2/11/21

Tatewin Means among parents demanding Lakota language in Rapid City schools

Arabic, Mandarin and Spanish in South Dakota schools? Sure, that's cool; but learning where students are steeped in American Indian languages is giving the next generation of Natives opportunities to preserve their heritage.

I attended a few classes at South Dakota State University with Peggy Phelps: the third wife of the late American Indian activist Russell Means and Tatewin Means' mother. In 2018 Means challenged Randy Seiler for the Democratic nomination for attorney general. She is a former attorney general for the Oglala Lakota Oyate and lives in Rapid City.
Twenty-one Indigenous parents, educators and their allies used public comment time at Monday night's school board meeting to call out Superintendent Lori Simon for opposing a bill that would have created four Oceti Sakowin schools across the state, including in Rapid City. Senate Bill 68, which would have set up the schools to teach essential values of the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota people, failed in the Senate last week. Tatewin Means and Laura Schad echoed the same disappointment with the district and with Simon for testifying in opposition of SB 68. “We want it now,” Means said. “I don’t want Oceti Sakowin schools as an option. I want a true immersion school.” [Rapid City Journal]
Mato Standing High practically lived at our house in Spearditch from 1983 until he and my stepson graduated high school in 1994. As both my step kids did he got his Bachelors of Science at the University of Wyoming. A Bush Fellow and a member of the Sicangu Oyate, he is an attorney having received his Juris Doctor at University of Montana Law School. He has also taught at Black Hills State University, a leader in American Indian Studies. No doubt he has heard me expounding on the importance of preserving Indigenous languages as i have been ranting about it for over thirty years. My young nephews called him "My Toad." Mato is Lakota for bear. 

The Cheyenne River Sioux Nation developed a Lakota language immersion curriculum. The Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community, a tribal nation trapped in Minnesota, has bequeathed Oglala Lakota College with a grant of $25,000 to help fund the school's Lakota language immersion program. Flandreau added Dakotah language to its high school curriculum. 

But in South Dakota white people steal money slated for American Indian education and murder their families when the jig is up then place a complicit attorney general at the head of the investigation. 
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