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For Stacey Oberly (’92), reclaiming her ancestral language began with a challenge—and a cassette recorder.

Now a linguist and the language program manager for the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, Oberly supports Indigenous language revitalization efforts through community work and education.

Last year, Oberly traveled on Friday and Saturday nights to Towaoc to teach a group of Ute Mountain Ute language instructors to teach as part of Fort Lewis College’s Summer Indigenous Language Development Institute, or SILDI.

The program merges culturally rooted content with pedagogy, creating a sustainable pipeline of Ute language teachers. This year, the second cohort included nine instructors who received their certification in a ceremony this spring.

Oberly said her passion for language began with a deeply personal realization.

“My mother was a fluent Ute speaker, and my father was a fluent Spanish speaker,” Oberly said. “But they chose not to speak those languages to us growing up. They wanted to protect us.”

Oberly said it was a summer field trip with Fort Lewis College when she met a fellow student—a Navajo woman from Cortez—who knew more Ute than she did.

“That really struck me,” Oberly said. “Our tribes were traditionally enemies, and here my ‘enemy’ knew more of my language than I did. I came home, got a cassette recorder, and went to my mom and said, ‘Teach me.’”

Her mother agreed—but only on one condition: Stacey had to prove she learned each word before she could learn more.

“That’s how it started,” Oberly said.

From cassette tapes to a doctorate

After earning her degree in Spanish and an elementary teaching certificate from FLC, Oberly began teaching Ute and Spanish in her community’s public schools. She co-authored Conversational Everyday Ute, a book and cassette project with Ute language educator Georgia McKinley.

That same summer, the tribe brought in Jean Charney, Ph.D., a linguist, to revise the Ute dictionary. Charney noticed Oberly’s keen ear for the language—especially subtle sounds like glottal stops—and told her she was doing the work of a linguist.

“I didn’t even know what a linguist was,” Oberly said. “But I knew then I needed to be one to be taken seriously. So I went and studied linguistics.”

She earned a master’s degree in bilingual multicultural education from the College of Santa Fe, and a doctorate in Native American linguistics from the University of Arizona, where she later taught.

Building a language pipeline

Today, Oberly leads the Southern Ute Tribe’s language program and continues to grow language preservation efforts through collaboration including the SILDI program.

SILDI began through a partnership between FLC and the Southern Ute Tribe as part of a grant from the Administration for Native Americans. The program was run on Friday nights and Saturday in Towaoc. 

Oberly said she hopes to continue working with the college to expand the program into something even broader.

“It would be great if it could be open to many languages,” she said. “Different languages can use the same techniques.”

Multiplying speakers, strengthening communities

Oberly said her latest grant proposal aims to do just that—expand group master-apprentice programs that pair fluent speakers with multiple learners to accelerate language learning.

“With fewer fluent speakers, we need to multiply our efforts,” she said. “When one speaker works with a group, it creates a ripple effect—and more new speakers.”

For Oberly, language revitalization is about more than linguistics. It’s also about healing, resilience, and cultural continuity.

“Language is identity. It connects us to who we are, to each other, and to the land.”