With the help of their community and a language app developer, two Indigenous teachers have brought Swinomish Lushootseed classes to the palms of people’s hands.
Since “Swinomish Lushootseed” made its debut on Apple and Google Play last spring, Olivia Bailey has run into fellow tribal members using the app and greeting her with words once customary to her people.
It’s an encouraging sign for the future of this endangered oral dialect, which the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community has been working to revitalize for over a decade.
Lushootseed is spoken by 13 tribes in a region that extends from Olympia to the Skagit watershed and from Hood Canal to the Cascades. Swinomish Lushootseed is part of the Northern Lushootseed dialect, which is also spoken by the Upper Skagit, Sauk-Suiattle, Stillaguamish and neighboring peoples.
This very area, as well as the greater Pacific Northwest, is among six regions worldwide that are categorized as under “severe” threat of language loss by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, which counts roughly 20 regions under low, medium, high or severe risk.
When she moved to the Swinomish Reservation as a teenager to join her grandparents, Olivia noticed that “hardly anyone” in her new community spoke their ancestral language. Kyle Bailey, who would later become her husband and colleague, didn’t have anyone who could speak to or teach him while growing up, despite living in the tribe his whole life.
This was a stark difference from Olivia’s childhood on the Hopi Reservation , a sovereign nation in Northeastern Arizona, where the Hopi language was part of her everyday life and identity.
Bringing back the language
The loss of Indigenous languages is predominantly attributed to residential schools, institutions that operated between the 1800s and 1978 to systematically eradicate Indigenous culture and force young generations of Natives to assimilate into the dominant American society that spoke English and practiced Christianity.
The U.S. funded hundreds of residential schools around the country, often run in partnership with churches. Many students endured physical, sexual or mental abuse in these institutions where over 3,100 children died under the custody of the government, according to an investigation by the Washington Post.
As many among the older generations chose not to pass down their native language in an effort to protect children from abuse, the number of speakers shrunk. Olivia has heard of scolding looks elders would get in their youth whenever they attempted to speak the Swinomish dialect, but refrains from inquiring about residential schools out of fear of bringing back traumatic memories.
During her first years in the Swinomish Tribe, Olivia recalled, she didn’t care much about learning Lushootseed. But as time went on, she felt sadness at the idea of the language fading away.
Kyle and Olivia began taking Northern Lushootseed classes at Northwest Indian College’s Swinomish campus in 2012, thinking it would be a fun activity to do together but also a way to reconnect with their heritage.
“Being Native American, I feel like language brings you back to your roots and awakens something in you,” Olivia said. “Having part of the language just in your life, in your home, or even just somewhere, it makes you proud.”
Their interest soon developed into a passion and a way for Olivia to learn more about her Swinomish side of the family. While taking classes, the Baileys started teaching preschoolers at the college’s Tulalip location and, in 2019, they began working at La Conner High School as tribal employees. Now, they are in their second year of teaching Northern Lushootseed as certified teachers.
The Baileys came up with the idea of an app as an attempt to further support students in learning and to reach more community members by making the lessons more accessible.
In 2022, the La Conner School District approved the use of grant funding for the app, which was developed by Thornton Media in collaboration with the district and the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community.
The app was created in three years with input from the tribe and the students, Olivia said.
Many Swinomish community members, including children, adults and elders, responded to a call for volunteers to pose for photos in traditional clothes and record words and phrases.
Users can learn over 570 words from 27 units, like food and drinks, animals, colors, numbers and clothes. The app also includes 10 traditional songs performed by the Swinomish Canoe Family, as well as historical photos with descriptive text, and credits all the community members who participated in the photoshoots and voice recording sessions.
Reconnecting with the past
Farther north, the Ferndale School District has been offering Lummi language classes at the middle and high schools as part of the Native American Education program, which started in 1994.
Matt Warbus, who goes by his Indigenous name Smak i’ ya’, said some people have been surprised to learn that he is a Lummi instructor, and are even more surprised to learn the Lummi language is still in use.
Smak i’ ya’ has 25 years of experience teaching the dialect, which he learned primarily as an adult. While growing up in Lynden, he learned some from a daily 30-minute class at the Lummi high school and from his grandmother, a residential school survivor who hardly ever talked about her experience.
While a number of people in the community are learning and practicing, the fear instilled by residential schools is still present for some adults, he said. At the beginning of his teaching career, tribal members had mixed feelings about teaching the language to the younger generations.
Smak i’ ya’ refers to those who know the language but choose not to speak it as “silent speakers.” In his grandmother’s case, it took some time for her to finally teach him and his cousin some words.
The turning point came in 1999, years after his grandmother’s passing.
Smak i’ ya’ was among hundreds of people sifting through the dirt to recover human remains and ancient artifacts at Semiahmoo Spit, where more than 100 Indigenous graves had been disturbed and partly stolen while crews worked on the City of Blaine’s sewage treatment plant expansion project.
