India is a large country that contains an incredible amount of cultural diversity. As the country continues its growth into a major economic power, the modern world has begun to creep into its small, traditional villages.

This brings opportunity, but can also cause people to shed their traditional languages and cultural identities in order to fit in and better compete for jobs. This problem isn’t unique to India, of course. It’s happened time and time again, and often the people involved don’t realize how important their language and culture are to them until they have almost completely disappeared.

In India, however, the New York Times reports that Ganesh Devy is leading an effort to try to preserve some rural Indian languages and cultures now, while they are threatened but still relatively healthy. To accomplish this task, he has created a school called the Adivasi Academy. The school serves young adults from adivasi tribes. The adivasi are native Indians who typically live by hunting and gathering, worship trees and elephants, and are known for creating and appreciating art.

Despite similarities between different groups of adivasi, there are also many differences in language and culture. At the Adivasi Academy, students are taught to document and preserve the unique cultural elements of their clans and villages. They create dictionaries of languages that have never before been written down, and record elements of their culture such as traditional foods, clothing, ceremonies, beliefs and stories.

By basically turning students into anthropologists studying their own cultures, the academy helps communicate that these traditional languages and cultures are valuable, and worth preserving even as the adivasi become more connected to the rest of India and the modern world.

Is it working?

It’s too soon to tell how much of an impact the program is having, but most of the students who graduate from it do choose to stay in their villages.
For example, the New York Times article quotes one student, Vikesh Rathwa, who originally planned to leave his village and become a filmmaker.

According to Mr. Rathwa,

“Coming here made me see my household life in a new way. We need to walk in step with our traditions, and with technology, too.”

On Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, the Northern Arapaho tribe is struggling to preserve its language.

As with many Native American tribes, Arapaho children were forced into boarding schools started in the late 1800’s in an effort to make them more “American.” Of course, that’s really pretty ironic if you think about it, considering that their ancestors colonized America thousands of years before the ancestors of the people who tried to “Americanize” them even knew this continent existed.

However, the goal of the boarding schools was to make Native Americans give up their culture and be more like the “civilized” English-speaking whites.

At the boarding schools, traditional Native American hairstyles were forbidden. So was the Arapaho language-students were punished harshly for speaking it. These practices persisted even until the 1940’s and ‘50s. As a result, there are no native Arapaho speakers under the age of 55. Knowledge of the Arapaho tongue has basically skipped a generation, although adults are learning it now as a second language. The New York Times reports that in an attempt to save the language, the Arapaho are opening a school for children where classes will be taught only in Arapaho. At first, the school will teach pre-Kindergarten to 1st grade, but will start taking in progressively older students over time if everything goes according to plan.

Hopefully, the immersion environment provided by the schools will create a new generation of Arapaho speakers. The American government’s attempt to extinguish Native American culture has done some serious damage and left many tribes with a legacy of poverty and social problems.

One interesting tidbit mentioned in this New York Times article was that fluency in native tribal languages has been tied to better academic achievement in Native American kids.