Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Language and Culture Institute

wooyake.org is a project to build an online hub of recordings in the Dakota/Lakota language, digitally rematriated to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in collaboration with institutions around the country.
The project seeks to address the access challenges that most language students at Standing Rock face when seeking out fluent speech to watch, hear, read, and learn from.

The recordings include newspaper articles, manuscripts, and other writings from as early as the 1870s; sound recordings including interviews and radio broadcasts dating back to the 1950s; and videos such as stories and cultural teachings starting in the 1990s.

Cataloguing of the materials, carried out by experts in the Standing Rock community, is revealing a diverse cross-section of individuals, places, and historical moments featured within them. Moreover, an ongoing effort to produce word-for-word transcriptions is resulting in an ever-growing corpus of language that students and teachers can search to find resources of interest. Navigation is facilitated by custom-built viewers that tightly synchronize the transcripts to the media files and document scans. Levels of public access to the recordings are determined by community-established protocol, implemented through the Mukurtu CMS.

Digitization and preservation of the material is carried out by our partner institutions, including Sitting Bull College, the University of North Dakota, the American Philosophical Society, Black Hills State University, and the Minnesota Historical Society. wooyake.org is also a platform for previously unpublished or unarchived material. The project is funded in part by a generous grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.

To stay up-to-date with development and releases, please follow our project blog: https://wooyake.wordpress.com.