 Welcome to the first linguistic seminar of the New London every year. My name is Vivian Salomac, I'm standing in for Sheila Sharp who arranges these seminars but unfortunately has thought in the number of the content that she has to teach at the moment at this time. I really appreciate it to introduce Elliot Ballester, who graduated from this August's institution in 2014. 2014. In a degree in Arabic and Persian. And then he says he went and lost a lot of the Bedouin tribe and found himself in the photograph. And found he instead the Standing Rock Siw tribe with whom he now works as their linguistic consultant. Yes, thank you very much. Ion waslo all hangi tyw a tielo. Ina Julia Eciapi na ha, a The Mark Eciapi na ha, Trunca Shilla Peter na Stane Wichachia pi na ha, ond ti wai aci Pamela na ha Maulia Wichachia pi. Cha le miti wahela le mi e alo. So good afternoon my relatives and I shake your hand with a happy heart. And I'm very happy to be back here at SOAS. My name is Elliot and I'm from here originally, but I live and work now at a little town of about 900 people called Fort Yates, which is on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, which straddles north and south Dakota. My parents' names in Mark and Julia, my grandparents are Peter, Stan, Molly and Pamela. And I give you this information because when we introduce ourselves in the Lakota way, you always tell people who your family are and where you're from, so that people can identify you and work out whether you're a goodie or a baddie. So I'll leave you to make up that decision. I always think it's kind of good to give details about yourself, not only kind of from that traditional point of view, but in this academic sense, before I kind of launch into this presentation, just a kind of statement of positionality. So as I say, I grew up here in the UK. I work now as the language specialist for the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, which is fantastic work and I'm very privileged to be able to do that. And so as we kind of go into this presentation, as I start to discuss the topics I want to discuss today, I want to kind of keep this in mind. So a few pointers to kind of, you know, so you can decide how many pinches of salt you want to take my words with. I work there as a washichew, as a white person, and obviously that carries an immense amount of privilege. It has its advantages as well as its disadvantages in this particular brand of community work. I live in the community as an outsider. I could very easily leave the reservation if I wanted to. I don't, but I could and I think these are just pointers to bear in mind. I was educated at one of the world's finest institutions right here. I don't have any formal linguistics training. I'm not a linguist, according to myself, according to some others. I am, but my interest in language revitalisation as a whole is really in the role it plays as a kind of tool for social justice. And the power it can have in enhancing and kind of forwarding the way of life out there on the reservation. So this is where I'm based. It's the Standing Rock Siw Tribe. Just a kind of brief introduction to the nation. It is a sovereign nation. What I mean by that is that it is independent and has a government-to-government relationship with the United States, which means that, by law, the chairman of the Standing Rock Siw Tribe, in fact, the newly elected chairman, they had their elections just last week. The chairman is on equal standing with the president of the United States, or Wagmo Tranka, the great pumpkin, as he's better known out there. The Treaty of Fort Laramie, which was signed in 1868, was the treaty that set aside this particular sect of land for the Standing Rock Siw Tribe, and much more besides the original borders of that treaty extended all the way to the everywhere west of the Missouri River and into the surrounding states of North Dakota, Wyoming to the west, and Nebraska to the south. Over time, in 1877, there was a shiny yellow rock that was discovered in the Black Hills, and the United States decided to go back on the treaty promises they had made, and gradually, over time, those reservation boundaries have become smaller and smaller. Now the size of the reservation as it exists now is this little blue triangle shape, which is actually a fairly sizeable piece of land. It's about half the size of Wales, which seems to be the reference that people always give. This slightly lighter blue colour is the original boundaries of the Fort Laramie Treaty, that treaty signed in 1868, so you can see just how much land has been stolen over that time. The other reservations here marked in dark blue are also Lakota and Dakota reservations. Collectively, these people are known as the Oceti Shacoe. This means the Seven Council Fires, and those seven refer to four bands of western Dakota, two bands of eastern Dakota, two bands of western Dakota, and the Lakota people themselves. Now all of the languages that these nations speak are mutually intelligible. They could be considered dialects of the same language, and we'll discuss in a moment the usefulness or lack thereof of dividing these into distinct dialects or languages. Lakota and Dakota are official languages of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, and part of the work that we do in my department is getting a language and culture code written into the constitution of the tribe with the purpose of full revitalisation for the language. Now just to give the term, the name Standing Rock might be familiar because of the prominence that it had in headlines, all across the world really in the latter part of 2016. This was the battle that the Standing Rock Sioux tribe were fighting in defence of their water rights, and I just want to show this little clip. For those who have never heard a Lakota victory song, and for those who hadn't heard of that issue, I just wanted to show this little introduction. Drum beats, cheers and tears, the sound of victory for the Standing Rock Sioux and thousands of others gathered to stop the Dakota access pipeline. This massive humanity living off the grid joined by thousands of military veterans helped to exert so much political and legal pressure, effectively forcing the pipeline to be regrouped. People will have said that this is either a regular break and I just thought it would be amazing. It was almost to the river when it was halted by the Army Corps of Engineers so we could take another look at the path. Sunday, special decided it was a no-go. For months, the Sioux nation had been demanding the project be scrapped. They were convinced the pipeline carried crude oil underneath the Missouri River with one-day lead, poisoning the drinking water of millions down the river. This is too much of a risk to the drinking water to the thousands of people standing outside. Too much of a risk for the sacred sites all along that route in this area and too much of a risk for us as a pipeline. The pipeline's plan route did not go through Indian Preservation Line, but the tribe argued that water is part of training land and therefore it too must agree to its path. A couple of very important figures within contemporary Lakota life that were featured in that video. Chief Arvil Looking Horse, who is the keeper of the sacred