Wanna Dakota unkiapi kte!

I spent the summer of 2004 at my own and two other Midwestern Dakota communities unsuccessfully trying to learn to speak the language my grandparents spoke, my uncles and aunt were prohibited from speaking, and my mother was never taught. When I returned to Baltimore and Washington, DC, where I work and live, there were no Dakota speakers with whom to practice, but even if there had been, I had not acquired a foundation in the language to build on from three fluent elders who agreed to teach me. I learned a lot about the language and about linguistically traumatized individuals and communities, but the vast majority of the time we spoke in English. In this article I attempt to understand why, before resuming work with all three teachers and a fourth, new teacher in summer 2005.¹

First, a little about my teachers and our time together. I traveled a great distance to study with my oldest teacher, one of my tribe's most trusted spiritual advisors. After an inauspicious start (I got lost on the way to his house), doctor's appointments and ceremonial commitments kept him from meeting me during the two weeks I had prearranged with him to be on the reservation. He was friendly when we ran into each other at a Sun Dance and later at a tribal conference when he said prayers, but hearing him respond in English to another elder speaking a mixture of Dakota and English, I suspected he was not always comfortable conversing in Dakota. "Sometimes today when I see a Roman Priest," he announced in the presence of a Catholic archbishop at a "reconciliation" ceremony we attended in a white town, "I'd like to go out and punch [him] in the nose for the things they have done to us" (qtd. in Bauske). One of those things was the prohibition on speaking Dakota in the reservation Catholic mission school.

My second teacher, a sixty-five-year-old college- and seminary-educated Dakota Presbyterian minister, spoke a little more Dakota in my hearing during the several weeks I lived with him, though I didn't hear him speak Dakota to his family (his wife is Choctaw). In his Dakota culture class at the tribal college, I heard a few words but not many. When he Sun Danced, I heard him speak Dakota; in his backyard sweat lodge, we sang Dakota songs with other speakers; and at his church, we sang Dakota hymns. To each other, however, we communicated almost entirely in English.

My third, most experienced teacher, an ex-journalist in his fifties, changed careers after a near-fatal car accident. While unconscious, he witnessed his own death, he said, but the ancestors instructed him to come back to life and teach the language, which he had grown up on a Canadian reserve being encouraged to speak. We spoke every day, concentrating on things in the here and now, according to an excellent teaching method he used with kids at the Dakota community center. But with no structured variation-on-a-pattern progression, every conversation was a new one, and I wasn't developing a repertoire. He kept saying I knew more than I thought and was just in a phase beginners in any language experience of absorbing without speaking. Moreover, in order to learn Dakota, he told me, you must heal of the trauma you suffered from not learning the language as a child. He recalled a two-year language seminar he taught in which selected members of his Dakota community had been paid to learn the language, but only one actually made real progress in speaking it.

In addition to my three teachers, for a week I visited with two other fluent elders at the senior center on my reservation and a Dakota teacher at the tribal school. I observed the protocol of bringing the elders tobacco, and they shared stories and tied prayer ties with me, which...