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BOISE IKASTOLA: BOISE BASQUE LANGUAGE IMMERSION PRESCHOOL

JACQUELINE THURSBY

Defining the Boise Basques

It is said that the first Basques to reach the Western Hemisphere were early cod 
fishermen. Following them was the fleet of Christopher Columbus, whose ships 
had been built in Northern Spain by Basques, and there were Basque sailors in his 
fleet. Some remained in South America and their descendants still flourish there, 
mostly in Argentina and Uruguay. At the time of the California Gold Rush, many 
of the Basques who ran cattle and sheep in the Pampas region of South America 
migrated to the United States. They were not made to feel welcome in the gold 
rush camps, because they were looked on as sojourners rather than American 
citizens. In order to survive, they slowly took over what had traditionally been the 
work of the Native Americans: namely, the sheep herding industry. 

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, many Basques, young 
men and women, migrated to the United States from the Basque Country in 
northern Spain and the Basque region in Southern France. Economic need forced 
vast Southern European migration at that time because of little hope for the 
future. By the turn of the century, large sheep companies had been created in 
the American West, located mostly in the states of California, Nevada, Wyoming, 
Oregon, and Idaho. The companies were often owned or tended by reliable and 
competitive Basque sheepherders. Invitations were extended to brothers, uncles, 
nephews, and friends to join and work with the herders in the American West. 
A network of one hundred twenty-one Basque hotels sprung up throughout the 
West, and young women were invited to come from the old country to work 
in the hotels. Those gathering places were sometimes called “marriage mills,” 
because many of the young Basques met their life-partners there.

Boise was one of the early settling places for the Basque people. There were 
hotels where the language was spoken, familiar foods were served, and familiar 
music, games, and dances were practiced. The language is a major marker in the 
Basque tradition. It cannot be definitively traced to any other language. There 
is an old joke told again and again to explain why the Basques are so good. It 
seems the devil decided to corrupt the pure people of the Basque region. Try as 
he might, he could not learn the difficult language. He learned “yes - bi” and “ 
no - es,” but that was all. Consequently, because he couldn’t tempt the Basques 
in their own language, he left and they remained very, very good people – even 
to this day. Right here on Grove Street, there is an old Basque hotel that has been 
lovingly restored and donated to the Basque community of Boise. 

Maintaining Cultural Identity

There are many people in the United States of Basque heritage, and the Basques 
are recorded as a group separate from the Spanish or French in the United States 



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census. Because of the unique language, cultural mores, and rich traditions of 
the old country, the American Basques work hard to blend and syncretize their 
Basque heritage and their American national identity, and that often begins with 
the young children. The National American Basque Association, called NABO, has 
chapters in many states throughout the country, including New York and Florida, 
and NABO provides club interaction, language training, and other activities for 
adults. For children, the Basque Museum and Cultural Center sponsors summer 
Euskara Immersion camps, and NABO supports other opportunities for Basque 
language training, dance and music lessons, arts and crafts, and a variety of other 
Basque cultural experiences from festivals to study abroad programs (through the 
University of Nevada at Reno and Boise State University) to trips and tours of the 
old country. 

History, Purpose, and Goals of the Basque Ikastola

Founded in 1998, Boiseko Ikastola is a preschool for children to learn to 
understand and speak Basque. Housed at St. Paul’s Catholic Church on the Boise 
State University Campus, it introduces young children to Basque and not only aids 
in their comprehension of the Basque language, but also helps with developing 
other language skills. Twenty-five years ago the Basque government was one of 
the first to recognize the need to establish a curriculum especially designed for 
preschool aged children. The program, called the Urtxintxa Project, has been 
replicated by other European countries. The Ikastola uses this same curriculum 
and has proven very successful for children continuing on at both private and 
public kindergartens. There are two full-time instructors with Early Childhood 
Development degrees. 

