FORT WASHAKIE - Wilfred Ferris is proud of his heritage as a member of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe.

He was born in Lander and is old enough, he says, to remember a time when the language of his elders was spoken far more frequently than it is by those of his generation.

"There was a time when you always heard our own language spoken in the community," he said.

There was also a time, older members of the Eastern Shoshone said, when their language, culture and heritage were all but banned from the classrooms they learned in, to the point that the language their parents were born with nearly vanished.

"It saddened me," said Pansy St. Clair, a member of the Eastern Shoshone who was educated in those classrooms. "I didn't ask questions because I was always afraid to ask."

She spoke the language at home, St. Clair said, but never at her mission school on the Wind River Indian Reservation. "It kind of mixes you up," she said.

Like the Northern Arapaho are attempting to do with the help of a five-year federal grant, members of the Eastern Shoshone are looking for ways to expand the language to children as young as three years old, in hopes that the little ones will grow up with the language and culture their elders might have forgotten.

The Eastern Shoshone Certification Committee is just beginning to recruit Eastern Shoshone language instructors who would teach children in preschool programs their native language and culture, and expand it later to elementary-aged children and their parents.

They're also looking to access money from a federal law passed in December that preserves languages once frequently spoken by Indians to pay for some of the instruction.

Though the idea is still in its infancy, Ferris said reinvigorating the Eastern Shoshone language is critical.

"If you have kids who have kids who don't know the language, it's lost," he said.

Ferris and the committee are exploring all avenues at this point, he said, including asking Wyoming's congressional delegation and the Eastern Shoshone Business Council for assistance.

One of the avenues for the program could be the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act of 2006, which, according to the text of the law, provides three-year grants for the preservation of American Indian languages and cultures. Ferris said he'd like students in the program to take classes for five years, from as early as preschool up to the fifth grade.

The committee is looking to issue a survey of Eastern Shoshone tribal members to recruit instructors, as well as gauge how well the language is spoken on the reservation to see if such an undertaking is feasible.

Much like the program at Arapahoe School, the goal is to track how students' test scores improve once they've been in the immersion school for five years.

"If they learn the language, they'll be better students overall," Ferris said.

Native language instruction is given on a limited basis at Fort Washakie and Wyoming Indian schools, as well as Arapahoe and St. Stephens.

The proposed immersion school would enroll students five days a week, four hours a day. The program would be free, Ferris said.

That meets the requirements of the Esther Martinez Act, which requires that any such program operate at least one program in the community it serves, while teaching instructors in their native language.

The program, Ferris said, is vital to keeping the culture and heritage of the Eastern Shoshone alive.

"It's being threatened now, and it's close to extinction," said Ferris, who is learning the language himself, returning to the reservation after being gone for several years.

"What I notice is, this is a language and a culture that takes a whole lifetime to learn."