Yasmine Halmane, Photo Editor

Yale has informally offered Indigenous languages as part of the University’s curriculum for over seven years through the Native American Cultural Center and the Directed Independent Language Study program, but this fall marks the first time that studying one will fulfill the language distributional requirement.

Patrick DelPercio, a Cherokee language instructor at the University of Oklahoma, will join the University’s faculty to teach a lecture course focusing on Cherokee language and culture.

“Other home speakers can take heritage language classes at Yale, but not Indigenous students,” Director of Undergraduate Studies of Linguistics Claire Bowern told the News. “Particularly for Indigenous students, it seemed very out of place that one can do one’s language requirement by studying languages from all around the world… except the Indigenous languages of the Americas.”

Indeed, students and community members have advocated for course and language credit for Native American languages for years. As far back as 2018, students have petitioned for those classes to be offered officially for course credits, noting the disjunction between Yale’s historical exploitation of Indigenous resources and the lack of attention paid to those peoples on course syllabi.

Professor Ned Blackhawk, of the Western Shoshone, noted that up until now the onus has fallen largely on Native students to create their own classes — which they often take for no credit. Native language learning “evolved and eventually moved into the ‘community class’ model,” Blackhawk explained.

 “The NACC has held the vast majority of the language courses and has often been overseen by the NACC directors,” Blackhawk said. 

Sandra Sánchez GRD ’24, a PhD candidate who attended Professor DelPercio’s first lecture, wrote that they hoped that Yale might in the future form stronger relationships with Native people and communities. 

“With the wealth of resources and collections here, I can imagine a future where language revitalization, preservation and education can happen if the right care and respect is taken to support tribal-University relations,” Sánchez added.

Though the course may not be offered in this month’s course selection process, it will be available in the fall through add-drop period and will employ a number of University materials. Interaction with — and reclamation of — the University’s own historical resources has long been a major focus of Indigenous curricula on campus.

Bowern noted that the limited documentation and archival material which exists on Native peoples is often held within the walls of the very institutions which have historically excluded those communities. She pointed to the Belonging at Yale Initiative’s emphasis on curricular reform.

“We don’t want to lock things up in archives and make it difficult for the communities whose cultural heritage they are to have access to those materials,” she explained.

Community access is important for local Indigenous peoples like the Quinnipiac, Mohegan and Wâpanâak in Southern New England, she said, who have sought access to materials preserving their linguistic and cultural roots.

Sánchez expressed hope that the University would facilitate the expansion of Native Studies at Yale, and that new course offerings would help bring University-owned materials into the hands of Native communities and students.

Yale’s Native American Cultural Center is located at 26 High St.