medicine bundle, the white buffalo calf woman pipe and therefore the carrier of the most important item within Lakota spirituality. Dallas Goldtooth, who heads up the Indigenous Environment Network, which is an advocacy organisation. I mention this not because this relates directly to the topic of today's presentation, but because it's essential to acknowledge what is going on here at Standing Rock. It placed Standing Rock really at the forefront of Indigenous resistance and it carries that responsibility today. Eventually, once the Great Pumpkin came into power, the pipeline was approved and oil started flowing through it at the start of June 2017, but it's still being fought in the courts and the battle for kind of land and water goes on. Now the way that it's seen within traditional culture is that the land and the language are intrinsically related. This is true from a kind of intersectional point of view. It's true from a traditional point of view that the language belongs to the land. Words, conjugations, syntactic structures, anything like that cannot exist in isolation. It is always a reflection of creation of the world around us. I want to quote Hankashi de Beziwi, who is a colleague who works at one of the immersion schools in Lakota country. She says, I truly believe that our language is tied to our land. How many years our land has heard our language, I just believe it belongs here. As such, I just want to frame the rest of this presentation within that idea of decolonisation that this return of the traditional language is tied very directly to the return of traditional land. Every project that I talk about today I want us to consider in that kind of decolonisation framework. How useful are these projects to re-empowering people? How useful are they in terms of what sort of power structures do they promote? How can they help us reclaim land and water and our rightful place within the world as a nation? I'm a second language learner. I'm not a native speaker. Now I thought I was all alone, and I think I was for many years. Now I can see that there's this movement. To me, I'm relatively detached in whether Lakota language becomes fully revitalized. I think it would be nice, but the exciting thing to me is it just represents a shift in consciousness. It represents a coming into wakefulness. It represents people realizing there's something beautiful in the heritage. People realizing that we have something wonderful and essential to contribute towards an emerging world of civilisation. So this is a gentleman called Kevin Locke. He is a renowned hoop dancer and spiritual leader at Standing Rock Reservation. His Lakota name is Trocaea Inagi, the first to arise. What struck me about this particular interview is his attitude towards full revitalization. It would be nice, he says, but is that really the point? It's the process of revitalization that he's invested in. It's that process of reclamation, and that's the frame that I'm going to put this presentation in. So with that said, let's talk speaker numbers. Very important stuff, speaker numbers. The US Census in 2000 put 15% of the Siw population as speakers of the language. By Siw, we mean the Oceti Siakoi, the Seven Council Fires. That's for the Lakota and the Lakota Nations. So about 15,000 people were fluent speakers in 2000. Ethnolog in 2015 estimated 6,000 Lakota speakers and about 18,000 Lakota speakers. So let's see in 15 years we've gained 9,000 speakers. This is good progress. Rising Voices, which is a documentary that we'll be seeing clips of throughout this presentation, is also quoting 6,000 Lakota speakers in 2015. In 2016, February of 2016, the Lakota Language Consortium, which is an organization that was involved with the production of the film, reassessed those figures and came out with a more realistic 2100 first language speakers of Lakota, plus about 100 second language learners, and then maybe another 100 who speak the Lakota dialect instead. Meanwhile, the Lakota Iapi Ocodakichie, which is an advocacy organization for the Lakota dialect, estimated more like five speakers of Lakota within Minnesota, which is the traditional homelands of the Lakota, and maybe about 20 in other states, all together around 25 speakers. So what happened between February 2016 and May 2016 that caused such a monumental loss of speakers? What's going on? Could it be that just nobody really knows how many speakers there are? Could it be that it's actually incredibly difficult to carry out a scientific house-to-house survey of speaker numbers? Could it be that it's too difficult to measure fluency? What does fluency even mean when you say my grandma is a fluent speaker? Could it also be that numbers in these different contexts are there to serve a certain purpose? They say that 73% of statistics are made up. I believe that to maybe be the case here too. So that just goes to show you don't need to trust anything I say in this presentation. This idea of the purposes that these numbers are serving talked about in an article by Jane Hill in 2002. She talks about expert rhetoric, which are these common themes that the experts, us linguists, use when we're setting the scene to talk about language endangerment and language revitalisation. One of those is the idea of universal ownership. These languages belong to all of us and we must work to save them. Another is hyperbolic valorisation. These languages are precious. They contain immeasurable knowledge and wisdom. Number three is this habit of enumeration. Alarming statistics. Only 5 speakers left, only 2100 speakers left. So why is this happening? Funding is the reason behind all of these varying statistics. So media attention too. When you send out a press release saying there are now only 2,000 speakers left, that leads to media attention and that again leads to funding, which is something that is desperately needed in the field. Hill, also in this article, suggests that these numbers can have an impact on communities. Quoting these random statistics that are pulled from proverbials, has a real impact on communities. She quotes Moll Hoysla in another article who said that the vast collections of numbers, these vast collections of numbers are a major form of knowledge in colonial regimes. So if you bombard people with numbers enough, that is a way of exerting control. They're meant to be scary. They're meant to encourage this feeling of loss. But it also imposes this burden of responsibility too. In that same press release, I just wanted to quote a gentleman called Ben Blackbear, who is a fluent speaker and elder. He's a member of the board of that particular organisation who put out the press release. He expresses that negativity isn't necessarily useful for the fluent speakers whom we're purportedly helping. From the outside perspective, the language is in critical condition, but from the inside, from those of us living and speaking it, we just need to look at ourselves in a positive way to move the language forward. Hill in her paper suggests that there are alternatives to this kind of expert rhetoric that if you actually listen to how it's talked about in the community, it's always talked about in human terms. These are people with names, they're relatives who you've known and loved and who have walked on and who you've