Language and Literacy

Children learn the Basque language through thematic units and interaction with 
teachers, peers, music and print. Other opportunities for conversation include 
dramatic play, story time, circle time and puppet shows. The Ikastola’s print-rich 
literacy environment includes some of the following: books in Basque and English, 
books made by individual children, magazines and newspapers appropriate for 
young children, calendars, bulletin boards, alphabet charts, labels on materials, 
supplies, equipment, lists of all kinds, children’s names displayed, child dictation 
or writing and drawings displayed. When the children want to write, copy or 
draw, the “tools” are always available. 

Science

Open-ended questions by the teacher help the children learn how to question, 
how to be thinkers. Hands-on activities include using simple machines, sensory 
table play, plant and animal life, and cooking activities.



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55

Math

The children learn to print and work with numbers. They compare, sort, classify, 
and organize objects. The concepts of time and seasons are introduced, and the 
children learn the days of the week and months of the year. Clocks and calendars 
are used to teach time. 

Social Studies

Learning about the “world around us” is the focus of this curriculum area. Field 
trips and studies of occupations are included.

Art

Exploratory, sensory art activities help the child experience a variety of media. 
Paints, chalk, pencils, crayons, markers, glue and play dough (made by the 
children) are available in a “free choice” area for the children to use as they wish.

Large and Small Motor Skills

Movement activities including dance, running, balancing, and sports are just part 
of the large motor program. From using scissors to completing small puzzles, 
children are continually offered opportunities to develop their smaller muscles. 

Field Trips

Students enjoy a variety of field trips that add to the rich learning experience. 
Common trips are to The Basque Museum and Cultural Center, Fronton, Edwards 
Greenhouses, The Pumpkin Patch, Zoo, and the Boise Public Library. 

Dramatic Play

Dramatic play is one of the most valuable forms of play for children. The 
preschool gives children many opportunities to play and the toys and tools 
with which to learn. Play provides opportunities for exploration, manipulation, 
and experimentation that are vital for a child to construct knowledge. Through 
immediate feedback of peers, children refine their learning and restructure 
concepts. 

Guidelines

Because it is a non-profit center, a portion of the annual budget is generated 
through fund raising activities and events. Boiseko Ikastola requires a parent 
participation activity from each student’s family. This parent participation activity 
program is designed to keep students safer, and to keep parents involved in their 



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56

children’s learning environment. Under the auspices of the Urtzintza Project, the 
following guidelines (condensed here for time purposes) are to be followed:

confidence, physical abilities, social and communicative skills.

autonomy and shared social development.

reinforce human values and self-respect. 

Basque Country. Thus, the contents of the lessons are directed to 
develop among the children knowledge of the Basque language, 
culture, customs, and sentiment all over the eight territories of the 
country in and out of Europe. The project includes the study of 
traditional songs, poetry, art, literature, theatre, mythology, and 
rural sports as a way to widen their love and respect for the Basque 
language and culture.

The program heightens the respect, use and knowledge of the Basque 
language. 

for developing within the students the respect, admiration, and care 
for the rest of the nations, cultures, languages, and peoples all over 
the world.

Purpose and Linguistic Performance

For many adult Basque Americans or American Basques, learning the language  
of the old country is a frustrating dream. The unique language itself is non- 
Indo-European, and it is difficult to learn because the vocabulary is not rooted in 
Latin or Greek, the common origin languages of the Western world. Because the 
Basque language is dialectical and can vary significantly from village to village, 
Basque scholars created a consensus language called Batua, which is now taught 
both in the old country and in the United States. There are Basque language 
classes in various American cities including Boise, Reno, Fresno, San Francisco, 
and New York. 

