Dozens of Native elders from South Dakota tribal nations gathered in the Prairie Knights Casino on the Standing Rock Reservation earlier this month.

Sitting at tables armed with pens and composition notebooks, they wrote about memories from their childhoods and shared their stories orally with each other in Lakota and English.

Those conversations will be recorded, transcribed and translated by Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation, a nonprofit on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Thunder Valley will use the material to preserve elders’ memories and stories for their families, and to preserve the Lakota language and build a foundation for new Lakota learning standards.

Those standards will map out what is historically important to Lakota people regarding education and spirituality, said Dallas Nelson, Thunder Valley Lakota language and education director and a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation. From there, Thunder Valley will build a curriculum, lesson plans and classroom activities for its Lakota language and education program based on those values. While the standards will be used primarily for its classrooms, it will be available for other Lakota immersion programs or private schools to use.

“We collect the information, disseminate and analyze it and then put it together in a format that openly and radically says, ‘This is what we want for Lakota people and education’ without any fear of hearing ‘That doesn’t fit into the system,’” Nelson said.

Lakota language is ‘critically endangered’ with 2,000 speakers

The effort started after community elders, some of whom have died, recognized the need to encourage Lakota language learning and curriculum in area schools. Those elders worked with Thunder Valley to set the work in motion.

The Lakota language is recognized as “dangerously close to extinction,” according to the Endangered Languages Project. The number of first-language Lakota speakers sits at less than 2,000 – a decline of 66 percent in 10 years. The Lakota population is about 170,000, spread across tribal bands in western South Dakota and North Dakota, along with parts of Canada, Montana, Wyoming and Nebraska.

Ethnologue, a catalog of world languages, has redesignated the language from “threatened” to “moribund” with the special status of “reawakening” to reflect efforts to revive the language.

The elder retreat program is an urgent project, since the elders are windows into the past “that’s slowly closing as they die,” Nelson said.

Building Lakota curriculum, standards

The mission to create Lakota standards is not only to build a curriculum for teaching the Lakota language, but is also a response to standards prescribed by non-Lakota people and agencies for years, such as the Bureau of Indian Affairs or South Dakota government.

While the State Board of Education Standards did adopt the Oceti Sakowin Essential Understandings and Standards in 2018, the intentions of the standards are to teach South Dakotans about the Oceti Sakowin, its people’s history, beliefs and challenges — not to focus specifically on teaching and preparing Lakota students. And only 45 percent of teachers were teaching the Essential Understandings according to a 2021 survey by the state Department of Education.

Native children are consistently left behind in the state’s education system. During the 2018-19 school year, less than one in four Native American students in grades three to eight and grade 11 was rated as proficient in reading and writing on state standardized tests. Roughly one in seven Native American students was proficient in math, and just one in eight was proficient in science.

The retreat staff pointedly did not ask elders about curriculum and schools, staying away from the perceived standard of education and memories of boarding schools. Instead, they asked about what their grandparents taught them, what they played with and how they learned as children.

“They wouldn’t have shared intimate memories and information that they’ve carried with them for decades at 80 years old if I would have said ‘school’ or ‘curriculum.’ We would have never touched this philosophy that’s been handed down by grandparents that they still walk with and hold,” Nelson said.

The new standards Thunder Valley seeks would complement standards already in place, like math requirements, or programs used already, like Montessori for early childhood education.

“Kids learn everything they need to know – math, geology, geography – but in Lakota,” Nelson said.

New standards could include horses, gardening, foraging activities

For example, horses are widely mentioned in elder recordings as important memories of learning while growing up and the activities they did as children. Yet horses aren’t typically introduced to Lakota children in the educational system, though equine therapy and equine-assisted learning have been effective across the country. Some children never see a horse in person until they’re older, Nelson said, though the horse is important to Lakota culture and religion.

“What if one of our standards was that in Lakota country, at 6 years old, you should have 600 hours with a horse? Why not?” Nelson said. “We have that power and knowledge and work and resources to say that growing up on a horse is a big part of who we are, that it does things for us educationally, spiritually and emotionally that we don’t have in the current system. Thinking like that, you can change what education is.”

Other examples elders mention include learning language through storytelling, working in gardens with their grandparents, using the country as their playground and eating snacks of chokecherries or other foraged foods.

Elders would recall their grandmothers smudging them with sage after playing outside or leaving the house for a time to “call their spirits back,” Nelson said, which teachers don’t do after recess or field trips today. Calling your spirit back is a spiritual ritual meant to ground yourself and be mindful of your presence and actions.

“They’re just telling stories but for me as an educator, I’m asking: What are they eating and doing? Who is teaching them? They learned by playing, from horses and from the land,” Nelson said. “Part of revitalizing a language isn’t just speaking it and building curriculum, but knowing that language is directly connected to ceremonies and philosophy.”

The elder retreat at Standing Rock was the second one held since the program started. The first retreat was held in Keystone in October 2022. Nelson hopes to have a report finalized in the next year or two to lay out what the standards should be based on the information collected from retreats.

Then Thunder Valley can build its learning centers in ways children can “proudly be Lakota in every sense” like their ancestors were.

“We can do curriculum, but what we really need is a roadmap and a guide developed from fluent speakers and their lived experience that outlines what’s important to us,” Nelson said. “Who better to ask how to be Lakota than Lakota people?”

Thunder Valley CDC