Saving Salish
Generations join to revive an ancient langauge

Story by: Alex Strickland
Photos by: Ryan Tahbo

          They stare at the words for a long time, quiet in the room their children abandoned hours ago for backyards and ball games. The parents speak softly, conscious of the catching in their throats when they make the glottal stops that give rhythm to their words, the fading language of their fathers.
           Here, on a rainy Wednesday night in a converted bowling alley in Arlee, on Montana’s Flathead Reservation, the Salish heart beats.
          This, and every Wednesday, a group of adults meet at the Snqwiiqwo immersion school. Most are parents of children in the school trying to pick up the language their kids speak and learn for seven hours each day. Some are siblings or adults from the community. One is the mother of the school’s director.
          Johnny Arlee, a Salish elder and one of the last 58 fluent speakers of his native language, sits next to a picture of whole kernel corn and its Salish translation, tkwlkali.
          The walls around him are covered by the fronts of cereal boxes, pictures of animals of every type and the crayon-colored art of children, all of it with the Salish words attached. Above a whiteboard is the alphabet, printed on enlarged lined paper, as in many schools in America, only this is the 39-letter Salish alphabet.
          Seated in modest chairs around modest tables is a group of modest people, charged with saving a language and a culture.
            The four-year-old immersion school is the experiment of four young people and a fledgling success story for the tribe. Snqwiiqwo is a Salish word meaning “a place of racing.” The school, at the north end of town, sits where Salish men used to race horses, a coincidence not lost on its founders.
          “We’re racing to save the language,” says school director Tachini Pete.
          The school is the first step made by a group called Nkwsum, meaning family, which is derived from the Salish word for “one fire.” Nkwsum — which many have confused with the name of the school — opened the school in 2001 as a preschool, and now teaches children from ages 3 to 11, and, if all goes according to plan, will one day host children through 12th grade.
          Pete is director of the school and one of the Nkwsum founders. To him, the school is the culmination of 40 years of work by those who came before him. It is, in his mind, the last chance.
          “Us here, we only have five years to get a solid program,” Pete says. “Not just a school, a program training young adults to become teachers.”
          Pete says the group has five years to develop “capacity.” This capacity includes an adult immersion program and an elementary education program.
          “Soon, most of our high level language speakers won’t be around or be able to continue teaching,” Pete says.
          Once these speakers are gone, few can replace them. Pete estimates that, excluding the children in the school and tribal elders, about 10 can speak the language. All agree Pete is the furthest along, and he realizes that even though he’s been learning the language for 14 years, he still has a long way to fluency.
          With his limitations in Salish, Pete often finds himself in an important and not entirely comfortable position.
          One of Pete’s projects done in conjunction with Snqwiiqwo has been creating an updated Salish dictionary.
          Pete’s first dictionary, born from notes taken in years of Salish classes, was published and sold through the SKC Press in Pablo.
          That volume, which contained about 150 pages, will be replaced this summer, Pete hopes, by an updated edition more than three times that length.
          The small pool of Salish speakers plays a large part in expanding the language. Words for items like computers and pencils didn’t exist in ancestral Salish, and Pete says when students at Snqwiiqwo ask what names for things are, the burden falls to him and the teachers to decide on the right word.
          The word for bus, snukwunwe, he says, literally means “the thing that we carry each other around in.”
          And though Pete and the teachers create the words they teach the children,           Pete sees the children as the ones who will bear the burden of a changing lexicon.
          “These kids,” he says, “will be the ones that create the new language.”
          Pete, who is half Navajo, grew up on the Flathead Reservation. He began college at the University of Montana at 17. He lasted only a year, saying he had the “wrong roommate,” a rich kid from Vermont who urged him to join him at too many parties.

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