ARAPAHOE -- Teacher aide Carolyn Bauer gathers about 15 squirming kindergarten students onto the rug in front of the teacher's chair. They are a miniature gaggle of alert, bopping faces, many dressed in sweatpants and sneakers. Bauer, in the manner of a grandmother, readies them for their language lesson.

Everything in the Arapahoe School classroom exists on an almost Lilliputian scale: low hexagonal tables with tiny multicolored chairs; 3-foot-high easels for drawing and painting.

The students' daily chores are posted on a cork board beside them. Today, Orlando is the line cleaner and Antonia must report on the weather. Cassie is responsible for the daily news, and Nizhooni has the day off. Above the white board are the kindergarten rules: 1. Look and Listen. 2. Be nice.

Maryann Duran strides into the classroom and says, in Arapaho, "Hello, good morning, is everything all right? It's been cold at night."

The petite, gray-haired woman holds a commanding presence. The children fall into place and pay attention as best kindergartners can. She leads them through the Arapaho pledge. They sing the Arapaho flag song, the Morning Song, and then they fall into the day's lesson.

Duran is a precious asset to the tribe. Arapaho is her first language. In her house and with her family she spoke nothing but Arapaho. She is one of a shrinking minority in the tribe who is still fluent.

"Our language is almost dead," she says after the class.

Even though English is their primary language, Arapaho children on the Wind River Indian Reservation score similarly on standardized tests of academic English as children who come from the impoverished South, or the barrios of Los Angeles.

At the K-8 Arapahoe School, 100 percent of the children come from poverty, which is the primary reason for such poor test scores. The secondary reason is that the English spoken on the reservation is a nonstandard dialect, specific to the Arapahos who live there. The local vernacular incorporates occasional Arapaho words and mixes in Arapaho grammar, cadence and syntax.

Although the dialect is as rich and useful as so-called standard English -- and more useful on the reservation than standard English -- limited knowledge of academic English can hold a child back economically. It can keep a child from going to college, and in adulthood it can hinder him or her professionally.

In order to find academic and economic success, American Indians usually need to learn to "walk in two worlds," as the Mohegan matriarch, Gladys Tantaquidgeon, once explained. This is a process of learning to navigate two very diverse landscapes, with different rules and customs -- and, yes, even different ways of speaking English.

Children at a bilingual school, one that values both their indigenous language and academic English, are beginning this process. With this in mind, and with the help of a five-year federal discretionary grant through the No Child Left Behind Act, Arapahoe School has launched a project to revive the Arapaho language, with the hope of boosting the school's academic performance.

"The federal government wanted to find the best way to reach children with limited English proficiency," said Becky Dechert, teacher and director of the five-year, $1 million grant for Arapahoe School. For children on the reservation, research indicated that a bilingual approach would be best. The grant itself is geared toward English-language learners and indigenous speakers.

In order to write the grant and implement the program, Dechert did extensive investigation into bilingual curricula around the world, discovering what tended to work and what didn't. She believes that the bilingual approach should allow students significant improvement in the coming years.

The administration is confident, as well.

"This will do it," said Burnett Whiteplume, federal programs director at the school. "The evidence is there."

Arapahoe School wants nothing particularly unusual for its children, Whiteplume said, and he hopes people understand that. "We're working to get our students to perform academically, just like everybody else."

"What we're doing is not going to make everybody here fluent in Arapaho. It will be a start," he said. More importantly, it will improve students' acquisition of, and receptivity to, academic English.

During the lesson with the kindergarten students, Duran holds up a white cup, and they say "white cup" in Arapaho. She holds up a green plate, a bunch of grapes, bananas, a red apple. She goes through commands including "hop," "turn around" and "wave hands," and the children gleefully comply.

She says in Arapaho, "Only the girls stand up." All of the girls and one boy stand up, and the children laugh. One of the girls whispers to him in English, "She said only girls!"

When the Arapaho lesson is over, Duran switches to English to give the students a brief lesson in culture. She says, "Remember what I told you about February?"

They know that February is the time of year when "our people" started moving. They did so for the purposes of hunting.

"What did our Ind'an people hunt?" she asks the children.

"Buffalo!" shouts Ruban Sinclair. He's up on his knees, wearing a bright blue T-shirt. The rest of the class repeats what he said, "Buffalo!"

