OSEU Three: Delores Taken Alive– Teaching Lakota Language

I talk a lot to not only the language, but I talk a lot to my students about our way of life. In order to do that, you need to be knowledgeable or you can call in an elder and talk to the class…bring them in and ask them questions about what they know. A lot of our elders speak English now. Most of the elders are really knowledgeable about our way of life. And that needs to be shared. I’ll say to the elders…when we have an elder meeting, “We need to share now. Don’t hang on to your knowledge and leave us with your knowledge,” I said. “When that happens, it’s really going to hurt our younger generations that are coming up. Now is the time to share.” When that elder was getting after me about teaching the classroom about our language, I thought to myself…I didn’t answer her back because she was older than I…she is no longer here…but I respect her for what she was saying to me…but nowadays, we need to teach our children in classroom settings… if we need to…to teach our Lakota language, our culture, or even our way of life… how we were brought up. Just what I talked about. How our parents…especially if you grow up with parents…that really has a stability of mind to the children nowadays if you have a father and a mother. That really is so helpful. That is not the case in some cases. Some of us grandparents are raising our children. And that is something that is going on strongly nowadays. That, to me, is because of alcohol. Nowadays we were talking about…we used to be able to tell when a person is drunk through alcohol because they staggered…nowadays you can’t tell with those drugs…so we need to really alert and have our children be aware of what is going on. And tell them what it can do to their lives so they’ll be aware of that. So the teachers here need to take that time out. Say like if they were talking about science…what harm does science do or what good does science do…because I always say science and religion are supposed to go hand in hand…but even like now I’ll say…I was teaching them LAKOTA WORD yesterday…LAKOTA PHRASE today…LAKOTA PHRASE tomorrow…and I talk say LAKOTA PHRASE…and they don’t know…like LAKOTA PHRASE is Monday so LAKOTA PHRASE would be Sunday. So I was teaching them that and I said, “How many of you went to church? Nobody raised their hand. So what does that tell you? Spirituality is not in every home. We need to remember who is the almighty and powerful…who has made us in his image…and who gave us this brain…to use it and to learn about life. We need to tell these things to our children. I do that in my classroom. You need to be aware of who the powerful one is, our Creator. You need to know that. Look out the window and look up at the sky and say, “Good morning, oh God.” Even that little phrase will help you throughout the day. So these are some of the things that…even like our native teachers…non-native teachers…or native teachers…they need to do these things to this day and age because if they are not learning that in the home, they are going to be lost in the world. They are not going to really…they’re going to be taking things for granted. And they themselves are going to feel sorry for themselves. They are going to feel so sorry for themselves. Then comes suicide. These are very important things that we need to do in the schools. Like this is a place to learn. If the teachers are of that…and if we can pull in grandparents…that’ll be so helpful. And that’s where our children will learn. When Gladys Hawk was teaching in a college, she asked me and my sister if we could come to her class and talk all in Lakota about our way of life. So we did. We had to really concentrate not to say a word of English. It was really surprising that we talked for a whole hour, maybe more, in our language about how we grew up. I could just picture some of those faces of those students…they were so amazed of how the Lakota language could be so cherishing and yet so loving. You could speak it. Some of them said, “I wish someday I could understand or even speak the Lakota language.” That’s where it is so important that we do that now. Like that one person mentioned about parenting. We need to be concentrating on that. How are we going to get to these young adults, these young parents, So they can raise their children in a nice way…a loving way.