And the blueprints for the pyramids… what’s the latest claim some of them are taking credit for inventing?? I saw it recently but have forgotten.
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Jesus?
No… that was a while back. Something else that made me eye roll.
Bit of a mouthful. Maybe…tatanka osíŋkpȟekpȟeyakel.
A buffalo who moves around like a rodent.
Ask a Navajo. Or a Hopi.
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Ok. Jokes aside, are there resources out there to learn your people’s language?
Post got longer than I planned. I like to talk about this stuff more than single moms.
Short answer: yes.
(Really) long answer: The Lakota were an oral society. I don’t know for sure when but I would guess it was sometime during the nineteenth century that missionaries, likely Jesuits, first started writing down Lakota words using the English alphabet. That went on for a while. I’ve seen old hymnals written in Lakota. I’m not sure when they were made - maybe the early twentieth century.
After the resurgence of pride in Native heritage in the 60s and 70s, language revitalization become a big priority for a lot of people/tribes. One Lakota man, Albert White Hat (with the help of others), developed an, I believe, original Lakota orthography and a Lakota dictionary during the 80s and 90s.
Then in the 2000s, some European, maybe a Swiss or Czech or something (see: Europeans and their love of Indians and the Wild West, haha) somehow got connected with some Lakota people and came up with a new Lakota orthography that, I believe, is just the same used on some European languages and a new dictionary. His endeavor turned into a whole organization that created and sold grammar books, student workbooks, CDs, children’s materials, informational posters, etc. There has been two controversies with his work. The first is that it maybe wasn’t totally necessary - White Hat had just created this stuff a decade prior. Why did the Euro have to come in and reinvent it? Plus it wasn’t original - he used a “European” orthography on a non-Euro language. He also left out some of the nuance of the language. For example, the phrase “wakíŋyaŋ tuŋwáŋpi” says “lightning” in his dictionary. What it really means is, “the thunder-beings are coming back and opening their eyes.” The thunder-beings are creatures who returned from the west with the rains in the spring, and the lighting is the flash of their eyes as they open them. So you lose a lot of culture and…poeticness when you define things in such a simple way.
Secondly, he got all of his information through the willingness of Lakota people, mostly elders, to share their knowledge. Few, if any, were aware that it was going to become a business, and they weren’t compensated for their contributions. I’m not commenting on the morality here, just noting the issues that some take with this new dictionary and related materials.
There is a lawsuit going on right now over intellectual property or something. In fact, while I was typing this, I was in a meeting and someone said the Lakota dictionary app the company made had been removed from the Samsung app store and their online bookstore had stopped selling materials. So I’m not sure what’s going on. But on the other hand, there are still some Lakota people associated with this organization and plenty of Lakota teachers use their materials in their classrooms, so everyone has their own view of their work.
The dictionary app still works on iPhones (for now), so I can look up pretty much word I want, see the root words and different verb conjugations, and for many words, even hear a recording of both a man and a woman saying the word. I have several children’s books that I read to my son that have the words in English and Lakota. There are a handful of Lakota-dubbed episodes of the kids show, The Berenstain Bears, on Youtube. Last summer, a guy I know worked with Marvel and Disney to release a Lakota-dubbed version of The Avengers. That was a pretty huge deal - I think Mark Ruffalo read all of his lines in Lakota himself. Organizations in the Dakotas and Minnesota sometimes host classes or even immersion camps. A few of the state universities in South Dakota offer Lakota classes. Many schools on reservations or urban areas that have high Native student populations will offer classes.
I did not grow up speaking the language or hearing much of it, but I’ve been studying it for a few years, and am hoping to become certified by my state to teach it within the next year, if not by next summer. Depending on the size/demographics of the school I work at, I could probably get permission to teach it in addition to history/social studies. If I stay in my hometown, my university has already said they would let me adjunct-teach a class for them - they’ve never had an in-person teacher and if I would be willing to teach online as well, it gives them something to attract students from other schools.
So, yes. There are resources. And there is a growing movement to create new speakers. Having a language is one of the things that makes a tribe a tribe, according to their own beliefs, as well as the federal government’s stipulations for tribal recognition. That’s why most of the state-recognized, not federally-recognized, tribes are on the East Coast, because they were the first contacted and were immediately wiped out by disease. Their languages didn’t survive, and now their descendants have a hard time proving their heritage or showing what sets them apart from neighboring tribes. Tribes further west had more time trading and interacting with whites, so the government was more aware of their various identities and affiliations.
A 2010 census estimated that around 2k first-language (not merely fluent) speakers of Lakota were alive. They were likely mostly in South Dakota, but due to the Indian Relocation Act of 1956, many were likely also in cities like Minneapolis, Cleveland, Denver, and Los Angeles. That was almost 15 years ago and Native Americans were hit particularly hard by COVID, so that number is probably much lower now. Maybe less than 1k, but I really have no idea.
It is unlikely that anyone will ever become a first-language speaker of Lakota again. Maybe it’s possible - if both parents can speak it at home, and they use the admittedly small supply of Lakota-only media, a child could probably at least learn their first few words in Lakota. But I know lots of people in their 70s and 80s who said they didn’t learn a word of English until they were 5-10 years old and had to go to school or they went into town and saw their first white person. That requires more than just parents; it takes whole communities only speaking Lakota. It’ll be hard, if not impossible, to ever get back to that point again.
So, in the meantime, those of us that care and have the time and resources to learn it, do what we can do by seeking out and listening to the fluent elders before they pass, taking what classes we can find, and making do with the materials available to us. Lakota children who attended boarding schools were usually (not always, but mostly) encouraged at best (or beaten and abused at worst) to not speak their language for a few decades or so, so it’ll take some time to reverse that trend and recover from the generation(s) that lost the language and didn’t pass it on.
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I’m sure Russel Means would be very pleased with your efforts.
Use it or lose it!
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Thanks man. Have a Merry Christmas!
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I just passed a pink cybertruck going shopping.
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A.I. generated weirdness. Creeeeepy.
Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/shockfactor_ai?igsh=eTdvMThqZ2thNWEz
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Ai art is strange, but this thread on AI Lego Sets is both intriguing - and shows how much AI improved over one year.
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Sort of random.
You get released from prison. You may never get out of a mental hospital.
Yep. That way you can go out and do more criminal stuff instead of being in an institution where you can’t. Gotta have chaos and fear in the public.
I assume this is legit, but don’t actually know. Assuming it is, I thought it was interesting. The ankles and hips look so painful.
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