska Native pupils. Many Native children attend state and local public schools rather than BIE institutions. (Source 03)

BIE also supports Native students outside its own campuses through programs including Johnson–O'Malley, and it connects to Tribal colleges, scholarships, and early childhood programs. That broad role does not erase the distinction between a federally operated school and a school governed by a Tribal nation. Funding, accreditation, curriculum, special education, transportation, and language instruction can involve different legal and administrative authorities. (Source 03)

Congress reauthorized the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Programs in December 2019, addressing Native language immersion and restoration grants. Grant programs can help support speakers, curricula, and immersion schools, but a grant awarded for one term is not the same as a permanent community workforce of fluent teachers. A sound evaluation looks at the continuity and quality of instruction, not merely the number of new documents translated. (Source 04)

WHO DECIDES WHAT CULTURE MEANS?

Federally recognized Tribal nations possess distinct sovereign authority; Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian communities have differing legal and institutional relationships that must not be casually flattened into one administrative category. Decisions about ceremonies, sacred sites, historical names, stories, recordings, and the sharing of traditional knowledge belong in appropriate consultation with the people and governments holding those rights and responsibilities.

Not all cultural material is intended for public release. A classroom may appropriately teach the documented history of treaties, dispossession, boarding schools, and Indigenous contributions without publishing restricted ceremonies or family-held knowledge. Language digitization raises additional questions: Who owns recordings? Who may train speech-recognition systems on them? Can a community restrict access, correct an error, or take down a resource? Public funding should not turn consent into a perpetual license for extraction.

THE SCHOOL CURRICULUM PROBLEM

Students can leave school knowing the names of distant monarchs while knowing very little about the Indigenous nations whose homelands their city occupies. Historical education should explain differing nations, treaty relationships, contemporary sovereignty, federal policy, Native scientific and artistic contributions, and the persistence of communities—not present Indigenous people as a civilization that ended when a textbook reached its westward-expansion chapter.

School curricula are governed through multiple state, local, federal, and Tribal systems. A federal initiative may support teacher development, records access, grants, and model resources; it does not automatically possess authority to dictate every public-school lesson. The best educational materials should be developed with Indigenous historians, educators, language speakers, and sovereign governments, accompanied by accurate citations and a way to correct errors.

WHAT THE EVIDENCE DOES & DOES NOT SHOW

The boarding-school investigation establishes documented federal involvement in assimilation and child deaths, while recognizing substantial gaps in surviving records. It does not supply an exact count of every child affected or establish identical experiences at all schools. The BIE school figures establish a current federal-funded educational footprint, not the overall success or failure of Native education in the country. Language vitality also requires community-specific measures rather than one national number for hundreds of distinct languages.

There are legitimate design questions about language immersion, English-language proficiency, limited instructional time, funding sustainability, student choice, and standards of academic achievement. Supporters of immersion may emphasize identity, intergenerational continuity, and educational opportunity; critics may ask how scarce teachers and classroom hours can meet multiple educational goals. Those questions should be answered by community-led evidence and student outcomes, not by treating Native-language education as a decorative extracurricular activity.

WHAT COULD BE BUILT WITHOUT REPEATING THE OLD MISTAKES?

01 · PUT TRIBAL AUTHORITY FIRST

Support negotiated, nation-specific education agreements that identify the relevant government, curriculum control, consultation, data ownership, and methods for resolving disputes. Federal agencies should distinguish a legal obligation to consult from a genuine transfer of decision-making power.

02 · DEVELOP TEACHERS, SPEAKERS AND APPRENTICES

Fund paid pathways for fluent elders, language specialists, young teachers, curriculum developers, and community apprentices where appropriate. Design flexible credentialing that preserves educational quality without excluding qualified speakers solely because they followed a traditional path of learning. Plan for succession instead of assuming the same handful of elders can teach forever.

03 · SUPPORT EARLY CHILDHOOD THROUGH HIGHER EDUCATION

Connect immersion preschool, primary and secondary education, adult learning, Tribal colleges, libraries, and community classes where the sovereign nation chooses. Provide disability access and practical resources for families while measuring fluency, retention, and student outcomes over time.

