PINE RIDGE RESERVATION, S.D. — While on a tour of Pine Ridge, Rapid City leaders additionally obtained an inside have a look at the Lakota language immersion program at Red Cloud Indian School.
Red Cloud’s program teaches kindergarten by fifth grade completely in Lakota, and in 2018, they formalized a complete Ok-12 Lakota language curriculum.
Former instructor, Elyssa Sierra Concha, says reclaiming the Lakota language in schooling is vital for the success of natives throughout generations.
“Us dismantling that conventional schooling system and rebuilding one thing based mostly on our instructing and our language and who we’re is critical for our indigenous youth to thrive,” Concha says.
Concha says within the early levels, with a scarcity of Lakota language curriculum, they labored nightly to develop these lesson plans for the subsequent day.
At Red Cloud – a former boarding college – the Lakota language program has a particular significance in that it matches proper in with their “Truth and Healing Initiative.”
“It is a part of a reckoning for this group, proper? This used to be a boarding college,” says Tashina Banks Rama, the manager vp at Red Cloud Indian School. “We have been a boarding college beginning in 1988 and we operated as a boarding college till 1980.”
Administrators at Red Cloud say one of many greatest points they face is the shortage of Lakota language audio system, with solely 6,000 estimated remaining.
Training new academics to converse Lakota isn’t a fast course of, however at Red Cloud, they’re working to develop the subsequent technology of Lakota-speaking academics.
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