At a recent candidates’ debate held by Standing Rock’s community radio station, His Horse Is Thunder announced that if he does not learn the Lakota language by the end of his four-year term, he will not run for re-election. His mostly elderly audience, sitting on the cold bleachers of a community gymnasium, met these remarks with loud applause. The next day, His Horse Is Thunder won the election by a landslide.
His Horse Is Thunder, who told the Associated Press that he knows "about 10 percent of the language," is not unusual among North and South Dakota’s Lakota people in his inability to speak his ancestral language. Nor is his well-founded concern over its future. Elderly Lakota are especially worried about the fate of the Lakota language -- they are quickly becoming the language’s only speakers.
In South Dakota’s eight Lakota and Dakota reservations, areas in which the population is rapidly growing and increasingly young, it is nearly impossible to find a person under the age of 30 who speaks their ancestral language. Peter Hill, a teacher at Red Cloud High School on the Pine Ridge Reservation and a student of the Lakota language himself says, "We have fluent speakers dying every week and there is a pretty much zero percent replacement rate."
According to statistics collected by the Lakota Language Consortium, in the year 2000 only 15 percent of the 102,619 self-identified Lakota, Dakota and Nakota people over the age of five in the United States spoke their native language, a figure that has continued to fall as elderly speakers die. In 1993, the median age for a Lakota speaker was over 50 years old, while today it is over 65.
Now, tribal leaders, fluent elders, and concerned outsiders are trying to breathe new life into the Lakota language before it becomes relegated to anthropological texts and archaic dictionaries. Without action, this slow death could be complete in the next ten to twenty years, reveals Wilhelm Meya, Executive Director of the Lakota Language Consortium. "We need to find a way to create a new generation of speakers before the last generation of teachers passes on," he urges, "There are only a few Lakota kids today, maybe from two or three families, who actually are speakers of the language. We are starting from scratch in a way."
Meya compares the potential loss of the Lakota language’s mostly oral tradition to the loss of any great, culturally defining body of literature. "There was the famous library in Alexandria that the Egyptians had that held all the texts, and there was a great fire that burned the library down, and people are still lamenting 3000 years later the loss of that literature," he says, "The same thing is happening here."
But to a population plagued by economic depression, unemployment, poverty and alcoholism, saving the Lakota language is more than an academic concern. Many Lakota speakers see their language as key to the maintaining a culture that has survived two hundred years of assault and that has recently begun to go through a renaissance. Virgil Taken Alive, a DJ at KLND-FM, Standing Rock’s community radio station, plays a mixture of Lakota powwow music and classic country on his morning show. He speaks mostly in English with a little Lakota thrown in for what he supposes is a predominantly elderly audience. Interest in Lakota culture and tradition is not limited to the elderly, he alleges, but the essential cultural ingredient of language increasingly is. "There is now a renewal of Lakota ways," he notes, "But in order to be a practitioner of these ways, you must be able to speak the language."
Gladys Hawk, the great-granddaughter of Gall, who helped defeat Custer at Little Bighorn, and the granddaughter of Episcopal missionaries on the upper Missouri, now teaches Lakota at Sitting Bull College in Fort Yates, North Dakota. She says that the language she grew up with is inseparable from her cultural values. "If it weren’t for the language, I don’t think the culture would amount to a hill of beans," she asserts, "The words that we use every day, they are sacred, because there is no other language on the earth, I don’t think, that is like ours."
The Lakota language, part of the Siouxan language group, is a close relative to the Dakota and Nakota languages. All three languages used to be referred to collectively as Sioux. Lakota, rich with soft aspiratives, hard glottal stops, references to nature and possibilities for wordplay, was an entirely oral language until missionaries in the early nineteenth century began recording it using the Roman alphabet. The Lakota alphabet commonly used today has 31 letters, 20 of which correspond to those in the English alphabet.
Students of the language work to master the half dozen Lakota sounds that have no English equivalents, while also learning the cultural concepts that can be conveyed only in the Lakota language. Hawk gives the example of the word for children, wakanheci, which incorporates wakan, the word for something sacred. "In English, all you say is ‘kids, damn kids’," she comments with a laugh. "You don’t think of them as sacred."
