Standing Rock Lakota/Dakota Language Project

FAIN: AE-248016-16

Sitting Bull College (Fort Yates, ND 58538-9721)
Michael Moore (Project Director: August 2015 to November 2024)
Mark Holman (Co Project Director: March 2016 to September 2018)

A three-year project to record, preserve, and provide educational access to interviews with tribal elders who are fluent native speakers of the Lakota/Dakota language.

Sitting Bull College (SBC) proposes a three-year humanities initiative designed to record a dwindling collection of fluent speakers of the Lakota/Dakota language on the Standing Rock Reservation in North and South Dakota. These recordings of elders, who began their lives speaking the Lakota/Dakota language, are an invaluable part of efforts to reinvigorate the endangered Lakota/Dakota language. Fluent speakers, immersed in “Lakota/Dakota thought” speak differently and it is important to record this to create a “bridge” between a dwindling generation of fluent speakers and a new generation of young speakers who are learning Lakota/Dakota as a first language and will one day seek to draw on these resources. The project, guided by Sitting Bull College faculty and staff in cooperation with the speakers themselves, will create a vast well of primary source recordings in both audio and video for future generations to draw on. The three part project will engage local speakers in conversation

Media Coverage

Sitting Bull College Receives National Endowment for the Humanities Grant to Record Lakota/Dakota Language (Media Coverage)
Author(s): mark holman
Publication: Sitting Bull College News
Date: 5/26/2016
Abstract: website news article
URL: https://sittingbull.edu/2016/05/26/sitting-bull-college-receives-national-endowment-for-the-humanities-grant-to-record-lakotadakota-language/