This Tohono O'odham linguist is fighting to keep indigenous languages alive in Arizona

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25-05-2025

A Tohono O'odham girl growing up in the 1950s spent her formative years helping her farmworker family pick cotton in the fields in central Arizona.
With a thirst for learning but few books at home, Ofelia Zepeda would play make-believe school with her siblings using discarded textbooks during the summer breaks when she wasn't working the fields.
Years later, Zepeda would become a renowned poet and linguist, and one of the world's foremost experts on the Tohono O'odham language. Now a member of the University of Arizona's faculty, she works to advocate for disappearing and endangered indigenous languages.
At 71 years old, Zepeda is a regents professor in the linguistics department, the highest faculty rank at the University of Arizona. She wrote the world's first grammar book on the Tohono O'odham language and has published several poetry books in O'odham and English. She is also the director of the American Indian Language Development Institute and has been a member of the UNESCO Decade of Indigenous Languages International Task Force.
Zepeda grew up speaking only O'odham, which was originally a spoken language and was deeply connected to her indigenous culture.
'That's what language can do for you,' she told The Arizona Republic in April.
But she didn't live on a reservation, a detail which she said surprises many people.
'My family's not from any community within the O'odham Nation. And that's why my background has to start with the town of Stanfield,' Zepeda said, sitting in her office at the University of Arizona among the well-manicured lawns and palm trees that swayed in the breeze on campus, miles away from the cotton fields where she grew up.
Zepeda recalled the poverty she experienced growing up in the 1950s in Stanfield, a farming community in Pinal County near Casa Grande.
Cotton was picked manually back then, a task she would often help with.
"I didn't think that much of it, you know. Sometimes you sort of worked and helped, and then a lot of times you just played," she said.
She was seven or eight years old when she began attending Stanfield Elementary School. Zepeda liked school and learning, and was supported by teachers who saw something special in her.
"In the school system, there is always one teacher who for some reason they find something in you and make it their mission to nurture it, to support you," she said.
When she was older, a high school counselor submitted her and her cousin's names to Upward Bound, a federally funded program that supports low-income, first-generation, high school students as they prepare for college.
She was accepted, and after she completed the program, she attended community college before being accepted to the University of Arizona.
Once at UA, she was studying sociology, but all she wanted to do was read O'odham books. She would scour the library for books written in her native tongue.
'I would check them out and try and figure out how to read them,' Zepeda said. But she couldn't figure them out. 'It's challenging to try and teach yourself. And it's better to have a teacher. So that was it. That's all I wanted to do. I wanted to read and write.'
Looking for someone to teach her, Zepeda met world-renowned linguist Kenneth Hale. Hale was knowledgeable in the O'odham language and had helped create one of the O'odham writing systems with Tohono O'odham linguist Albert Alvarez. Zepeda began studying with Hale and helped him lead a small class teaching other O'odham students.
After learning the basics of linguistics from Hale, she excelled and in 1984 she obtained her Ph.D. in linguistics and went on to win a MacArthur Fellowship in 1999 for her work as a poet, linguist, and cultural preservationist. MacArthur fellows are 'extraordinarily' creative and have a 'track record of excellence' in their fields.
Despite Zepeda's success, she remains humble about all she has accomplished.
'When there's so few of us, you're bound to be one of the people that benefits from these (federal programs) for targeted populations,' she said. "Over the years, I've appreciated the benefits that I have been offered, and I've tried to use them the best way that I can."
Amy Fountain, an associate professor of practice, met Zepeda in the early 1990s when she was in her first year of graduate studies in linguistics.
Zepeda was a hero to her, and in the decades since she first assisted in Zepeda's class, Fountain has seen firsthand Zepeda's work around indigenous language revitalization, language teaching, and language policy.
'She's the only scholar I know of her level of accomplishment who is universally respected, admired, and beloved,' Fountain said. She added Zepeda's way of teaching is 'humble and warm and sweet, but incredibly wise.'
Zepeda is also working to bring awareness of the state of indigenous languages to the forefront.
Part of this effort came to fruition in 2022 with the creation of the Native American Language Resource Center.
'This is the first time the federal government has put forth funding just for Native American languages,' Zepeda said, recalling her initial reaction to the resource center.
Zepeda highlighted how indigenous languages hold knowledge that has helped society, like plant knowledge, which has impacted science and modern medicine, as well as the way people view nature and the environment, she said.
'All languages are part of all of us that are part of humanity, and so they should be acknowledged and supported,' she said. 'The notion of supporting a language is very foreign, especially in the U.S., and that's a very, very hard mindset to change, but we keep working on it.'
Reach the reporter at [e-mail]. The Republic's coverage of southern Arizona is funded, in part, with a grant from Report for America. Support Arizona news coverage with a tax-deductible donation at supportjournalism.azcentral.com.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Tohono O'odham linguist, poet fights to keep the language alive