Native languages should be spoken and preserved, tribes say after Trump's 'English' order

Yahoo

07-03-2025

As Native language programs flourish in classrooms, Indian centers, tribal meeting rooms and online, President Donald Trump issued an executive order over the weekend declaring English would be the official language of the U.S.
Trump also rescinded a 25-year-old order that increased services to people with limited English proficiency and further enforced Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which among other provisions, forbids discrimination against people whose English skills aren't proficient.
What's unclear is if Trump can enforce his order in Indian Country, where federally recognized tribes have a government-to-government relationship and federal law protects Native language use and instruction.
Faced with the risk that Native languages could fade as elders pass on, tribes are trying to preserve their words to keep their tongues alive. The significance of preserving Indigenous languages often goes beyond culture or history, such as when a group of Navajo speakers played a role in helping the U.S. win World War II.
For many Native people, the order created confusion, said Pima County Recorder Gabriella Cázares-Kelly.
"It is taking a stance without really any teeth behind it," she said. "So it's essentially saying this is optional for people, which is not how our government operates or should operate."
The order also revived memories of failed federal policies when Indigenous languages were banned and children caught speaking their mother tongues in federal boarding schools were punished and often beaten.
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Native languages within the U.S. border account for about 245 out of more than 500 languages spoken on the North American continent, according to the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian.
The federal government attempted to eradicate Native languages by instituting English-only instruction in government- and religious-run schools, including boarding schools operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, beginning in 1887. That directive also banned any tribe's language from being spoken on school grounds.
'The Government has entered upon the great work of educating and citizenizing the Indians and establishing them upon homesteads,' said Commissioner of Indian Affairs J. D. C. Atkins, who issued the language order.
For more than 100 years beginning in the late 19th century, Native children as young as four were removed from their homes and sent to government- or religious-run boarding schools designed to extinguish their languages, cultures and tribal identities. The goal: assimilate tribes into mainstream society and eliminate the government's trust responsibilities to tribes as listed in treaties, executive orders and legislation.
An Interior Department investigation, with support from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, identified 417 federal Indian boarding schools operating on 451 sites across 37 states, or then-territories, between 1819 and 1969. That included 22 schools in Alaska and seven in Hawaii. The investigation didn't include the estimated 1,025 religious or private schools.
The 1887 order, which was in effect for about 50 years, resulted in tribal kids being punished, sometimes brutally, for the "infraction" of speaking their native tongues.
During a fact-finding meeting in the Gila River Indian Community in 2023 held by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, one woman said her aunt's tongue had been split after a clothespin was put on it for being caught speaking O'odham.
In 2024, then-President Joe Biden formally apologized to tribes for the boarding school program and the intergenerational abuses, including language suppression, that they caused in Indian Country.
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In 2015, the Administration for Native Americans, an agency housed within the Department of Health and Human Services, reported 65 Native languages were extinct and another 75 were under threat in the nation.
Federal laws affirm the right of tribal member students to receive education in their Native languages and of Indigenous peoples to use their languages without fear of punishment. The Native American Languages Act protects the rights and freedom of Native people to use, practice and develop Native languages. It also enables tribal language instruction in federally funded schools and recognizes the rights of states, territories and other U.S. lands to make Native languages official as well as other such provisions.
The Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act of 2006 authorizes the Secretary of Health and Human Services to make three-year grants for educational Native American language nests such as immersion schools, survival schools and restoration programs.
Cázares-Kelly is a citizen of the Tohono O'odham Nation and works with a group, Democracy Rising, to empower women of color leaders and officials. She said she will conduct business as usual, based on federal law.
"The people are protected by certain laws protecting your voting rights and ensuring that you can understand the ballot process," she said. "The voter registration forms and other voting materials are protected by law."
