9th LSI 2015

June 19th marked the last day of the ninth Lakota Summer Institute (LSI)! Can you believe that we’ve been running the Institute for almost ten years? This year was big in many ways! Last year we had more than 100 participants at Sitting Bull College, but that included Lakota, Crow, and Mandan-Hidatsa-Arikara Summer Institutes. This […]

8th LSI 2014

With our shift to a WordPress blog in early 2014, reporting on the 2014 LSI became a series of posts rather than one story. There’s More Than You Imagined at the Summer Institute! — April 30, 2014   Part of the “extra” at the 2014 LSI was the presence of two other Summer Institutes, for the […]

7th LSI 2013

[embedplusvideo height=”480″ width=”625″ editlink=”http://bit.ly/1h2Bqsf” standard=”http://www.youtube.com/v/KJ6qrA8stas?fs=1&hd=1″ vars=”ytid=KJ6qrA8stas&width=625&height=480&start=&stop=&rs=w&hd=1&autoplay=0&react=1&chapters=&notes=” id=”ep6014″ /]   The Lakota Summer Institute continued to blossom in 2013 as the creative possibilities for language learning emerge.  This year, our attendance was over 110 for the first time.  Besides our regular curriculum of language study and second-language teaching method trainings, a linguistic conference for scholars in […]

6th LSI 2012

Somewhere, the dam broke – and a trickling interest in the Lakota language has become a rushing torrent.This year’s Lakota Summer Institute (June 4-22) completely exceeded all expectations, in attendance numbers, diversity of the participants, and a continuous excitement that changed lives and created new language activists.The Institute had 86 registered participants, the largest group […]

5th LSI 2011

The fifth Lakota Summer Institute was completed June 6th-24th having seen 74 participants and 21 classes in three weeks.  Sunshine Carlow, Education Manager for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, said that she noticed a “more relaxed attitude” in general as learners and speakers found it easier to communicate with each other in Lakota.  Students arrived […]

3rd LSI 2009

Aloha Lakota! The Institute ran from June 1-19 and consisted of 11 courses ranging from Lakota Morphology, Phonetics, Syntax, Methodology, and Conversational classes.  A total of 32 teachers representing the Rosebud, Cheyenne River, Standing Rock, and Pine Ridge Reservations, as well as Sioux Falls School, and Colorado and Minnesota schools had the opportunity to get […]

2nd LSI 2008

Lakota Language Teachers Sharpen their Teaching Skills One of the fluent Lakota language speakers stated, “I am fluent in my language but no one has ever taught me how to teach my language.” That has been the goal of the Lakota Summer Institute held at Sitting Bull College this June 2nd to 20th. The Institute […]

1st LSI 2007

Eighteen Lakota language educators in the Standing Rock reservation schools participated in a three-week LLC course at Sitting Bull College, Fort Yates, North Dakota, in June 2007. The course, Fundamentals of Instructional Lakota, was divided into three sections, the first dealing with the phonemics of Lakota (the recognized sounds of the language), the second addressing […]