lost, and that's how it's talked about, never in terms of statistics. So moving the language forward, I like that phrase that he uses as a synonym to revitalisation or revival. He's talking about the language as a living language and what we're doing is we're progressing with it. So just a few of the projects at Standing Rock that are ongoing to move the language forward. The picture we see here is from Lachol i api wahogpi, which is a 100% Lakota language immersion environment. There are about 20 kids who attend four days a week and it's divided into two schools. Lachol i api wahogpi is up to first grade and then second and third, which is the highest level that it currently goes to, Wichachini o waio wa. There are three fluent elders who teach in the nest. There are also second language learners who are working as teachers. So that is one of the most powerful projects that is ongoing. Can you translate the names for us? Yes, so Lachol i api wahogpi, wahogpi is literally a nest. So Lachol i api is the Lakota word for the Lakota language, so it's the Lakota language nest. Wichachini is something like revival or recovery maybe. So it's the revival school, Wichachini o waio wa. The third program, and this is one that I'm going to focus on a little later in the presentation, is Chpejachini on speici i ci api, which is a project at Sillimol College, the Tribal College on Standing Rock, and it's funded by the National Science Foundation. It provides funding for 10 very capable students to study the Lakota language intensely for four hours a day, five days a week. So they are getting four hours of intensive Lakota language classes every day, and the idea is that they will be brought as close to fluency as possible by the end of an academic year. These are people who have been identified as capacity. They could be future teachers, they could be using the language with their own children, they could be leaders within the movement, and so a college course of this vigor has never been taught for the Lakota language. Four hours a day at college level two, we're talking teaching college at college, we're talking complex subject matter, and that's never been done. So that is a project that I'm going to come back to a little later on in this presentation. And a master apprentice program, which will be starting in spring next year. So 10 hours a week, direct contact, a learner and a fluent speaker, engaging in everyday interactive activities. So let's talk about texts, which is one of the main themes of the talk today. English speakers can read Shakespeare, they can read the Bible, they can watch television with their kids and laugh at all the stupid things that all the cartoon characters say. They can read newspapers all over the world in English, and that is part of their basic social identity and part of a national culture. And that's why no one who is an English speaker would want to lose their language. In the same way, Lakota people want to reinvigorate their language. So that was Joe Allen Archambeau, who is a researcher at the Natural History Museum, part of the Smithsonian's institution. And when we're talking about texts here, I'm not only referring to written texts, we're talking about any kind of permanent record of the language. So that could be written texts or it could be audio recordings too. Now, obviously, as Archambeau says, Lakota has virtually no written history, no written literature or text corpus in comparison with the English language. But if you compare it to most Native American languages, Lakota is actually very, very well documented indeed. It's probably the most, if not the second most, well documented language in North America. Going back to the 1830s, when missionaries started to live and work amongst the Dakota, the Eastern Dakota, so that's the bands living over in Minnesota, that part of the country. Two brothers, Samuel and Gideon Pond, put down a lot of stories into writing. And another missionary named Stephen Riggs who worked with a number of different speakers. And I always like to mention their names because these texts are often referred to as the Riggs texts and not by the names of the speakers who actually gifted these stories in the first place. So Michael Renville, David Greycloud, Walking Elk, James Garvey and many others. And also newspapers, newspaper projects, some of which were more long-living than others, which began amongst the missionaries too. Examples are the Dakota Trawashit Cookie, the Dakota Friend, Ampao, which means Daybreak, bit like the sun, but in Dakota, and Iapii o ae, which is the word carrier. There are Lakota texts as well, dating back to a little later on, so 1890s. The image we see here is an image of George Sword, who was a Oglala Lakota, so he was from Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. He, along with George Bush Otter, Edgar Firethunder, Alex Charging Crow, began to put some of their stories and memoirs and autobiographies down in writing. In the early 1900s, another missionary by the name of Eugene Beagle, it's kind of a corruption of whatever the original German pronunciation is, but they call him Beagle, that's how they pronounce it. And Ivan Starr Sr, who was one of his consultants, they worked together with speakers to put down text into writing. So Brave Dog, Little Cloud, Bad Yellow Hair, all of these people we have to be grateful for for the stories that they gave us. And then Francis Densmore, who you might have come across in kind of musical ethnography. She not only recorded a lot of Lakota songs, but also narratives that go along, the stories behind the songs. Later on in the 20th century, a woman by the name of Ella Deloria was an incredibly important part of this effort to document the language. She is a Lakota woman herself. She grew up with fluent speaking parents. She grew up in a fluent household and went away to, I think, Columbia University and trained with Franz Boas. So she learned kind of the technical side of language documentation and returned to her own people to start documenting her language. She recorded a huge amount of work, monologues, dialogues, and often the subject matter is legends, mythology, memoirs. And she worked primarily with monolingual speakers. So at this time there was still, the vast majority of the Lakota population was still monolingual, which certainly isn't the case now. The social outlook of her informants has always kind of been questioned. It's from personal communication I've had with researchers into Ella Deloria. She tended to work with social outcasts, those who had a kind of outside perspective on their own society, and that reflects itself somewhat in some of the stories she's put down. And then a huge amount of documentation has been done in the modern period too. So from the 1950s onwards, a lot of audio recordings have been made of the language too. So James Emory was a, I think an Oglala, Lakota from Pine Ridge too, who started making recordings of his own relatives. In the 1960s a huge amount of recording was done with people like Frank Foolscro, a cedio of which was gifted to me earlier today. Thank you very much for that. Spotted Eagle, Black Horse, Schweigman, Kild's Insight, Bee Medicine, an anthropologist, Peat Catches, and all of these are stored at the University of South