Rez CAP

In violation of its 1867 treaty with the Dakota or Northern Sioux, the U.S. government divided the vast territory of the Sisseton Wahpeton Bands into two 400-square-mile, federally recognized reservations: the 5,000-member Spirit Lake Dakota Nation in North Dakota, where my mother and I are enrolled; and the 10,000 member Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota Nation in South Dakota, where my grandfather was enrolled.

Relatives on both reservations regard any effort to rejoin the two as an assertion of the sovereignty of the Greater Sioux Nation.

Therefore, in 1998, I began to develop student and faculty opportunities in digital illustration, grant writing, teleconferencing and filmmaking for a community arts partnership (CAP) between the Sisseton Wahpeton Tribal College, the Spirit Lake Tribal Education Department and the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, where I have taught since 1986.

This paper is about how those projects evolved in relation to one another through problem solving:

Digital illustration

In 1998 I submitted to MICA CAP founder Ken Krafchek a Native American outreach proposal to be included as part of MICA’s original $650,000 Lila Wallace CAP grant application. I proposed that my Native American literature class collect oral traditions that teach survival skills, conflict resolution and care of nature. Illustration students I shared with Ken would then illustrate the stories, and my graduate students in the Digital Masters Program would put them on the Web. Next, K-12 school children with computer access would add to this Web site by telling, illustrating and digitizing their own related stories. Children without computers at the Baltimore American Indian Center and three inner-city schools would be brought hard copies of the illustrated stories by MICA art-education students, who would help those children collect or make up related stories and illustrate, sculpt, dance, sing and/or perform them theatrically.

The prospect of digitizing all these performances and artworks would serve as a funding rationale to provide computers and Internet access to schools and community centers without them, so that students at those locations could share work with their peers in other communities in Baltimore and on the rez. Computer literary would thus be taught not as a trendy end in itself but as a means for combining digital and traditional visual and verbal media and for strengthening and connecting communities.

To connect Baltimore and rez kids digitally, I knew there would first have to be face-to-face interactions between their mentors, so I invited Spirit Lake Tribal Education Director Vernon Lambert to the interdisciplinary liberal arts and illustration course I taught with Ken. Ken and I assigned our students the task of producing visuals for Vern’s power-point presentation to reservation students on their three identities as enrolled members of the sovereign Dakota Nation, as American citizens and as members of the oldest U.S. minority group.

Problems: Ken’s and my team-taught course ended without MICA students digitizing the illustrations Vern had requested, and after Ken collected hard copies and mailed them to Vern, neither MICA nor the two Baltimore elementary schools followed through on the digital rez CAP. It languished for almost ten years until summer 2007, when, as poet-in-residence at MICA’s faculty artist and writers retreat at Rochefort-en-Terre, France, I wrote “Story of Dakota Origins, Imprisonment, and Exile,” a long narrative poem in Dakota and English, based on the oral traditions of my own tribe that I collected for the earlier project. Rochefort artist-in-residence and MICA colleague Lew Fifield made a beautiful illustration and offered to work with his students to design a book, which MICA provost Ray Allen encouraged us to publish in a limited, letter-press edition from MICA’s Dolphin Street Press. I also hope to publish the poem online on the Blackboard site of my Native American literature course and as curriculum materials for the Spirit Lake Dakota education department.

Grantwriting

In 2001, Spirit Lake Tribal Education Director Vernon Lambert asked me to write a planning grant to design, build and finance a reservation community center for developing and delivering tribal education curricula, cultural programs, exhibits and performances. Every tribal student would visit on grade-appropriate field trips; every tribal employee would receive continuing education there; tribal artists would participate as storytellers, musicians, dancers and artisans. The whole tribe would have a place for cultural events and ceremonies. Non-Indian school and tour groups would be offered a Dakota perspective. Currently no reservation cultural program is part of the North Dakota state school curriculum taught in tribal schools. The reservation’s mostly non-Indian teachers are given Pan-Indian rather than tribally specific orientations. Current pedagogy stresses Indians as victims and dependents. And Dakota culture is often exhibited by non-Indians as a series of artifacts rather than a continuing, living story. The Dakota Survival Institute, as the community center would be called, would disseminate the tribe’s own interpretation of its history and culture, provide insight into how Dakota people survived in the past, and promote survival rather than dependency in the present and future.

