Education

NPR: Berenstain Bears brings Lakota language to new generation

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

"After teaching children life lessons for nearly five decades through their books and recent TV series, the bears are now helping revive the American Indian tribal language of Lakota. Guest host Jacki Lyden discusses Lakota with Sunshine Archambault-Carlow of the Standing Rock Sioux, a reservation in North and South Dakota.

SUNSHINE ARCHAMBAULT-CARLOW: Thank you for having me. LYDEN: So first, I have to know, I love the way this sounds. What did we just hear Brother Bear and Grandpa Bear discuss?

ARCHAMBAULT-CARLOW: That was a clip from the episode "Trouble at School," and so basically, Brother Bear has been not going to school because he was out sick and didn't do his homework and Grandpa Bear is talking to him about a wagon that he got stuck in the mud because he didn't ask for help before it was too soon before - so kind of the lesson of the story is clip that you just heard.

LYDEN: Why use the Berenstain Bears to revive the Lakota language?

ARCHAMBAULT-CARLOW: Well, for one, the project itself came out from a request from our community activists and our elders and fluent speakers to compete with kind of the cartoons that are out there and, you know, we have English everywhere we look and our Lakota language is struggling and so to give us an option to have Lakota in our homes and just the Berenstain Bears themselves is a cartoon that is really family-oriented. It has, just like you heard, the lesson - inter-generational lessons and it shows some of the struggles that we have in modern day and so it's an absolute gem when it comes to being able to use our language in a modern context."

Get the Story:
Berenstain Bears Reconnect Sioux To Native Language (NPR 9/26)