Prairie Island Indian Community Dakota Language Project
The Dakota Language Project will print 400 Early reader Dakota language readers and 400 comic books in Dakota. A web page will also be created for Dakota language with a youth focus. Two Dakota language consultants will be hired to teach the Dakota language to the people of the Prairie Island Indian Community.
The Prairie Island Indian Community is a federally recognized tribe governed under the terms of the Constitution and By-Laws adopted by the tribal members on May 23, 1936, and approved by the Secretary of the Interior on June 20, 1936. In order to understand the importance of Dakota language preservation efforts, some things first must be explained. In the Dakota language, one of the words for children is, "wakanheza," meaning "sacred ones." The Dakota people believe that it is the responsibility of the whole community to care for the sacred gifts from the creator.
$550,000 in 2010 and $700,000 in 2011 are appropriated to the Indian Affairs Council to issue grants for programs to preserve Dakota and Ojibwe Indian languages and to foster educational programs in Dakota and Ojibwe languages.
We have accomplished all of the objectives of this grant. We have completed our youth oriented learning resources and made them available to the entire community. We have recorded the impact and performed an evaluation. We developed youth oriented learning resources, we planned and implemented traditional language and craft classes (beading, medicine gathereing, dress making) that included tradtional cummunity socializing projects where we practiced conversational Dakota, identified a new medicine for the Medicine Gathering Project, and identified key Dakota speakers and craft makers and developed a Dakota Traditional Language and Crafts Preservation team.Traditional Language and Crafts Preservation team.