Anthropologist from the Indiana University will work with Assiniboine scholar Tom Shawl to preserve the Nakota language.

Only about 50 members of the Assiniboine Tribe, part of the Fort Belknap Indian Community in Montana, are fluent in Nakota. Experts will publish their oral history and create a dictionary of the language.

The project is one of the first to document the Assiniboine language, often mistakenly associated with the Sioux language. Work will be carried out at the American Indian Studies Research Institute, the Fort Belknap Reservation and on the Carry The Kettle First Nation in Saskatchewan.

Funding comes from a $250,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant.

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Press Release: With only 50 speakers left, tribe's language to be preserved by team of IU anthropologists (Indiana University 9/15)<