There is a particular kind of violence that comes with being spoken of only in the past tense. For generations, Indigenous cultures across the “United States” and beyond have been described by outsiders as “vanishing,” deemed as artifacts to be salvaged before they disappear entirely. Museums have built entire wings based on that premise. Textbooks still frame Native nations as a chapter that has closed. But walk onto a seed farm in the Midwest of the “U.S.,” sit in a language nest in Hawaii, or watch a bison herd move across restored grassland in “Montana,” and a different story unfolds, one where tradition is not a relic preserved behind glass but a practice still evolving, adapting, and being debated.

This is the story that matters now: not whether Indigenous cultures survived colonization but how they continue to exist in ways that refuse the framework that views Indigeneity as extinct.

Keeping Traditions Alive Through Language

Language is often treated as the clearest marker of cultural death or survival, and the numbers explain why. A 2016 joint analysis by the “U.S.” Departments of Education, Interior, and Health and Human Services found that dozens of Indigenous languages are critically endangered, including Eyak in “Alaska,” which has no first-language speakers, and many others with only a handful of fluent Elders remaining. The report warned that, without sustained revitalization efforts, fewer than 20 Native languages may still be in active use in the country by 2050.

That trajectory did not happen by accident. Between 1819 and the late twentieth century, the U.S. government operated a nationwide system of Indigenous boarding schools designed to assimilate Native children into Euro-American society. The “U.S.” Department of the Interior identified more than 18,000 Indian children who attended Federal Indian boarding schools, where they were forcibly separated from their families and communities and often forbidden from speaking their languages, practicing their traditions, or maintaining cultural ties. The lasting effects include interrupted language transmission, intergenerational trauma, and the loss of cultural knowledge that many Indigenous communities are now working to restore. In October 2024, the “U.S.” government, under then-Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the first Native American cabinet secretary in the “U.S.”, formally acknowledged this history through the final volume of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report, Volume II.

But the response to that history is not archival. It is instructional, communal, and ongoing. The Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project, a collaboration among the Assonet, Mashpee, Aquinnah, and Herring Pond Wampanoag communities, whose ancestral homelands span southeastern “Massachusetts” and the islands of “Martha’s Vineyard” and “Nantucket,” has spent decades rebuilding fluency in the Wôpanâak language, which had no fluent native speakers by the late nineteenth century. Using historical documents to reconstruct its grammar and vocabulary, the project now teaches the language through community classes, educational programs, and immersion initiatives, helping children and adults learn and use Wôpanâak in everyday life. Similar efforts are taking place in other Indigenous communities. The Northern Cheyenne Language Consortium, which serves the Northern Cheyenne Nation in southeastern Montana, develops textbooks, dictionaries, digital resources, and teacher training materials to strengthen the use of the Cheyenne language in schools, homes, and community life. Likewise, the Apache Language Consortium, which supports several Apache Nations across Arizona and New Mexico, develops language learning materials, curriculum resources, and educator training to revitalize Apache languages for new generations rather than preserve them solely as historical records.

While the “U.S.” federal government took an important symbolic step with the release of its 10 Year National Plan on Native Language Revitalization, released in December 2024, many of its recommendations remain aspirational rather than fully implemented. The plan proposed expanding language nests for children under seven, establishing 100 new Native language immersion schools, training 10,000 Native language teachers, and increasing direct support for community-led revitalization efforts in partnership with Tribal Nations. It also acknowledged that existing federal investment was insufficient: Native language revitalization programs administered through the Departments of the Interior, Education, and Health and Human Services received approximately $41.5 million in fiscal year 2024, while the plan estimates that achieving its goals will require a $16.7 billion investment over the following decade. Although existing grant programs, including the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Program, continue to receive federal funding, Congress has not appropriated funding at the scale envisioned by the plan. As a result, Indigenous communities continue to carry much of the work of language revitalization themselves, defining fluency and cultural renewal according to their own priorities rather than external benchmarks.

Foodways as an Act of Return

Just as communities are revitalizing their languages to preserve their cultures, food sovereignty movements are reclaiming traditional food systems to protect Indigenous knowledge, identity, and ways of life. For many Indigenous Nations, seed keeping is about more than preserving crops. Seeds carry generations of ecological knowledge, planting and harvesting practices, ceremonies, and relationships to the land. Saving and replanting ancestral seeds helps ensure that these traditions continue to be practiced, while strengthening Indigenous food sovereignty and reducing dependence on commercial seed systems.

The Indigenous Seed Keepers Network⁠, a program of the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance⁠, supports Tribal communities across North America through regional networks, including an Upper Midwest network serving Indigenous communities in “Minnesota,” “Wisconsin,” “Michigan,” “Iowa,” “North Dakota,” and “South Dakota.” Through a partnership with the “U.S.” Department of Agriculture, the network has helped establish six regional Indigenous seed-saving hubs and distributed seed-cleaning fanning mills that allow communities to preserve and replant traditional varieties of corn, beans, squash, sunflowers, and other culturally significant crops while expanding local seed access and seed stewardship.

