Category: Blog Post

Tusweca Tiospaye has announced a special two-day breakout session during the 2014 Lakota-Dakota Language Summit in Rapid City, SD in October — one that will earn its students college credit at Sitting Bull College.

The Intensive Lakota/Dakota Language for Beginners breakout session is “designed for second-language learners who are at a beginner to elementary level,” according to Tusweca’s release. “It will give an overview of Lakota/Dakota pronunciation and how to use a Lakota/Dakota dictionary for self-learning.”

Attendees will need to complete an application to Sitting Bull College, and have a GED or high school diploma, to participate. Participating in both classes during the Summit’s breakout sessions will earn learners one 16-hour credit from Sitting Bull.

Instructors are Nacole Walker, Sunshine Carlow and Michael Moore. All have been instructors or staff at the annual Lakota Summer Institute, which is a joint program of Sitting Bull College, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the Lakota Language Consortium. Tusweca has initiated this two-day class at the Summit to support language learners who can’t attend the Summer Institute.

Lakota language teachers can also earn Continuing Education Units through Sitting Bull College just for attending the Summit.

Contacts for more information are found at the Summit’s College Credit page.  The Summit is scheduled for Friday through Sunday, October 10-12, at the Rushmore Plaza Holiday Inn.

 

We’re sharing this appeal from the Linguistic Society of America and CELP, the Committee on Endangered Languages and their Preservation. It’s a simple way to keep up on Congress’ consideration of two important pieces of legislation supporting preservation and education in endangered Native American languages.

              

CELP and LSA say:

This is just a reminder to please contact your congresspeople to request their support and possible co-sponsorship of these important bills that will potentially impact the future of Native American languages:

H.R.726/S.2299 Native American Languages Reauthorization Act of 2014

H.R.4214/S.1948 Native Language Immersion Student Achievement Act

The bills are moving onto the floor for debate and looking (cautiously) positive for passage in the Senate. The House may be another matter, but there’s always room for hope.

The LSA’s webpage for tracking this legislation is available HERE.

HERE is a template you can use to contact members of Congress.

You can, of course, make changes to the template provided before sending it. There’s also a SHORTLINK for the call-to-action form—-if that’s helpful for social or print media.

Finally, if you’re interested, here are the webpages which track Congressional co-sponsors (the Senators and Representatives supporting the measures) for the two Senate bills and their House counterparts.

S. 1948 and H.R 4214

S. 2299 and H.R. 726

Feel free to pass this information along to colleagues and friends, and thank you all for any effort you can make on behalf of this legislation.

There’s good news out of Congress for Native American languages, thanks to intensive effort by the Linguistic Society of America’s Committee on Endangered Languages and their Preservation (CELP)!

Two pieces of legislation introduced in the U.S. Senate earlier this year, S. 1948, the “Native Language Immersion Student Achievement Act” and S. 2299, the “Native American Languages Reauthorization Act of 2014,” were both approved by the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs on July 30, 2014.  This means both bills can be considered by the full Senate soon.S. 1948 is known as HR. 4124 and S. 2229 is H.R. 726 in the U.S. House of Representatives.

CELP and LSA ran a heated campaign to get their supporters – and anyone else who supports the preservation of endangered languages – to contact their senators and representatives to support the two bills. This vocal pressure worked, and both bills now have bipartisan support in the Senate.

As of July 30, 2014, the list of Sponsors includes these elected representatives:

Senate Bill Sponsors

• Brian Schatz – S.1948 & S.2299 co-sponsor; HI
• Mark Begich – S.1948 & S.2299 co-sponsor; AK
• Tim Johnson – S.1948 co-sponsor, S.2299 lead sponsor; SD
• Max Baucus – S.1948 co-sponsor; MT (no longer serving in the Senate)
• Tom Udall – S.1948 & S.2299 co-sponsor; NM
• Lisa Murkowski – S.1948 & S.2299 co-sponsor; AK
• Heidi Heitkamp – S.1948 co-sponsor; SD
• John Walsh- S.1948 & S.2299 co-sponsor; MT
• Martin Heinrich – S.1948 & S.2299 co-sponsor; NM
• Al Franken – S.2299 co-sponsor; MN
• Mazie Hirono – S.2299 co-sponsor; HI
• Jon Tester – S.1948 lead sponsor, S.2299 co-sponsor; MT
• Angus King – S.2299 co-sponsor; ME

