Students headed to an Arapaho language school. The goal is to create a new generation of native speakers.

By DAN FROSCH

RIVERTON, Wyoming - At 69, her eyes soft and creased with age, Alvena Oldman remembers how the teachers at St. Stephens boarding school on the Wind River Reservation would strike students with rulers if they dared to talk in their native Arapaho language.
“We were afraid to speak it,” she said. “We knew we would be punished.
More than a half-century later, only about 200 Arapaho speakers are still alive, and tribal leaders at Wind River fear their language will not survive. As part of an intensifying effort to save that language, this tribe of 8,791, known as the Northern Arapaho, recently opened a new school where students will be taught in Arapaho. Elders and educators say they hope it will create a new generation of native speakers.
“This is a race against the clock, and we’re in the 59th minute of the last hour,” said a National Indian Education Association board member, Ryan Wilson, whom the tribe hired as a consultant to help get the school started.
Like other tribes, the Northern Arapaho have suffered from the legacy of Indian boarding institutions, established by the federal government in the late 1800s to “Americanize” Native American children. It was at such schools that teachers instilled the “kill the Indian, save the man” philosophy, and students were forbidden to speak tribal languages.
The discipline of those days was drummed into an entire generation of Northern Arapaho, and most tribal members never passed down the language. Of all the remaining fluent speakers, none are younger than 55.
That is what tribal leaders hope to change. About 22 children from pre-kindergarten through first grade started classes at the school .
“I want my son to talk nothing but Arapaho to me and my grandparents,” said Kayla Howling Buffalo, who enrolled her 4-year-old son, RyLee, in the school. Ms. Howling Buffalo, 25, said she, too, had been inspired to take classes because her grandmother no longer has anyone to speak with and fears she is losing her first language.
Such sentiments have become more pronounced in the five years since Helen Cedar Tree, at 96 the oldest living Northern Arapaho, made an impassioned plea to the tribe’s council of elders.
“She said: ‘Look at all of you guys talking English, and you know your own language. It’s like the white man has conquered us,’” said Gerald Redman Sr., the chairman of the council of elders. “It was a wake-up call.”