CNAIS Director, Andrew Cowell, Partners with Arapaho Community to Revitalize Language

For nearly three decades, Professor Andrew Cowell from CU Boulder, and current Director of CNAIS, has partnered closely with the Northern Arapaho community to support the growth and vitality of the Arapaho language.

After arriving in Colorado in 1995, Dr. Cowell began learning from Arapaho speakers on the Wind River Reservation, building long-term relationships that shaped a shared vision for language renewal. Over many years of collaboration, community members, educators, and researchers have recorded natural conversations, documented everyday speech, and created one of the most extensive Indigenous language databases in North America.

The collaborating working is fueling a new chapter of language learning in Arapaho community. Teachers are using curricula drawn from the database to support students from early elementary through high school, and dual-language classrooms are emerging on the Wind River Reservation. For more information on this Dr. Andrew Cowell's work with the Arapaho people, please see the following articles:

• University of Colorado professor works with Northern Arapaho to revitalize and teach the language
• A database could help revive the Arapaho language before its last speakers are gone