St. Regis

The Akwesasne Freedom School

At this school in upstate New York, students are free to speak Mohawk

Culture

For more than 100 years, the governments of both the United States and Canada forcibly assimilated generations of Native people by taking their children and sending them off to English-only boarding schools — a process the pushed the majority of indigenous languages to the brink of extinction. More than 35 years ago, a small Mohawk tribe in New York decided to fight back — by creating a school of its own.