NPR – Amy Martin
“Many Native Americans who attended a recent powwow in Missoula, Mont., remember what it was like to be punished for speaking a tribal language. For about a century, starting in the 1870s, the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs ran boarding schools for Native American children, removing them from their families and homes and separating them from their language and culture so they would “assimilate.” Carrie Iron Shirt’s father was one of those children. “My dad, being in the boarding school, they were taught not to talk their language,” she says. Iron Shirt, 37, says her father still has bad memories of the treatment he received for speaking his native Blackfeet at school. “He didn’t want us to go through that,” she says. “So my generation missed out on the language.” Iron Shirt tried to make up for that loss by enrolling her own daughter, Jade, in a private Blackfeet language immersion school. Now 16, Jade can speak the language fluently with her grandparents, something for which she’s grateful.”(more)