Honoring Dr. Bernard Dov Spolsky: February 11, 1932–August 20, 2022

Honoring Dr. Bernard Dov SpolskyFebruary 11, 1932–August 20, 2022 Teresa L. McCarty [End Page 6] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Bernard Spolsky with Dame Katerina Mataira, Māori language reclamation leader, 2008. (Photo courtesy of Springer Nature, License No. 5527970835886) Bernard dov spolsky, the eminent sociolinguist who led the first comprehensive sociolinguistic study of a Native American language and its implications for education, passed away in Jerusalem on August 20, 2022, surrounded by loving family members. He was 90 years old. Born and raised in Aotearoa/New Zealand to parents of Ukrainian and Russian Polish descent—a family he once described as "plain and humble members of the Wellington Jewish community" (Spolsky, 1994, p. 271)—Bernard Spolsky went on to become a secondary teacher and later, a professor in Canada, the United States, and Israel. A seminal scholar of language policy and educational linguistics, Professor Spolsky had a lifetime commitment to the revitalization and maintenance of Indigenous languages, particularly Māori and Diné, the Indigenous language communities with whom he worked most closely. His scholarly corpus is immense—more than 300 articles and book chapters and 40 books, many of which he wrote after his official "retirement." In this memoriam, based on JAIE coeditor Teresa McCarty's longtime relationship with Professor Spolsky but offered from all of us on the JAIE editorial team, we pay special tribute to Bernard Spolsky's pathbreaking work on the Navajo Reading Study, a landmark project in American Indian bilingual-bicultural-biliteracy education. I first met Professor Spolsky (Bernard) through his work and his words, long before I would ever have the privilege of meeting him in person. I was living and working at Rough Rock, Navajo Nation, Arizona, the site of the first contemporary American Indian community-controlled school. With the school board's and the local chapter's approval, I had embarked on an ethnographic study of the school's [End Page 7] bilingual-bicultural education program. One winter day, in the library of what was then Navajo Community College (now Diné College), I came across a treasure trove of reports from the Navajo Reading Study (NRS), which Bernard directed at the University of New Mexico from 1968 until his departure to Israel with his family in 1980. Working as we were then at Rough Rock, in a test-driven national political climate increasingly hostile to bilingual education, the NRS reports were a blast of fresh air. Here were bilingual education researchers saying something radically new: that instructional effects were likely the least consequential outcome of bilingual education for Navajo and Native American learners, and that those outcomes could not be understood separately from the social, economic, political, cultural, linguistic, religious, and psychological contexts in which bilingual education takes place (Read, Spolsky, & Neundorf, 1975; Spolsky, Green, & Read, 1974). I would like to share the rest of this story as much as possible in Bernard's words, as he and his colleagues wrote them in the dozens of NRS reports left to us, and in his many scholarly writings.1 It was 1968. Bernard had recently arrived at the University of New Mexico (UNM), with the institution's expectation that he would, in his words, "build a new linguistic program that would include … the teaching of English to Spanish speakers and Native Americans" (2010, p. 7). In the wake of the civil rights movement, the U.S. Bilingual Education Act had just been passed. But within the Navajo Nation, bilingual education was almost unheard of; the exceptions were a few schools with early bilingual programs, such as Rough Rock, Rock Point, Borrego Pass, and Ramah. English as a second language (ESL), Bernard wrote, was just being introduced as a "new subject" in some classrooms (2010, p. 2). Shortly after arriving at UNM, Bernard was invited to visit what he described as "a large Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) school" within the Navajo Nation. As he reflected four decades later: It was a three hour drive … the last hour through the … high desert … of … the Navajo Nation. In the midst of this varied and open land, … the school stood out as an alien settlement, surrounded by a wire...

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