Dakota, and they were made. The interviews were done by a number of different people. And then since then, a number of private collections have emerged too. In the 1970s, an anthropologist called Ray DeMalle, who works out of Indiana University, made recordings with speakers on Shine River Reservation, the next res south from Standing Rock. In the 1990s, Don Moccasin made a lot of recordings at Rosebud. Regina Pustit made recordings with Lakota people living in Denver, Colorado, which is quite a way away from Lakota Country, because it was one of the relocation cities. So there's a surprisingly high proportion of Lakota speakers in Denver. And then a linguist, a check linguist by the name of Jan Ulrich, has made several recordings with several hundred speakers across Lakota Country. He's done an incredible amount of documentation work. We'll come back to some of that in a moment. There's also a small number of speakers who are writing their language as well in different formats. Ivan Star, Francis Apple, Archie Bovey are a few of the most prolific writers in Lakota Country. The Lakota Country Times, which is kind of a national newspaper, tends to be the medium that carries these written texts. The example we have up here is a text by Francis Apple, titled, So a long time ago, the Lakota people were starving, they say. And it's a text about how the Lakota were forced to migrate during starvation. And then the cartoon says, grandson, don't play with your food. It's a boy playing with a dog. It's a very sacred food within the Lakota tradition. So the fact that we have so much documentation of the language has meant that historical linguists have been able to identify changes that have occurred. And these changes have been identified by Ulrich's three different types. One is natural language change. And an example is the gradual loss of palatalisation. So historically, what was often a jah sound has eventually become a gah sound. For example, if I said, let's see, sapeci historically meant the black one, but nowadays you'd hear it as sapeci, so that jah has been lost and replaced by a gah sound. Language attrition, so the conflation of certain features of the language, and nowadays more or less interchangeable. One was historically a definite article and the other was a future time clause marker, so a kind of adverbial marker, and then more or less used interchangeably now. And then of course English influence too. We don't have any monolinguist speakers of the Lakota language today. So all of the speech that occurs today is somewhat influenced by the English language. And a nice example of that is, or I guess a clear example of that is the way that inalienable nouns are often used in structures which were traditionally only used for inalienable nouns. So by inalienable nouns, I mean things which intrinsically belong to you, your relatives, your body parts, your spirit, your voice, things like this, whereas inalienable nouns are things that are possessions that don't really belong to us. And historically, fluent speakers would express their relationship to inalienable nouns in such ways as me chinksi yw cre, my son exists. It means I have a son but it's expressed in a different way. Nowadays you'll often hear people say chinksi wan bloha, literally I possess a son is how you might literally translate it, but that's one of the examples of how English has had an impact on Lakota syntax. So if there are so many texts, why am I giving this presentation about the difficulties that we face in engaging the community with them? And I've identified five main challenges that we face in accessing the text corpus. One of them is geography. Where are these manuscripts, where these recordings are physically located? Number two, the format and nature of the texts are sometimes inaccessible to complete beginners of the language. Number three, we're going to look at the authenticity of the text, working out how much of the text corpus is real authentic fluent language. Four, the idea of writing the Lakota language is generally accepted nowadays, but attitudes towards writing the language are very, very nuanced, and I want to look a little bit at how those opinions differ. And number five, as is often the case with endangered languages, the orthography issue. So people not being able to agree about which spelling system to use, or having an opposition to using certain material written in a certain way. Let's start with the first one. Snap. So the red peg up there is the Standing Rock Reservation. And I've just marked on these blue pegs to show where some of those archaic Lakota and Lakota texts. So those texts from the mid-1800s and the early 1900s, where they're located, they're all over the place. They're at the Colorado Historical Society, University of Oklahoma, Berkeley, the Marquette University in Wisconsin, Minnesota Historical Society in Minnesota, some university in Michigan, the Smithsonian, Library of Congress, various places on the East Coast too. So geographically completely inaccessible to the Lakota community, which is who live in northern South Dakota. As you can see, there are a few pegs. These tend to be tribal colleges and so on that do hold archive materials too, but generally quite inaccessible. And this is just looking at the archive, the kind of archaic texts too. If we look at more modern recordings, the recordings made from the 1970s onwards, we're going to be looking even further east. We're going to be looking at Europe. Texts which are made by linguists and stored on their computers and not shared in a kind of open source, or not necessarily open source, but a way that gives back to the community that they were gifted by. Standing Rock itself has a provision in the Tribal Code of Justice, which says that any personal entity intending to conduct research on the residents, members and the resources of the reservation shall first complete an application to the City Board College Institutional Review Board, and no data collection may be conducted by a research until this approval is obtained, and a copy of all results of the research under this section shall be provided to and maintained at the college, and researchers shall abide by the ethical principles and respect for the persons, beneficiaries and justice. All researchers shall respect the culture of the residents of the reservation when designing and executing proposed research. All researchers shall follow the guidelines and procedures developed by the college and the IRB for the protection of human subjects. So basically any research that gets done at Standing Rock Reservation must be deposited at City Board College too. The reality is that is not the case. It could be that it's not very well enforced. It's not very strictly enforced. It could be that research has come onto the reservation without seeking approval in the first place. So really this sort of provision, as laid out in this Code of Justice, relies on the ethical standpoint of the linguist, of the researcher, and their understanding that it is important to give these recordings back to the community. There are a couple of instances of repatriation that have happened in the past couple of years. This one from 2008, I mentioned James Emory, who was the Oglala Lakota who started making recordings in the 