The Lakota Wicowoyake Canku owapi: Lakota Language Story Map
My colleague James Rattling Leaf and I created a story map on the Lakota language. We had 2 goals in doing so: (1) We have long been interested in and collaborated on projects involving education, maps, and GIS, and wanted to illustrate how the story maps platform can be used to learn and teach about Native Languages, beginning with Lakota. When you access the story map, and step through its contents, you will be able to hear audio of a dozen words that are in both Lakota and English, a photograph of each spoken feature, and what that feature looks like on satellite image and topographic maps. Note: I updated the spellings during June 2023 to reflect the Lakota diacritical marks and added additional information.
(2) We wanted to draw attention to the serious situation that many Native or indigenous languages around the world are endangered. By coupling visual cues with audio, we hope to inspire others living on the Lakota lands, those working with language projects such as Recovering Voices, at the WoLakota Project, at the Language Conservancy, and others, to not only to keep this and other languages alive, but to help them to thrive and grow, and to create a community of practice. For more story maps and other resources, see the indigenous languages across Canada resources from Canadian Geographic.
We hope the reader will take these ideas and do even more with the story maps platform and other web mapping applications. For example, you could embed these story maps in web pages; you could add video to the maps (as we illustrated with the word "lake"), you could create different types of story maps, dashboards, instant apps, infographics, and much more. For learning about language, place, biology, history, geography, and many other themes, integrating audio and video with maps is becoming an easy-to-understand medium and yet a very powerful one. Entire narratives of tribal elders speaking about locations, events, people, and other things of significance could be added to maps such as this. In addition, quizzes can be embedded into story maps to help people learn a Native language such as Lakota.
Part of the Lakota language story map.
Story maps are part of a rapidly evolving geotechnology platform. Compare the above Lakota story map, for example, with the first one we created, and the changes will be evident. Plus, the story map from 2022 took only a fraction of the time that the original story map required! It shows that the tools become more powerful and easier to use as time advances.
Give these techniques a try!