 

House Bill Sponsors

• Ben Ray Lujan – H.R.726 lead sponsor; NM-3
• Colleen Hanabusa – H.R.726 co-sponsor; HI-1
• Lucille Roybal-Allard – H.R.726 co-sponsor; CA-40
• James Moran – H.R.726 co-sponsor; VA-8
• Gloria Negrete McLeod – H.R.726 co-sponsor; CA-35
• Louise Slaughter – H.R.726 co-sponsor; NY-25
• Betty McCollum – H.R.726 & H.R. 4214 co-sponsor; MN-4
• Stevan Pearce – H.R.726 co-sponsor; NM-2
• Raul Grijalva – H.R.726 co-sponsor; AZ-3
• Ed Pastor – H.R.726 co-sponsor; AZ-7
• Raul Ruiz – H.R.726 co-sponsor; CA-36
• Tom Cole – H.R.4214 lead sponsor; OK-4

 

The LSA has sent thank-you letters to all current legislative sponsors of the bills. If your members of Congress are listed as sponsors, you may wish to do the same – by clicking here, where the National Humanities Alliance has established an action alert.

A Lakota-Dakota-speaking Berenstain Bears cartoon is the kid magnet at the new Innovation Gallery at the State Historical Society of North Dakota. The Gallery is one of four new galleries built in the Society’s newly expanded Heritage Center educational museum space.

You can see that children hear the language on the telephone handsets while seeing the animated cartoon action and reading the English translation off to the side. The cartoon is “Homework Hassle,” dubbed into Lakota-Dakota for the 2011 PBS series Matȟó Waúŋšila Thiwáhe, produced by the Lakota Language Consortium as part of their mission to promote the language to the wider public.

Chris Johnson, Museum Division Director at the Society, told us how the cartoon — and the region’s many indigenous languages – all fit into the Innovation Gallery’s educational intent.

“When we were designing this exhibit, we went out to the five reservations in North Dakota, and talked with people about what we hoped to do in the gallery,” Johnson said. The two galleries now open – Adaptation and Innovation – look at two different stages of North Dakota history: Adaptation is pre-human, ie. dinosaur fossils and geologic record until the end of the last Ice Age 13,000 years ago, and Innovation shows the development of human societies from the end of the Ice Age until 1860.

“We took public feedback and had a team of advisors from each reservation,” Johnson said. “What came back in comments was the importance of presenting the tribal language – whether in New Town, Spirit Lake, Standing Rock, or wherever, it was a universal comment.  So we made sure we worked languages in wherever we could.”

The Innovation Gallery exhibit incorporates Plains sign language as intertribal communications, and winter counts to show how the Plains peoples recorded their long-term history.  However, Johnson says, the exhibit designers also wanted to talk about “how contemporary tribes today are working to either preserve or revive languages, and how for a language to be viable is it has to be current, relevant to today’s world.  So we thought the Lakota Berenstain Bears cartoon would show how to take a language some would think was from the past, and make it relevant today.”

Johnson contacted LLC for permission to use the cartoon.  How could we say no?

Johnson admitted that the Society sought an easy way to get past the closeness of “Lakota” and “Dakota” languages – so they just used “Dakota” as a universal term for the tribes speaking those related tongues.

There are other uses of regional languages significant to the Innovation Gallery.  Each section of the Gallery has a panel to introduce the section’s theme with a quote from one of the languages, printed in English but with a push-button audio option that lets the visitor hear the quote spoken in that language. The section on the history of horses in the Plains region is introduced in Lakota.

The Lakota-language play, Iktómi Lečhála Tȟawíčutȟuŋ (Iktomi’s New Wife) has its premiere tonight at 7 pm at the Standing Rock High School Auditorium, 9819 Highway 24 in Fort Yates.  Admission is FREE.