At the time, he recalled, the Lummi Nation wanted tribal members involved in the project to know the Lummi language and held a 20-minute class every morning before workers headed to the ancient burial site.
Supporting the recovery efforts was a gratifying experience, he said, as he felt he was doing something meaningful for his ancestors. This inspired him to improve his Lummi skills and later landed him a job as a teacher for the Lummi Nation’s language department.
Today, Smak i’ ya’ works at Ferndale High School, where aside from teaching Lummi vocabulary and grammar, he takes students on field trips to talk about medicinal plants, fishing and hunting grounds and the history of Indigenous place names.
As he watches students grow from freshmen to grads, he is glad to see their understanding and appreciation for the culture grow as well and hopes they will continue to pass down the knowledge to their children and grandchildren.
“Being able to speak your language is the most important thing,” he said. “We learn the language because this is who we are.”
‘Yoda talk’
For Olivia and Kyle, who speak some Lushootseed in their home and mostly in class, communication might get a little more complicated with Lushootseed speakers from other tribes. Within the Lushootseed family, the dialects can be different in a way that Kyle likened to the Spanish spoken in Mexico and Spain.
Syntax can also be a challenge. To this day, Kyle and Olivia need to take a moment before they say a sentence to avoid messing up the structure, which they likened to “Yoda talk.” The sentence structure from the Star Wars franchise follows an object-subject-verb order as opposed to the subject-verb-object structure of English.
In Swinomish Lushootseed, a word is placed at the beginning of a sentence for emphasis, Kyle said.
For example, “I am very hungry” becomes “Very am I hungry” — or “day̓ čəd ʔəstagʷəxʷ” — where the speaker emphasizes the intensity of their hunger. For English speakers, the sentence sounds like “dye ch-uh-d us-tog-waa,” Kyle wrote in an email.
Lushootseed was revitalized by Vi Hilbert, a fluent Lushootseed speaker from the Upper Skagit Tribe who spent over 40 years building and maintaining a research archive of the Lushootseed language and culture at the University of Washington. Her efforts inspired the creation of tribal language programs across Western Washington.
Thanks to her collection, which is housed at the UW Ethnomusicology Archives, teachers like Olivia and Kyle are able to listen to and learn from old voice recordings.
Smak i’ ya’ also has access to a limited collection of old recordings that are stored in his office. One of the linguists came from as far as the University of Arizona to record his teacher’s teacher, Al Charles.
To explain the extent of his knowledge, he said that if his teacher, Bill James, knew half of what their ancestors did, he now knows a fraction of that.
There have been times when Smak i’ ya’ realized he had been pronouncing a word slightly wrong and times when he needed to focus before saying something. In other cases, he was corrected by other speakers who have strong opinions about which words are more authentic than others.
The Lummi dialect is part of the North Straits Salish languages, which are spoken on Southern Vancouver Island and Western Washington and include the extinct Ts’ooke, Semiahmoo and Songish dialects, as well as Saanich and Samish, which still have some speakers.
The Lummi dialect shares some words with the Lushootseed dialects, Smak i’ ya’ said, though when it comes to actual sentences, “it’s a world of difference.” On the other hand, when he visits the Lower Elwha Tribe in the Olympic Peninsula, he can understand most of what they say because they speak Klallam, a close relative of the Northern Straits dialects but its own separate language with several dialects.
Sometimes, the Lummi dialect, also known as Xwlemi Chosen, follows a similar sentence structure to English and on other occasions, it follows the verb-subject order, which he said can be confusing.
When he first started to learn, he had a particularly hard time pronouncing some words and phrases, like those with blended sounds such as “xw,” which to non-Lummi speakers can sound like an exhalation.
“When we say the difficult ones, sometimes we have to sit back and laugh a little bit because of the way that it sounds,” he said.
Learning a language that looks and sounds completely different from English is no easy task, especially with limited documentation and few remaining fluent speakers.
While Smak i’ ya’ finds that keeping an endangered language alive can be difficult in the era of modern distractions, he believes technology can be used to help preserve this integral part of Indigenous identity. As younger generations seem more open to learning the dialect and participating in cultural activities, Kyle believes more people will speak it.
For these three teachers, learning has been an ongoing process of ups and downs, but they remain hopeful for the future.
By Luisa Loi
Also read in Salish Current:
• “Keeping Indigenous wisdom afloat,” Sept. 26, 2025
• “‘Storm before the calm’: The making of Tribal Canoe Journeys,” Sept. 22, 2025
• “Lummi reclaims traditional name for TiLeqw-iLhch at Haida Point,” July 11, 2025
• “Children of the Setting Sun expands vision in new space,” July 7, 2025