Carrie Haderlie | The Sheridan Press | August 22, 2020

Roanne and Harold Hill work at a mobile recording station on the Crow reservation, lending their voices to the Crow dictionary.

SHERIDAN — Board games, picture books, flashcards and posters — all of these things are now available to Crow children in their native language, when 100 years ago, children were sent to boarding schools and punished for speaking the Apsáalooke language.

The language is endangered, but in 2014, members of the Apsáalooke tribe formed a nonprofit called the Crow Language Consortium and have undertaken a number of initiatives for language revitalization, including documentation and a comprehensive dictionary, development of materials for children, community learning and the first-ever Crow Language Weekend Sept. 19-20, where language learners will have the opportunity to learn vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation, and practice the language with Crow speakers.

In November, an update to the online Crow dictionary could mean 11,000-12,000 Apsáalooke words are preserved, said educator and advocate Janine Pease, who is the founding president of Little Big Horn College.

“This is one of the most incredible projects that we have ever taken on,” Pease said.

Partnered with the Language Conservancy in Indiana, which has done preservation work for the Lakota, the Crow Language Consortium already has a repository of words in its online dictionary, complete with audio recordings for pronunciation. In 2018, the two organizations held a “rapid word collection” event with over 100 tribal elders and Crow speakers to capture as many additional words to include in the dictionary as possible. Bob Rugh, director of publications at the Language Conservancy and editor of the Crow Online Dictionary, said that rapid word collection is a word association technique used over a series of semantic domains, designed to get participants to say as many words associated with a theme as possible. Once the words are collected, he removes duplications and phrases, selecting final words for inclusion in the dictionary.

“We gained so much knowledge of our language that summer,” Pease said. “Our language has traveled into the 21st century and we have words for everything.”

By bringing Crow elders and language speakers together, organizers gathered 14,800 words. Earlier attempts at dictionaries garnered around 3,000-7,000 words, which have been added to the online version. The Language Conservancy plans to publish its new version in November.

“A dictionary of 3,000 words is very useful. But a 4-year-old child knows 4,000 words,” Pease said. “We need a dictionary that has the words of our culture in it, as much and as close to its entirety as we can. We should have a dictionary of 30,000 words.”

In addition to work on an Apsáalooke dictionary, the Crow Language Consortium has developed language immersion curriculum and content for grades pre-K through second. The organization has published three levels of textbooks that can be used in the classroom, along with posters, DVDs, CDs and flashcards.

“It is a marvelous curriculum,” Pease said. “As we have worked on these levels of textbooks, we have had schools adopt language immersion programs for pre-K through second grade, where they learn all subjects in Crow.”

There are now 14 individual classrooms from pre-K to second grade in five different schools where students experience language immersion at least half a day, sometimes in a full day.

Rugh, who is also in charge of audio recording for the online dictionary, said most Crow speakers are elders.

“The younger generation needs to continue in this language. We need to have materials out there for them like textbooks and like dictionaries … and language immersion programs especially, for this language to continue on,” Rugh said.

Imagine no more English, he said.

“You would no longer have your favorite novels, you would not be able to watch movies or reruns of whatever you loved … those would not exist,” he said. “The European culture has had a major stake in robbing these indigenous people of their language. We took their languages away when we put their children in boarding schools and made it — they were punished if they spoke their language. But it is important to keep cultures as diverse as we possibly can. It makes for a healthier society.”

Language building is also community building, he said. It gives people purpose. During rapid word collection, “people would just say, ‘Oh my gosh, I haven’t heard that word since I was a child,’” he said.

Brianna Hughes, events coordinator for the Language Conservancy, said that many people don’t realize there are endangered languages in the United States.

“If you can start a conversation that it’s a problem, that there are endangered languages here, and that there are organizations out there that can help promote that, that raises awareness,” Hughes said.

Awareness can lead to something concrete, like donations, said Adelaide Petrov-Yoo, project development coordinator at the Language Conservancy.

“Spreading awareness means spreading awareness about the tie between language and culture and the history — that white settlers’ society made a strong effort to erase or tamp down those cultures,” Petrov-Yoo said. “If we can reverse that by learning about the history of the erasure, and why it is important to save these languages to preserve the cultures, it can be a tangible thing.”

Chris Branam, PR manager for the Language Conservancy, said that 2020 has been a unique year for his organization.

“These languages were already endangered but now you have the added threat of Covid-19, which affects the elderly, who are mostly the language keepers,” Branam said. “That threat to the language, and also the efforts by us to protect those speakers, has led to innovation like remote work stations so we don’t have to be there in person to keep people distant.”

Because in the end, language is culture, and there is more work to be done to save the Apsáalooke culture.

“We have an enormous number of words to go, but right now we are working with what we have,” Pease said. “A dictionary stabilizes the language as we know it. It captures the language of the current generation as well as previous generations.”