Washington High Schools Go Native in Foreign Language Instruction

The letters on the board are unfamiliar, as are the sounds that fill the classroom at Port Angeles High School.

“Hshoooo,” say the students, trying to imitate Klallam language teacher Jamie Valadez’s gentle sound, like an exhalation of breath, like a light wind sighing in the cedars.

The students are taking the Klallam language class for credit toward college-admission language requirements--just like French, Spanish, German and Japanese--under state legislation passed in 1993.

About half the students are members of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, hoping to be part of the resurrection of their native tongue.

“I wanted to learn my own language,” said George Charles, 15, who is also doing traditional dances and participating in canoe journeys to familiarize himself with his heritage.

The others are non-Klallam natives and white kids, curious and interested.

“I thought it would be fun, and it is fun,” said Jacob Zappey, 17, a senior who likes the way Valadez weaves in tribal history, lore and art.

On a recent spring day, tribal elders Bea Charles and Adeline Smith dropped in to hear how the kids were doing on the sprawling campus in this community, bracketed on the south by the snowcapped Olympic Mountains and on the north by the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

“I never thought it would be taught in schools,” Charles said, quietly pleased.

“You’re the people that are going to carry it on,” she told the tribal members in the class. “Be proud. You come from strong people.”

Charles learned English from her Canadian mother, and for a time spoke Klallam as well.

“I was just a child when I stopped speaking it,” she said. “I was punished when I spoke our language, you know.”

“I didn’t know English at all in my time,” said Smith, whose first exposure to the language came when a relative dropped her off at school.

But she learned quickly. Now, more than 65 years later, she’s hearing Klallam spoken again.

Revival of the language, familiar to only a handful of elders by the 1980s, began as an Olympic National Park project financed with National Park Service grants.

“We didn’t know it was going to balloon into such a big thing,” Charles said.

Park staff worked with elder Ed Sampson, then 90, who died in 1992. Adeline Smith recalled him joking that whites wanted to hear him speak Klallam after 90 years of telling him not to speak it.

And when the park people wanted to record him, “he said he wouldn’t do anything unless we helped,” Charles said.

She and Smith kept tape recorders handy to log Klallam words that popped into their heads day or night.

In 1995, Valadez and two other aspiring language teachers began a three-year training program financed by an Administration for Native Americans grant.

“This is our first year actually in a school,” she said.

First-year Klallam students learned in six-week increments focusing first on terms for the body, then those for family, community, the environment, the salmon ceremony and canoe journeys.

Next year, in the second phase of this class, “we hope to get to the point that we can carry on conversations,” Valadez said.

The Klallam class and two others in Northwest Native languages--a Makah class taught by Maria Pascua at Neah Bay High School and a Lummi class taught by William John at Ferndale High School--were made possible by 1993 state education legislation that inserted the phrase “which may be American Indian languages” into a section on language studies in public schools.

The legislation addressed the Indian perspective on “foreign” languages, which many say should include English, and tribal concerns about the lack of Native history in standard curricula. In time, all 27 tribes in Washington state could offer courses in their language at local schools.

“I can’t do what I do without the older people and their language ability,” Pascua said.

She said Makah “is still used routinely by some” in the tribe’s remote community at Cape Flattery, northwesternmost point of the contiguous Lower 48 states. And as each year passes, between five and 15 more young people learn it in school.

The class has been a part of the Neah Bay curriculum since the 1992-93 school year, though tribal elders have worked for years to pass on the language. Some colleges accepted it for foreign-language credit in the 1970s, Pascua said.

The two-year course in Lummi has been offered officially at Ferndale since 1994, but was taught in informal lunchtime “enrichment classes” before that.

“Finally we jumped through all the hoops and got permission to have an actual class,” said Vanessa Casimir, secretary in the school’s Indian education department.

Most of the students are Native, and many are Lummi, she said.

A class in Twana, the language of the Skokomish people, had been offered at Shelton High School but was suspended this year when the teacher, Bruce Miller, became ill. It is not expected to be an option next year either, school officials said.