Language and Stories

Have you ever heard Mary Louise tell a story? If not, you're in for a treat! She weaves English and Dakotah languages together to create beautiful images, teach lessons, and share history. One of the reasons she weaves the languages together is because she wants people to hear the sounds and tones of the Dakotah and Hidatsa languages. Mary Louise also hopes that in listening to the languages in her stories you'll begin to learn the language they way she did, through stories.

Everyone in Mary Louise's family told stories, but it was her Hidatsa grandmother who left a lasting impression on her about Native languages. While Mary Louise was growing up, her grandmother frequently came to visit. She lived about 45 miles away and Mary Louise remembers that she "would always hire someone to drive her here. As kids, we would see a car pull up and get excited because we never knew who it was going to be at first! But, sure enough, the driver would be bringing our Hidatsa grandmother! Oh, I remember how she'd tell us this story about a boy who lived with his grandmother and had many adventures..." By listening to her stories, Mary Louise learned Hidatsa words.

Speaking Hidatsa was very important to Mary Louise's grandmother. She had such a difficult experience going to an English-only boarding school that once she left, she only spoke in Hidatsa, never in English. "You know my grandmother went to school in St. Louis. At the time, her father was captain of a freighter that went up and down the Missouri River. He sent her to school in Missouri and my grandmother said she was never so lonely in her whole life. She said she cried every day. Somehow word got to her father to take her back, but by then it was winter and overland travel was difficult. He told the school officials that as soon as the ice melted on the Missouri River, he'd come up to St. Louis and get her and he did. I remember when she told us about that time in her life and she said, 'So I told myself at that time that I would never speak English again.' And she never did speak English again. She lived among the Dakotah people when she came back and later learned my mother's language [Dakotah]. But she always retained the Hidatsa ways."

Did you know that many Native American children were sent to boarding schools to learn the English language and customs? "With European immigration and conquest, tribal education gave way to 'Indian education.' The knowledge transmitted by colonial and, later, by mainstream teachers was not Indian knowledge taught in Indian languages, but European and American knowledge taught in a foreign language. The curriculum and instruction were less of an education than a manner of forcing Indians to assimilate into American culture. For 150 years, this system of educating Indians was unquestioned-from 1778, when the first treaty was signed, to 1928 when the Brookings Institution issued the Meriam Report criticizing federal Indian policies." For more information on Indian education, ask Mary Louise.

Above excerpted from the "Indian Education Summary," Briefing Packet for the National Education Association/National Indian Education Assorication Forum on American Indian Education (November 8, 2001). Washington, DC: NEA Human and Civil Rights.