12/25/2025
Indigenous Women are the Backbones of their families and communities, as our Lakota Relatives say
Big Warm, Montana, 1941. Five-year-old Minerva Crantz spoke two languages her government didn't want her to know.
Assiniboine and Gros Ventre—the languages of her French Chippewa father and Assiniboine-Gros Ventre mother—flowed naturally from her lips as she played on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation with her grandparents. These were the languages of her ancestors, carrying centuries of stories, wisdom, and identity.
But across America, the federal government was still operating under a different philosophy. One that had guided Indian policy for over 60 years: "Kill the Indian, save the man."
Between 1869 and the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Native American children had been forcibly removed from their families and sent to boarding schools designed to erase their cultures. Children as young as five were taken hundreds of miles from home, forbidden to speak their languages, punished brutally if they did, given English names, forced to cut their hair, and taught that everything about their heritage was inferior and shameful.
The goal wasn't education. It was cultural extinction.
At these schools, speaking your native language meant beatings, confinement, deprivation. Thousands of children died from disease, malnutrition, and abuse. Those who survived often returned home unable to speak to their own grandparents, their cultural identity shattered, their languages forgotten.
By the time Minerva Crantz was learning Assiniboine and Gros Ventre in 1941, both languages were already dying. The last traditional speaker of Gros Ventre would die in 1981. Assiniboine had maybe 200 speakers left, most elderly. An entire way of understanding the world—thousands of years of accumulated knowledge—was vanishing within a single generation.
Minerva learned English not through punishment, but through singing songs with her teacher at the reservation school. She was brilliant—tutoring other Native students, graduating eighth grade at just twelve years old. She continued her education in Flandreau, South Dakota, until her grandfather died. He'd been a well-known tribal policeman for twenty-five years, a bridge between two worlds.
She finished high school in Lodge Pole at seventeen, then attended Northern Montana College. She had dreams. She had potential. She had two languages in her head that were slipping away from the world.
Then her mother died unexpectedly.
Minerva was fifteen years old. On October 6, 1951, she married John Allen in Malta, Montana. She would raise eight children of her own. That alone would have been a full life.
But then six more children came into her life—abandoned by their parents, with nowhere else to go.
Minerva took them in.
Fourteen children total. She raised all of them while her languages continued dying, while her people's stories were being forgotten, while the government's century-long project of cultural erasure was nearly complete.
Most women in her situation would have focused on survival. Getting everyone fed, clothed, educated. Keeping the family together. That would have been enough.
Minerva looked at those fourteen children and saw something else: the last generation who might still learn.
She went back to school.
While raising fourteen children on a Montana reservation—where poverty, limited resources, and the legacy of trauma from boarding schools made every day a challenge—Minerva Crantz Allen earned a bachelor's degree from Central Michigan University.
Then a master's degree from Northern Montana State College.
Then completed additional coursework at Weber State College in Utah.
Think about that for a moment. A Native American woman on a reservation, raising fourteen children, traveling to three different states for higher education in an era when Indigenous people faced massive discrimination in academia. When Native women were statistically the poorest, most marginalized demographic in America. When her own people's languages were dying and taking their cultural knowledge with them.
She didn't do it for herself. She did it because she understood what was at stake.
Starting in 1970, Allen took her education back to her community. She worked in the Hays-Lodge Pole school system, becoming director of Head Start for eight years—ensuring the youngest children got the foundation they needed.
But her real mission was preservation.
She wrote Nakoda Sky People—a guide for bilingual projects that could teach children their own languages. She published two books of poetry, including Spirits Rest in 1981, capturing the voice and worldview of her people. She wrote an Assiniboine history book specifically for use in reservation classrooms, so children could learn their own history from their own perspective, in their own words.
She taught Nakota language classes twice a week, year after year after year. Not as a job—as a calling. Because every child who learned even a few words was another thread connecting them to ancestors going back millennia.
In the early 1990s, she was named Indian Educator of the Year—recognition of what everyone on the reservation already knew. Minerva Allen wasn't just teaching languages. She was keeping them alive against impossible odds.