Problems: Vern asked me, a professor and tribal member, to negotiate the funder’s requirement that the tribe bring in a diversity of internal and external consultants from a wide array of tribal constituencies and academic disciplines. Six Native Americans from other tribes were among the ten outside consultants I appointed. I also created an internal tribal advisory board of elders, teachers and other key leaders and community members. Vern warned that he had had a hard time getting tribal insiders to agree on similar projects, but both the funder and outside consultants insisted on insiders being included. Vern agreed too late for me to actually consult with the internal tribal advisory board before submitting the grant application, but once the grant was awarded, the first thing I did was arrange to meet with them to discuss the project. Only one such elder showed up, and he insisted, with Vern’s complete acquiescence, on getting rid of every last one of the outside consultants, the very people without whose equally strong insistence the elder from inside the tribe would never have been asked for his opinion at all.

Concluding that I might have understood these dynamics better if I spent more than my summers in Indian country, I decided to try to arrange a joint academic appointment at MICA and either the University of North Dakota (UND) in Grand Forks – 100 miles from Spirit Lake -- or at North Dakota State University (NDSU) in Fargo, 90 miles from Sisseton. In 2004 I was runner-up for a job at UND, and was offered a job at NDSU – a full professorship in Native American Studies. The plan was for me to teach one semester a year there; encourage MICA-NDSU-SWCC (Sisseton Wahpeton Community College) exchanges among students interested in Rez CAP; recruit SWCC students to complete their educations at NDSU or MICA; and coordinate a partnership in which SWCC and NDSU construction-management students would build and renovate houses together on the reservation.

Problem: SWCC and NDSU were willing, but MICA would not exchange students with institutions that were not members of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design. Not wanting to stop teaching at MICA, I declined the joint appointment at NDSU but continued to cultivate the department chair there who had offered it to me, inviting him to the Sisseton Wahpeton pow wow one summer, and stopping by his office every time I flew into Fargo on my way out to the rez. In September 2007 he invited me back to NDSU to read in English from my “Story of Dakota Origins, Imprisonment, and Exile,” with my fluent-speaking Dakota teacher Glenn Wasicuna reading in Dakota. That reading lead to plans for Glenn to teach NDSU’s first course in Dakota language and culture.

Teleconferencing

Having learned he could depend on me, Spirit Lake Tribal Education Department Director Vernon Lambert asked me to sit in for him at the 2005 legislative summits on Capitol Hill of the National Indian Education Association and the National Congress of American Indians. To pay two MICA video students to go with me and tape the sessions for Vern, I tried and failed to get funding from the video department, my own liberal arts department and the Graduate Studies dean. Finally the Office of Academic Affairs agreed to pay if I deposited copies in MICA’s Media Resources Collection.

Problem: It took me a year to get one of the graduating seniors to edit the tapes, by which time the next year’s conferences had been held. The out-of-date tapes are still sitting on my desk at home.

Opportunity: I noticed that other tribal leaders besides Vern had been unable to attend the conferences, but they had arranged their Washington contacts to set up videoconferencing for them to participate in real time. Several months later, I attended the World Indigenous People’s Conference on Education in New Zealand, hosted by the indigenous Maori, who have been teleconferencing to revive the remote island’s economy (profits in traditional sheep herding have suffered from the success of synthetic fibers like Polartec). At the Maori-language launch of Microsoft Office Suite, I learned that it took five days and $50,000 for an assembly of linguists, computer technicians, and Maori elders to come up with the Maori equivalent for the English phrase “log on.” Coincidentally, $50,000 was also the cost of a video-conferencing unit and content server that Tandberg, one of the conference vendors, was offering to the enrolled member from any tribe at the conference who best described in 500 words how he or she would use the equipment.

In my winning entry, I wrote that my tribe annually spends thousands of dollars sending representatives to Washington, D.C., where I live, to give presentations before members of Congress, especially regarding the periodic flooding of Spirit Lake, the largest natural lake in North Dakota, which is located on our reservation. The Army Corps of Engineers has been involved in solving our flood problem, which has resulted in the loss of thousands of acres of valuable tribal land. Video conferencing would enable our environmental-protection director and tribal council members to be in touch with the appropriate Bureau of Indian Affairs and other U.S. government officials in Washington on a much more timely basis. Money and even lives could be saved.

I mentioned two other tribal applications of video conferencing:

Language and culture revitalization: Because Dakota ceremonial, song and dance traditions, traditional government and healing are entirely conveyed by oral traditions in the language, the loss of our endangered language would be a tragic blow to all aspects of our culture. Instead of having to gather elders and students together from great distances all over the remote reservation as well as from surrounding urban areas in distant states, video conferencing would allow fluent speakers to distant-teach youth on and off the reservation. A content server would help them integrate into this live format an online version of our Dakota Language textbook. The pages in the book could be scanned and linked with sound files from our language CD so that students could hear any item on the CD tracks by clicking with the computer mouse on the appropriate letter or word or phrase in the text. All the work that’s gone into the textbook and CD could then be made available to anyone with a computer and Internet hook-up. Through an online teaching program, our tribal college technology faculty could teach students the skills to handle this technology, so that they could add material to this project and do other culture-revitalization projects.