1950s. He gifted over 300 old recordings to the Oglala Lakota College, which is the equivalent of Sitting Bull College but for the southern part of Lakota Country. And these recordings that he made preserve some of the old songs that have otherwise been forgotten. Here's another nice example. She says she's honored to return them to her words and their rightful works. The meaning of the repatriation is very special because of being able to honor their art, their culture, their self-expression, and their words of life. That's very meaningful because America is all about all kinds of diversity and we can honor and celebrate that. June will deliver the recordings of the Rushmore 5th Civic Center as part of the Lakota language. The language summit he's referencing there is literally called the Lakota Lakota Lakota language summit. He's not just tripping over the autocue. This happened in October of last year and it was a very special moment because with the repatriation of this material it's not just about the linguistic content or in this case the content of the songs but it's this repatriation of trust as well that exists between the Library of Congress and the tribe itself. Let's talk a little bit about linguistic authenticity that I mentioned. When we talk about an authentic text what I'm referencing is a text that is being produced by a fluent speaker for a fluent speaker. So it's speech or language that has emerged in its natural environment. It's not language that's being designed for a textbook for example. A lot of translational material does exist as well works that have been translated from English and other languages into Lakota. Of course translation is an art or a science that requires a real intricate intuition of both languages, of the structure of both languages and often if the translated doesn't have that then the resulting text is not necessarily good or useful for learners of the language. So examples of translational texts there's a lot of liturgical literature, Bibles, stories of various Biblical characters that have been put into the language by those early missionaries, Stephen Riggs and Eugene Beagle among others. In recent years TV commercials there is a bank called the Black Hills Federal Credit Union that's actually put out a couple of TV adverts in the language and it's kind of cool but it's scripted in English and then translated into Lakota. Movies, dances with wolves, anyone seen it? Yeah. It's good in the sense that a lot of the script is in Lakota and it was translated by fluent speakers but the actors were not fluent speakers themselves and the resulting language is kind of questionable. There's another film that's coming out this month called Woman Walks Ahead about a white woman who develops a kind of deep friendship with Sitting Bull. It's based on a true story and again the script had been translated into Lakota and taught syllable by syllable to the actors. And one of the criticisms of these types of projects another one I want to mention is the Berenstein Bears which, does anyone know the Berenstein Bears? So I had never come across them in England so when I went to Lakota country I assumed it was like they only ever spoke Lakota but I was told they originally spoke English and they'd been dubbed into Lakota but there's 20 episodes, it was a monumental project and Standing Rock was one of the co-partners on that project. So 20 episodes of the cartoon dubbed into the language and this is the first kind of TV programming that had been done for the language and pretty much apart from these adverts remains to be the only TV programming that's been put into the language. So it's incredibly, it's a powerful project in that sense because it represents Lakota and Lakota language entering new contemporary realms. On the other hand, the stories were designed for American English speaking audiences and I quote a fluent elder from Cheyne River Reservation Stephanie Charging Eagle who says it's an English show but it's been taken and translated into Lakota so what you have now is a Lakota story with Washi'chwil thought, Washi'chwil thinking that means white man's thinking. What really should be happening is that we tell our stories in Lakota to our children so that they understand where they come from. So there is criticism to these projects as well as the advantages they bring and I see the advantage in both. I agree with Charging Eagle that original stories do matter. We should be doing both. Let's talk a little bit about the attitudes to writing the language in the first place and actually putting the Lakota language down into writing. This is a newspaper excerpt written by Francis Apple again for the Lakota Country Times and he tells a story about the white buffalo calf woman who brought the traditions to the people in the beginning of time. He says, well he's written it in Lakota but I shall read the English translation that he's put underneath. When the white buffalo calf woman brought the buffalo calf pipe to the Oyate to the people, she taught them for four days about the teachings that go with it. Ptessanwi, that is the white buffalo calf woman, her final instruction went something like this. Listen carefully. Whenever you put this sacred language that the creator gave you on paper, you will cease to be a nation. It's a slight irony that he wrote this for a newspaper that was published in print but the idea that you lose something, you lose the sacredness of the language and with it you lose the language the sacredness of the language, and with so much that's already been taken away from the people that is one thing that they have left. On the other hand, there are other writers, Ivan Starr, again writing for the Lacrote Country Times, who said, y blwg llan chi he'i Lacrote api chi le wopio'i ce'i le o wahan glu api chi te tro gata. My belief about the language is that we will have hours in writing. The language will recover only if we encourage the whole nation to speak it. People will write books in the language and treat it as their first language. Y api chi le tro gata he'i chi api chi te tro gata he means first, to treat something as your first. So there are advocates of writing too. My belief in it is not that somebody has come to our classroom and talked about stories, and the moral of that, what did you get out of it? What was so important? That's why I believe in oral storytelling. That's because I was always asked to do this at the Sundance Youth Camp. I try to tell stories that there are morals to it. Because that's the way these stories work. And I want to comment on how stories have come. Even when you go hunting, or even to make a hide, scrape a hide, or to rework another. There's always morals to that story. The one that I like about that is how one was a cousin that was so appreciative of her male cousin. So she started meeting. So Marcus was so important for her appreciation for looking after her. And she said to them, they're not O'Han. So what that up? Mae'r cwsn am ysgledd o'r O'Han bydd yw'r pwg. So he might not boil the water and put a little bit of Marcus in the sink. Anyone get that joke? So Lena O'Han, it's a synonym. She's playing with synonyms. O'Han means to boil something, but it also means to put something on your feet. So this cousin had made this beautiful