About

“Lakota is a spiritual language,” says former Chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, Jesse Taken Alive, in a video he recorded a few years before he walked on. “And to think it was outlawed! There was attempts to banish it, about a hundred years ago through governmental processes,” he said, referring to systematic efforts to silence speakers of Dakota, Lakota, and all Indigenous languages.

In the same breath, Mr. Taken Alive calls on us “to really appreciate the sacrifices that our Elders made. They said ‘we’re gonna continue on … we’re gonna continue to share that.’”

Dakota/Lakota recordings

Against all the odds, our ancestors continued to speak Dakota/Lakota in their daily life, continued to raise their kids in it, and continued to think of the future generations – us. 

They continue to speak to us through the recordings they made, using whatever technology was available at the time. Before video they made audio recordings, as far back as 1910. Even before that, our ancestors had been writing letters and keeping journals for over a century.

The recordings they created are a gift to us today.

Uses of wooyake.org

wooyake.org is an online archive of recordings made in Dakota/Lakota by the fluent speakers of the past and present. The word “wóoyake” refers to stories, tales, and teachings, like those we find within the recordings. 

Groups of recordings that were made together are called collections. Wóoyake.org features an exciting variety of collections, Some of these, like the Dakota/Lakota language shows on KLND Radio, or the songs recorded by Frances Densmore, are available as audio or video. Others, like the ledger of Joseph White Bull or the Dakota newspapers of the early 1900s, have helped preserve the language through writing.

As learners of Dakota/Lakota, we can gain a lot by exploring these recordings. They demonstrate to us how the language is used by fluent speakers of the past and present. We can discover, for ourselves, how ideas are phrased and words are pronounced, and build these into our own efforts to speak Dakota/Lakota. 

The recordings can be powerful in other ways too. A visitor researching family history might find their relatives featured or mentioned in a recording. Or a teacher preparing a class on a cultural topic could build in some related recordings into their lesson plan.

“The language is here,” Mr. Taken Alive says in his video. “Here and there we still hear ‘our language is gonna be gone, it’s gonna be lost,’ and I understand the reality of that. But, on the other hand, to hear all our young people, a lot of little children beginning to speak and relearn our language.

“It’s a awesome time to be a Lakota.”

Features of wooyake.org

Organized catalog of recordings

• Catalog of recordings is well organized and ever-growing.
• Recordings have been digitized for online exploration.
• Info on each recording including the speakers, date of creation, keywords, and more.
• People and places are interconnected throughout to help you explore.

 Interactive transcripts

• Scrolling transcripts synced to the media help you follow along.
• Controls to show or hide translations and word glosses.
• Uplifting historical language efforts (e.g. Ella Deloria’s translations of George Bushotters stories) – and creating new translations where needed
• Written works can be read in original orthography, or their phonetic spelling.

Fully searchable

• Search a word to explore its use across recordings
• Search by Dakota/Lakota words or its translation
• Results send you to the exact place in a recording - saving you hours of searching
• Narrow down results with filters, e.g. time periods or dialects

Access protocols

• Increased community access to language while respecting real-life cultural protocols
• Certain recordings are accessible according to e.g. the current season
• User registration helps protect against commercial exploitation of the language

Community building

• A comments section on each recording to help you learn and share more
• Create your own Wóoyake community, with their own access protocols
• Submit your own recordings to share with all users, or just with your own community

The team behind the project

This project was facilitated by staff in the Iyápi Program at the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, with financial support from the National Archives and Records Administration and Joint Advisory Tribal Committee. It was brought to fruition by a collective of over 20 tribal members (mostly Standing Rockers), who conducted the cataloging, translation, and software development work, and by the Standing Rock employees who helped administer our grants. We were given a headstart in our web design by Mukurtu, itself a collaboration between Washington State University and our Warumungu relatives in Australia. (This is not an exhaustive list of the people and organizations who helped make this project possible.)

Several of the collections that make up Wóoyake have been cared for by tribal institutions like Sitting Bull College since they were recorded. Most of the collections, however, have ended up at non-tribal universities, archives, or libraries, some of them far away from Očhéthi Šakówiŋ homelands. We have been guided by a belief in the right of Dakota/Lakota people to access this heritage. If you can see a recording on Wóoyake, it’s because we have managed to rematriate at least a digital copy of it from the holding institution, often with their help.

As recordings get rematriated, our team works to organize them, and correct or expand the descriptive info that outside institutions have labeled them with. We then make them as searchable as possible for you by transcribing them and creating an approximate translation. We then convert all of this into a special format for upload to wooyake.org, so you can access it any time.

In the case of the older recordings, we are often the first generation in many to see these recordings. Explore them, share them, emulate them – this is another way we can keep our ancestors’ voices alive. 

If you would like to add Dakota/Lakota language recordings you’ve made, or you’re interested in making some, please get in touch. We also have opportunities for Dakota/Lakota language learners at every level to join our cataloging and transcription efforts, and help expand the archive for everyone.