N.M. pueblo attempts to save language from extinction

PUEBLO OF ACOMA — With fewer than 100 speakers remaining, the Acoma Keres language is on the verge of extinction.

Few young people under the age of 40 have learned the language. If no action is taken, the Native American Pueblo of Acoma stands to lose a fundamental part of its heritage, an Acoma educator said.

Acoma’s Department of Education and the Language Conservancy have created an Acoma Language Recovery Plan to restore the Keres language and preserve the pueblo’s legacy for future generations. They wrapped up the first phase of the project mid-March.

“This initial phase is called a Rapid Language Acquisition Process,” said Stanley Holder, executive director of the Acoma Department of Education. “What they’re doing is they’re assembling a 10,000-word Acoma Keres dictionary. From that they will be developing electronic media to support language revitalization by making that available for tribal members to learn. They will also be developing books and CDs and other products to support language revitalization.”

The Language Conservancy, a nonprofit organization headquartered in Bloomington, Ind., has been assisting tribes with language preservation and revitalization for more than 20 years.

“They are going to work with us to develop curriculum from early childhood to eighth grade,” Holder said.

The pueblo, about 60 miles west of Albuquerque, will assume operation of the Sky City Community School in 2018 from the U.S. Bureau of Indian Education. They plan to have teachers who are certified to teach in the state of New Mexico and who have tribal certification to teach the Keres language. To set the stage, Holder said they have applied for a consolidated tribal assistance grant to implement an after-school program that will provide 30 minutes of academic enhancement followed by an hour of cultural immersion.

“The goal is that when these students graduate eighth grade, they will be conversationally fluent in Keres,” Holder said.

Holder, a Wichita Indian from Oklahoma, said she comes from a tribe that had a window close in November. “Our last fluent speaker died.” But for Acoma, it’s not too late. Wilhelm Meya, executive director of the Language Conservancy, said more than 30 fluent speakers come in daily, and are systematically going through a list of more than 1,700 topic areas from A to Z, called semantic domains. A chart on a wall of the cafeteria documented their daily progress. As of Wednesday, they had 7,000 words and were hoping to get to 9,000 by Friday.

“This is essentially the largest dictionary project of its kind ever in New Mexico for this scale — and possibly one of the largest, fastest dictionary projects in the U.S. with this particular method, which is called rapid word collection,” Meya said.

“It’s a great way to build a dictionary quickly, especially in the context of a language like Acoma, where we don’t have 20 years to spend, slowly and methodically working on a dictionary. The average age of the speakers is relatively old — over 65,” he said. “It’s a very short window of time to try to capture all the words that are in the language.”