Day: January 25, 2012

There’s not much in the way of Dakota-Lakota language material on the internet. Dakota and Lakota are two closely-related dialects of the Sioux Native American language. Somewhat confusingly, the Lakota dialect is what is spoken in the Dakotas, while the Dakota dialect is spoken in Minnesota and Manitoba.

I studied the Dakota language while living in Minneapolis in the early 1990’s, during one of (one of ?) my “strange languages” phases. I really like the language. As an “active” speaker I can’t do much with, but I can still recognize verb conjugations and some basic vocabulary when I see it or hear it (not that that happens much). During my Lunar New Year time off I was surfing the internet looking for random things, and I took a moment to wonder if anyone, anywhere, had posted some Dakota Language poetry.

The below is the only thing I found in that vein. It was written by someone named John Hunt Peacock, Jr., a few years ago. He has been learning Dakota as a way to get in touch with his own cultural roots. Finding written materials in the language is hard – there are only a few thousand speakers in the world. He learned his language from the Dakota Bible and other Christian materials in the language, but he feels ambivalent about Christianity.

The poem is quite brutal in its assessment of the Christian legacy provided by the European Americans. He is both glad there is a Dakota language Bible, and bitter about the fact that that Bible was used to justify the mistreatment and dispossession of his people (“the cross of the Dakota culture’s crucifixion,” he writes). He asks how he could possibly be Christian.