The opportunities to attend higher education in Mexico have traditionally been offered to the middle class population since around 30% of students who finish high school are able to attend higher education. The main reason for this low attendance is the poverty in which much of the population lives and the lack of higher education institutions in…

Limited studies have considered meshing participatory visual methods, new technologies, and experiential learning to prepare preservice teachers to respond to the needs of adult second language learners with interrupted education. Thus, this small-scale exploratory action research investigates how implementing collaborative digital visual…

This article focuses on language displacement in the High Mountains of Central Veracruz. It begins by presenting a brief historical account of the Nahuatl presence in the region in order to distinguish this group from other Nahuatl-speaking groups. Later, it describes the situation of language loss that is currently underway and argues that the…

Ethnolinguistic Vitality Theory (EVT) asserts that status, demographic and institutional support (IS) factors make up the vitality of ethnolinguistic groups within intergroup relations. Specifically, IS factor refers to the extent to which a language group enjoys representation in the various institutions of a society, in particular, mass media,…

In 2011, Indigenous Initial Education teachers in Oaxaca, Mexico, for the first time participated in an alternative teacher professional development effort (called a "diplomado") to initiate community appropriate bilingual programs for pregnant mothers and infants under 3 years old. Collaborating with parents and village authorities, the…

"Globalization", a prominent and ubiquitous term in the academy associated with linguistic human rights, power, hypercapitalism, socio-political constraints, and social justice, is defined as powerful dynamic global forces stemming from the new world economy that constrict and restrict local contexts, progress, and possibilities--in this…

This paper presents the results of a study on cross-linguistic transfer in Andean Spanish word order. In Andean Spanish the object appears in preverbal position more frequently than in non-Andean Spanish, which has been attributed to an influence from Quechua (a Subject-Object-Verb language). The high frequency of preverbal objects could be…

The use of writing to represent the heritage language represents a contentious issue for many members of Puebloan societies in the American Southwest. Many community members resist the use of writing for this purpose on the grounds that it acts as a form of colonialism, while others accept the use of writing in the heritage language because it is…

This article discusses emerging research on youth and Indigenous languages. Based on a comparative and international Indigenous education study in Peru and the United States, the intersection between Indigenous community spaces, schools, and languages is examined. Given global trends of Indigenous language loss, comparative research provides the…

I do two things in my dissertation. One is to tell the history of academic research on my language from the perspective of a Native person who has been involved in this work as an assistant to non-Native researchers. The other is to explain more about my culture and language and how it works from the perspective of a Yakima person who has spoken…

The aim of this article is to study how children experience their ethnic identifications in relation to their knowledge of the Toba language through daily interactions with peers and adults (both indigenous and non-indigenous). The study is focused on an urban setting in Buenos Aires (Argentina) where monolingual (Spanish) practices are replacing…

This commentary reflects on the articles included in this special issue of "American Indian Culture and Research Journal" that develop the theme of "American Indian languages in unexpected places" inspired by "Indians in Unexpected Places." The articles develop two related concerns: first, American Indian linguistic practices have been…

In the spring of 2015, the North Dakota Department of Public Instruction brought together tribal Elders from across North Dakota to share stories, memories, songs, and wisdom in order to develop the North Dakota Native American Essential Understandings (NDNAEU) to guide the learning of both Native and non-Native students across the state. They…

With the passage of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001, the United States spent millions upon millions of dollars in a largely unsuccessful effort to close the academic achievement gap between American-Indian and some other ethnic minorities and mainstream Americans. NCLB's focus on teacher quality and evidence-based curriculum and…

In this article, the author recounts how he has become a writer and shares his experience in discovering who he is and what he does. The author didn't know who he was really until Ken Lincoln told him many moons ago in one of the seminal books of criticism of time. "Native American Renaissance" (1985) did much to pave the road that had been little…