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SPEAKER 1: Like endangered species, endangered languages are blinking out one by one across the world. In this country, more than 80% of the surviving 175 Native American languages are in danger of extinction. But many tribes are trying hard to prevent such a loss to their heritage. On the Mille Lacs Reservation in Central Minnesota, tribal members are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in casino profits on an expanded language program in their tribally-run school system. They hope to raise a new generation of Ojibwe speakers before it's too late. Minnesota Public Radio's Mary Lozier reports.

MARY LOZIER: The Nay Ah Shing School sits in dense forest on the small reservation of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe. A sign in Ojibwe and English welcomes visitors to the school's first annual language fair. Teachers stand by tables with away language workbooks, games, and home made picture books. There are t-shirts painted with the Ojibwe words. To one side, tribal members watch a puppet show by three 14-year-old girls performing in what is no longer their people's first language.

SPEAKER 3: [SPEAKING OJIBWE]

[LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE]

MARY LOZIER: The audience is mostly older people, the only generation able to speak Ojibwe fluently, like 58-year-old Ojibwe language teacher Elorraine Wejas. They learned the language at home.

ELORRAINE WEJAS: My parents-- that's all we ever spoke. I couldn't even speak English when I first started school. When I looked at a teacher, it looked like her mouth was just going but I couldn't understand what she was saying. It was really hard.

MARY LOZIER: Because Ojibwe-speaking children faced so many difficulties in an English language school system, many members of Wejas's generation did not teach their native tongue to their own children. The students at Nay Ah Shing School are the second generation to speak only English. A recent survey of the 3,000 members of the Mille Lacs Band found only 200 who spoke Ojibwe, nearly all of them 45 years old or more.

As these remaining native speakers age and their numbers thin, the tribe has stepped up efforts to teach Ojibwe in school. Instruction now begins in the tribe's newly built preschool and daycare centers and continues through 12th grade. The school hopes to purchase computer software and is developing a Ojibwe language videos and music.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[SINGING IN OJIBWE]

Sylvia Norberg, a Guatemalan who is part Mayan and heads the Mille Lacs' language program says one of the first things she did when she was hired last year was convince tribal elders to work with the young non-Ojibwe speaking music teacher to develop new songs in the language.

SYLVIA NORBERG: At the beginning, they were-- well, they weren't very sure because this was something different. They said, well, we already sing. And I said, yes, and we respect that. But what we're going to do is nothing related with religion. Like, right now, the children are listening to the TV, listening to radio and they hear songs. So those songs are not helping your child, the children to learn more Ojibwe.

MARY LOZIER: Norberg says children sing in a Ojibwe on the bus now. To her delight, she's even heard from some parents who say their kids are driving them crazy at home with the songs. Ojibwe language teacher Millie Benjamin who has taught at the school for years says the new approach is making a difference.

MILLIE BENJAMIN: You hear kids say things in Indian more outside of school now than before. And that's because, I think, they hear it more. We have elders in all our classrooms now to speak with the teacher and they hear it more. And already it shows that even that little bit helps.

MARY LOZIER: But even the most optimistic supporters of the new program know it will be a difficult struggle. For 100 years, the United States government made a systematic effort to wipe out Native American languages and religions. Federal laws forbidding Native American religious practices were not repealed until 1978. And the scars of such policies can still be seen on the Mille Lacs Reservation.

Tribal elder Baptiste Sam remembers being sent as a teenager to a government boarding school where she was forbidden to speak her native language. Even though she now works with children in the schools to teach them to speak Ojibwe, she fears the effort may have come too late.

BAPTISTE SAM: I used to hear all the old folks some back days like my great great grandmother used to say everything is going to be lost. Everything's going to be turned to white people way, everything. That's what they used to say. I believe it. I see it too.

MARY LOZIER: Others worry that even if children can be taught Ojibwe in the classroom, something has already been lost. A language is not just a set of words but a unique way of thinking. Angie Ross, an Ojibwe teacher from the White Earth Reservation in Northwest Minnesota, worries that a generation of children whose first language is English will never see the world the way a native Ojibwe speaker would.

ANGIE ROSS: Our language is picturesque and something's happening as you speak. And so when we translate that over, that's lost. At school, I'd find myself thinking even for a simple thing like an owl, the name of an owl is a gookooko'oo. OK, I don't even have to shut my eyes. It's in my mind. I picture that owl and he's doing gookooko'oo. You see? And you can't pass that on to the kids.

MARY LOZIER: In addition, the Ojibwe language is extremely complex. It's divided into two realms, the animate and the inanimate. And words vary, depending on which realm the subject inhabits and many other factors. A given verb can take hundreds of subtly different forms. Even the words for color change with the object described. Again, language teacher Millie Benjamin.

MILLIE BENJAMINl: We have the basic colors-- ozaawaa, waabishkaa, askibagung, ozhaawashkwaa. And then the word changes with shapes and types of material. So if they're round, then say-- let's say a word donor is ozaawaa. If it's around brown thing or yellow or orange, then it would be ozaawaa minagad. If it was cloth it would be ozaawaa weygad.

MARY LOZIER: But Anton Troyer, an Ojibwe who teaches history at the University of Wisconsin and a leader in the effort to revitalize the language, says those obstacles can be overcome. Troyer, who now edits an Ojibwe language magazine, the Oshkaabewis Native Journal, learned Ojibwe as a second language and speaks it fluently. He says there are a number of successful precedents for what people on the Mille Lacs Reservation are trying to do.

ANTON TROYER: For example, the Whitefish Bay Community in Ontario teaches the first three grades entirely in Ojibwe and then they switch over to English and Ojibwe starting in the fourth grade. Another one, for example, at the White Earth Reservation in Northwestern Minnesota, there was a pilot immersion program just for the kindergarten. Those kids were singing songs and speaking Ojibwe and much better than their parents, I might add, just from one year of the program.

MARY LOZIER: Troyer and his wife are teaching their own baby daughter to speak Ojibwe. She is the first Native Ojibwe speaker to be born on the White Earth Reservation in 60 years. Troyer urges adults to learn the language too and speak it at home with their children. He says it's time to act now before a vital part of the Ojibwe identity is lost.

ANTON TROYER: Without the Ojibwe language, it is impossible to conduct our most important religious ceremonies, our big drum ceremonies, medicine dance, shaking tent. Our elders clearly state that these ceremonies can only be done in Ojibwe. If we lose Ojibwe, then we can't communicate with the great spirit that way. We can't keep our culture going.

MARY LOZIER: Down the road from the Nay Ah Shing School, the Mille Lacs Indian Museum sits on the birch-covered shore of the lake that gave the band its name. Inside the new building are beaded bags and grass dancers' costumes, jingle dresses, and a birch bark canoe. Saving a language is harder than preserving artifacts. There are only 300 children in the Nay Ah Shing School and the future of the Ojibwe language on the reservation depends on them.

But Larry Matrayas, the Mille Lacs elder who is helping to write the new songs used in the Nay Ah Shing School believes Ojibwe will not die. After all, it takes only a little while for a child to learn a language.

LARRY MATRAYAS: Right now I've got a two-year-old that stays with me now and we talk to him in Indian all the time. And he picks it up easy.

MARY LOZIER: For National Public Radio, I'm Mary Lozier. ,

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[SINGING IN OJIBWE]