In 2007 there were only 300 fluent speakers of the Paiute language left. The vast majority of these lived on the Fort McDermitt Indian Reservation along the Oregon/Nevada border. “McDermitt, being isolated, has retained the language,” said Thierry Veyrie, who is non-Native and the Tribe’s language program director. “The challenge we’re facing is that the youth doesn’t speak as much as older generations.” Until recently, most fluent speakers were 55 or older.
In recent years, the Fort McDermitt Tribal council combined grants from the government and other organizations like the Roundhouse Foundation to create a program to keep the Paiute language from going extinct. The program began educating students in the language the next year.
The first step was to begin classes with kindergarteners and expand it every year. The first cohort from 2023 is now in second grade. “The goal is for that first cohort to keep going through their K-12 education having Paiute language class every grade,” Veyrie explained. Interest among others in the community has been high enough that there are now daily high school classes.
But language, Veyrie pointed out, cannot be separated from history and culture. “All those things are integrated in everybody’s life,” he said. The program also does language immersion activities like crafts or field trips and digitizes historical documents, tapes, and reels so people can continue interacting with their history.
“Oral history is a very important part of the relationship people have with the language,” Veyrie said. The language program has allowed for more intergenerational transmission of these stories as well as other aspects of the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone Tribe’s culture like crafts, music, or food harvesting.
Even though school-aged kids have been the main focus of the program, an interest in language learning has moved through the community. Early on, Veyrie recalled, they taught kids a counting song in the Northern Paiute language that, like many kid’s songs, was extremely catchy. “It makes me happy that parents and grandparents were singing it in the shower,” Veyrie said. “Then the grandparents might realize they didn’t know how to count to ten before.” But now, thanks to the song brought home by a first grader, they did. “We’ve raised awareness and inspired the whole family.”
The second graders aren’t fluent after three years of language instruction, Veyrie said, but he’s impressed by how much they’ve already learned. “We’re tackling it a little bit at a time and hoping they’ll become fluent speakers.” Creating more opportunities for the language to be heard throughout the Tribe and connecting younger generations with their elders is already significant progress.
