More than two years had passed since Cultural Survival last visited the Arapaho Language Lodge immersion classrooms in Ethete and Arapahoe, Wyoming, and program manager Jennifer Weston was eager to meet with elder fluent speakers, tribal leaders, educators, and youth on the vast 3.2 million acre reservation in west central Wyoming held in common by the Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribes.
While the community radio station was unfortunately off-air due to lightning damage to the main broadcast tower—precluding interviews and discussions with community members about Arapaho and Shoshone language revitalization—during a three-day visit Weston met with the Wind River Tribal College president, the head of the local Sky People Higher Education nonprofit (the oldest locally chartered NGO), elders and teachers and both Arapaho language immersion preschool sites, and visiting linguists from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
A small summer youth language camp grant—made available to each of Cultural Survival’s language partner programs by a generous donor—also provided occasion for Weston to help elder speakers in Ethete prepare for their ten-day family immersion sessions, held each summer after the close of the preschool for the season. Weston also attended the first day of a family wellness event hosted for Arapaho and Shoshone families by the tribes’s Women, Infants, and Children programs through their Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health (REACH) grant from the federal Centers for Disease Control.
