FAQs

wooyake.org is an online archive of recordings made in Dakota/Lakota by the fluent speakers of the past and present. These include video and audio interviews, songs, and stories, as well historical letters, documents, and more. The website provides an extensive catalog with community interactivity, search options, and full transcripts. This website is an effort to make these recordings digitally accessible to our people, as many of them are stored at institutions outside of Očhéthi Šakówiŋ territory. We believe that Dakota/Lakota people have the right to this linguistic heritage.

The word “wóoyake” refers to stories, tales, and teachings, like those expressed within the recordings. Explore them, share them, emulate them – this is another way we can keep our ancestors’ voices alive.

This project was started 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. (But this is not an exhaustive list of the people and organizations who helped make this project possible.)

To start with, the website is accessible to the Standing Rock community. Enrolled members and employees of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, as well as students and staff at schools and colleges in the Standing Rock Education Consortium, are eligible to create accounts. We know that some relatives in our community don’t meet these criteria – please get in touch if this is the case. After a period of testing, we hope to expand access to the other Dakota/Lakota communities. This approach ensures community access to the recordings while preventing their commercial exploitation by strangers on the Internet.

If you’re new to the site, the best place to start is Browse Recordings and see what catches your interest. If you’re researching something more specific, such as a human or land relative, you can visit Browse People and Browse Places to find associated recordings. Or use Search Everything to explore using search terms.

Once you’ve found a recording, take the time to listen or read it. An awesome way to do this is alongside a fluent speaker in your life. Not only will they enjoy being immersed in their language again, but it may encourage them to reflect on and share memories of their own too.

The site is also useful for your personal language study. Here are some tips on how to use recordings in your language learning:

• Make sure you listen to audio/video rather than just reading the transcript. If there is no audio (e.g. a letter or newspaper article), make sure you read the text out loud. Don’t be afraid. You are putting voice back into the language.
• With audio/video recordings, use the loop button to play back a single phrase, and repeat it out loud each time until it becomes natural to you.
• Tap on a word to see the role it plays in the meaning of a phrase. Note down words that are new to you, either as voice notes or by hand, which you can turn into flashcards to refresh your memory.
• As your proficiency grows, you’ll have less need for the translations. Challenge yourself to listen or read through first to pick up on as much as you can before you turn on the translation.
• Most of all: put the words and phrases you learn to use with your community. And remember that using recordings is one tool in your toolbox of language learning. Keep going with every method that works for you: taking classes, posting Facebook videos, and spending time with your Elders.

We encourage teachers in Dakota/Lakota schools to use materials they have access to in their classrooms. Unless otherwise noted, they may also create derivative works, as long as they attribute the Wóoyake website, and share the works under the same cultural protocol associated with the recording itself. Here are some ideas of derivative works:

• A script for students to act out
• Fill-in-the-blank activities that help learners interact with a transcript
• Cartoon strips based on a story

We are interested in any and all recordings of real-life Dakota/Lakota language use, and making these as accessible as possible to the people. We continue to regularly add recordings that meet these criteria. Otherwise we don’t have a strict editorial vision, so the content and themes of the recordings do vary greatly.

A recording captures a moment in time: the phrases and words a Dakota/Lakota speaker used to express their ideas. These are really important for us as learners because they provide a model for expressing our own ideas in our language. However, some recordings may contain information that doesn’t match your own experiences or teachings. Others may contain racist language, descriptions of violence, or other disturbing information. We encourage you to listen openly, to reflect thoughtfully, and to take away from each recording what feels right to you.

Over the last two hundred years, the spelling of Dakota/Lakota words has differed vastly between writers of different generations, social backgrounds, and personal beliefs. As a project, we have chosen to respect the choices each writer has made, and have preserved their original spelling.

However, this means the same word may be spelled multiple different ways throughout the website. Let’s take the word for a “deed” or “custom”:

• The old newspaper editors spelled it wicoḣan
• Other accomplished writers wrote it as wicoran
• The Dakota linguist, Ella Deloria, wrote it as wicʻoḣ'ą

(The system Deloria used can be described as “phonetic” because she uses a specific letter for each sound in the language – for example, she consistently used that final letter ą to remind us that sound is nasal, and not a hard “n.”)

Even though this word has been spelled different ways by different writers, it always sounds the same when spoken. You can hear it spoken in a sentence here. No matter how you write it, remember that our language is oral and most learners’ goal is to sound good when speaking it.

We have also tried to make it easy for you to search for a specific word across the website by providing each recording with an optional phonetic transcript (use the dropdown menu on a recording to turn it on or off). Here, we use a spelling system which, like Ella Deloria’s, is consistent and phonetic, so that learners can always decode exactly how a word sounds.

Please note: while phonetic spelling is useful in this context, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, since 2022, has rejected its promotion as a “Standard Lakota Orthography.” Moreover, the Tribe declared “no singular endorsement for any writing system” and offered their support for all language learners regardless of their spelling preferences.

English translations are available for many of the recordings in the archive to help you understand the content, and to make searching easier. But please remember that no translation is perfect. It can bring us close to a speaker’s meaning but not all the way there. In other words, reading an English translation is not a replacement for learning to understand the original Dakota/Lakota. As your proficiency grows, you should turn off the translations and word hints as much as possible.

In some cases, the translations were made a long time ago (for example George Bushotter's stories were translated by Ella Deloria in the 1930s.) Historical translators are credited under the Contributors label of a recording. When there’s no historical translation, the Wóoyake Project has usually produced a rough translation. These are credited under the Research History tab. Please get in touch if you can help us improve on these!

Copyright is a wašíču concept referring to the ownership a person has over something tangible they create, such as a video, an audio file, or a document. According to U.S. law, a person who records themself telling a story will automatically hold the copyright to that recording. If it’s an entirely original story, they will hold the copyright to the story itself as well, but not if the story is understood to belong to a collective. A lot of our stories and teachings fit into this category – they don’t belong to individuals but collectively to the oyáte. Our approach is to assert our fluent speakers’ copyright of the recordings they make (to ensure that their voices cannot be exploited by others) while reaffirming that our language and culture more generally can be owned by no one but ourselves.