In 1998 the Comanche Language and Cultural Preservation Committee was successful and received a grant from the Lannan Foundation, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for a Three Year Master-Apprentice Team Project. Community meetings were held throughout Comanche country to hand out applications for the project.

Three days of intense training in the native language immersion concept was given at the beginning of Year One by Leanne Hinton, linguist from the University of California at Berkeley, followed by the selection of seven (7) teams who would participate. Guidelines were adopted for the project.

The proposal submitted required teams to work 20 hours together each week for a total of 20 weeks. Evaluations were given each team at the end of 10 weeks and again at 20 weeks to check their progress. In-home visits provided one on one monitoring by members of an evaluation team. At the end of Year One, a report was made to the funding agency, who then issued additional grant money for Year Two.

Year Two also began with a three day training session that all potential teams were required to attend. Again seven teams were selected, but with an amendment to the original proposal that allowed the teams to work 10 hours per week for 40 weeks. Many teams in Year One were unable to complete the full 400 hours allowed due to the huge time commitment. Because of the longer overall project period, three evaluations took place — at the end of 10 weeks, 20 weeks and a final evaluation at the end of the project. The Final Evaluation showcased the learning level of each apprentice.

Year Three began with another training session, but this time with a significant difference! Members of our own group participated in the training. It was a much more meaningful training, to hear our own language spoken during the training. Due to funding cuts, only six teams were selected for the final year of the project.

Our hope that each apprentice would gain at least a basic proficiency in the Comanche language was realize, much beyond our expectations! Earlier evaluations focused on the apprentice learning the basics of the language. Final Evaluations allow them to use those basics and form sentences.

Presentations given by the apprentices were both creative and unique, and extremely well done. We were impressed with the learning level each has achieved. Our final report to Lannan showed that we had made a difference in the number of younger Comanches that were learning to speak the language of our ancestors. We want to continue to add to those numbers.