South Dakota Humanities Council has awarded a media grant ($6,576) to Lakota Documentaries project on the Rosebud reservation. Lakota Documentaries is an elder documentation project at Sinte Gleska University, founded by the late Don Moccasin. The core of the project consists of more than 200 hours of video tape. The recordings are individual interviews with tribal elders and community events, with a significant part in Lakota language.

The collection is valuable not only for the accounts of Lakota history and cultural stories (e.g. World War II experiences, growing up on the reservation, child rearing practices etc.), but it also documents the Lakota language as it is spoken in the 21st century.

Over the last five years, the project team has worked to digitize Don’s video collection and translate it from Lakota into English and record additional video.

The grant will support editing a portion of the material into a bilingual (Lakota and English) book accompanied by a 52-minute video (in Lakota, with English subtitles) on a DVD. The goal of the project is to produce media in Lakota language for education and to encourage the use of the language in the community.

In the past, translation of the video collection was funded by grants from the Endangered Language Fund, American Philosophical Society, Whatcom Museum Society, and SGU.