Women of the Year: LaRae Wiley uses ‘natural gift’ with students to keep Salish language alive

Pre-European contact, the Salish language proliferated Sƛ̓xátkʷ, the Colville-Okanagan Salish place name for the region now called Spokane.

Generations later, the language is fading. LaRae Wiley, Colville tribal member, said she only knows of four living fluent speakers of her ancestral language.

Feeling the urgency and all that’s at stake, Wiley made it her mission to resuscitate her language by targeting toddlers and their families, building a thriving generation of Salish speakers to spread the language throughout the greater community. In 2010, she co-founded with her husband the Salish School of Spokane, a state-certified immersion school now serving 35 preschoolers to eighth graders and 60 adults in several different night classes, some accredited through Spokane Falls Community College.

The school’s structure and immersion model of her design has gone on to influence similar programs in the Spokane and Kalispel tribes, and 12 other North American indigenous groups.

Securely fenced in, the school’s campus consists of several brick-red buildings, ample playground space, a lush student-tended garden and a chicken coop.

Inside, Salish surrounds students. Classrooms resemble those in your average elementary school: pint-sized chairs and desks, colorful walls covered in Salish posters designed by Wiley and her team, shelves packed with novels in the language for all grade levels. Each classroom has a pet doted upon by students.

Salish instruction covers all core subjects, as well as music lessons on the piano and cedar flute, and horse riding and caretaking through a partnership with an equine rehabilitation center.

It’s a warm and comfortable setting, as Wiley has committed to lead the education of Salish with love.

“This school is like our, n’ʔaʔúsaʔtn’, our nest. It’s a safe, sacred place for our language and our kids,” Wiley said. “For parents or families, it’s a place we can be ourselves and gather and speak our language and practice our culture and support each other.”

‘An obligation to speak’

Her drive to save the language came from a deep generational hurt.

When Wiley was 35, her Salish-fluent great-uncle died. It was at his funeral she realized the world lost one of the last fluent speakers of an ancestral tongue she couldn’t speak herself. Mourners at his funeral lamented the loss.

“What are we going to do?,” Wiley recalls hearing.

“At that time, I was a teacher in Chewelah, and I thought, ‘Well, maybe I can learn it and pass it on,’ ” Wiley said. “When I recognized that the language was really lost for my family, I was heartstruck.”

Raised off the reservation in Cheney, Wiley said she always felt a little disconnected from her heritage. Her mission to learn and spread the language has yielded for her a sense of belonging and pride that connects her to her lineage, finally speaking the same language as her ancestors.

“It was what I was missing all along, was the language and culture,” Wiley said.

Though fulfilling, creating her school wasn’t easy. With no existing curriculum in Colville-Okanagan Salish and only a handful of fluent speakers left, Wiley created her now-thriving school with virtually no blueprints. She based the model on Hawaiian and Maori language immersion nests, and she and her husband’s collective teaching experience created their foundation. She worked with tribal elder and fluent speaker Sʕam̓tíc̓aʔ, English name Sarah Peterson, to create the curriculum: books to teach reading, classroom posters, recordings of pronunciations, textbooks and a website that the school still uses. She even composed a Salish alphabet song.

In the process, Wiley also felt an ache that spanned generations. The stark deficiency of fluent speakers can be traced to Indian boarding schools present in the United States and Canada from the 1800s to the 1970s. At these schools, Indigenous children were forced to assimilate to the dominant white culture, most effectively by barring the use of their Indigenous language.

Wiley recalls working with a fluent tribal elder still traumatized from her time in a boarding school.

“Every time she spoke her language, she could feel the nuns hitting her hands with a ruler. She was over 60 years old, and every time she spoke a word, she felt that. It was like a shock came through her body,” Wiley said. “But she was a speaker; she spoke every day and wanted the language to continue.”

Though an emotionally tumultuous endeavor, Wiley was undeterred. She was motivated by the mission she thought bigger than herself, in recognition of all the speakers before her and what they endured.

“I am still here, and I am speaking the language, because they were able to survive those times when they were so strong,” Wiley said. “I guess I feel almost like an obligation to continue to speak and pass it on.”

Danica Parkin, Wiley’s daughter, said her mother’s success in establishing the school was due to her dauntless and stubborn spirit.

“She’ll just be like, ‘Oh yeah, this is what I want to do’ and then she just does it and does whatever it takes to do that,” Parkin said. “I think a lot of people are more fearful and in some ways more careful or anxious about it.”

Establishing the school wasn’t the only uphill battle Wiley has waged. She was the first in her family to graduate university with her Bachelor’s degree. She wrote lyrics, sang in Salish and recorded full-length albums on her own label, accompanying her original songs with percussion, wooden flute, harmonica and keyboard. She has an astute ability to tune out the naysayers, Parkin said.

“I don’t know that I know anybody more driven by passion,” said Brad Read, a close friend of Wiley’s who nominated her for Woman of the Year. “She’s quiet and dignified, but under the surface is this really fiery passion.”

Wiley doesn’t give up easily, and she’s also eternally kind, those who know her said. Parkin said she gives the best hugs. Read, a teacher himself, called Wiley a natural teacher.

“She just has a sort of natural gift of how to relate to students of any age,” Read said.

‘They know who they are’

The Salish school wasn’t always the cheerful Maple Street campus it has called home for the past 10 years. Its inaugural class was four toddlers Wiley taught in her sister’s basement. One of the four was Wiley’s grandchild and Parkin’s child, now 16, who Wiley and her husband committed to only speak to in Salish. It’s a practice Parkin said paid off.

“They still start Salish when they see my parents; we’ll all be talking in English, but when they go into a conversation with my parents, they turn over to Salish a lot,” Parkin said.

Currently, Parkin is enrolled in twice-weekly night classes with other adult Salish learners, and her two youngest kids are in kindergarten and fourth grade at the school.

While two of her biological grandchildren are enrolled in the school, Wiley considers all 35 of its students her kin. Student art covers nearly every exposed wall in her school; she knows which young artist is behind many of the masterpieces.

“It really fills my heart,” she said. “It just makes my day when I walk out of my office and the kids run up and hug me and they say, ‘Way̓ Tama’ – that’s ‘Hello, Grandma.’ ”

At the school, she said she watched her dream of her grandchildren speaking her language come true. She’s also proud to foster pride in students they can carry with them beyond the walls of the Salish School of Spokane.

“Instilling in students this resiliency, this is who they are, creating that strong identity, and that’s, like, their safe place,” Wiley said. “They know who they are. They know where they come from.”