Overview:
A Washington tribe is opening a new Salish language immersion school.
For generations, Native American languages across the United States were pushed toward extinction through government policies designed to erase Indigenous cultures. Children were removed from their families, sent to boarding schools, and punished for speaking their own languages.
Today, many Native communities are working to reverse that history. In Spokane, Wash., LaRae Wiley and Chris Parkin are driven by a shared mission to restore their language and rebuild connections between generations.
The Salish School of Spokane is building a new language school dedicated to teaching Southern Interior Salish languages through full immersion. More than a new building, the school represents an effort to restore identity, strengthen families, and ensure that Native languages survive for future generations.
“The language is a healer,” Parkin, principal and co-founder of the Salish School of Spokane, told Native News Online. “It can remind people of who they are. It can connect people to where they come from.”
The need for revitalization is urgent. According to Parkin, the four Southern Interior Salish languages are among the most endangered in North America. Some have no remaining first-language speakers, while others have only a handful of fluent elders left, most of them in their seventies, eighties, or nineties.
For Wiley, an Elder-Linguist, language loss is deeply personal. Although her grandmother and great-grandmother spoke their Native language fluently, they never passed it on to their next generation. Wiley’s grandmother attended a federal boarding school, where Native children were punished for speaking their language. Fear and trauma kept many parents from teaching their children the language they had grown up speaking.
“I didn’t grow up learning my language,” Wiley said. “I never heard it until I was probably in my 30s.”
Everything changed when she attended her great-uncle’s funeral and learned he had been one of the community’s fluent speakers. Hearing that the language was disappearing left her feeling that something precious had been taken from her family. She decided to learn the language herself and dedicate her life to bringing it back.
Her story reflects the experience of countless Native American families across North America. Federal policies like Indian boarding schools and language bans interrupted the transfer of language from parents to children for generations. The result was not only the language loss but also the loss of cultural knowledge, identity, and community connection. The Salish School was founded to reverse that damage.
What began with four children in a basement has grown into a year-round immersion school serving students from infancy through eighth grade while also teaching dozens of adult learners. Unlike many language programs, parents are required to learn alongside their children because the school’s leaders believe true language revitalization happens at home, not only in the classroom.
“Our ultimate goal is to recreate a language culture community,” Parkin said. “Kids are raised in the language as their first language again.”
Wiley shared that one family now speaks Colville Salish exclusively to their young daughter, making her the first child in roughly 90 years to grow up with the Salish being her first language. For Wiley, moments like these prove that language restoration is possible, even after decades of decreasing numbers of Colville Salish speakers.
The school teaches far more than vocabulary. Students begin each day with songs and gratitude ceremonies, learn traditional dances and drumming, work with horses, harvest traditional foods, and spend time caring for the Spokane River. Every activity is conducted through the Salish language, reinforcing that language and culture cannot be separated.
Parkin said many people think of Native culture as something displayed only during ceremonies or cultural events, but the school’s mission goes beyond that.
“It’s the daily commitment to speaking the language, relating to each other through the language, being present in our songs, and in our way of relating to each other,” he said. “That actually is the greatest enactment of culture you could possibly do. We don’t need a fancy outfit in order to be in that deep cultural connection.”
Construction of the new campus is expected to provide the growing program with much-needed space. The project includes classrooms, a gymnasium, and community gathering areas. Although the school has raised most of the funding through private donors and nonprofit partners, organizers continue working to secure the remaining funds needed to complete the project.
For Wiley, however, the success of the school cannot be measured only in buildings or enrollment numbers. It is measured in grandchildren speaking the language that once nearly disappeared from her family.
“When I learned the language,” she said, “I felt whole.”