Writing in the Indiana Daily Student⁠, columnist Odessa Lyon argues that seed sovereignty is inseparable from resisting industrial monoculture because Indigenous seeds preserve more than biodiversity; they also sustain foodways, seasonal growing practices, creation stories, community knowledge, and reciprocal relationships with the land that have shaped Indigenous life for generations.

Chefs are another part of this continuum, transforming many of the traditional ingredients safeguarded through Indigenous seed stewardship and food sovereignty efforts into everyday meals that reconnect communities with their culinary heritage. Sean Sherman, an Oglala Lakota chef from the Pine Ridge Reservation in “South Dakota,” and Crystal Wahpepah, a citizen of the Kickapoo Tribe of “Oklahoma,” have partnered with the “U.S.” Department of Agriculture’s Indigenous Food Sovereignty Initiative to develop recipes and educational videos featuring Indigenous ingredients such as wild rice, corn, squash, beans, berries, and bison. Designed for home kitchens and community use, these resources encourage Native families to cook with traditional foods as part of everyday life. The Traditional Eastern Woodlands Foodways Alliance has extended this work by advocating for Indigenous foods to be recognized as reimbursable items in school meal programs, helping bring culturally significant foods into school cafeterias and reconnecting Native students with culinary traditions that have sustained their communities for generations.

Land as Relationship, Not Backdrop

Perhaps nowhere is the living, evolving nature of tradition clearer than in the return of bison to Tribal lands. For many Plains Nations, including the Blackfeet Nation in “Montana,” the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of “Oklahoma,” the Rosebud Sioux Tribe in “South Dakota,” and the Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes of the Fort Peck Reservation in “Montana,” bison have long been central to cultural, spiritual, and economic life. They feature in creation stories, ceremonies, seasonal gatherings, and traditional ecological knowledge, while providing food, clothing, tools, and shelter. By the late 1880s, the bison population had plummeted from an estimated 30 to 60 million at the beginning of the nineteenth century to fewer than 1,000 animals. The decline was driven by commercial hide hunting, widespread sport shooting by westward settlers and railroad travelers, and “U.S.” military-backed policies that promoted the destruction of bison to undermine the lifeways and resistance of Plains Indigenous Nations.

Today, the InterTribal Buffalo Council works with more than 80 Tribal Nations to return live bison from public and conservation herds to Tribal lands, where they are managed by Indigenous communities for cultural revitalization, ecological restoration, and food sovereignty. The council carries out this work in partnership with organizations including The Nature Conservancy and the National Wildlife Federation. In 2025 alone, more than 20 tribal nations welcomed over 1,500 bison back to their lands, part of a total exceeding 25,000 now under Tribal stewardship across the “United States.”

What makes this a living practice rather than a preservation project is the language participants use to describe it. For many Plains Indigenous Nations, bison are not viewed simply as wildlife but as relatives whose presence sustains cultural, spiritual, and ecological relationships. Their return makes it possible to revive ceremonies, seasonal harvest traditions, hide tanning, meat preparation, storytelling, and the transmission of traditional ecological knowledge that depend on bison remaining part of everyday community life. Tribal leaders and conservation partners alike describe this process as rematriation, an Indigenous framework for restoring relationships and balance rather than simply restocking animals. At the Fort Peck Reservation in northeastern “Montana,” the Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes have paired herd expansion with youth programs that teach winter counts, traditional ecological knowledge, and range science, treating bison restoration as inseparable from teaching younger generations how to care for the land and understand their cultural responsibilities. Jason Baldes, an Eastern Shoshone bison program manager, has described the work as reconnecting communities with relationships that federal policies deliberately disrupted, framing restoration not as nostalgia but as cultural renewal and healing.

Continuity as Resistance

None of these traditions, whether expressed through language revitalization, seed stewardship, or bison restoration, reflect a culture in decline. Instead, they reveal Indigenous communities actively negotiating what it means to carry knowledge forward under conditions colonialism never intended them to survive. Every seed hub, language immersion classroom, and bison herd is also an argument: that Indigenous Nations are not curators of their own history but authors of its next chapter. The distinction matters because the archive frame allows outside institutions to decide when a culture is over. The living practice frame does not ask permission.

What survival looks like now is not simply the preservation of traditions, but the assertion of Indigenous self-determination. Across the “United States,” Native Nations are rebuilding languages once pushed to the brink of extinction, restoring traditional food systems through community-led seed stewardship, and returning more than 25,000 bison to Tribal care. Together, these efforts challenge the long-standing narrative that Indigenous cultures belong to the past. They show that tradition is not measured by how faithfully it reproduces history, but by its ability to adapt, sustain communities, and shape the future on Indigenous terms. What is being preserved is not only language, food, or bison, but the relationships, knowledge systems, and responsibilities that have connected Indigenous peoples to their lands for generations. In that sense, survival is no longer simply about enduring—it is about defining what comes next.