OLYMPIA — Washington schools could get multi-lingual if the Legislature passes a bill heard in a House of Representatives committee Monday.
The bill would direct the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction to oversee grants for establishing and expanding programs where instruction is in English and another language, both in public schools and state-tribal compact schools.
The bill is the first step in an extensive effort to expand dual language offerings across the state. By 2040, bill sponsor Rep. Lillian Ortiz-Self, D-Mukilteo, hopes every district that wants such programming will have it in their course catalogs as early as kindergarten. But a number of Spokane-area programs have long been speaking in two tongues, reaping the benefits of bilinguality.
Learning another language can be a mental exercise, expand a person’s potential for connection and empower its speakers, as schools have found.
Spokane Public Schools offers foreign language classes in Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, French and German up to level six at some high schools that fulfill the state’s two-year language requirement.
Additionally, the district has for seven years had a school focused on Spanish immersion at the elementary school level. Pupils are taught in 50/50 English and Spanish; administration hopes to expand Spanish instruction and include more native Spanish speakers and students who use Spanish at home.
Seattle fourth-grader Lucas Gramer testified in support of the bill at its hearing. Lucas is deaf, and he used American Sign Language to address the committee, explaining that he’d like more of his friends to be able to sign.
“During social times, it’s extremely difficult for me to communicate with my friends,” Lucas signed while an interpreter spoke. “The interpreters do not interpret those communications, and so without my friends learning how to sign, we aren’t able to talk.”
Lucas struggles with not being able to connect with hearing kids outside of an interpreter, said his mother, Laura Gramer .
“He’s not able to have hearing peers communicate directly with him,” she signed. “And he can be such a chatterbox when he has that direct communication.”
Grants specifically surrounding Indigenous language revitalization and education would also be available for public schools.
Inchelium superintendent Brian Freeman also spoke in support of the bill at the hearing, saying it could help the district explore dual language instruction and its overall goal of “indigenizing the educational experience” for Inchelium students.
Shelly Boyd is a cultural arts teacher at the Inchelium school, a small kindergarten-to-12th-grade school on the Colville Reservation serving 191 pupils, around 70 percent of whom are Indigenous, according to state data.
Boyd, a member of the Sinixt band of the Colville tribes, finds it empowering to teach Salish, a language she’s fluent in. She also sees it in her students, who see learning and using their language as a tool to reclaim their identity and build pride in their heritage. That’s especially meaningful given the dark history of massacre, forced sterilizations and Indigenous boarding schools, where generations of native Salish speakers were taught to feel shame in their tongue.
“There is a perspective that our people have been given that’s one of ‘less than,’” Boyd said.
It’s a perspective that has inundated reservations, she said, all beginning with a loss in identity. Rebuilding identity starts and is strongest in language revitalization and native language use.
“The stronger the self-identity is in a person, the better they’re able to do,” Boyd said. “It’s just about embracing yourself — your strengths and your challenges.”
Using Salish shapes the user’s understanding of the world and the relationship with others: human and non-human.
Words for plants are “whole science lessons,” with implications towards use and properties embedded in their names.
There are different words for mother and father depending on if they’re said by a daughter or son, with prescriptions surrounding the role and the relationship therein.
“Really the most powerful thing a person can do is learn an Indigenous language, because it shifts a worldview,” Boyd said.
Rather than saying “to swim under the water,” a Salish speaker would say n’’a’x’ítk’, which translates directly “to swim with the water.” This distinction propels the user into perceiving the water as another being they’re interacting with, a perception Boyd said builds a relationship with the natural world.
Boyd isn’t defensive of her language when non-Indigenous people speak Salish; she feels the proliferation of Salish can help to collectively shift the thinking and better the global collective.
“Our language holds so many beautiful answers for people,” Boyd wrote. “If everyone understood the world view embedded in it, I don’t think we’d be having a climate crisis right now.”
