Established in 1873 on a fraction of the 1851 “Sioux” treaty’s Great Sioux Reservation, which originally encompassed all of western South Dakota, today’s Standing Rock Sioux Reservation spans the central border between North and South Dakota, hugging the Missouri River in the east, and abutting the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation on the southern border.

At the Sitting Bull College in Fort Yates, North Dakota, and at the University of South Dakota, future teachers of the Lakota language are honing their skills and working to become certified in a program appropriately called LLEAP, the Lakota Language Education Action Program. LLEAP was formed in partnership between tribal college leaders at Sitting Bull, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s Education Department, and the Lakota Language Consortium, which had collaborated for several years on Lakota language textbooks for primary school students and a Lakota dictionary project.

Sunshine Carlow, Tribal Education Manager in Fort Yates, says that teachers with first- and second-language Lakota abilities requested curriculum materials for their classrooms with different levels of language instruction, and the Education Department was able to work with the Consortium’s linguists, consultants, and Lakota speakers to produce three levels of textbooks with a second edition of the New Lakota Dictionary in-progress.