In the Basque Country, much of the dominant language is Spanish. The primary 
reason for the rise in early second-language acquisition in the Basque Country is a 
result of studies conducted there concerning monolingual and bilingual presence 



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in families in various regions of the country. Basque language scholar Maria José 
Ezeizabarrena reported that “research into early language acquisition has lead 
many researchers to conclude that bilinguals with ‘sufficient “ input behave like 
monolinguals” (2007, 1). In other words, in homes where Basque is the dominant 
language, children are monolingual before the age of three or four. Older children 
become more and more bilingual as they pass through the educational system. 
Production data of Basque vocabulary, verb morphology, case morphology, and 
Spanish-Basque mixed utterances have shown that monolingual and balanced 
bilingual children follow a very similar developmental pattern in linguistic 
production. 

The value of second language acquisition in early childhood is particularly 
significant because it can enhance cross-cultural understanding, and it fosters an 
active interest in learning one’s own cultural knowledge and maintenance. In the 
United States, as children progress through the elementary grades, studies suggest 
that they retain the ability to form certain sounds of the language learned in 
early childhood even though they may not remember all of the vocabulary. This 
ability to enunciate the sounds correctly will serve as an aid in their mastering the 
language in their later years should they return to the study.

Through shared lore, songs, expressions, games, and belief practices, children 
in these early second language acquisition programs learn to understand and 
adapt to new situations. The Ikastola enculturates children into their own ancient 
heritage as well as the language and culture of the United States, their homeland. 
W. K. McNeil, in his introduction to Simon Bronner’s 1988 edition of American 
Children’s Folklore, referred to the research of William Wells Newell as saying: “By 
this means he also demonstrated that games, songs, and rhymes moved across 
linguistic and geographic barriers just as easily as folktales and legends” (1988, 
11). Though Newell feared that traditional lore was waning, time has proven 
differently, and many scholars have demonstrated that children’s lore continues 
over time and space. 

Referring to the playful sound sequences in Dr. Seuss’s Sleep Book (1962), such 
as “Up at Herk-Heimer Falls, where the great river rushes And Crashes down crags 
and in great gargling gushes,” a scholar of children’s language and learning, Judith 
Wells Lindfors, stated, “I believe that it is the unexpected in the language of these 
books that is most engaging to the child” (1987, 73). The books I observed at the 
Boise Ikastola, written in Basque, carry the same kind of language play presented 
in stories familiar to American children. The Three Pigs, for instance, called Hiru 
Txerrikumeak, cleverly tells the old tale and is profusely illustrated with the 
expected visual images: first a house of straw, then a house of sticks, followed by 
a house of bricks, and then what appears to be a foiled (but still living) picture of 
a wolf with a scalded foot. Another book tells the story of the peculiar duckling, 
rather than the ugly duckling. As these changes are pointed out, the different 
tellings of the tales introduce the children not only to subtle differences in story, 
but also subtle and sometimes not subtle differences in the expressed culture of 
varied people. 



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58

Second Language Acquisition

In a Stanford doctoral dissertation, L. W. Fillmore posed a question and offered 
a succinct answer: “What is it that second-language learners must learn? After 
intensively observing during an entire school year five Spanish monolingual 
children (ages five to seven) acquiring English as their second language, one 
researcher summed up the second-language learner’s task this way. The learner 
must figure out how the sound system of the new language is organized, how 
units of meaning are organized into words, by what principles these words are 
put together to form sentences, how these sentences can be used appropriately in 
given settings, and in what ways meanings can be conveyed in the new language 
and culture (1976, 634).

Using the new language as it is learned, “it is fascinating to watch children 
of all ages in dramatic play as they assume high-status roles and role play 
interactions in various status relationships. They play with various language styles, 
deliberately changing style when they are queen or subject, teacher or pupil, 
boss or employee, parent or child. Such play is an important support for the 
children’s growing ability to express and to interpret language expressions of role 
relationships, one of the many reasons that sociodrama should be an ever-present 
opportunity in every elementary and preschool classroom” (Lindfors 1987, 377). 

