Don Moccasin (1948-2009) started documenting people’s stories and community and family events in the mid 1990’s. Don’s a passion for documenting all around him developed into the Lakota Elder Documentary Project in 2000. In 2007, Dr. Jurgita Antoine joined Don’s project and started directing the translation work. In Don’s vision of education, the knowledge of family relationships and family histor
ies played the center role. In his own words, “I wanted to record information on how to be Lakota. I wanted to keep the histories and stories, family trees and genealogies. I want the children to know who their relatives are.” Also, he understood that the real history of Lakota people resided in the communities with community elders. Thus Don recorded elders’ stories and histories. “I want young children to know stories and histories of their parents and grandparents. We need to strengthen the oyate through education and through the university,” said Don Moccasin. Don worked to preserve the elders’ knowledge for the Sicangu children and future generations. In 2007, working with anthropologist Dr. Jurgita Antoine, Don started a new stage of his project - translation of his video-tape collection into English. The process contains three stages: transcription of Lakota text, translation of the text into English, and the final editing of the texts. Due to the oral nature of the language, highly contextual meaning variations (indexing), and lack of trained fluent speakers, translation is a slow and lengthy process. Today, about 150 hours of recording time have been digitized, about half – transcribed, and one-third - translated. The recordings tell stories of Sicangu Lakota individuals, families, and communities, e.g., tiyospaye (extended family) connections, early life on the reservation, women’s roles and child-rearing practices, and individual life experiences. Don had a sincere interest in his native Lakota language and passing it to the next generation. When he started teaching language classes for Lakota Studies in 2008, one of the first projects of the class was to name objects in the building in Lakota. Today, there are handwritten signs “janjan” on the window or “tiyopa” on the door. Most of Don’s interviews, when the interviewee was a fluent speaker of Lakota, are conducted in Lakota. Don hoped that his work would contribute to language preservation and help young people learn it and use it. Lakota Documentaries is the first cultural documentation project designed and implemented by a Lakota person on the Rosebud Reservation. Don’s work is unique in the sense that these are the recordings of Native people made by a Native person. Linguistic anthropology has recognized that the quality of a story depends on the relationship between the speaker and the listener and the story is shaped according to the perceived level of the listener's understanding. Don was a fluent Lakota speaker, born and raised on the Rosebud Reservation, and thus many of his interviewees were his friends and relatives. Also, Don’s kind-heartedness and a sincere belief in his project allowed the interviews to maintain the tone of a friendly conversation between relatives, the uniqueness of Lakota voice and expression, and the complexity of the story. Lakota Documentaries is a monument of Lakota language, culture, and history as it is lived, experienced, and spoken at the end of the twentieth—beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Today, the project continues Don’s work in the following directions:
• Interviewing of elders
• Digitization and archiving or recordings
• Creation of contemporary written Lakota texts based on the transcripts and translations of Don’s recordings
• Creation of video materials in Lakota language
• Lakota literacy training; mentor-apprentice model for training new Lakota speakers and translators
• Lakota language and language teaching research
