New Resources to Introduce Indigenous Languages in the Classroom
By Iyekiyapiwiƞ Darlene St. Clair, Associate Professor at Saint Cloud State University
Editor’s note: Today’s post is by Iyekiyapiwiƞ Darlene St. Clair, an Associate Professor at Saint Cloud State University, where she teaches American Indian Studies and directs the Multicultural Resource Center. Her work focuses on the integration of Native cultures, histories, and languages into curricula and educational institutions. She is Bdewakaƞtuƞwaƞ Dakota and a citizen of the Lower Sioux Indian Community in Minnesota. In honor of Native American Heritage Month, St. Clair explains the importance of providing students with ways to consider the historical and contemporary Native experience. She shares immersive classroom resources which provide students opportunities to learn about language revitalization efforts taking place in communities worldwide.
Language provides us ways to see, understand, describe, know, communicate, engage and be in relationship with the world. Arguments for language diversity are often framed through a Western value of “more is better,” without addressing the harder question of what is lost when languages are lost. In my work supporting language revitalization in my community and other Native communities, I know that a world with fewer languages will impact our futures. We drastically reduce our capacity for surviving on this planet when we have access to fewer worldviews.
I am Daḳota and I live in my homelands in Minnesota. As an educator, I am using colonial structures — schools — to provide sixth graders an opportunity to reconsider Minnesota’s state history by considering Dakota wicoḣ’aƞ (Dakota ways of life). How might we understand our shared history more deeply if viewed through teachings that center our relationship with the land as a relative? Our project, Mni Sóta Maḳoce: The Daḳota Homelands Curriculum, invites Minnesota’s sixth graders to develop their own relationship to this land by learning from Dakota people about our relationship to the land.
There are many Dakota people and allies doing the work of preserving and revitalizing our language and lifeways. This work is hard, but also provides many blessings as we witness our communities being revitalized. We look to other Indigenous people for assistance and inspiration as we protect our wicoḣ’aƞ within the ongoing experience of colonization.
However, our access to useful interventions, responses, and strategies of other Indigenous peoples are challenged by distance and resources. The Google Earth audio collection Celebrating Indigenous Languages provides both Indigenous language warriors and sixth grade students opportunities to connect with other Indigenous people worldwide who are doing language revitalization work in their communities. Through this site, you can see where they live, what their land is like, what the speakers look like, what their language sounds like, and other ways that language illuminates their worldviews.
For educators, it can be a challenge to both humanize, complicate, and contextualize our understandings of Indigenous peoples and the historical and ongoing impacts of colonization. The Global Oneness Project has developed lessons to accompany Celebrating Indigenous Languages that help students deepen their understanding of Indigenous languages and lifeways through the central themes of Identity, Family, and Community; Songs; Language and Landscape; and Language Revitalization. For example, you’ll find lessons built around listening to indigenous songs and discussing how they celebrate the living world; viewing the Google Earth tours to discover how language celebrates landscapes; and exploring how language creates identity.
Get involved in this project by sharing this effort with schools, educators, and students. Are the languages of the place where you live included in this project? If not, communities not currently represented are encouraged to reach out to be included.
Our languages are not simply words. They are sacred gifts from the Creator. They form the foundational teachings that direct us to be in relationship with the land and to “everything that is seen and unseen.” They give name and narrative to our important places. They help us understand our roles and responsibilities in a world of change and crisis. They describe worldviews that cannot be properly or precisely described without our languages.
Supporting the efforts of Indigenous peoples is a shared responsibility if you are living on Indigenous lands. Living into this responsibility, our shared humanity is affirmed.
Iyekiyapiwiƞ de miye ye. (This is Iyekiyapiwiƞ.)