I applied to the National Endowment for the Humanities, writing that “the Spirit Lake Dakota Nation is making a critical contribution to the humanities by revitalizing its endangered Dakota language; my contribution to its revitalization is to propose digital means that address the criticism by Valiquette and others that such means ‘bypass intergenerational teaching’ so critical to indigenous knowledge systems (Valiquette 111).” I acknowledged that not since the Fort Totten Indian School have Dakota children encountered as grave a threat to their language as that posed by electronic media. Just as in boarding schools, traditional enemies developed friendships that would blossom into a national Pan Indian movement, maybe the Dakota diaspora could use the Internet for the revitalization of Dakota languages and culture.

Problem: Although NEH deemed that “the attempt to rescue a language that might disappear is certainly worthy of humanities support,” it declined my application for funding because of its “emphasis on community outreach rather than humanistic research.”

Telemedicine: Meanwhile the remote Sisseton Wahpeton Tribe Indian Health Clinic director expressed interest in using my teleconferencing unit to connect his similarly equipped facility with medical specialists in the extensive Washington-Baltimore medical community. After Verizon so bungled the server set-up at my home that I lost all Internet and phone service for a month, I went to MICA’s vice president for technology, on whose advisory committee I had served for three years, and asked if my server could be run from MICA. He took me in a room full of servers and explained that each one requires bandwidth, which costs money. The equipment I had acquired in November 2005 sat in my house until fall 2007, when I applied for and won a MICA Technology Support Grant to pay for bandwidth and for work-study students to transport the portable video-conference unit to and from doctors’ offices in the Baltimore-Washington area.

Filmmaking

Having never been able to bring MICA CAP students to the rez because their AmeriCorps scholarships stipulated that they work in inner-city Baltimore, in summer 2006 I brought my own nephew Sam Sapin, a 2006 Parsons Art School graduate, to Sisseton Wahpeton Tribal College to teach “Dakota Digital Narrative,” a filmmaking course that Sam’s course description said would “help train a new generation of story-tellers to use digital equipment … to express themselves [and] produce a new take on the Dakota tradition of oral story-telling.” For their main projects students could choose from among a wide range of storytelling methods to either document a pow wow, profile Dakota veterans for a National Museum of the American Indian exhibit, or make a music video using the Sisseton-Wahpeton-produced hip-hop track “Wicozani Mitawa” (My Life).

Problems: Though I started making arrangements a year in advance at the suggestion of the college’s Dakota Studies director, by the time we arrived in Agency Village, South Dakota, the four-week summer course had not been advertised and the registrar was out of town. We had no students. Moreover, the college’s computers were all PCs with Adobe Premier editing software, but Sam was strictly a Mac and Final Cut Pro person.

While Sam learned the hard- and software, I got his picture and a description of the course into the Sota, the tribal paper. Lacking a place to stay, I negotiated with the dean that in lieu of salary, we would get tribal housing (not his original offer of a tent and cold-water shower). Originally the dean also offered us the use of a tribal-college vehicle only during school hours, until I pointed out we didn’t need the car during school hours when we were teaching, but before and after, to get to and from school. Finally, I procured for us a windowless classroom, an LCD projector to mirror Sam’s computer screen for the students, and, so that students could see the screen and still take notes at their consoles with the overhead lights off, some desk lamps.

By the end of the four days it took to accomplish all this, I had learned to avoid the dean, registrar and college president, and go directly to the president’s wife and college custodian. Among the people I met in the maze of college offices, I gained the most perspective from Bill Yellow Robe, an Assiniboine playwright from an east-coast university, who had just been hired by the college, and was also struggling to find his way. Bill had moved to the rez with his wife and all their belongings; Sam and I were just there for four weeks. Unable to trade his salary for housing, Bill and his wife finally gave up and went back to where they came from. His absolute helplessness made Sam’s and mine pale by comparison.

Sam’s class started out with five students: Dakota Studies Director Reverend Clifford Canku; the college recording studio technician, who had produced the hip-hop song in Dakota; a Ph.D.-level curriculum developer at the K-12 Tribal School; the son of one of the tribe’s main pow wow singers; and Chad Monteau, a recent graduate of the two-year college, who had transferred to the University of Minnesota, Morris, an hour-and-a-half away. Chad lived in Morris and didn’t have gas money, so I negotiated with the dean to pay this former student to be our teaching assistant – the only paid member of our teaching team. When Chad’s car broke down, Sam and I drove to Morris and brought him back to live with us.

