SBP: Planning Grant: Collaborative Research: Strategies for Building Capacity for Linguistic Research on Dakota, an Endangered Native American Language

Sisseton Wahpeton Community College, Agency Village SD

Investigators

Abstract

American Indian and Alaska Native students earn fewer than 1% of all degrees from the bachelor's to the doctorate, according to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics at NSF. One way to increase the number of degrees earned is by partnering tribal colleges and universities (TCUs) with research universities. This project will undertake planning activities to pilot just such a partnership built around language preservation. The Native American Languages Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1990, enacted into policy the recognition of the unique status and importance of Native American languages. This project will do planning and assessment to identify areas of institutional capacity building for three tribal colleges which serve a set of tribal communities which share a common heritage language. Broader impacts include the potential for greater participation of underrepresented groups in the language sciences and identification of areas for capacity building at a network of TCUs in the language sciences and linguistic archiving. This collaboration between Sisseton-Wahpeton Tribal College (SWC) of South Dakota and University of Virginia (UVA) will foster planning activities that will serve Dakota communities served by SWC, as well as other tribal colleges in South Dakota and Nebraska. Dakota and its sister languages in the Siouan family are all endangered. This lost language vitality affects the well-being of the community, impedes linguistic research, and represents a loss of American heritage. The project will enable exchange visits between Virginia and South Dakota by project personnel from both teams. These exchanges will contribute to identification of needs and areas of potential support for the development of tribal college infrastructure for linguistics education and Native language preservation, archiving, and revitalization. The project directly advances the broader participation of Native Americans in higher education and STEM research and will promote teaching and research at the tribal college and associated community. The project will also support training in language archiving to be held at SWC for interested members of the local communities.