US cuts stoke fears of identity loss among native Americans

DW (English)

Since January, the Trump administration has moved to freeze or cancel trillions in federal funding. DW gained rare access to Montana’s Rocky Boy Reservation, where one Native nation—the Chippewa Cree Tribe—is fighting to preserve its heritage.

Transcript

00:00This is Montana, home to the Native American Chippewa Cree Nation.

00:05Children here are learning Cree, it's the language of their ancestors, and it's dying

00:10out.

00:13We haven't produced any fluent speakers in over 50 years and we only have about 80 fluent

00:22Cree speakers left, none of our children speak our language, none of them.

00:27Both Americans say that they have faced centuries of marginalization and discrimination by the

00:33United States.

00:34Since they couldn't eliminate us, they planned to assimilate, to put us into the mainstream

00:42society and one of the ways they did that was to eliminate our language.

00:48Because our language is our identity, that's who we are, the language is the key to everything

00:53that we are.

00:55This Cree language program relies on federal funding.

00:58It costs a million dollars a year to run.

01:01But the Trump administration's push to cut government spending is sparking fears that this may not

01:07survive.

01:08We have to operate grant to grant, year to year, so there's no guarantee when my funding

01:15ends in November that I'll be able to continue what I'm doing.

01:20Last year, the federal government provided over 30 billion dollars to native tribes.

01:26For the tribes, this money is an obligation, mandated by treaties and federal law.

01:32We depend on federal funding just about every program we've got.

01:36We're not self-sufficient.

01:39The U.S. is home to over 175 tribal languages, but the Indigenous Language Institute warns that

01:46without restoration efforts like this, only 20 will survive by 2050.

01:51Many fear that President Trump making English the country's only official language will further

01:57undermine these efforts.

01:57None of the languages are the same here in the state of Montana because every tribe has their own language.

02:05That's one of the things that the president is trying to take away by his executive order.

02:11Trump's decree has made the reservation student council even more determined to protect their

02:17language for future generations.

02:20We still learn it, and we still fight for it, and we have a language revitalization program that

02:24does need funding, and I think as long as we can keep fighting for that, he can say whatever language

02:32he wants to be the main one for America, but we have our own, and we're going to keep that.

02:36In the classroom, they're doing what they can to keep their language alive.

02:41The prayer is in our lifetime to hear one of our own babies speak our language as their first language.

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