One Lakota Instructor is Working to Revive the Language
Renee Cooper | KX News | June 19, 2018
Only about 1,500 people nationwide speak Lakota.
This is down 5,000 from ten years ago and 10,000 from 20 years ago.
But one Lakota Language Consortium instructor is working to revitalize the language.
The instructor, Alex FireThunder grew up hearing Lakota on a daily basis.
He explains, “My mom is Lakota, she is a native speaker. She learned Lakota first, and only spoke Lakota in the home until she went to kindergarten.”
Now he spends his time teaching the language and working for it’s revitalization.
He says, “If you want to speak Spanish, you can go to Spain and you can hear Spanish be spoken when you go to the store. And when you go to a restaurant, you have to order in Spanish. You’re expected to speak the language of the people.”
He says he hopes one day the same will be true for Lakota Country.
This is the first year the Lakota Summer Institute has come here to UTTC after 11 years in Standing Rock, and Bismarck is very much a part of Lakota Country.”
So how do you normalize a language that is currently in decline?
FireThunder says, “You need to read, you need to write, you need to speak and you need to hear it. I’m on social media and I just bombard all of my friends with the language. So when I’m on Snapchat, I’ll be talking in Lakota on my snapchat videos.”
It won’t be easy though.
Executive Director for the Lakota Language Consortium Wil Meya says, “In order to maintain even current levels, we need to be creating about 200-300 new speakers a year.”
But the 80 students enrolled at UTTC this summer keeps him optimistic.
Meya adds, “It’s not enough yet to offset the decline of the speakers but we estimate in the next couple years, we’ll be able to generate in the order of hundreds of new speakers a year.”
Meya says more people are interested in learning the language than ever before.
And FireThunder is assured: Lakota is a living language that will not be left in the past.
Storycorps, one of the largest oral history programs in the world, has partnered with the Lakota Language Consortium.
They will be in Bismarck starting next week, to record stories from the Lakota community.
