UC Berkeley

In recent decades Native communities have been dedicating time, energy, and resources to maintaining, reclaiming, and revitalizing their languages. Native languages serve as keys to accessing Native epistemologies and pre-contact perceptions of the world. Moreover, in settler societies like the United States–wherein settlers seek to eliminate Native bodies, identities, communities, culture, and ways of life as means to “justifiably” seize Indian territories– Native languages are politically significant. Because Native languages help maintain, sustain, and develop Native identity and sense of community, Native language revitalization serves as a direct form of decolonial resistance. However, Native communities are not simply “recovering” from a cultural-linguistic injury caused by a series of colonial incidents from the past. Rather, all Native communities are working to revitalize their languages within a society that is organized around those same colonial values and goals. My dissertation entitled “Lakȟótiyapi kiŋ uŋglúkinipi (We Revitalize our Lakota Language): Native Language Revitalization at Standing Rock” examines efforts to revitalize Native language in one particular reservation community in order to shed light on these processes at the grassroots level. Drawing from two-years of participant observation in the language movement at Standing Rock, my dissertation examines the limits and possibilities of Lakota/Dakota language education within the tribe’s three education-based language projects: Lakota/Dakota language and culture classes within K-12 schools, the Lakota/Dakota immersion programs, and Lakota/Dakota language education at Sitting Bull College. As an "applied" study of the actual implementation of a language revitalization program on an Indian reservation, my dissertation is meant to offer both "best practices" and "likely problems or areas of difficulty" to practitioners working in other Native communities. Second, as a community and tribal history, it tells the larger story of Standing Rock’s struggle to revitalize its language and culture against great odds.