Amidst the cries of “protect our water, protect our land, protect our peoples,” Native Americans, ranchers and farmers are standing their ground along a highway in North Dakota. They are blocking the crews of Energy Transfer Partners — a Dallas-based company whose workers are protected by both police and armed, private security personnel — from […]
As the start of 2016 shatters last year’s record as the hottest year on record, the Oceti Sakowin (Seven Council Fires of the Great Sioux Nation) once again find themselves on the front lines of the battle against the fossil fuel industry. Members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe have established a Spirit Camp at […]
Suicide arrives in waves on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. On Christmas Day, a 15-year-old Lakota girl took her own life. Soon afterward, a boy, just 14, took his. Since then, a young man and six more girls, one as young as 12, have followed as this current wave continues to swell. There have been numerous […]
New programs to teach and restore the lost language and cultural heritage of the Lakota Sioux offers hope for the children who live on reservations where dire poverty, suicide, unemployment and substance abuse have become a way of life. For more than a century the Lakota language endured a deliberate and systematic attempt to eradicate […]
It’s a crisis point in history for Native American languages. Without a concerted effort to revitalize them, many will soon go extinct, succumbing to the generations-long effort to destroy them. “You could reasonably say every single Native American language, including the large ones, are endangered,” said linguist K. David Harrison, a National Geographic fellow teaching […]