As students sang in n̓səl̓xčin̓, Indigenous community members from around the Northwest gathered Thursday to break ground on a new campus for the Salish School of Spokane.
The private, non-profit language immersion school teaches classes in Colville-Okanogan Salish to K-12 students, as well as night classes for adults. It’s open to Native and non-Native community members alike.
Right now, it’s situated in a small campus in the middle of town, on North Maple Street. But thanks to a 3.5-acre land donation by the Catholic Charities of Eastern Washington and a multimillion-dollar campaign, the school is moving to a site along the Spokane River, near Spokane Falls Community College.
“Fifteen years ago, the founders of the Salish School of Spokane had a dream that someday our little school might be the heart of a revitalized Salish village in a natural area along the Spokane River. Tell the truth, it was a crazy dream,” said Randall Schleuffer, Salish School board president and Coeur d’Alene Tribal citizen.
“Now that it has [come true],” he told the crowd of assembled community members, elected officials and students, “we’re not done. We still have lots of planning to do, even after the school is completed. We will keep building. We will keep planning.”
The school still needs to raise about two million more dollars to hit its $17.5 million goal to fund the project completely.
Plans for the campus include an expanded education building, a community center, and outdoor facilities for traditional activities like hide tanning and tule weaving.
“Our kids will be able to step out the back door and into a 30-acre protected forest that surrounds this property,” Schleuffer said. “That forest will be filled with the sounds of drums and songs, and this—this will be our biggest classroom: the entire outdoors.”
Meghan Francis, education chair of the Colville Tribal Business Council, said a number of Colville Tribal members and descendants attend the Salish School.
“And not only are they learning the language, but they're learning to see the world in the way our ancestors did,” Francis said. “And that's really, really important for our future so we can take care of the earth and we can take care of each other and love each other the way our ancestors did.”
The new campus will house solar panels and battery storage, which school officials say will make the new campus more resilient and a community gathering space as climate change leads to more frequent power disruptions.
The education building will be named for Sʕamtíc̓aʔ, a Salish woman who mentored school co-founder LaRae Wiley and Principal Chris Parkin.
The two went on to develop a teaching method that’s now used for language revitalization in the U.S. and beyond, Parkin said.
“The Fluency Transfer System we built for n̓səl̓xčin̓ has now been adapted and adopted by communities across North America from Alaska and the Yukon Territory to California, Oklahoma, across our region here, and also in Australia,” he said. “More than 50 indigenous language communities in Australia are using this work and this system and this vision that Sʕamtíc̓aʔ helped us make come true.”
n̓səl̓xčin̓ (Colville-Okanogan Salish), isn’t the only type of Interior Salish. n̓xaʔm̓xčín̓ (Spokane-Kalispel-Bitterroot Salish), n̓xaʔm̓xčín̓ (Wenatchi-Columbian Salish) and sn̓čic̓úʔum̓šc̓n̓ (Coeur d’Alene Salish) are all related to n̓səl̓xčin̓, and tribes across the Northwest are making their own efforts to revive their heritage languages, helped in part by work done by the Salish School.
“It all started with just a good idea, good thoughts, and maybe just showing us the way a little bit,” said J.R. Bluff, Kalispel Language Program founder and language director. “And this is only fitting for the Salish School to start this project, to start pushing that envelope a little higher for us all. It's been said before, everything that they've created, they've shown us, they've helped us, they've given us stuff to take [for] ourselves.”
The daughter and granddaughter of Sʕamtíc̓aʔ traveled to Spokane from the Similkameen Valley of British Columbia for the ceremony. Joined by eldest girls from each Salish School class, they gathered around a golden picha—a traditional Salish digging implement—to officially break ground and start the next chapter of language and cultural access in Spokane.
“Our co-founder, LaRae, always says, ‘It's taken many hands to push our culture and language down to try to kill us off,” Schleuffer said. “‘And it will take many hands to raise us back up again.’”
