Darrell Robes Kipp was influenced over 30 years ago by one of his teachers at Harvard University, the famous African-American psychiatrist, Chester Pierce. Kipp learned things that were to influence his actions. First he learned that the atrocities perpetuated against Native Americans in the 1800s still echoed in him and his people. "Pierce lectured on the roots of violence in cultures that have suffered 'extreme environments' ". What Native American communities suffered from was post-traumatic stress syndrome. Wounds were present and needed to be healed and Kipp could become a healer. "Pierce said to him, 'Do not go home and look for a job. Go home and look for a career, a career that involves in-depth change, that involves mastering the true energy of your people' ".

In the late 1970s Kipp went on a retreat at Badger Creek to learn about the "sacred medicine lodge ceremony". There he also debated the social collapse occurring and arrived at the conclusion that language was at the centre of the breakdown. Their reaction was to research the decline in the use of their language.

In 1987 Kipp, with others, founded the "non-profit Piegan Institute to study and archive the language. To test potential language-teaching methods, the institute established a preschool for a handful of children of the researchers. From there, Nizipuhwahsin was born". Kipp says, "The core element that is necessary for us to truly regain our equilibrium and regain our sanity is to regain the good things about our heritage". This force resulted in Kipp, with others, 14-years ago, opening the Nizipuhwahsin ("Real Speak") Center. It was intended to be a place where the Piegan language of the Blackfeet people, could be learned-less than one hundred people could still speak the language. This "immersion school for grades K-8 has become a model for indigenous peoples worldwide. Tribes from as far away as South Africa come to the remote Blackfeet Reservation, often at the rate of two a month, to observe Nizipuhwahsin's work".

Kipp says, "Language is the true, essential human quality of an individual ... we think and feel our world in the language we speak". Kipp and his colleagues, Dorothy Still Smoking and Thomas Edward Little Plume, developed holistic approaches grounded in total physical response". Classrooms are organized so that older students can help younger ones. Total immersion methods, including acting out phrases are employed. Often students and teachers sit in a circle. As words and phrases are learned, vocabulary is augmented, the lessons are extended and integrated to include other subjects like biology, geography, history, and social studies.

For example, "wild peppermint, or ahsi sooyoopuk, which translates as 'good leaf'. Where does the plant grow? How does it reproduce? What did our people use it for?" This was the method used by Gandhi when he developed basic education in India.

"Formal English grammar classes don't start until the eighth grade at Nizipuhwahsin. That may sound alarmingly late, but Kipp says Nizipuhwahsin students quickly catch up to and even surpass their peers as they enter public high school because they're already familiar with the grammatical structures of two languages". Nizipuhwahsin Center is an alternative school covering nine years of education, replacing the state and federal government systems that have failed Native Americans.

Their dropout rate in Montana's schools was over three times that of non-Native American children. Kipp says that the mother tongue "has the power to 'soothe children's hearts ... kids who learn their native tongue gain an identity that will both connect them with their peoples' past and empower them to succeed in the modern world. Or, as they say in Piegan, okoyi: to have a home' ". These findings may be helpful to Botswana.

 Like in South Africa and Namibia, the time has come to recognise minority languages in education in Botswana. Perhaps it can begin, like it did for the Blackfeet, by supporting preschools where children can learn to read and write in their mother tongue.