The Administration for Native Americans Language Preservation and Maintenance grants program has awarded Cultural Survival $80,000 annually for a three-year period to support master-apprentice speaker training at the Sauk Language Department of the Sac and Fox Nation in Stroud, Oklahoma.
With only five fluent speakers of the Sauk language remaining, three speaker-apprentice teams have committed to half-time language training, and will aim to build conversational proficiency among the apprentices. According to department director Jacob Manatowa-Bailey, the funding will enable the speaker teams to add 600 hours per year of master-apprentice time to the training schedule, boosting participants’ commitment from 14 scheduled weekly sessions to nearly two dozen. In addition, funds will support speaker development field trips to Tama, Iowa, home of the Meskwaki Nation, which speaks a closely related language. Manatowa-Bailey will reduce his administrative duties by fifty percent in order to devote more time to his language apprenticeship, but will continue in his role as advisor to Cultural Survival’s endangered languages program.
