Native American Languages Acts

In 1990, 1992, and 2006, the United States created legislation that collectively reversed a national policy of actively discriminating against Native American languages by ending such practices and by providing some financial resources for Native American communities to maintain and revitalize their indigenous heritage languages. This legislation was achieved through the unprecedented collaboration of political leaders, language activists, speakers of Native American languages, and professional linguists, and it is rightly viewed as an abandonment of a national goal of complete linguistic assimilation to standard English.

By recognizing the positive roles Native American languages provide, this legislation promotes a multicultural adaptation that encourages the maintenance and revitalization of Native American languages. Proponents of the legislation hail the explicit rejection of educational policies that deprecated and neglected Native American languages (as in educational institutions affecting the language socialization of generations of Native American children).

But its critics say that it is “too little, too late.” By the last decade of the 20th century, one-third of the more than 300 precontact Native American languages had already died. For the remaining 200 or so languages, only about 20 still have speakers in every generation, including the youngest generation. Because so many Native American languages are endangered, the comparatively small amount of funding this legislation provides may be viewed as more of a symbolic statement than a realistic allocation of resources designed to undo the harm of past policies.

As the first of this series of legislative acts, the Native American Languages Act of 1990, the title for Public Law 101–477, represents the most important historical repudiation of national policies that sought to eradicate Native American languages and replace them with English. This legislation called for a new policy that would “preserve, protect, and promote” Native American languages. This act called for educational reforms and practices that would promote the educational use of Native American languages as media of instruction. The act rationalizes the change in policy in several ways that clearly demonstrate a transformation of an assimilationist national policy into one that embraces a multicultural adaptation. For example, Native American languages and cultures are described as unique and critical to the production of the cultural identities of its speakers.

The act also repudiates past policies that deprecated Native American languages as useless anachronisms and recognized the foundational role Native American languages have played as “the basic medium for the transmission, and thus, survival, of Native American cultures, literatures, histories, religions, political institutions, and values.” The act goes on to state that past policies of linguistic suppression and extermination are “in conflict with the United States policy of self-determination for Native Americans.”

The need for this legislation emerged from a conservative backlash in the 1980s that attempted to reverse gains in the promotion of linguistic diversity and in the support of bilingual education that were accomplished in the more liberal climate of the 1960s and 1970s. Though the 1974 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Lau v. Nichols created an important precedent for bilingual education and for a renewed emphasis on heritage languages rather than on linguistic assimilation, early successes were countered by the rise of the Official English and English Only movements and [Page 1587]their attempts to restore exclusive emphasis on Standard English.

...