Maya Hilty
The Santa Fe New Mexican
OHKAY OWINGEH —One of dozens of handwritten posters lining the walls of Joseph Patrick Aguino’s portable classroom phonetically spells out a Tewa prayer for a dance.
Another, with a drawing of GEICO’s gecko, sports a Tewa translation of “Somebody help me, please, I have a flat tire!”
Stacked on and around Aguino’s desk are binders of songs, prayers and translations of stories; vocabulary worksheets filled out by his students; and a homemade storybook about a rabbit and coyote with speech bubbles in Tewa.
The materials have accumulated since Aguino, a member of the Ohkay Owingeh Tribal Council, began teaching two-hour, twice-weekly Tewa language classes to learners of all ages almost 20 years ago.
He hopes his students will become fluent in Tewa and also that some will go on to become teachers themselves — which a few have, he said.
Six of the Eight Northern Pueblos are Tewa-speaking but have suffered significant language loss over the past several generations — particularly since the federal government in 1819 began removing Native children from their homes and placing them in boarding schools that forced them to speak English. The practice lasted 150 years.
In the mid-2000s, a health survey in Santa Clara Pueblo identified only one school-age child fluent in the language, though almost all tribal members over age 50 spoke Tewa, said Porter Swentzell, executive director of Kha’p’o Community School.
“In our community of a couple thousand tribal members, that’s not a recipe for continuity of our language, right?” he said. “Our language, it’s tied to everything that we do, but also, the language tells us the story of who we are as a people, so losing the language is almost losing who you are.”
He added, “Every generation had their struggles going back. They all overcame those obstacles so we could be sitting in these roles right now. It’s like, this is the fight of this time to make sure that we don’t cease to exist as a people, that the story of who we are as Santa Clara people won’t end on our watch.”
Language preservation efforts also closely tie into broader efforts to maintain traditional arts and culture, said Mark Moquino of Zia Pueblo.
Fewer young people today know how to weave a textile, build a cooking pot or sew a shirt than in the past, he said. “We’re at a pivotal point, an integral point, of these being lost, and our language is tied and interconnected with stories, spirit, clothing, our entire way of life.”
In 2020, Moquino co-founded the Indigenous Knowledge Collective, a small, Northern New Mexico-based nonprofit with a mission of promoting education in traditional arts and culture, in part to “meet this need of knowledge transfer” from older to younger generations, he said.
Over the past two years, the nonprofit has hosted a handful of textile, beading, sewing and pottery classes in Tesuque and Ildefonso pueblos, with all classes delivered in both Tewa and English. Last summer, the collective also invited a master buckskin tanner to San Ildefonso Pueblo so people could learn how to tan a hide, from scraping hair off the skin to readying the material to make buckskin bags.
Most of the classes are open to any Pueblo person, including those living in urban areas, who are often overlooked, Moquino said.
Moquino described Tewa as both an “oral and visual” language.
“The symbols in a textile are their own language,” he said. The four rays of the Zia sun symbol represent the four seasons, four times of the day, four directions and four stages of life, he cited as an example.
“It’s not just at the surface, like, ‘Come in and we’re going to speak one, two, three, A, B, C, red, white, blue,’ ” he said. “We have a Puebloan life way. … Our language is so interwoven and interconnected into everything that we do.”
Going forward, Moquino hopes to continue organizing trips to culturally relevant sites and expand classes to topics such as traditional agricultural practices and homebuilding methods.
“There’s no limit to what we can do, other than financial,” he said.
Leaders of Kha’p’o Community School in Santa Clara Pueblo also have been expanding programs to reverse a trend of language loss, especially over the past year and a half. The pre-K-6 school, which has an English and Tewa dual-language program, has about 90 students enrolled.
The need for language revitalization was a primary reason the Santa Clara Pueblo Tribal Council took over control of the school from the federal Bureau of Indian Education in 2016, Swentzell said.
The new school leadership — all from Santa Clara Pueblo since 2022, for the first time in the school’s history — have expanded Tewa instruction from one hour per day, per class to 50% of each student’s day, said Darrin Rock, who oversees language programs at the school. In 2016, the school had one full-time Tewa teacher; today, it boasts a team of six, with one Tewa teacher in each classroom for the full school day.
This school year, Kha’p’o also began offering weekly language classes for staff, and about 90% of staff have participated, Rock said.
“Why tell our students ‘come here’ in English when we can tell them in our language?” he said. “As soon as they get out of the car with Mom and Dad, we’re talking to them in our language. … We are immersing our students at any chance we get.”
But some students have no other Tewa speakers in their homes. That’s why the school plans expand into a community language program, with classes for parents and grandparents starting up this semester.
The school’s “incredible progress” to revitalize Tewa hasn’t been easy, in part because funding for language initiatives from the Bureau of Indian Education falls far short of the amount needed to sustain a dual-language program, Swentzell and Rock said; the school’s language programs are grant-funded.
“We’ve been through the mud,” Rock said, but “this is very personal for us.”
He continued, “Language is at the basis of who we are as Santa Clara people … and I think that’s what makes us strive more.”
In Ohkay Owingeh, Aguino — a self-taught Tewa instructor who developed his own alphabet for writing — said teaching has become easier over the years, and his class sizes have grown, too.
Born in 1945, he was raised “very culturally” by his father, a spiritual leader for the tribe who died when Aguino was 18 years old, he said.
In his middle age, Aguino, a longtime teacher at Santa Fe Indian School, wanted to give back to the community in Ohkay Owingeh and realized his knowledge of language and culture was what he had to give, he said. He asked the tribal council to allow him to become a Tewa instructor Tuesday and Thursday evenings, essentially year-round, in 2005.
The class began with about five students and at one point dropped to just one. It now has a core group of about 15 students from age 8 to over 80, with others who come and go, Aguino said. Most students are from Ohkay Owingeh, which has over 3,000 members, but some occasionally come from other pueblos.
A lot of the class content is just “about life,” Aguino said, including culture, history, “how you were brought up and who you became.”
On a recent snowy morning, he flipped through his classroom materials to a page welcoming newcomers.
Why is the Tewa language important? It is “the basis for all your ancestry,” he read.
This article was published via AP Storyshare.