Right Relationship Boulder’s 2025 summer camp for Arapaho language and culture. Noobései Nííbei kneels in the front row on the far left wearing a skirt adorned in bright green ribbons. Andrew Cowell stands in the back row, fourth from the right, wearing a black shirt and a red jacket. (Photo by Jake Beyer, YMCA of the Rockies)
Noobései Nííbei (Singing Southern Woman), a retired teacher from Oklahoma, practices the Arapaho language in the car. As she drives down a road, she tries to name off things she sees on the way. It took her months to learn the word ‘semi-truck.’
“Héébe3cébno3eéénotii,” she said.
Semi-truck is a seven-syllable word describing a moving device that’s large and going in a specific direction. These are the implications Noobései Nííbei thinks about when learning a polysynthetic language made up of large word structures. Some Arapaho words translate to a sentence in English.
She grew up knowing sparse words in her people’s language, a common feat for Native kids. She didn’t really start learning Arapaho until adulthood and grew to be functionally fluent after joining the University of Colorado Boulder’s Arapaho Language Project in 2013.
The project’s founder, CU linguistics professor Andrew Cowell, started documenting the Arapaho language around 25 years ago. When he first visited the Northern Arapaho Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, there were significantly more native speakers.
Today, there are fewer than 100 native Arapaho speakers left in the world. All of them are elders, according to Cowell.
Native languages declined throughout centuries of European colonialism and forced assimilation. Children were taught only English in Native boarding schools, many of which didn’t close until the 20th century. Then, Native speakers decided not pass the language down.
Noobései Nííbei recalled that when she was a kid, she heard stories of an elder named Young Bear who told the community not to teach kids Arapaho.
“He said, ‘They’re going to have to try to make this world,’” she said.
Before degradation progressed, Cowell wanted to record every medium possible: Words, songs, prayers and audio recordings. Most importantly, he recorded videos that captured hand gestures and expressions of mundane conversations.
“There’s a lot of culturally specific stuff going on,” Cowell said. “You can’t see it unless you’re seeing the video.”
He got extensive permission to record from individuals and the Tribal Language and Culture Commission. He said almost everybody he worked with was willing and understood the importance of the project.
Not every tribal government would approve the same request, Cowell noted. Among Native tribes, there is growing tension between integrating technological advances and preserving traditions.
Noobései Nííbei and Cowell said that the Arapaho will do what it takes to bring back and maintain their language. It’s sacred, but that should not discourage people from learning it for everyday usage as a way to build connection.
“If you’re constantly saying the language is sacred, then you kind of put it in a little box,” Cowell said. “That just drives people away, sometimes, rather than attracting them.”
Over time, he made a database of over 100,000 sentences, a dictionary of roughly 25,000 words and an educational website. The site offers beginner self-guided lessons that break down Arapaho sounds and basics, but he said it’s intended to be used with a teacher.
Noobései Nííbei joined the Project to help build school curricula and went to Arapaho immersion schools that teach K-12 students following a dual language model. She said that before then, she spent her thirties scavenging the internet for anything on her culture and the language.
“There’s just a yearning there. I see it and hear about it from other people, especially those wanting to know their Arapaho names, or who their family is,” she said.
That’s how the Southern Arapaho teacher ended up in Northern territory on the Wind River Reservation, among found family members lost generations ago.
The North and South separated throughout the mid-1800s amidst growing white settlement, and the 1868 Treaty of Laramie solidified the division by allowing Arapaho territory only north of the North Platte River in Wyoming.
Noobései Nííbei’s mother’s maiden name is Black Bear, after her great-great-granduncle Chief Black Bear, who resisted expansion and was killed by white settlers. Black Bear stayed in Wyoming, but his brother, Six Feathers, went down to Oklahoma.
Many from the North and South have shared bloodlines. Upon discovering shared ancestry, Noobései Nííbei recalled feeling “complete” like broken pieces brought back together.
“It is a very emotional time when we get together, and are able to thank the people who made it possible to go back to our ancestral homelands and reunite with our Northern relatives,” she said.
Noobései Nííbei shares an embrace with Sallie Robinson Ward, a critical organizer for the camp. Noobései Nííbei holds a ribbon skirt with the Northern Arapaho colors on it. The skirt is a gift to Ward, to show appreciation and honor. (Photo by Jake Beyer, YMCA of the Rockies)
She, Cowell and others from Northern and Southern territories united last summer for a language camp hosted by Right Relationship Boulder, a group dedicated to building Indigenous connections. The camp took place at the Snow Mountain Ranch YMCA of the Rockies in Colorado, the primary ancestral homeland of the Arapaho.
An effort to computationally program under-resourced languages
By recording everyday conversations, Cowell broke up complex words into their smallest units. Then, each unit could be assigned a literal meaning and a speech sound. As words grow in complexity and length, linguists apply semantics, the contextual meaning of a word or phrase, and then discourse.
This is how he systematically kept track of sentence meaning to program Arapaho, or enable computers to understand and translate the language. Concurrently, CU researchers, including Cowell and computational linguistics PhD student Benet Post, paired with international universities to further develop a 2012 semantics project called Uniform Meaning Representation (UMR).
UMR is a modified version of the preexisting Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR), which linguists use to systematically graph the meaning of a sentence. Post said AMR is most efficient for Indo-European languages like English, whereas UMR modifications facilitate cross-lingual annotation.
The purpose of UMR is to extend programming to non-Western languages. Post uses UMR primarily for Quechua dialects of South America, but she and Cowell contributed to a 2024 paper that applied UMR to Arapaho using examples from Cowell’s linguistic database.
They translated the Arapaho sentence “ne’toukutooxebei3i’ hinit neeheyeiniihi’” to English, which means, “Then they tied their horses right there nearby.”
Throughout centuries of European colonialism, thousands of Native languages have gone extinct. Of 7,159 known living languages, the Ethnologue reports that about 50% of them are in trouble or endangered, including Arapaho. However, digital language support is growing as a result of documentation from Cowell and collaboration with Northern and Southern Arapaho people.
“I think it’s really valuable to do linguistic inquiry into other languages that are not English and other non-Indo-European languages,” Post said. “If anything, [language projects] should be reassuring to people that actual linguistic inquiry is going into their language. That shows that it’s valid.”
Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Sarah Taylor at Sarah.Taylor@colorado.edu