Children possess an innate curiosity and actively pursue their urge to find 
out about the world, and school is a good place to do it. In an interesting study 
about questions asked by pre-school children with the categories being curiosity, 
procedural, and social-interactional, researchers found that “of the 159 preschool-
kindergarten questions analyzed, approximately 45 percent (almost half) were 
social in nature, approximately 33 percent (one-third) were curiosity questions, 
and approximately 23 percent (less than one-fourth) were procedural” (Lindfors 
1987, 288). Lindfors continued her discussion with examples of typical pre-school/
kindergarten questions demonstrating the various categories of the questions 
under consideration. A curiosity question addressed to an adult observer in the 
classroom was: “Is God in cookies?” A procedural question asked of the teacher 
during an art lesson was, “Do I have to write my name up here?” And a social-
interactional question, spoken after an argument between children at an art gable 
was, “I forgive you, Jenny. Do you forgive me?” (Lindfors 1987, 288-89). Questions 
help children build a rich theory of the world, and in a focused school like the 
Boise Ikastola, curiosity, play, and learning are constantly fed. 

Conclusion

October 2008 marked ten years since the Boiseko Ikastola opened its doors in 
Boise, Idaho. On May 15, 2008, Ikastola families (past and present), teachers and 
supporters gathered to commemorate this milestone. More than 130 people came 
to the Basque Block to enjoy lively music, good food, entertaining games, and 
precious memories. As in the Japanese Foreign Language in Elementary School 
(FLES) programs in the United States, Islamic primary schools for teaching Arabic 
in order for the children to study the Q’uran, Jewish early Hebrew training, and 



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59

even the folkloric and play activities taught to the Yupik Eskimo children, like 
carving stories in mud with a knife, Basque people are sensitive to the realities of 
lost cultures and languages. 

Professor Dan Dewey, an early childhood linguistic scholar at Brigham Young 
University, stated that early second language acquisition has many benefits. He 
listed increased brain development and capacity, even without mastery; greater 
use of the left and particularly the right brain; a more sensitive cultural awareness; 
increased ability to pronounce sounds in language; increased vocabulary; and an 
early knowledge of the subtleties of language (Dewey 2008).

In the article “Narrative Practices and the Social Construction of Self in 
Childhood,” the authors state: “Although we believe that personal storytelling plays 
an important role in the social construction of self throughout the life span, we 
are especially interested in the beginnings of this process. There is evidence that 
conversational stories of personal experience are available early in life to children 
from a variety of cultural backgrounds. … The process of self-construction may 
be especially visible in early childhood, when it first gets under way. Bruner 
(1986) has suggested that stories are one of the first cultural constraints on the 
nature of selfhood” (Miller, Potts, Fung, Hoogstra, Mintz 1990, 263). Wouldn’t it be 
fascinating to sit in on a conversation among these budding bilingual children and 
see for ourselves how they are or are not constructing themselves with a strong 
American Basque identity? 

WORKS CITED

Bruner, Jerome. 1986. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard 
University Press. 

Dewey, Dan. 2008. Personal Interview. November. Provo, Utah. 
Ezeizabarrena, Maria José. 2008. “The Linguistic Performance of Early Bilingual 

Speakers of Basque Compared to Monolinguals.” Paper presented at the 
Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Centre for Research on 
Bilingualism. Bangor, North Wales, UK, 28 April.

Fillmore, L. W. 1976. The Second Time Around: Cognitive and Social Strategies in 
Second Language Acquisition. Doctoral Dissertation. Stanford University, 
Stanford, California. 

Lindfors, Judith Wells. 1987. Children’s Language and Learning. 2nd Edition. 
Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc.

McNeil, W. K. 1988. Introduction. In American Children’s Folklore, ed. Simon J. 
Bronner, 11-23. Little Rock: August House Publishers.

Miller, Peggy J., Randolf Potts, Heide Fung, Lisa Hoogstra, and Judy Mintz. 1990. 
“Narrative Practices and the Social Construction of Self in Childhood.” 
American Ethnologist. Vol. 17, No. 2 (May) 292-311.

Seuss, Dr. 1962. Dr. Seuss’s Sleep Book. New York: Random House.


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