Watch "Rising Voices / Hótȟaŋiŋpi - Revitalizing the Lakota Language" (57 minutes 2016)
Award-winning documentary movie which profiles the history of Lakota cultural identity changes tied to the Lakota language's loss, reinvigoration and revitalization. "Rising Voices/Hótȟaŋiŋpi" aired on public television across the USA. Story wise this film supports our ancient voices being heard, and respected, in present time. The documentary covers the Lakota people's cultural history, cultural identity, impact of manufactured pop culture on public image and cultural appropriation trends. The Lakota language was also severely impacted due to the deliberate post-colonization language erasure in the residential school system and popular mass media business. This story tells of the challenges and fight to revitalize the Lakota language before the Elders pass, and the children grow up without their language. Our world thrives at it's depth through ancient languages gifting cultural diversity.
Watch the short film "Tradition Transformation" by Lakota filmmaker Dana Claxton.
Florentine Films/Hott Productions, in association with The Language Conservancy, presents this new documentary project: "Rising Voices/Hótȟaŋiŋpi". Five years in the making, this multi-platform project tells the story of a powerful threat to a Native culture. This threat is an insidious, impersonal villain – one that comes through TV sets and social media sites, through Tweets and comic strips and the daily news. The menace is the English language, and the victim seemingly marked for extinction is the Lakota language itself – the language of the Lakota nation, once usually called the Sioux. For the Lakota people, it’s a local problem, but it’s just one instance of a massive global one – a worldwide epidemic of language extinction.