pair of Marcus inns for her cousin. And told him Lena O'Han, so he threw them straight in the water. This is, on chi, Dolores Taken alive, who is one of the most fluent elders, very eloquent, lachodd y speaker at Standing Rock. And one of the co-teachers with me on the Chpe'r Chashni on Spe'eg i Chiapii course that I mentioned earlier that I'll touch on in just a minute. I'll skip over that for the sake of time. It's really exciting. I was telling the college and the federal government that we should probably continue to, we should probably draft a lot of our policies, everything in writing that would be in our language. Understanding that our language back in the day wasn't written for the purposes of advancement and growth as a society and we see the need to write it. And now we are, we've evolved the way amongst the leaders to write it in a different fashion where non-speakers when they read the sentences or say the word, the way it's written in the sounds of the speakers for the long time. Jesse Taken alive, a former chairman of the Standing Rock Siw tribe and another very fluent speaker. And what he's talking about here is a learner's orthography that was developed to help people pronounce the words as they would have been pronounced a hundred years ago. Some of these interviews in mind, others are, this one included, produced by the South Dakota Department of Education. They've done a lot of documentation in English of elder's knowledge. So this question of orthographies, I don't want to get too deeply into this because it's a subject that a lot of heat and not a whole lot of light has been generated from. But if we just contrast some of the different writing systems that exist for the language, you possibly can't see it at this resolution, but suffice to say that these are three very different ways of writing the same thing. If we look, for example, at how nasal vowels are represented, so they are sound, in the Deloria orthography we have a little oganec underneath the vowel like they do in Polish, right? In the White Hat orthography it's an end with a long tail. In this orthography it's an end with a long tail and a flick. Three different ways of writing the same sound. Ah, the nasal sound. It's a little clearer. So let's look at these two words, for example, geapie here, K-E-Y-A-P-I, with an acute accent on the E. Contrast that with geapie right at the top there, K with a bar on top of it, P with a bar on top of it, has to represent the unaspirated ga, or the ku and pu sounds. So in this particularly orthography you don't mark unaspirated sounds in the White Hat orthography you do. So very different approaches. And, you know, my general feeling is that whatever orthography people want to use to ensure they're teaching the language and passing it on, that's good. But there are, there's a lot of disagreement in the community. It's related to power structures, of course, you know, who divides the orthography in the first place, what efforts have been made in the schools to teach that to the children. So there's still a lot of kind of emotional and historical baggage associated with these orthographies. This, and you don't need to see this in detail, I just want you to see how many different orthographies have been created for this language. This was a survey done by a Spanish researcher called Corral Esteban. And all of these down this side are different orthographies. So 20 plus different orthographies for Lakota. And each of these have maybe two or three materials produced in that orthography. So it's gradually shifting. It's gradually shifting. There are in different communities different orthographies which are becoming the norm. Over in Lakota country there's one that's advocated for by the University of Minnesota at Standing Rock. We tend to use the Ulrich orthography. To find fluent speakers is the Lakota Salmon Institute, Healthy Gears in your college in North Dakota. Maybe speakers can learn to learn how to teach them in their place but it's a struggle. Someone who speaks Lakota fluent, who has been raised speaking Lakota fluent, doesn't automatically make you the best Lakota language instructor. Just like myself, I wouldn't be the best English instructor because I speak without thinking. It's natural to try and understand the sentence structure, verbs, conjugations in English, but I have to go to school to learn everything that I need to teach the students. That's what a lot of fluent speakers are here for as well. Don't shy Henry and Emma doing the law. In one word they ask, the law is taken with a short story by Sandra Black. The law is written by Sandra Black here. The class that I have there was a process writing class and we were trying to get these speakers, I thought the language speakers, to the point where they will write material that they can use in the class they can structure so that it's easy for young children to read in Lakota. Obviously, despite all of this documentation that has happened, the most important resource we have for authentic language are our fluent speakers. Any projects which encourage them to start putting that down into writing is a beneficial one. This is not necessarily a representative sample of elders. These guys are advocates for this particular orthography. It's not always that easily accepted, but it has helped them start to produce materials for their own classroom. I'm going to skip forward a little bit because how much time do I have left? Sure. I want to talk specifically about some of the creative ways that these texts are being made accessible against the communities. I'll focus on two or three projects including the college course that we're teaching at the moment. First, leave some lessons from Alaska. This is Gary Halton, who is writing about the Dena'ina language, which has very few speakers, or in the case of the Kenai dialect, no speakers. Over 300 documents including field notes, out-of-print primers, over 300 recordings dating back to the 1950s. A lot of this material is archived at the Alaska Native Language Centre, which is some way away from Dena'ina territory. How to repatriate those materials? The project that he's been involved with is a digitisation project. There was a website produced called Dena'ina Kenaga, which is an online digital archive of these resources. These are the four lessons that he offers to other indigenous communities. Number one, that digital repatriation facilitates new kinds of circulation, so more people, different audiences, are getting access to the text. Number two, that digitisation alone is not sufficient. You have to go above and beyond. You have to find ways for people to engage with the texts. Number three, that I think that's what I just said, is to engage with communities to develop and repurpose these materials, so finding a reason for their existence other than just nice artefacts in an archive. And number four, of course, when the community is involved in driving these efforts, that's when they're the most long-lasting and successful. So these are kind of four pieces of guidance guided by when we're looking at projects to do with Lakota language texts. One of those, of course, is mass publication of these texts. Whereas we could walk into Waterstones and pick out any book, there are about five, this one's