My Nonprofit Reviews

The Association On American Indian Affairs, Inc. has worked extensively to create much-needed materials, including storybooks, posters, audio CDs, teacher phrase books, and CD-Roms, for children and adults learning Dakota, an endangered indigenous language of the Northern Plains and adjacent woodlands. Resources for Dakota, especially children's resources, are extremely hard to come by. Most Dakota language teachers spend what limited planning time they have creating their own materials. For myself and other Dakota language teachers, the professional-quality materials from AAIA have been indispensable. Not only are their resources centered in the Dakota way of life, they also can be easily integrated with topics (fall harvest, health, life cycle, important political figures, etc) already covered in a standard classroom. Furthermore, all of the materials are developed under the guidance of elders or fluent Dakota speakers, and often, young language learners take part in creating them as well! Most of those who are fluent Dakota speakers are 50 years of age or older, so in the effort to revitalize the language, our most important task is to retain the wisdom of the elders by passing their knowledge on to the younger generations. Through their work in language preservation, AAIA is doing just that!

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