Woihanble Offers News in Lakota

Check it out—a 100% Lakota website!

Woihanble—translated: “Dream”—translates articles from the Lakota Country Times and produces some of its own original content. Site creators Matthew Rama and Peter Hill also operate a Lakota-immersion day care on Pine Ridge. Rama and Hill’s efforts are part of the Lakota Language Initiative sponsored by the Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation.

I feel some kinship to Woihanble (I’d say, mitakuye oyasin, but Francis White Bird says that would make me a mistranslating cultural thief), as they are building a news website for a small market:

The Lakota people say their language originated from the creation of the tribe, long before Europeans came to North America. But the number of speakers has shrunk through the decades, falling to 6,000 by the early 2000s and to just 2,000 as of last year. Those remaining have an average age approaching 70 [Regina Garcia Cano, “In Effort to Preserve Language, Website Posts News in Lakota,” AP, 2016.03.18].

Interest in reading about South Dakota politics online has grown since I jumped into the blogosphere; let’s hope the same holds true for interest in reading Lakota online now that Woihanble is offering that opportunity.