"The Buffalo was like our super Wal-Mart for our people long ago," the teacher says. "But nothing was wasted."

Duran tells the children about how they used the buffalo hide for warmth, the tongue like a brush, the tail as a whip, the meat, bones, and how they used the fat to slick down their hair.

Modeled after successful programs in that teach native languages in Wales, New Zealand and Hawaii, the Arapaho language component of the project is not restricted to school grounds or school hours. The intention is to foster communitywide involvement and participation, in conjunction with immersion classes in school, including weekend retreats and summer camps.

According to Dechert, the key is to encourage the parents and grandparents to learn and use Arapaho if they don't already.

As of today, Arapaho is classified by linguists as a "moribund" language, which means that it is only spoken by people 65 and older, for the most part, and that if nothing is done to revive it, it will be dead in 20 years. Arapahoe School hopes to do its part to bring the language back into common use.

"It comes down to community involvement," Dechert said. "The (revitalization) programs that had community development worked."

To teach English, the school has adopted an approach similar to techniques and practices employed by English as a Second Langauge programs. All of the teachers at the school will receive ESL training and professional development, and the school will adopt a standardized protocol and common vocabulary. This helps to be organized and unified in their approach, said Dechert, who has a master's in teaching English as a second language.

ESL training for the teachers is key.

"They need to have a little knowledge about how the human brain acquires a language," she said, "so they can incorporate that into their already good lesson plans."

As for the grant money, it is all predicated on success.

"We have to prove that we're making a difference if we want to keep getting funding," she said. The school will have to show quantifiable improvement in a variety of state and national standardized tests on a yearly basis.

Arapahoe School sits along a barren swath in the center of the Wind River Basin. It is almost alone out here. There is a white water tower casting a cone-shaped shadow, a few houses and barns scattered about, the brick school buildings built in a horseshoe around the parking lot, and rolling wild grass meadow in all directions.

The valley is semi-surrounded by mountains. A treeless, rust-colored spine is off to the north, an ashen rim to the east, and the pine-forested Wind River Range off to the southwest.

The school facilities are modern and well-kept. The windows gleam, and the hallway floors reflect the sunlight.

The white walls are decorated with student-made poster board projects, with details about Steven the Snake's week ("on Monday Steven ate ants"); students' plans ("When I grow up I will be a Doctor"); and pictures of buffalo-hide teepees and men and women in traditional buckskin dress pasted under the handwritten heading, "Proud to be Arapaho."

Most striking are the elegant, wall-sized portraits painted with simple black strokes, of famous leaders including Chief Black Coal of the Northern Arapaho, Chief Little Shield, their last war chief, and Chief Washakie of the Eastern Shoshone.

The difficulties that students face on the Wind River reservation are common to American Indian communities throughout the United States.

"These kids, as a group, American Indians, have not done well in school," said Jon Reyhner, professor of American Indian education at Northern Arizona University. "In terms of No Child Left Behind -- they, as a group, have been left behind."

The reasons are historically based, and common around the world. After being colonized, indigenous groups are forced to abandon their way of life in order to get along in the world that is now controlled by the invading group, Reyhner said. Education is an essential component of the dominant group's control.

"You have to give up your language and culture to do well in school," he said. And you have to do well in school to be economically successful.

When people are forced to give up their language and culture, it causes the sorts of problems common today on reservations across the United States, including depression and high suicide rates.

The bilingual approach, like the one being implemented at Arapahoe School, can make a difference.

"I see these kinds of revitalization projects as part of the healing process," Reyhner said.

Through learning their native language, the children will also be learning the values embedded in the words. They'll be learning, in essence, about their traditional, pre-colonial culture -- "values like humility, working hard, respecting elders, being responsible for relatives," Reyhner said.

Asked to comment on the Arapahoe School bilingual project, Reyhner said, "Research says that if they're run well, kids will learn English better than in the English-only school, especially in the long run ... Children at these bilingual schools are better behaved, healthier, and do better in English once they've had a chance to learn.

"Unlike popular notions, you can learn two languages and learn them well."

And he hopes that people understand that these types of revitalization projects are a way of moving forward with dignity -- a way for a tribe to hold on to its values and culture, while improving the academic performance of its children.

When the children do better in school, the tribe should do better economically. And in order for that to happen, the children at Arapahoe School must learn to walk in two worlds.