The difficulties facing Navajo language education have remained fairly consistent since the revival of interest in indigenous culture and activism in the 1970s as part of the civil rights movement and the passage of the 1972 Indian Education Act and the 1975 Indian Self-Assistance and Education Assistance Act. According to Dr. AnCita Benally, the education program manager at the Office of Standards, Curriculum, and Assessments Development at the Navajo Nation Department of Diné Education, many community members believe that classes about Diné (the Navajo word for the Navajo language and people) are irrelevant or even counterproductive. Such people, she says, believe that “academic achievement … [can]

be achieved only with English.” Frequently, administrators and teachers think that teaching the language is pointless, and parents argue that cultural education should be taught at home or left by the wayside. “And so people are assuming that if there is a lot of Navajo language and culture education, it will interfere with the academic success,” she concludes.

At home, though, many parents either continue to emphasize English, or they are unfamiliar with Navajo themselves—a product of similar emphasis by their own parents and schools. Shelly Lowe, the executive director of the Harvard University Native American Program, explains that her parents’ generation was taught to prioritize English. “My grandparents’ generation would still speak to them in Navajo, [but] the expectation was, ‘You speak English, and that’s important.’ So when my generation came along, we were primarily and only taught English in a lot of cases. Even though we knew and listened to our parents speak to our grandparents in Navajo … we were spoken to in English.” This prioritization had a self-perpetuating effect: as more and more Navajos became used to English in business and daily life, it became the de facto necessary language for economic success.

This vicious cycle is compounded for those Native Americans who live off reservations. In more urban or heterogeneous areas, the forces of assimilation are even stronger: children attend English-speaking public schools with peers whose cultural backgrounds are strikingly different from their tribal heritage. For such off-reservation Indians, the pragmatic benefits of English are even more striking, and the need for their native language seems all the more unclear.

As a result, most school-age Navajos—especially those that don’t speak Diné at home—are apathetic towards learning their tribal language. In Dr. Benally’s view, they’re “more interested in music and texting their friends and that kind of stuff,” but music, texts, movies, and websites are all in English. Those that are about to graduate or attend universities often experience renewed interest in their heritage, but by then they are making up for lost time. “Once they get into college, a lot of them finally realize what they don’t have.”

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Dineé Dorame, Yale University senior from Albuquerque, N.M. experienced this pattern. Her mother’s fluency in Navajo had a limited effect, and her interest in learning the language only began near the end of high school. “I just never really picked up on it as a kid because she thought it was much more important for me to be fluent and able to study in English,” she explains. Dorame became curious about learning Navajo at the same time as she considered applying for the Chief Manuelito Scholarship. (Clark’s great-great-grandfather is now the namesake of a middle school in Gallup, N.M. as well as a scholarship that provides college funds for high-achieving Navajo students who have also completed Navajo language and government courses.) Thus, she enrolled in an approved Navajo class at the University of New Mexico.