Hawk also sees today’s children losing respect for their elders as they stop using the kinship terms central to Lakota social structure and communication. In the Lakota language, men and women have different ways of speaking, and listeners are addressed according to their relation to the speaker. These names do not necessarily correspond to blood relationships, but to social ties and obligations. A child, for instance, might call her mother’s friend "mother" or her older cousin "uncle." "We never had English names, so that is how we addressed each other," said Hawk, who is known as Grandma to many in her community.
Lakota speakers say that their language is not only respectful, but also funny, essential to the teasing sense of humor that often strikes newcomers to Lakota communities. "It’s a wonderfully funny language," says Hill. "You see people talking Lakota to each other and they’re having a ball making similes and other sorts of wordplay. That is part of where the Lakota humor comes from." Valerian Three Irons, a professor at South Dakota State University who speaks four Northern Plains Indian languages, argues, "Language is important for a number of reasons. Primarily it is an identification of oneself to have your language and culture. Sometimes even to say something in the language has a deeper meaning. Humor is funnier, things have a deeper meaning in your own language."
Despite the inextricable link between Sioux language and culture, Lakota language educators are today facing the frustrating paradox of a language that is dying out even as the culture that it defines is increasingly accepted and embraced by Indians and non-Indians alike. "At our school, every kid is proud to be Lakota, and if they could take a pill that could make them speak Lakota, they would, but the problem is they don’t grow up with it," says Hill. Today’s generation of Lakota young people is the third to grow up without hearing the Lakota language spoken at home -- the third generation not to pass the language on to their own children.
What Hawk calls "the silent generations" are the result of a mixture of passive cultural assimilation and active attempts by the United States government to exterminate American Indian culture and languages. From the 1880s, when the U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs banned the use of Indian languages in public and parochial schools to the 1930s, when the Indian Reorganization Act promoted Native American self-government, American Indian children throughout the country were sent to boarding schools where they were usually forbidden to speak their native tongues. Throughout this time, Native American languages faced a continual process of sponsored obsolescence.
When these policies ended and efforts were to introduce bilingual education, an entire generation of Lakota had grown up without speaking their ancestor’s language, and were unable or chose not to pass the language to their children. Virgil Taken Alive did not start learning the Lakota language from his parents until 1981, when he was 28 years old. "They were both full-blooded Lakota, but they didn’t teach us at home because of all the things that happened to their family," he reveals. Census figures reflect this pattern throughout the country, as the percentage of American Indian people who identified their tribal language as their first language dropped from 87.4 percent in 1951 to 29.3 percent in 1981.
This trend is widespread throughout the U.S. Researchers predict that 400 to 500 languages were spoken in Pre- Columbian North America. According to Language and Literacy Training for Indigenous Education by Jon Allan Reyhner, there are 154 indigenous languages spoken in the U.S., 20 of which are spoken to children by their families. The most widespread of these languages is Navajo, spoken by 148,530 people, while seven languages have only one surviving speaker. Meya predicts that only twelve North American indigenous languages have a chance of surviving the next 30 years.
Valerian Three Irons is at the forefront of an effort to save one of these quickly diminishing languages. Three Irons is one of four living speakers of Mandan, a linguistic relative of Lakota spoken by the Mandan, or Nuita, people of the Northern Dakotas. He says that the Nuita lived in a thriving village in the days when his ancestor, Sheheke, hosted Lewis and Clark. However, an 1837 smallpox epidemic quickly reduced the tribe to 60 people, a loss from which the Nuita never fully recovered. Three Irons heard Mandan from family members while growing up on the Fort Berthold reservation in North Dakota, and as an adult worked to achieve a level of competence, if not fluency, in Mandan as well as Lakota, Hidatsa and Crow, the related Plains languages. He is now looking into methods of preserving samples of the spoken Mandan language to supplement the written work of outside scholars. He laments, "With only a few people left, something has to be done before it’s gone."
"I want my descendents to be able to speak the language," Three Irons hopes. He uses some Mandan words with his own children and his grandfather teaches the language part time at a grade school on Fort Berthold, but he fears that there may never be any more fluent speakers of the language. "To lose the language is the end of the Mandan people," he said, "The Plains have heard that voice for eons and they won’t hear that anymore."
