Interview with LaRae Wiley, Co-founder of the Salish School of Spokane
LaRae Wiley is part of a team engaged in the revitalisation of the Salish language group. She is a co-founder of a school devoted to teaching these languages to children via a full immersion curriculum and to the community via classes. I interviewed her about her school, language and community.
LaRae, it’s a delight to be talking — please would you talk my readers through who you are and the work you do?
My name is LaRae Wiley and I’m a founder of the Salish School of Spokane.
[NB: LaRae said the sentence above entirely in Colville-Okanagan Salish before translating, and I experienced a stab of very real panic that I’d under-researched this interview to a degree beyond embarrassing]
We’re a non-profit, founded in 2009, formed by five women who decided they wanted their kids and grandkids to learn Salish, their language. We started with four little girls in my sister’s basement and this year we have 58 students. We run a pre-school program and a private school from kindergarten to 12th grade.
I read recently that educational outcomes are much better for children who are taught in their native language — including outcomes in the non-native language.
We’ve really seen that that’s true for our students. They spend all day in immersion education, but for the hour per day they’re reading in English, it’s at grade level and above; it’s almost counter-intuitive. We’ve got really academically successful students. Our oldest is 17, and our longest running (at 13) has been with us right the way through. We’re going to keep following these students up through the grades.
A better understanding of how languages work means students make connections faster and have a wider view of the world. Our hope is that they go to college, do what they love, and come back and support the community!
I’d like to hear about the support you have from the community right now.
Really our parents are very committed. We ask a lot of them in terms of learning the language [60 hours of Salish study per year], but they’re happy to do it because they see the education their kids get. Most parents do really well in making that commitment, and it helps the school to be successful. There’s a value, as a child, when your parent comes home and they’re speaking that language. It shows — we value that language, it’s a part of who we are.
Part of the reason we did that was what we saw in other schools that didn’t have that connection; it was a struggle to get parent involvement and a struggle to have parents speaking the language so the kids could hear and use it out of school.
In the wider community as well, there’s been a ripple effect. When there are rallies around indigenous causes, there are people who will stand up and speak the language, introduce themselves in the language. They see that it’s important to use what they have.
I’m also interested to know how Salish and English interact with one another in your community.
At the school, we do like to play with language and make it fun, so we’ll make slang. There are some fluent elders who might get offended, but for us, it’s about bringing a language back to life. Our elders, because of the boarding schools, never had the opportunity to play with their language. They were taken from their parents and punished if they spoke their language and expressed their culture. The intergenerational connection was lost.
I think it can be hard for the elders because they haven’t seen children speak Salish for years. It’s confusing at first to see these young people mangling the language, then getting better and better at it.
We are developing curriculum for our students and we have to come up with terms for new words. We work with our fluent elder, Sarah Peterson, to do this. One of the terms we came up with was for computer. It’s málx̌aʔs c̓asyqn, a “fake head”, because it acts like your brain.
I’m interested in the role technology does, or might, play in revitalising endangered languages. Duolingo is always keen to tell me that it teaches Navajo and Hawai’ian.
It depends on where your language is at in endangerment. Navajo and Hawai’ian have thousands of speakers. We have hundreds, most of whom are in Canada. Our language is very highly endangered and there are different strategies to use with that level of endangerment. Technological solutions can’t be the main strategy. Really, you need fluent speakers — adults who talk to their children in their homes in our language.
We definitely use technology, though. It’s recordings of our elder, Sarah Peterson, that moves us through our curriculum. We rely on technology but use it with our community.
If you’re interested to understand more about the strategies behind language revitalisation, we read Reversing Language Shift by Joshua Fishman. He has this generational scale, talking about the different strategies for different levels of endangerment. He looked at case studies all over the world and saw what was and wasn’t working to preserve these languages.
Can you tell us a bit more about the Salish language group?
There are four sister languages of Salish — we teach Colville-Okanagan in our immersion setting because that’s what I learned. We want to support the other sister languages, and in our community classes we offer Spokane and Coeur D’Alene. We use IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet, for our writing system, but that’s not been systemically adopted. For example, some folks use phoneticised English. Eventually people might adopt the IPA or the APA as a standard.
It’s a tremendous amount of work to build the curriculum. Development is a part of our organisation, including helping apprentice speakers to teach in their own classrooms. Our dream is that we can help other languages and continue to bring ours back from the brink.
Related, I’d like to hear about how interest from the academic community interacts with your grassroots efforts.
We haven’t really worked with linguists as a school, but we’ve benefited from the linguists who worked with our tribes in the ’60s and ’70s. That’s how we have a dictionary as well as lots of recordings. Mostly we work with revitalisation activists on how the transmission of our language can be more open to more people.
Sometimes linguistics can be a bit off-putting. In our community, there are a lot of folks with trauma associated with school and that way of learning. Our learning is based around games and fun, and we make that clear from the first class so that the kids know they’re not in that kind of environment any more, that from now on their mistakes are opportunities to grow.
Is there anything else you’d like to share with us from your experience of running the school?
I want to share this idea of people making a difference in the world. Our organisation was formed by five ladies who said “we want this for our children and grandchildren” — they were committed, and they worked towards a goal. If you have that, you can do great things.
We’re successful because we’re connecting people to one another; to their families and to their ancestors. We have a lot of single moms, a lot of people on low incomes, and being a part of this community helps because they know they aren’t alone. The need for connection is hardwired in humans. That’s what was taken from us, from our community, and that’s what we’re giving back.
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