Indigenous America in the Spanish Language Classroom, by A. Fountain, 2023

Abstract

In military and government language programs, linguistic proficiency without historical and cultural literacy constitutes a strategic vulnerability. Anne Fountain’s Indigenous America in the Spanish Language Classroom offers a timely, practice-oriented framework for embedding Indigenous histories, epistemologies, and contemporary voices into Spanish instruction. Our central appraisal is that Fountain operationalizes decolonial and content-based pedagogy for secondary and postsecondary contexts with remarkable clarity, ensuring direct applicability to Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLIFLC) courses and Foreign Area Officer (FAO) training. The book’s most significant contribution lies not in presenting superficial “cultural add-ons,” but in reframing Spanish as a pluricentric language whose lexicon, pragmatics, and textual traditions are inseparable from Indigenous presence and influence.