The statistics were devastating. By the time she was doing this work, Gros Ventre had fewer than ten elderly first-language speakers, none fully fluent. Assiniboine had maybe 200 speakers total across Montana, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. Without intervention, both languages would die within a generation.
Everything Minerva did—every book written, every class taught, every child tutored—was a form of resistance against a century-long federal policy designed to make her languages extinct.
She formally retired from education in 1996. She was 60 years old. She'd raised fourteen children, earned two college degrees, written multiple books, taught thousands of students, served as director of Head Start, and been recognized as one of the most important educators in Indian Country.
She didn't stop.
She volunteered in the community. She offered language classes. She served on the Fort Belknap College Board, Head Start Board, Senior Citizen Board, Montana State University Elder Board, and the Montana Association of Bilingual Education. She coordinated the Lodge Pole senior programs. She advised two Montana State University presidents.
She lived on her ranch in Big Warm with cattle and horses, teaching Nakota twice a week into her eighties, passing on knowledge that had nearly been lost.
She was doing what her government had spent a century trying to prevent: ensuring that her people's languages, stories, and ways of knowing survived.
On May 24, 2024, one month after her 88th birthday, Minerva Crantz Allen died.
The languages she spent her life preserving are still here.
Courses in Gros Ventre and Assiniboine are taught at Fort Belknap Community College—the school bears a language preservation building dedicated to keeping both languages alive. Her books are still used in classrooms. Students she taught are now teaching their own children and grandchildren.
The federal boarding school policy failed to kill these languages because people like Minerva refused to let them die.
But here's what haunts me about this story: We almost lost it all.
If Minerva—one woman, raising fourteen children, facing poverty and discrimination—hadn't made the choice to go back to school, to write those books, to teach those classes week after week for decades—would Gros Ventre exist today? Would Assiniboine? Would those thousands of years of accumulated knowledge, those ways of understanding the world, those connections to ancestors, be completely gone?
How many languages did we lose because there wasn't a Minerva Allen to save them?
The federal boarding school policy was explicitly designed to commit cultural genocide. The phrase "Kill the Indian, save the man" wasn't metaphorical—it meant destroying everything that made Indigenous peoples who they were. Their languages, their religions, their names, their hair, their clothes, their stories, their ways of seeing the world.
For a century, the full weight of the federal government, backed by churches and funded by taxpayer money, worked systematically to make Indigenous cultures extinct.
And it nearly worked.
Minerva Crantz Allen stood against that. A five-year-old girl who spoke two endangered languages became a woman who ensured those languages would outlive her. She didn't do it with grand declarations or political movements. She did it by raising fourteen children while earning graduate degrees. By writing books used in classrooms. By teaching language classes twice a week until she was in her eighties.
She did it by refusing to let her people's voices be silenced.
When historians talk about resistance to cultural genocide, they often focus on political leaders, activist movements, dramatic confrontations. But resistance also looks like Minerva Allen: driving to three different states for college courses while raising fourteen kids. Writing curriculum for bilingual education. Teaching Nakota every week to children whose great-grandparents had been beaten for speaking it.
That's not just preservation. That's defiance.
Every child who speaks Assiniboine today speaks partly in Minerva's voice. Every student who learns Gros Ventre words carries forward knowledge she refused to let die. Every book she wrote is an act of cultural survival.
She was born in 1936—when boarding schools were still operating, when speaking her languages could get children beaten, when the government's position was still that Indigenous cultures should be eliminated.
She died in 2024—when her languages are taught at tribal colleges, when her books are used in classrooms, when her people's stories are told in their own words.
That change didn't happen by accident. It happened because Minerva Crantz Allen raised fourteen children, earned two degrees, wrote multiple books, taught thousands of students, and refused to let her people's languages die.
She spoke two languages the government tried to erase.
She saved them both.
And in doing so, she ensured that her people's voices—silenced for generations—would be heard again.
