Assiniboine Indian Traditional Narratives

FAIN: RZ-51015-09

Trustees of Indiana University (Bloomington, IN 47405-7000)
Raymond J. DeMallie (Project Director: November 2008 to August 2015)
Douglas R. Parks (Co Project Director: November 2014 to August 2015)

Preparation of two volumes of Native American oral history narratives and an accompanying dictionary. (24 months)

This project will transcribe, translate, and edit a body of texts in Nakota, the language of the Assiniboine people of the Great Plains. These narratives were tape-recorded in the 1980s from the last generation of elders who were fluent in the language and who told traditional stories. The collection represents every major community of Assiniboine speakers in the U. S. and Canada and includes virtually all genres of oral tradition. The project will make Assiniboine oral literature available for the first time: two volumes of Nakota texts with English translations and an accompanying dictionary will be produced. There is great urgency to this project because only a few speakers of Nakota, all elderly, are still able to collaborate in this work. The project is based on the collaboration among DeMallie, a cultural anthropologist, and Cumberland, and Parks, anthropological linguists, with the Assiniboine people.