“Everything has a spirit. Our language is a spirit. I hope that spirit don’t ever die.”

At Rocky Boy, Montana, the smallest reservation in the state and home to the Chippewa-Cree Tribe, COVID-19 took a significant share of the Nation’s fluent first-language speakers, deepening a language loss that boarding school policies had begun generations earlier. In response, the Tribal council declared a state of emergency for the language and used Self-Governance authority to fund the MCCLR program, named for Mahchiminahtik, the spiritual leader given the language to share.

This story follows a community returning to Nēhīyawēwin, one student, one prayer, and one word at a time. Featuring the Chippewa-Cree Self-Governance Coordinator and program participants whose lives have been changed through their work with the language.