SDSU faculty, students work to preserve Oceti Sakowin language

For centuries, Oceti Sakowin — including the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota dialects — was the human language that flowed over the prairie. A forced assimilation campaign tried to extinguish it. 

“Four years ago, I would have jumped on the bandwagon and said Lakota was an endangered language,” South Dakota State University senior Dasani LaCroix said. “But my professor taught me that language is a sacred thing, and sacred things can’t die. It’s always there.”

LaCroix is an enrolled member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate tribe. She’s pursuing a degree in American Indian and Indigenous studies along with minors in studio arts and the Oceti Sakowin language.

South Dakota State University first offered the Oceti Sakowin language minor in fall 2025. It is the only such program in the South Dakota Board of Regents system, but it is one of many language revitalization programs nationwide.

SDSU research at an international conference

A year ago, two South Dakota State students, including LaCroix, and their professor, Erin Griffin, flew to Honolulu, Hawaii, for the ninth International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation.
Griffin is an assistant professor of Dakota/Lakota/Nakota and American Indian studies and an enrolled member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate tribe.

“Hawaiians and Māori are who everyone looks up to for language revitalization. Hawaiians are the rockstars of this world,” she said.

Griffin, LaCroix and then-SDSU senior Dallas Kelso have all researched how to preserve and revitalize the Oceti Sakowin language. Each presented their research at the conference.

LaCroix, for example, presented on how community or the lack of it impacts language learning and retention in South Dakota. Kelso, who has since graduated with an education degree, presented on education standards.

“We all presented our own research,” Griffin said, “which was something that a lot of people at the conference were surprised by. They didn’t expect two undergrads presenting on their own.”

Griffin presented her research on teaching the Dakota dialect and the process of learning and teaching the language. She took the lessons she gave and learned in a South Dakota State classroom and explored the changes she’s made and the standards she’s establishing for her students.

She’s found that teaching Oceti Sakowin in the classroom comes with unique challenges.

A rich language

Griffin said that a professor can’t solely teach vocabulary words. Cultural components have to be included in every lesson. One of Griffin’s first lessons in the program is on the names of seasons and months.

“The important thing to remember is that the Dakota language is descriptive. It describes our experience in the world,” she said.

One Dakota word for fall translates to “the time for sorting wild rice.” South Dakota is outside of this plant’s geographic range, so Griffin said the name speaks to a time in history when the Dakota people lived and harvested in northern Minnesota before being forced from the area by white settlers.

That means the word carries both cultural and historical lessons for language learners.

There are also more complex lessons in the different dialects of Oceti Sakowin (Lakota, Dakota and Nakota). There are variations in a language from community to community.

“It’s like the English language. You go from region to region, and people are going to be speaking differently, like England and Ireland.”

Teaching while still learning

Griffin didn’t grow up speaking Dakota. Her mother would drive her to language classes in the few places they could find them around her home state of Minnesota, but they weren’t structured and would often start up and end abruptly. She remembered that the only part of the Dakota language she got down was being able to introduce herself.

She moved to Sisseton to work on a political campaign and became the instructor of Dakota studies at the tribal college while still learning the language herself. She developed a Dakota language teaching certificate program and inherited the state certification process for teachers.

Knowing the importance of working with fluent Dakota speakers, she created a structure where teachers could work with fluent speakers to get certified.

She also ran a Voices of Our Ancestors adult immersion program, making Sisseton the most successful site of the program.

She’s seeing a lot of progress.

“People’s comfort speaking publicly in Dakota is growing. There’s been a lot of fear in doing that historically.”

Still, it wasn’t too long ago when everyone in the Sisseton area was speaking it, from townspeople to car salesmen, she said.

Reconnecting with the language

Like Griffin, LaCroix didn’t grow up speaking Oceti Sakowin.

She first encountered the language very briefly in middle school through word of the day lunch groups. She then took a Lakota class in high school. For two years, she wouldn’t learn another Lakota word in a classroom until she came to South Dakota State as a Wokini scholar.

The research she presented at the International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation explored language programs in South Dakota and also sprang from her personal experiences.

“It stemmed from these unanswered questions I had. I’ve been studying the language for four to five years now, and, according to research, I should be able to hold a conversation in it. It’s still difficult for me. Why?”

She found that while it’s possible to learn the basics of a language in the classroom, true language acquisition requires immersion.

The research she presented at the conference was corroborated by the trip to Hawaii.

In addition to attending the conference and meeting leaders in language revitalization, LaCroix and the rest of the group also toured a full immersion program for Native Hawaiian students from pre-K through 12th grade and college.

“From student to teacher to parent, it’s a rock-solid community. You could see that the language was prospering because of what they’d built around the language,” LaCroix said.

At the school, she saw young kids running around speaking their Indigenous language.

“That inspired me to come back here and make something like that or be a part of that for our youths and communities,” she said.

Applying lessons learned

One of the reasons the Hawaiian program is so successful is that it extends past school grounds. Seeing that really impacted Griffin.

“At the conference, one parent said that if they didn’t send their kids to immersion school to learn the language, they’d still be doing it at home. Her saying that shifted the way I was thinking about everything,” Griffin said.

At a Dakota class she teaches through a Bush Foundation grant, families were showing up for the weekly class engaged but wouldn’t remember the lessons at the next class. Hearing the parent say that made her realize what was going wrong.

“The reason was because people weren’t using it outside the classroom space,” Griffin said. “Language will get stuck in certain spaces.”

She switched up the program and gave each family a box of dictionaries, labels that could be affixed to household items and lesson materials. A family outreach coordinator would also give lessons to families in their homes.

She’s also applying this lesson to her work at South Dakota State.

“How can we make Dakota accessible so people can learn and be comfortable using it at home, at the grocery store or on campus?” she said.

To do that, she’ll take students out of the classroom. They learn introductions while walking through an academic building’s hallways. They learn directions by navigating SDSU walkways. They learn cooking vocabulary in the American Indian Student Center’s kitchen.

In addition to bringing Lakota language students out of the classroom, Griffin wants to bring the Lakota language out of the program.

“I think understanding the language can be useful in every program and in every space. It gives you a different worldview when you learn another worldview,” she said.