Wilhelm Meya, like Ron His Horse Is Thunder, believes that the Lakota language does not have to go the way of Mandan. "Lakota is probably one of the most documented languages we have, with one of the largest corpus of texts," Meya reveals. It also has the third largest speaker base of any American Indian group, with 105,000 people self-identified as Lakota, and is the predominant language at pan-Indian events, such as international powwows.
Meya’s non-profit organization is working to produce Lakota language textbooks for elementary schools, something he was shocked to find did not exist after thirty years of bilingual education on Lakota reservations. Meya says that perhaps the biggest problem facing Lakota language education is teachers’ lack of training and materials. "The kids want to learn something but they can’t get it from the teachers because the teachers have given up," he says. "What we found is that it is better to train good teachers -- even non-speakers -- than to just get a native speaker and put them in a classroom." The Lakota Language Consortium’s textbooks are now used in 22 schools, reaching 4000 to 5000 students each year, Meya estimates. His goal is that the Consortium can help 20,000 students reach language proficiency in the next five years and fluency in ten, with the hope that the newly fluent speakers will pass on their language skills to their own children. He hopes that even students who only study Lakota for a few hours a week in school can reach proficiency with the right teaching. "It’s this natural curiosity that they have about their own language and who they are," he said. "They have never been given the opportunity to learn it correctly."
Some educators believe, however, that the Lakota language cannot be revived with anything short of total language immersion for students. Meya himself cites the revitalization of Hebrew in 20th century Israel as the greatest success story of language recovery, but that effort required boarding school methods similar to those that stamped out indigenous American languages in the first place. "It is really difficult bringing back a language, it is not easy at all," he said, and for guaranteed success, "you almost have to use Draconian methods."
Dr. Jon Allan Reyhner of Northern Arizona University, who has published several books and articles on Indian education and language revitalization, advocates bilingual language immersion systems that offer extensive instruction in both American Indian languages and English. He cites the large-scale successes of immersion programs among the Maori in New Zealand and among Native Hawaiians, and of smaller programs in some Arizona Navajo reservations. "Thirty minutes or an hour a day in school is really not enough," he insists. "If the kids come in speaking the language, it’s okay, but if the kids come in without speaking the language, it’s not enough. Without immersion, it is very, very hard for most kids to learn the language." Reyhner says Navajo students in bilingual immersion schools succeed academically while retaining their cultural values and pride in identity. "The old idea was that these kids would assimilate, become Christian, and do well in school. We have been doing this for 100 years and it still doesn’t work. I’ve found that kids who know their history and have a sense of where they come from have a better sense of who they are and have their acts together," he says.
Currently, there are no Lakota language immersion programs available in North or South Dakota schools, where students often receive as little as one hour of language training a week. A lack of funding is often the greatest obstacle facing those attempting to reform language education in the Dakotas. The Standing Rock tribal government, for instance, began a $286,000 project last year to train elders to teach Lakota adults, but cut the program when funds ran out. Despite these limitations and setbacks, many in the Standing Rock Nation and other Lakota reservations hope that the efforts being made, combined with the growing interest of Lakota young people in their culture, will save the vitality of their language. "My hope, and I see it happening, is the younger generations getting interested in their identity," Virgil Taken Alive posits. "And they are, and that is going to be an indicator of what is going to happen with the language."
"The people who are learning it now will never talk like the elder generation," says Peter Hill, "But there is no reason why the next generations can’t use it in a way that is as fundamental to their personalities as English is to our personalities." The Lakota language today continues to adapt to a changing world. A man from Pine Ridge recently created a book of modern Lakota words after cataloguing and naming every item he found in a Wal Mart. And for Halloween this year, Everette Chasing Hawk, the Lakota language and culture teacher at the Wakpala Public School in Wakpala, South Dakota, made his younger students a Lakota/English coloring book, using some ghoulish creativity. He translated Frankenstein as TancanOstanpi- Wicasa, literally BodyPutTogetherMan, and Witch as WinyanWakaSica, or BadSpiritWoman. Chasing Hawk encourages his students to spend time with their grandparents to learn their traditional language, but also wants them to carry the language into the future. "I tell a couple of them, ‘I bet you can teach this language’," he says laughing. "I try to fire them up." 
Miranda Blue is a senior art history major from Hamden, Connecticut.