not even published yet. There are about five books that Lakota people, fluent speakers, can choose from to read their own language. Ella Deloria, who was that anthropologist from northern Lakota country, published in 1932, and it's been republished since, a big collection of mythological works. Professor Ingham did a wonderful study into dozens and dozens of texts on the topic of Lakota spirituality, the role that spirituality plays in contemporary society and comparisons between Lakota spirituality and Judeo-Christian traditions. These come from a number of fluent speakers, including George Bush Otter, Edgar Fyathunder, Frank Fools Crow, and finally people have access to these. Digitisation, of course, is a reality for some of those older, more archaic texts. Once they're out of copyright, for example, the Francis Densmore texts were done so long ago that you can kind of find them online. But how to actually encourage engagement and interaction with these texts remains a big question. There was a project, an online forum project that was set up, let's see, about eight or nine years ago, where some of these older texts are published online and users on the forum can sign up, they can practice translating little sections of the text, you can double click on words and the dictionary entry for that particular word will pop up. Technologically speaking, it's a very beautiful project and a successful one. Of course, the flip side of digitisation is that you... it is then open to everyone in the world. Tasha Hough, a colleague of mine who was somewhat critical of this project, is worried about the number of oddballs, essentially, who are attracted to these sorts of environments. She speaks about the inadvertent contribution to a broader phenomenon of non-Indians going native. In this way, non-natives learning la cota today remains part and parcel of the conquest of Indigenous peoples. That's big words, but she did a study of the users that were interacting on that forum most frequently, and Germany was a far more active country than Stanley Ruck itself. It could be attributed to privilege, how much free time you have to spend learning language, how much time you have to do the sort of research that leads you to finding these texts, but that is one of the downsides of publishing and digitising in a kind of open source way. So, chpe-cha-shni o'n speitio itiapi literally means, when we first had the group come together at the start of the academic year, we were 10 students and sat round with my co-teachers and we said, what shall we call this group? The name that was said or done was chpe-cha-shni, which means boldly or fervently, full of energy o'n speitio itiapi to teach yourself or to learn. So this is a group of people who are boldly setting themselves the task of learning the language to fluency in a year. Curriculum, as I say, has never been developed to the kind of college level. So, the focus that we have when we're developing this curriculum is preserving the authenticity of language. As more and more of our fluent speakers begin to make their journey, these texts that are documented become more and more vital. They become a more important treasure trove for fluent language as it was spoken 100 years ago. So, I quote Philips here when we talk about authenticity. What he's talking about is the youth, let's see, certainly these texts must be selected with care so that students' linguistic competency is balanced with background knowledge, interest in strategic competencies in ways that render the task challenging but not frustrating. The advice to edit the task and not the text encourages instructional practice where students develop effective interpretive strategies such as contextual guessing, hypothesising and confirming or revising those. So, that means even as a beginner when you're interacting with a story that has been documented by a fluent speaker, you are presented with the entire story. You listen to the entire recording as it was made or you read the entire text as it was written down. We don't give extracts. We don't dumb the language down. We don't paraphrase. We give them the entire thing so that they can interact with the text in as full and authentic way as possible. But the response that we expect from the students is where their language competency comes into play. So, we start with simple tasks. I'm just going to give a quick example of one of those now where we have five minutes left. This is a story as it was written down by Ella Deloria from one of her fluent informants, monolingual informant. It's the story of a meadowlach and a rattlesnake. Bigger? Sure. It's only about ten sentences long. Who here remembers the word wahochbi from early Iran? Anyone remember? Wahochbi. Yes, nest. It was the word for a nest. Wahochbi is a little nest. Cute little nest. This is the story of a rattlesnake who approaches a meadowlach nest with four or five little baby meadowlachs in there. And instead of freaking out, the mother meadowlach says, Uncle rattlesnake, how nice of you to visit. Thank you for coming. I haven't seen you in so long. I'm going to cook you a meal and welcome you in the proper way. Hey, old eldest born, why don't you fly off and find us a kettle so we can cook your uncle rattlesnake a feast? And so the eldest meadowlach flies off and they wait around for five minutes, ten minutes pass, and the eldest born doesn't come back. So she says, wherever could he be and sends off the next in line, the second born child to go and look for his older brother and to bring back a kettle together. Five minutes pass, ten minutes pass, and that meadowlach doesn't return either, so she sends off the third meadowlach to go and look for them. Fourth meadowlach, fifth meadowlach, and until eventually the nest is empty, at which point she turns to the rattlesnake and says, ha! As if anyone would ever cook for you and flies off and they all live happily ever after. But the point is that this is quite a formulaic text. It's a story that's quite repetitive, there's language, there are verbs that are used throughout. So one of the activities that we did with this particular text was identifying the word iaia to depart from a nest in its various forms. So they're getting conjugation practice, not in a dry way, not in a way that would involve filling out a conjugation table, but by interacting with a story that their grandparents would have known. Just to end with, I'm going to show you two more little projects. The religion of the end of the world told in Lachota by the words taken by my eye. Lachota ma'ch ma'ch osu'ch a'i mahe, y rhyw hwnna'ch gwylochau. Ha, le, rha, gymsa, rha, oedau, nai iecheg i boi'i cimani oedau, si'n dweud ni, y rhyw hwnna'ch gwylochau rhyw hwnna'ch hef, rhyw hwnna, le, rha, gan, nai, dech chi, chi, maherdwchon. Ha, ha, trwy'n aga'w, e, ha, ni, e, chympis, a'ch gwyta, oedau chi, iecheg i ddweud wuzafu. Oed hwnnch hwnna'ch hef, hef, ychynna'ch, hwnna'ch hef, i'ch bach i fi aswm cais a rhyw le, rha, gymsa, si'n giswm ni, nai, oedau, rhyw hwnna'ch hef, chi, ma'ch hef, chi, ffai, rhyw hwnna'ch hef, rhyw hwnna'ch hef, rha, gymsa, rha, gymsa, oedau i mi ycharyg, ma'ch hwnna'ch hef, hwnna'ch hef, yw'r cyntaf, yw'r cyntaf, e'ch mynd yn y pithio yw'r cyntaf, yw'r cyntaf, oedau oedau i mi, oedau i mi, oedau i