This chapter argues that disciplining of bilingual education as a scholarly field served to divorce discussions of bilingual education from broader political and economic struggles in favor of the seemingly objective pursuit of the benefits of bilingual education. This disciplining of bilingual education was part of a larger discursive shift that reframed discussions of racial inequality from a focus on unequal access and the need for structural change to a focus on the deficiencies of racialized communities and the need for modifying these deficiencies. The chapter ends with a call for bilingual education scholars to situate issues of language inequality within the broader white supremacist and capitalist relations of power. This will offer bilingual education scholars tools for rejecting deficit perspectives of language-minoritized children and pointing to the broader racial stratification that makes these deficit perspectives possible to begin with.

Forty years ago there were approximately fifty child speakers of Hawaiian in the state of Hawai‘i. Today there are thousands of speakers of all ages and a constellation of pre-K–PhD programs to promote the Hawaiian language and culture. In the early 1990s, there were no living speakers of myaamia (Miami) or Wôpanâak (Wampanoag), both North American Algonquian languages. Today, these languages, once decreed “extinct,” live in vibrant community-based education programs and family homes. Drawing on an international scholarly literature and the author’s long-term collaborative research with Indigenous educators, this chapter reflects backward and forward on the field of Indigenous language reclamation, tracing its development against the violence of settler colonialism and exploring current movements, their challenges, and the language planning and policymaking possibilities they suggest. In an age of growing raciolinguistic inequality, these movements provide both a cautionary tale and a vision of the interventions necessary to support Indigenous self-determination and sustain linguistic diversity for all.