04 · OPEN THE HISTORICAL RECORD RESPONSIBLY

Preserve and index federal boarding-school records, treaty documentation, maps, school registers, and relevant administrative correspondence. Support survivor and descendant access, correction procedures, culturally appropriate handling of remains and burial information, and privacy for living families. Access must not mean indiscriminate publication of traumatic or protected material.

05 · TEACH CONTEMPORARY HISTORY, NOT ONLY TRAGEDY

Develop accurate school resources that include living governments, modern economies, Indigenous achievements in literature, science, the arts, law, and environmental stewardship, alongside histories of dispossession and resistance. Avoid implying that every nation shares the same language, traditions, or political position.

THE ONE-YEAR & TEN-YEAR LEDGER

YEAR ONE · ESTIMATE PENDING. Establish the enacted-law baseline for BIE operations, Tribal education grants, Native language programs, archives, historical research, and existing state partnerships. Price language-teacher compensation, curriculum development, school transportation, facilities, digitization, privacy review, consultation, and independent evaluation. Identify which activities are new versus already funded, and obtain nation-specific consent before describing a Tribal initiative as a federal deliverable.

YEARS TWO THROUGH TEN · ESTIMATE PENDING. Forecast recurring teacher wages, immersion enrollment, fluent-speaker pipelines, training costs, maintenance of learning materials, school facilities, archive stewardship, and independently evaluated outcomes. Show federal, state, Tribal, philanthropic, and institutional contributions separately, with annual and cumulative costs under low, central, and high scenarios. Do not treat a rise in cultural participation as an automatic Treasury saving.

For illustration only, one hundred additional language-teacher and apprentice positions at an assumed fully loaded average of $100,000 per year would cost $10 million annually before facilities, materials, administration, or travel. That calculation is not an adopted target, a verified compensation average, or a national estimate. Actual language programs vary enormously in staffing, geography, and community priorities.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

A federally designed standard curriculum could displace local Indigenous authority while presenting itself as culturally sensitive. Temporary grants can create a program that disappears when funding ends. Digitization can expose restricted knowledge or hand valuable recordings to technology contractors without meaningful consent. Small schools can face a genuine tension between scarce specialist teachers, language immersion, and other educational obligations.

Historical education can become politicized or reduced to symbolic acknowledgments with no records, training, or classroom time. Conversely, lack of attention to evidence and conflicting interpretations can produce errors that undermine trust. Strong governance requires durable funding, community leadership, academic rigor, transparent outcomes, and the ability to revise decisions.

WHY IT MATTERS

A language carries memory, humor, technical knowledge, family ties, and ways of describing a place. But it is not an artifact belonging to the federal government simply because federal policy once tried to erase it. The goal is not to make every American speak every Indigenous language. It is to enable the people who inherit those languages to decide whether and how they survive and grow.

The United States can document its own history, honor its legal commitments, support living schools, and respect sovereign choices without appointing itself the curator of everybody else's identity. A federal government that once told children not to speak their grandparents' words should begin by listening to the governments and communities those children came from.

E pluribus unum, bitches.

SOURCES & FURTHER READING

01 · U.S. Department of the Interior — Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, final investigative report released July 30, 2024. https://www.bia.gov/service/federal-indian-boarding-school-initiative

02 · Office of the Law Revision Counsel — 25 U.S.C. §2903, Declaration of Policy: Native American Languages Act. https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?edition=prelim&num=0&req=granuleid%3AUSC-prelim-title25-section2903

03 · Bureau of Indian Education — Bureau of Indian Education: schools, students, and Tribal education programs. https://www.bie.edu/topic-page/bureau-indian-education

04 · U.S. Government Publishing Office — Esther Martinez Native American Languages Programs Reauthorization Act, Public Law 116-101, December 20, 2019. https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/PLAW-116publ101

05 · U.S. Department of the Interior — Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative historical and investigative records. https://www.doi.gov/node/58981

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WE ARE ONE.  ·  E PLURIBUS UNUM.