mi, ach, i'w cartch rhen, llwyr bod yw fawr, rhaid i fydden, a o hwnnw'r cael cawn i'n le'r erbyn. yn gweithio o'r ystyried o'r cyfwyr yn yw'r cyfrannu yn gyferlau. Felly, mae'r cwbl yn ymddangos diwethaf, ond rwy'n gweithio gwybod eu hunain gwneud o'r cwestiynau. Mae'r gweithio i fynd i'r idea diwethaf ..a Lywodraeth. A yr unig wedi rhoi ymwybodiant ymwybodiad Aysburg... ..y holl ymlaen i yw y virus i ddaeth y teimlo. The more we can overcome the challenges of geography... ..and the actually reclaiming tribal ownership of these texts... the more we can overcome simple technical details about orthography and the more we can show that writing Lakota isn't necessarily a corruption of the language but a representation of authentic language then the easier it will become to reintroduce these texts into the community and hopefully with that ensure that these stories and the knowledge written into the memoirs and autobiographies and the other texts that are out there is passed on to the next generation of learners. So that's why we're doing this. Ehan i la o er princ delaw. Wopila. I.T. infrastructures like what kind of ways of processing either of the varieties you mentioned. Is there a keyword layout? Is there an online dictionary? What kind of resources do people have access to? Yeah, there. The orthography that's used at Standing Rock contains about 10 or so characters that aren't in the English alphabet. They're all unicode characters and the keyboard layout has been designed. It's installed on most of the computers in the schools. There's also a very good desktop dictionary that has been produced with audio recordings of pretty much every word in there. They sat in a studio up in Bismarck North Dakota for days on end just reading through the dictionary and recording word by word. And so when you look up a word in the dictionary, you can hear it pronounced by a fluent speaker. And the credit for that project goes to the Lakota Language Consortium, which is a non-profit that works with various technical projects, I guess, mostly across Lakota country. And is that generally Internet access, Google Transfigure, etc. in the community? Yes. The resources that we design have to be mobile compatible because most people have access to the Internet through their phones and don't necessarily have a computer at home. So apps that we've worked on in the past have always been made primarily focusing on mobile applications. You know the Ulrich's dictionary and now the grammar that it must produce, which are basically obviously thorough and very readable. Do they get sort of distributed to schools and things over there? Is the Dakota Indian Foundation produced? Yeah, the Dakota Indian Foundation, I think, were one of the sponsors for the dictionary. I'm not sure who sponsored the grammar. I think the North Dakota Humanities Council was one of the sponsors. They're certainly available for purchase and, you know, 50 bucks a pop. It's relatively cheap for a grammar of its size. I don't think there's any kind of free distribution to schools. That would be nice if the money was there. Yeah. I'm curious about the people that we saw trying to write down and the stories that you have there. So the fluent speakers that you have, do they know the stories already or do they actually get to reconnect with them via the texts? Or how much of the knowledge is still with the fluent speakers? At Standing Rock, we're blessed to have a number of very eloquence and, let's say, very wise storytellers on our radars. Some of them speak the Lakota language, some of them don't, but they know the stories and are able to tell them in English. There are others who are fluent speakers but don't necessarily know the stories, so for them it is a moment of reconnection and discovery. All of the students within our class are second language learners, so they came to this college course as complete beginners who may know some of the stories, may be familiar with the content of the stories, and that helps them to understand and engage with the texts. But this is possibly the first time they're ever engaging with them in Lakota. It's actually not a question, it's just a comment. I mean, when you've referred to texts, usually they've been traditional stories, haven't they? Yes. Other things like Beagle and others have were actually not really traditional stories. They were just accounts of life, or speeches that, for instance, Beagle has these things with us, speeches of the Chiefs, incredible talking, sitting ball talking, et cetera. Also very, very interesting. There are modern things about life in South Dakota right now. People lived in the 30s and people who went on the Buffalo Hills show to England, they're also very interesting. Yeah, for sure. It's a good point to make that a lot of these texts are very secular as well. They're not necessarily, not everything is a sacred text. There are a lot of narratives of daily life, recipes, instructions for how to, how to make, work with beadwork or quillwork, which are valuable in their own way as well, of course. There are a lot of things that I want to ask you, but we can have a chat later perhaps. Sure. Can I ask you about the orthographies that have been created? You have this whole list, and at the end there is still a lot of this checking list. Right. The orthography that I'm most familiar with, which is the auroric orthography, it's claimed that there were a number of fluent speakers consulted on the devising of the orthography. Quite how many speakers were actually involved is a different question. Even if two or three speakers are involved, then what input do the rest of the Lakota population get in it? The fact is there's been quite a strong and relentless campaign by the linguists and educators to use this orthography. It wasn't necessarily conducted in the, not necessarily conducted in the most tactful way sometimes, but we are at a stage now where we are, and that is that most teachers are prepared to use it in the schools. Everyone's on the same page. Yeah. It's not really about the userty of the orthographies, it's about palo, it's about relationship with the community. I remember talking to people, and I'm telling all the people about orthographies, and traditional people often preferred ones which didn't have lots of accents, because they thought it was a little foreign. It's really a naive attitude, but it's their attitude. So they didn't like accents, you know, and the older ways of writing were really just like English, but they used certain things, like they used a J in French, and they used an R for her, and I'm sorry, kind of French. The early ones were affected by French by the early ones. Yeah, and a lot of those fluents because you are writing in the language tend to use whatever system works for them at the time of writing. It's not necessarily consistent, they don't necessarily have a system in place, and whatever, they're writing the language and that's a beautiful thing. Time will tell whether this orthography that is kind of becoming standard, whether it will last, maybe it's a useful learner's orthography, and then once people are fluent again, they will find other ways of writing in maybe a more simple, more technologically adaptable way than what we have at the moment. Thank you for being here.