Intensive language class wants to bring back dying language, culture of Arikara to IU

Graduate student Brad Kroupa can almost dream in a language that no one speaks fluently – not even him.

Kroupa, known to the Arikara tribe and his relatives as Kuunux Teerit or Standing Bear, is spending the week as a participant in an intensive Arikara language class held at IU’s American Indian Studies Research Institute.

“In five to 10 years, everybody is going to know who the Arikara are,” Kroupa said. While no one alive today speaks the language fluently, Kroupa is optimistic his work will help to spread the language of his tribe.

Kroupa, along with the intensive language class, is working to continue what he called a modern movement to revive Arikara language and culture.

During the class, the group speaks only Arikara and works on everyday conversation skills and what they can say in different situations at home, at work or at traditional ceremonies. Kroupa said he wants to build solid, everyday speech skills.

Douglas Parks, co-director of the American Indian Studies Research Institute, leads the intensive class, which is a follow-up to a language intensive class last March.
Parks started working with the Arikara people in 1970 after working with the Pawnees in Oklahoma as a graduate student. There, he met an Arikara woman who asked him to come to North Dakota and write about her tribe.

Most of the Arikara tribe now lives in a reservation in Fort Berthold, N.D., Kroupa said.
Parks recorded the stories of the last of the fluent Arikara speakers in the 1970s and 1980s. He estimated that in 1970 there were about 200 speakers of various skill and that by 1990, that number dropped to about 35.

Kroupa was the first Arikara student to come to IU to work with Parks. He said he knew his culture and language were about to die, and he wanted to preserve it.

Kroupa plans to write history books and dictionaries about the Arikara and said he is currently translating songs into both Arikara and English to send to Arikara students.
At White Shield School in North Dakota, elementary and high school students learn the basics of Arikara. Parks has written one college-level and five high school-level textbooks to learn Arikara and is currently working on a textbook for elementary students.

He uses the textbooks during the intensive class and said his goals for the week were to refine the participants’ pronunciation skills, teach the participants grammar and make them comfortable writing and reading Arikara.

Class participant Loren Yellow Bird Sr., who also attended last year’s class, said it was challenging to speak Arikara after not speaking it since the last intensive class ended almost a year ago.

The class is not only learning the language, but adding to it as well. They are adding words for modern places and things such as Burger King and iPod.

“We are at the lowest point, but that decline has stopped,” Kroupa said.

Boarding schools forced many American Indians to neglect their language and culture, Kroupa said. Parks said he spoke to American Indians whose parents didn’t want them to learn Arikara because they thought English would help them succeed.

“The attitude was that speaking Indian wasn’t progressive, but there were a few old die-hards who still clung to the language,” Parks said.

For Yellow Bird, learning Arikara is not only about his culture, but also about helping him at his job at Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site in North Dakota, where he teaches visitors about the different American Indian cultures.

For Kroupa, he wants to keep the language alive.

“I’m going to write history,” Kroupa said. “Once I get my Ph.D., it’s going to be big.”