The Navajo Language Program, originally called the Navajo Reading Study, was founded in 1970 by Dr. Bernard Spolksy as a project of the Interdepartmental Program in Linguistics and Language Pedagogy. Its goal was to produce Navajo language materials and to promote literacy in the Navajo language. That same year, the Interdepartmental Program in Linguistics and Language Pedagogy helped design UNM’s first Navajo language courses; these were taught by Irene Silentman in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages. In 1973, the same year that the Linguistics Department was formally established, the Navajo Reading Study developed the Teacher Training Project. This project’s aim was to prepare Navajo educators for bilingual education. While the Department of Modern and Classical Languages continued to offer courses in Navajo, the Navajo Reading Study officially ended in 1977 with the completion of Dr. Robert Young and Dr. William Morgan’s seminal work, The Navajo Language: A Grammar and Colloquial Dictionary.
At this time, the Department of Linguistics expressed its desire for the study, now officially called the Navajo Language Program, to continue to conduct research in linguistics and educational linguistics by joining their department. However, due to budgets and departmental structures, the program remained part of the Department of Modern and Classical Languages for the next ten years; there, it helped with the creation and maintenance of the Navajo language classes. The Navajo Language Program was finally integrated into the Department of Linguistics in 1988. In 2003, the program began to offer Navajo Language as an undergraduate minor; this change was thanks to the efforts of Roseann Willink, who began as a Navajo instructor back in 1980. Four years later, Dr. Sherman Wilcox and Dr. Melvatha Chee (who was a graduate student at the time) lobbied the New Mexico legislature to secure funding for a tenure track professor, staff, and teaching assistants for the program. In Fall 2019, Dr. Melvatha Chee joined the faculty of the Department of Linguistics and began as the director of the Navajo Language Program. Amelia Black was hired as the primary instructor in 2021, and, thanks to her expertise, the program started using an immersion method of instruction for its introductory courses. The program also started offering online immersion courses in 2021, which has been popular with students who do not live in Albuquerque. The Navajo Language Program celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2020.
You can learn more details about our history by visiting the pages listed below.