For over thirty years, a political and social battle over bilingual education raged in the U.S. This book, a period piece rich in political, historical, and local western context, is the story of language, education, inequality and power clashes between the dominant society and the Crow Indian Reservation of Montana.
For over thirty years, a political and social battle over bilingual education raged in the U.S. This book, a period piece rich in political, historical, and local western context, is the story of language, education, inequality and power clashes between the dominant society and the Crow Indian Reservation of Montana.
Comprehensive in scope yet full of ethnographic detail, this book examines the history of language policy by and for Native Americans, and contemporary language revitalization initiatives. Offering a critical-theory view and emphasizing the perspectives of revitalizers themselves, the book explores innovative language regenesis projects, the role of Indigenous youth in language reclamation, and prospects for Native American language and culture continuance.
This book traces a history of bilingual education in the US, unveiling the pervasive role of politics and its influence on integrity of policy implementation. It introduces readers to once nationwide, systemic supports for diverse bilingual educational programs and situates particular instances and phases of its expansion and decline within related sociopolitical backdrops. The book includes overlooked details about key leaders and developments that affected programs under the Bilingual Education Act. It delves deeply into a past infrastructure: what it entailed, how it worked, and who was involved. This volume is essential reading for researchers, students, administrators, education leaders, bilingual advocates and related stakeholders invested in understanding the history of language education in the US for future planning, expansion, and enhancement of bilingual educational programs and promotion of equity and access in schooling.
Focusing on the Americas – home to 40 to 50 million Indigenous people – this book explores the history and current state of Indigenous language revitalization across this vast region. Complementary chapters on the USA and Canada, and Latin America and the Caribbean, offer a panoramic view while tracing nuanced trajectories of "top down" (official) and "bottom up" (grass roots) language planning and policy initiatives. Authored by leading Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, the book is organized around seven overarching themes: Policy and Politics; Processes of Language Shift and Revitalization; The Home-School-Community Interface; Local and Global Perspectives; Linguistic Human Rights; Revitalization Programs and Impacts; New Domains for Indigenous Languages Providing a comprehensive, hemisphere-wide scholarly and practical source, this singular collection simultaneously fills a gap in the language revitalization literature and contributes to Indigenous language revitalization efforts.