That law is particularly needed in Pima County, she said, a "border county," where at least 26% of the population are Hispanic speakers, as well as O'odham and Yaqui speakers.
Although recent censuses found few Native people need translation services, Cázares-Kelly said she keeps tribal and Spanish language interpreters on hand to help voters exercise what she called the fundamental rights of citizens.
At least three states — Hawai'i, Alaska and South Dakota — have made one or more Native languages official. Hawai'i enshrined the Hawaiian language as one of its two official languages in its constitution in 1978.
Arizona voters approved a proposition mandating English only in public school education, with English learners placed into immersion programs in 2000. Then-Arizona Attorney General Janet Napolitano said Native kids attending public schools on "the Reservation or elsewhere" could be taught Native languages and cultures, citing tribal sovereignty and federal law.
Fortunately for the nation, some Native people had never lost their languages. During World War II, members from 15 tribes joined special units using their native tongue to confound enemy troops. The most famous of them: Navajo Code Talkers.
About 300 young Navajo men created special terms in Diné Bizaad, or the Navajo language, to relay military equipment or troop movements. Their communications, never broken by the Japanese in the Pacific Theater, were acknowledged to play a pivotal role in winning the war.
'Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima,' Marine Division signal officer Major Howard Connor said.
Tribes and organizations serving Indigenous peoples have taken advantage of funding from the Administration for Native Americans to open or sustain language instruction both on and off tribal lands.
To keep that part of tribal heritage alive, the Phoenix Indian Center offers free language classes in both Diné and O'odham, funded by federal grants.
"Our language is an important part of who we are," said Phoenix Indian Center's CEO Jolyana Begay-Kroupa, a Navajo Nation member. "Just speaking my four clans in Navajo is beautiful." And, she said, many terms delineated in Indigenous languages, including Navajo, aren't translatable into English.
Preserving languages is also an important part of tribal resilience even in the face of barriers to preserving languages and cultures, said Begay-Kroupa, who called the executive order "divisive."
"It's a way to maintain our cultures," she said. "Our languages provide storytelling lessons given to us. It's beautiful."
The Administration for Native Americans told The Arizona Republic there are no interruptions to funding for the agency's language programs.
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The leader of the nation's largest Indigenous tribe affirmed the value of using and preserving Native languages.
"Diné Bizaad is power. Our language is more than words — it is our connection to our ancestors, our teachings, and our future," Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren said. In December, Nygren signed legislation and an executive order officially reaffirming Diné Bizaad as the official language of the Navajo Nation.
"As a sovereign nation within the United States, we have the right to pass laws that protect and strengthen our identity, culture, and language," Nygren said.
Nygren and the Navajo Division for Children and Family Services launched a Diné Bizaad literacy campaign. The program will focus on preserving family stories through books written in Diné.
And, Nygren said, the nation holds free online lessons in Navajo on Facebook and YouTube every Wednesday at noon, featuring Diné language expert Peter Thomas.
Begay-Kroupa also said that technology is increasingly used for teaching Indigenous languages. The Indian center uses online tools like Zoom to support language learning.
In the Verde Valley, the Yavapai-Apache Nation went a few steps further. The 2,700-member tribe created a comprehensive language program in 2023 to preserve and sustain its two languages. Elders worked with The Language Conservancy, a nonprofit that works to preserve the world's endangered languages, to create a mobile database, picture books and a phone app that features words in the Wipupka-Tolkapaya Yavapai and Dil'zhe'e Apache dialects common to the two peoples of the region.
"What a boring place it would be if we all spoke, ate and did the same things," Begay-Kroupa said. "There's no one language that supersedes all on Turtle Island."
"Our words carry the wisdom of our ancestors, and through them, we are building a stronger future," Nygren said. "We will continue to defend and promote Diné Bizaad's use for generations to come."
Debra Krol reports on Indigenous communities at the confluence of climate, culture and commerce in Arizona and the Intermountain West. Reach Krol at [e-mail]. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter @debkrol.
Coverage of Indigenous issues at the intersection of climate, culture and commerce is supported by the Catena Foundation.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Tribes say Native languages should be spoken despite Trump's English order