One of Utah’s indigenous languages — Navajo — has faced a precipitous decline in recent decades.
In 1980, 93% of Navajos spoke their native language. Thirty years later, that number had dipped to 51%. By 2030, the percentage of fluent speakers across the Navajo Nation could be as low as 10%.
On a macro-level, any Navajo language loss marks a cultural and linguistic emergency.
But the loss is also felt on individual levels.
There remain members of the Navajo Nation who speak only their ancestral tongue — and, with each decade, there are fewer people inside their own community with whom they can communicate.
It’s a crisis that Weber State University radiography student Kendra Ellison is witnessing firsthand.
While completing clinical hours at the Northern Navajo Medical Center in Shiprock, New Mexico, Ellison watched when non-English-speaking elders from her tribe arrived at the medical center seeking essential care.
Their faces often betrayed apprehension and fear, even during routine procedures such as X-rays and scans. Simple directions from nurses and technicians such as “Can you please lay flat?” or “Can you hold your breath?” often prompted confusion.
“There was a lack of Navajo translators whenever we would try to find someone to explain, in specific terms, something like a fluoroscopy procedure,” said Ellison, an Army veteran and Navajo Nation member.
“There was clearly a barrier that needed to be overcome.”
And the need for Navajo language skills is just as vital outside of the clinics.
Many elderly people live in remote corners of the vast Navajo Nation stretching across Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. During a medical emergency such as a heart attack or stroke, paramedics and EMTs are often the first to engage with patients. Again, medical-specific Navajo language resources can make a critical difference in delivering lifesaving care, said Ellison.
Such language skills can also improve medical care across the region in disciplines such as physical therapy and home health care.
When Ellison recently attended a gathering for aspiring indigenous female entrepreneurs called Project DreamCatcher, the Navajo elders and their language translation needs was still weighing heavy in her heart and mind.
She soon learned that elderly medical patients from other tribes were facing challenges similar to what she was witnessing in Shiprock.
Blending an impulse to serve her community with her newly acquired business start-up skills, Ellison decided to create an app or some other sort of electronic audio glossary language platform that would allow heath care workers without Navajo language skills to better communicate with their elderly non-English-speaking patients.
Ellison’s ideas and determination to serve others were fueled by supportive Weber State professors who embraced her vision.
“I shared what I was doing with my professors and they loved it,” she said.
Founding a business takes time, sweat, innovation, validation … and then more time and sweat. Ellison’s plans to develop technology to better utilize medical care for Navajo elders is still, she said, “in the beginning phases.”
It’s a daunting task.
Given its unique grammar, syntax and tonal pronunciation, Navajo is a challenging language to learn and speak.
It’s especially difficult to translate into English and other languages.
Many are familiar with the story of the Navajo Code Talkers — a group of U.S. Marines who used their native Navajo language skills to transmit secret messages during World War II. The language’s complexities made it impossible for the enemy to decipher.
But as a person of faith, Ellison is confident her efforts to help her people are being guided by divine power. She is determined to succeed. “(God) has put these different passions in me — and whenever it’s the right time to jump, I’m going to jump,” she said.
Jace Norton is the founder of Maya Bridge, a Utah company that specializes in providing language interpretation services for rare Mayan languages. In recent years, Maya Bridge has expanded to provide translation services for other hard-to-find languages — including indigenous languages spoken in the United States.
Norton recently learned of Ellison and her intention to deliver Navajo language interpretation resources to health care workers.
“I called Kendra, we talked — and I could tell she had a good head on her shoulders and that we shared the same thinking about wanting to help and give back to others,” he told the Deseret News.
Soon, a burgeoning business partnership was in place, with Ellison’s vision leading the project’s initiative.
“We’re going to help Kendra start her own company that we will own a part of as well — and then we can work together to go after different funding opportunities,” said Norton.
“We’re ecstatic to be working directly with Kendra,” he added, “to create something together that will help with this specific (health care) issue — and that can even grow and help with a lot of other different things.”
For now, Ellison is a woman wearing many hats: student, health care professional, business founder.
She plans to continue her education at Weber State by pursuing a bachelor’s degree in computed tomography, even while developing her Navajo language project with Maya Bridge.
Besides improving health care to her community’s grandmothers and grandfathers, Ellison appreciates the cross-generational power found in sharing and preserving her ancestral language.
If Ellson and other young people from her tribe can protect and pass along their Navajo language skills, then, she asks, who knows what amazing things can come about?”
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