American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Materials for teaching the Lakhóta language developed by the University of Colorado Lakhóta Project are written in a special new orthography. This orthography, and rules for its use, differ enough from other systems which have been used for writing Dakota dialects to warrant a description of the principles and thinking upon which the system is based. The presentation has been made as nontechnical as possible to make it easily understood by non-linguists.

The Pequot Indians of Connecticut are usually remembered only for their so-called "brutality," particularly during the Pequot War of 1637 with the New England colonists. This article, however, originated in the opinion that previous studies of the Pequot have failed to appraise adequately this tribe's ambitions and incentives. By reviewing the anthropological sources along with the colonial records the article draws a different conclusion about Pequot activities and the motivations behind them. Hopefully, the reader will gain a more accurate insight i =nto this Native American people and remember them in a more objective light.

The 37,000 acre St. Regis Indian Reservation, located astride the U.S.-Canadian border, is home for 5,000 Mohawk Indians. Big cities' Mohawk men are famed for their sure-footed skill as "high-iron" construction wo rkers, builders of skyscrapers and bridges, but back on the reservation life is neither exciting nor well paid, and for years the Indians have been thoroughly ignored by their neighbors in the surrounding small towns of western New York. Most Mohawks living at St. Regis have low incomes and little education , and until recently there seemed faint hope for a better life for their children.

Grammarians are often harbingers of revolution. This statement (by Karl Deutsch) clearly points to the critical role of language in the definition of national consciousness which precedes revolutionary mobilization. As communities become self-conscious about their ethnic identity and preoccupied with delineating their boundaries as groups from those of others, the role of their native languages frequently assumes a hitherto unprecedented importance. What was once taken for granted as a natural fact of life-the existence of a particular linguistic idiam differing either subtly or vastly from all others-suddenly becomes a unique, identifying hallmark of the community; existence. At the moment when the use of a language becomes self-conscious, it becomes an element of ideology. When that self-consciousness is compounded by political, economic, and social overtones of "oppression "- such as occur, for example, in colonial situations - then language serves, often along with race, as a major determinant of the boundaries between groups and therefore of who gets what, where, when, and how. Language, and race, may then become interchangeable and explosively political in their implications.