I go to pow-wows annually. It's not all beautiful. There's still lots of racism, drug use and alcoholism. Racism is especially bad, I have friends that we're basically ostracized from their tribes for having non native fathers. The annual pow-wows sometimes feel like one big D.A.R.E. lecture and it's really sad because they talk about how every other generation gets caught up in addiction and grandparents are always raising grandkids.

My mother intentionally never got us properly set up for tribal membership because she didn't want us anywhere near the negative aspects of the culture. (I'm also not even sure if I could qualify despite tracing my ancestry back to the baker rolls.) And she didn't even grow up on the rez, just in Appalachia. It's been a blessing and a curse.

Navajo alone is spoken by 200,000 people. I'm learning lushootseed, the Salish language of the Seattle area, to help in its revival. Beautiful phonemes and totally unlike English.. it doesn't seem to have nouns exactly, and all words are made of many particles.

They're teaching it in reservation schools right now.. hopefully in another 15 years there'll be an active speaker community!

Not really the same thing. Most are just a shell of their former culture and independence.

It’s similar to native Hawaiians. Despite significant effort, that culture is being drowned by tourists and the massive non-native population influencing them. Sure, you can celebrate the culture and the language, but it doesn’t even begin to give you a glimpse of what it could have been without European invasions.