Blaze Starkey and Peter Hill practice being Meadowlarks

It’s based on two Iktomi stories, one of which is well-known: “Iktomi’s Blanket.” That story was collected in Old Indian Legends by Zitkala-Ša, published in 1901.

The other is “Iktomi and the Ignorant Girl.”  This was collected by Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz in the book American Indian Myths and Legends, published in 1984, and the story is recounted as one from the “Brule Sioux” people.

Picture this: two oral-tradition stories were written down in English, then adapted in English to be one story for the theater. Then that story was translated into Lakota by the actors – and back into English for supertitles projected for the audience!

Iktómi Lečhála Tȟawíčutȟuŋ (Iktomi’s New Wife) has its first performance on Thursday night, June 19, at 7 pm, at the Standing Rock High School Auditorium: 9189 Highway 24, Fort Yates, ND, Standing Rock. The Director is Steve Elm (Oneida), a professional actor-writer-director based in New York and Virginia.

Admission is FREE, so come on down and bring your friends!

After this excitement on Friday …

… more visitors from Washington, DC arrived on  Saturday …

… to talk about Native American language preservation.

Dignitaries meeting at Sitting Bull College included US Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell, William Mendoza (Executive Director of the White House Initiative on American Indian and Alaska Native Education ), Sedelta Oosahwee (Associate Director of WHIAIANE)  and Ron Lessard (Chief of Staff at WHIAIANE).

Welcoming them were Sitting Bull President Dr. Laurel Vermillion, Sitting Bull’s VP of Academics Koreen Ressler, Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Chairman Dave Archambault, SRST Education Manager Sunshine Carlow, joined by LLC Staff Wil Meya, Jan Ullrich and Kim Campbell, as well as many Lakota Native speakers and teachers.

 

During Week 2 of LSI, the schedule was stretched to “start early, end late,” in order to accommodate the special event that fell in our laps: a visit by the President of the United States and First Lady to the Summer Powwow at Cannon Ball, ND, on the Standing Rock reservation, less than an hour north of Fort Yates and Sitting Bull College.

The visit, which happened Friday, June 13, drew Standing Rock tribe members away from the Sitting Bull College campus for the entire day.  We’ll have a report on the day soon – as there was a significant event for Native languages on Saturday, June 14, in the backwash of that visit.

The second week of LSI saw a return to a strong focus on the Lakota language, after the friendly welcome given to the MHA Nation and Crow Nation Summer Institutes getting their start.

Dr. Lanny Real Bird of the Crow nation stayed on, and taught his course on Plains Sign Language.

Junior Garcia stayed on, too, after leading classes last week on Teaching Methods for the Crow Level 1 textbooks.  In Week 2 he led Teaching Methods for Lakota Levels 1 and 2 textbooks.

Longtime LSI Instructor Kim Campbell presented on Teaching Methods for Lakota Levels 3 and 4 textbooks.

LLC Linguistic Director Jan Ullrich continued teaching Lakota Grammar and language Intensives.

Peter Hill and Anpao Duta Flying Earth also taught language Intensives.

The dynamic energy of LSI is something you can feel in the halls at SBC, says LLC Executive Director Wil Meya. “People’s brains are so full, there’s so much learning happening,” he said. “We turn the whole place upside down, the place is full of movement and voices. This year was especially electric with all the younger people joining in – LSI is building a vital group of language activists, and gathering new activists on board.”

And then this happened:

And this, on Saturday:

William Mendoza (Oglala – Sicangu Lakota), the Executive Director of the White House Initiative on American Indian and Alaska Native Education, and Ron Lessard (Mohawk – Abenaki), Strategic Advisor for Native American Affairs, were at Sitting Bull College on Saturday to join a roundtable of tribal leaders, students, educators, higher education officials and others to discuss successes and challenges in language preservation.

More on this, coming soon.

Oneida Native Steve Elm doesn’t speak Lakota – but that doesn’t stop him from having a blast at the Lakota Summer Institute!

