Spanish language teacher creates a curriculum that can be used to teach tribal languages
Christopher Parkin, a non-Indian married to a member of the Colville Nation, taught Spanish in public schools in the state of Washington for many years prior to finding his true calling: the soulful challenge of tribal language preservation. Since that epiphany Parkin and his wife LaRae Wiley have dedicated their time on the planet to help interior Salish speaking tribes in the Northwest develop methods to learn and preserve their tribal tongues.
Through the years he and his wife have learned various dialects of the Salish language from some of the remaining fluent speakers Northwest and Canada. And they have developed a method and curriculum that jump-starts then juices the efforts of tribal language preservationists in their salvation of the tribal tongues before the fast setting sun sets on them.