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          “Kids started looking at me,” he says, and it was enough to prompt Arlee to revise and reorder his life and start talking to children. It also gave him the push to start the Salish Cultural Committee, a group that Pete and Bell cite as the precursor of all language movements, including Nkwsum.
          One of the first things that the culture committee did was to videotape elders telling stories of places or times or traditions to create a cultural archive.
          Part of the work Bell does as a student is interning under Julie Cajune, a Nkwsum board member and the coordinator of a statewide Tribal History Project at Salish Kootenai College.
          Bell’s job is to watch close to 1,000 hours of footage, categorize what he’s seen and convert it onto DVDs to create a reference library of film at the college.
          Stacks of televisions and computer monitors hide his workstation in the back of the long room where he watches the film, taking special care to denote any “culturally sensitive” information, like the location of sacred sites, the tribe might not want made available to the public.
          Watching the hours of tape has allowed Bell to witness the internal conflicts some elders faced.
          “There was one video with a 60-year-old woman who had the option to speak English or Salish,” he says. “She chose English.”
          His prowess with “digital storytelling” has benefited the immersion school as well. Bell has created Salish sing-a-long discs and compilations of stories in Salish called “Our Language is Alive” for the school, and the long bus ride.
          “It’s always playing when they pull up,” Bell laughs, and wonders aloud whether they just put it in when they get near him.
          The material Bell has compiled is only one small portion of curriculum the staff at Snqwiiqwo has to create.
          “If there was a McGraw Hill in Salish we’d have it made,” quips Arleen Adams, a curriculum builder at the school.
          Everything from posters to primers to artwork has to be converted from English or just created from scratch, sometimes with disregard for copyrighted work.
          A children’s book on Pete’s desk has been scanned into the computer page by page, the words cut and replaced with Salish.
          Melanie Sandoval, one of the school’s founders and now a curriculum builder and part-time teacher, says the process is made longer because none of the administrative staff is fluent.
          “We give the curriculum to fluent speakers to look over and proofread,” she says of the back and forth that can sometimes take days for a single worksheet or lesson.
          Sandoval says a long-term goal is to create a resource for others to use in teaching the language modeled in part on the “traveling trunks” made by the Montana Historical Society.
          The trunks are topically organized collections of artifacts and teaching tools that travel the state to teach kids a variety of specialized subjects.
          The business of bringing back the language is, on some levels, just that, business. When a child is enrolled in the school, the parents must sign a contract stipulating that the child not withdraw from school, recognizing the drain it creates on resources, and that the family volunteer at the school a minimum of 80 hours a year. Parents are also required to attend a monthly parent meeting, though Pete says the average attendance is about half.
          The school, while almost completely funded by the tribe, in theory charges a yearly tuition of $3,000 per student, though Pete says there is a minimum charge of $300. The difference must be made up by volunteer time, at a rate of $10 per hour. Between actual tuition and the $437,931 the tribe gave the school this year, Pete must renovate the building, buy supplies, pay staff and create a custom curriculum in Salish for every grade.
          It is not a small task, but it is one Nkwsum members know they must shoulder with so much yet to attain.
          For Pete and Bell, the goal is not only to pass on the language to the newest generation but also to restart the transfer of language from parent to child. Both men envision a time when Salish is spoken across the reservation and is acknowledged and understood all over the region.
          “If you live on this reservation, you live in our country and you should speak our language,” Pete says. He immediately follows that by saying the tribe has a concurrent responsibility to provide the means for that to happen.
          One night Pete had a dream about the success of what he and his contemporaries are trying to do. In the dream Pete was in a motel in Spokane, Wash., watching TV. The anchors were suyapis, white men, and they were speaking Salish. Pete says in his dream he was thinking, “Wow, our program really spread.”
          When he woke he said, “That is what we’re going to do.”
          For now, though, it is only a dream, and sometimes it may seem fanciful. While Nkwsum has been a success so far, there are other Salish-speaking tribes in the Northwest that are in even more danger of being too late to keep Salish alive.
          Arlee is pessimistic. “I see it as not really going too far,” he says. “It’s going to die out.
          “It can work if you really get support from the people, but you can’t hardly get them out of the woodwork.
          “You never think when you’re growing up that it’s going to get like this.”
          But Pete has not yet given up hope here. He is determined to press on saving the language of a tribe that, legally, is not even his own.
          “He’s not enrolled here,” says Arlee. “But he should be. He’s got more blood than anybody.”
          Inside the building that still advertises live music on the weekends across a weather-worn sign for Arlee Lanes, the adult class is coming to a close; most eyes in the room had begun to glaze a while before. Arlee tells what must be a joke in Salish and everyone laughs. Their understanding of the language, though basic, is enough to grasp a punch line.
          There is a loud noise from the next room that causes everyone to turn. It is Chaney Bell’s other son, Sxwlekws, a blonde 18-month-old who is more than ready to go home.
          Sxwlekws means whirlwind in Salish. Bell says he named his child for the swirl of smoke above a sweatlodge fire.
          The labors of his father and others like him will tell whether the fire is just starting or has finally burned out.

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