Steve is a polished theater pro from New York City who has worked with renowned Native American theater companies and artists, writing, directing and performing in original works.  His work helping school kids create their own emotionally powerful theater pieces – and training teachers on how to use theater skills in their classrooms – brought him to LSI to direct the new Iktomi play, Iktómi Lečhála Tȟawíčutȟuŋ (Iktomi’s New Wife).

We caught up with Steve on June 11, halfway through the three-week rehearsal process.

“Today was the first day we had the full cast, and we started rehearsing in Lakota today,” Steve said.  “I have no speaking knowledge of Lakota, but fortunately the three lead actors – Iktomi, his Wife, and the Ignorant Girl – are all strong. We worked in English last week, playing around and working out the dramatic objectives” of the story, he said, while “rewriting and restructuring” to accommodate the number of people who would be in the cast.

The script blends two traditional Iktomi tales: “Iktomi’s Blanket” and “Iktomi and the Ignorant Girl.” The stage story is that Iktomi and his old Wife have had yet another fight, and Iktomi is determined to find a new, young wife.  Naturally, Iktomi’s deceit blows back on him.

“We started translating the script yesterday,” Steve said, which meant changing the dialogue. “Lakota has different ways of saying things, and different meanings,” Steve explained, “which changed the jokes.”

Working with non-professional actors to develop their own expression in their own language is a challenge for Steve, but an intriguing challenge. A big part of the story hinges on the differences between how Lakota men speak, and how the women speak. In traditional times, the two genders were kept strictly separated, so that each came to say certain words and sentences in their own way.

“To me it’s like directing a play, only I don’t know the words,” he said. “What I do know is the feeling of the objectives behind the actors.  Even with supertitles [translations projected above the stage], the audience should have a good idea of what’s happening.”

Iktómi Lečhála Tȟawíčutȟuŋ (Iktomi’s New Wife) will be performed on Thursday, June 19, at 7 pm at the Standing Rock High School Auditorium, 9189 Highway 24, Fort Yates, ND.  Admission is free.

While still abuzz with LSI classes and anticipation of President Obama’s visit on Friday, the Sitting Bull College campus is a bit quieter this week.

The MHA and Crow Nations have finished their first Summer Institutes, initiating language education and revitalization programs based on carefully planned K-12 curricula and proven second-language education methods.

The MHASI and CSI co-located with LSI at Sitting Bull to breathe in the atmosphere of dynamic, “can-do” enthusiasm for learning and teaching Native American languages.

The Crow and MHA Nations were formally welcomed and acknowledged in the Lakota Summer Institute opening ceremony last Monday, which established an atmosphere of respect and safety, as well as hope, energy and enthusiasm.

The MHASI will relocate to Fort Berthold Community College in Fort Berthold, ND next year.

Lakota teacher Albino Junior Garcia came to both MHASI and the Crow Summer Institute to coach Crow and MHA teachers in Total Physical Response and the use of flashcards with their Level 1 textbooks.  He has taught Special Projects and Teaching Lakota Methods at the Lakota Summer Institute since 2012 and taught Teaching Crow Level 1 in 2013.

Armik Mirzayan came over from the Lakota Summer Institute to teach Arikara Phonology at MHASI as well.

Many of the second-language speakers and students at LSI are parents of young children, and they are determined to pass the Lakota language on.  One of these is Denny Gayton, of Standing Rock.

Denny told us he has brought his two children with him to LSI this year, because “I want them to have the passion, to grow in the language.  They want to learn it, but they have not had the environment – except at our house – where people are excited about it or even meaningfully encouraging about it.”

What he sees happening at LSI is something very powerful: “Here, people are excited and free,” he said, “using the language, talking and not afraid to make mistakes.  They either self-correct or someone will offer a correction for them to use.”

As an enthusiastic second-language student, Denny taught an evening class himself at last year’s LSI.  “This year I’m taking all of the same classes again – Teaching Methods in the morning and Intensive for Intermediates in the afternoon – so I can have fun with the language.”

For even more fun, Denny is helping LLC with an experiment – Lakota translations of these updates.  Watch for those!