The Cultural Survival Endangered Languages program is working with the Sauk Language Department in Stroud, Oklahoma, and the Meskwaki Historic Preservation Department in Tama, Iowa, to set up local archives and mentoring opportunities for language learners to work with the traditional stories and other cultural and linguistic knowledge contained within the 27,000 page document collection written by first-language Meskwaki speakers in the early 1900s.
While the two speech communities are geographically and politically separate, they share historical, cultural, linguistic, and blood ties that predate the European settlement of North America. Portions of the documents, stored for nearly 100 years at the National Anthropological Archives, have been viewed only a handful of times by community members, while the paper on which they were written is crumbling.
Access to the collection would prove invaluable in the development of tribally-specific teaching materials, and speakers remain in the community who are literate in the earlier orthography.
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