Vanishing Tongues, Vanishing Peoples

Native American languages, and with them a rich history and tradition, are in danger of being lost to assimilation. But grandparents and young people are now trying to rescue this essential heritage before it is lost forever.

Years ago, in the months just before I headed off to college, I set out on a road trip with my father in the Southwest, crisscrossing the deserts and highlands of Utah, Arizona and Colorado at the height of the summer’s heat. We explored national parks, historic sites, commercial strips and vast, empty expanses of land. At a certain point on the journey, we took a turn off the U.S. highway upon which we had been driving and inched along a rough dirt track until we reached a small village – if you could even call it that – of no more than a few structures. A few people – kids and elderly folks - greeted us as we attempted to ask them for directions. But not one of them, it turned out, spoke a word of the English language. This was not off in some foreign land. This was a little hamlet on the Navajo Nation in northeastern Arizona in the early 1990s, in our very own United States of America. Yet everyone there spoke only Dine.

But to find both old and young folks still speaking their native language together is rare. American Indian languages – even the major ones – are becoming increasingly endangered. In many tribes, it is often only the grandmothers and grandfathers who still speak their native tongue. These linguistic skills, along with the rich oral traditions and cultural and historic knowledge that are carried along with them, are being lost to assimilation at a dizzying rate.

Native Americans across the United States are beginning to make efforts to save an essential element of their heritage that is also a critical piece of every American’s general history. This is happening both formally, in tribal colleges and in classrooms, but also informally when young people sit down and begin to ask questions of their elders. I would like to document the people in communities across the United States, whether in remote rural settlements or in the inner cities, where native languages are both dying and where they are coming back to life. I want to meet and photograph the old folks who are an increasingly rare first-hand link to their nation’s past. And the young folks who are looking to their grandparents in a proud effort to return to their roots and honor their nation and their history by learning anew their native language. As elders pass on, time is running out – and these efforts deserve the urgent support of all Americans. I believe that such photographs could honor the efforts of young and old alike, and lend support to the belief that the preservation of our cultural heritages – whatever they may be – will only serve to strengthen our diverse nation.

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