I am from the village of Kewa, located between Santa Fe and Albuquerque, New Mexico.

I am a speaker of the Keres language, which is spoken in seven villages/communities in central New Mexico. Each village has its own distinct dialect; however, these dialects are mutually intelligible to various degrees based on location.

Keres is considered a language isolate and an endangered language (Ethnologue, 2024) with fewer than 10,000 speakers.

Each village/community is governed independently and practices sovereign rights as recognized through its own historical “time-immemorial” experience and interactions with the Spanish colonial government, the Mexican government, the Territory/State of New Mexico government, and currently the United States government. These sovereign rights include language, cultural, and religious practices.

Because of the sovereign rights of the villages, our language is claimed as the “intellectual property” of each village.

My language has not been taught in classrooms or schools; it has largely relied on daily use within the home and community to maintain its vitality. However, within the last 30 or so years, there has been a dramatic shift to English use by younger people. It seems, however, that the language vitality of young people also depends on the family to which they belong.

Around 2010, the elders and leaders of the community authorized the teaching of my language in schools.

My language is not written, largely because of our experience with aggressive collection by anthropologists and ethnographers of the early 1900s. There is no impetus to create a written language.

I have been a teacher of our language since about 2014 and have explored various pedagogies and approaches to teach our language to high school students. I graduated from Harvard Graduate School of Education – Learning Design, Innovation, and Technology in 2024. I hope to extend my understanding of LD and experiences to create language teaching that is authentic to my people’s language learning. Here at MIT, I wish to extend my knowledge of linguistics to build foundations for our community’s language future.