Marlin Spoonhunter, (2nd from right) president of the Wind River Tribal College, walks with Carrie White Antelope, (right) Family service manager of the Ethete Head Start, and pre-schoolers from the Ethete Head Start program during an honor walk for the Week of the Young Child on the Blue Sky Highway in the Wind River Indian Reservation Apin Ethete, Wyo.īut faced with losing one of its defining elements, a living institution that extends beyond words to a unique way of looking at the world, the tribe has turned to a variety of resources - including a University of Colorado Boulder linguistics professor - with increased urgency to reverse the trend. As English gained dominance in daily discourse, fluent Arapaho speakers dwindled to what’s now estimated to be perhaps a few dozen - most of those in their 70s - among the slightly more than 10,000 registered tribal members in Wyoming. “When I’d hear older people talking, I didn’t know what they were saying,” says Spoonhunter, now president of the Wind River Tribal College in Ethete. “I wanted to know.”įor generations, the tribe has been leaning into cultural headwinds to preserve a language on the brink of extinction. When Marlin Spoonhunter returned to the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming after decades working as an educator in Montana, he realized that something crucial, something elemental to his Northern Arapaho identity, had escaped him - the language.
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