Every morning at quarter to eight, still bleary from late-night TV, belching from Sam’s latest concoction of stir -fried vegetables, the three of us would pull into the tribal college parking lot with Gnarls Barkley’s “[Maybe I’m] Crazy” blaring on the tribal-car radio. While Chad and Sam were in class, I spent my mornings cozying up to the custodian to find out which classrooms were unused so that I could safely pilfer essential items like extension cords. From the custodian I learned not to worry about Sam’s class being cancelled for under-enrollment: the five students were all tribal members, and the US government awarded the college $2500 for every tribal member enrolled in a class – which added up to $12,500. So much for the dean’s not having money to pay Sam.

Class over, I would return at 11:30 to pick Sam and the Dakota Studies director up for lunch at “the elderly,” where for three dollars, we could have all the succotash, spam, tapioca and prunes in heavy syrup we could eat. Then I would give Sam a driving lesson on a gravel BIA road out on the prairie. Besides never having learned to drive, Sam had never taken an 8:30 a.m. class as a student, and he had begun to complain about having to teach at that hour, in a windowless room, for three hours, four days a week.

Besides supervising student projects, Sam and Chad produced an animated video of “Little Red Riding Hood” in Dakota for the daycare language program. Its director paid Sam $1,000, which he split with Chad, and Sam later received a letter of commendation from the executive director of the Association of American Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C. for “cultural preservation [and] language revitalization … work … identified by Native American leaders as critical for the well-being of Indian people.” The film was shown at the Association’s annual meeting at New York University.

That project led to Sam being recommended by the tribal college to work as a cameraman with a professional producer on a TV profile about a deceased tribal member who had just posthumously received the Congressional Medal of Honor for heroism in the Korean War.

Conclusion

Set clear goals but be prepared to flex so that not just projects but relationships can evolve. In working at the tribal college, I got to know the Dakota language and culture instructor Clifford Canku, who has vast traditional knowledge and is an ordained Dakota Presbyterian minister, but, as neither a master nor doctor of any academic discipline, is liable to lose his position when the tribal community college achieves accreditation as a four-year institution. Fluent-speaking traditional elders like Clifford have trouble keeping their langauge teaching positions in tribal elementary and secondary schools as well: every four years the Dakota language teacher at the Four Winds Tribal School, which receives funds from the North Dakota Department of Education, has to go to the state capitol to be certified to teach Dakota by a board of education, none of whose members speak the language they are certifying her to teach.

In recognition of Clifford’s work, I wrote to MICA’s president, Fred Lazarus, suggesting that he invite Reverend Canku as a commencement speaker and confer an honorary doctorate on him. I apprised Fred of Clifford’s history as the most eminent fluent Dakota-speaking educator on the 10,000-member reservation and a traditional sun dancer, drummer, singer and storyteller who has prepared many people for vision quests. I mentioned that as my Dakota elder and mentor, Clifford had taken me into his own home for the last three summers, taught me to speak Dakota and edited the poetry I began to write and publish in the language. He taught me the sweat-lodge ceremony, including how to build the lodge. In addition to giving me much valuable material to pass on to my own students, Clifford made it possible for me to bring Sam to the tribal college to teach a Dakota digital narrative course, which produced an award-winning Dakota language documentary. I mentioned that Clifford himself took the class from my 22-year-old nephew.

In response to my letter Fred wrote to Clifford saying that “one of the greatest pleasures of my role as president of the Maryland Institute College of Art is the opportunity to recognize the extraordinary contributions of individuals to our cultural heritage by bestowing the Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters. … We hope you will accept our invitation … to celebrate your distinguished career. John Peacock has made me aware of not only the generous role you have played in helping John do his work but the immense contribution you have made as an educator to foster understanding of the culture of the Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota Nation. You have done this through working with the youth as well as through sharing this rich tradition with the broader culture. Your work and values epitomize those that we try to instill in our students and it would be our honor to recognize you for what you have done.”

On May 19, 2008, Dakota elder Clifford Canku becomes doctor of humane letters honoris causa at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Across a thousand miles, two cultures, two communities come together. A proud day for MICA and the Dakota Nation!

This essay is part of the Community Arts Convening & Research Project, 2008, funded by a Nathan Cummings Foundation grant to the Maryland Institute College of Art.  The essay was reviewed and selected by the project's Editorial Board: Ron Bechet, Xavier University of Louisiana; Lori Hager, University of Oregon; Marina Gutierrez, Cooper Union; Ken Krafchek, Maryland Institute College of Art; Sonia Mañjon, California College of the Arts; Amalia Mesa-Bains, California State University Monterey Bay; Paul Teruel, Columbia College Chicago; and Stephani Woodson, Arizona State University.

John Peacock (Harvard B.A., Columbia Ph.D.) is an enrolled member of the Spirit Lake Dakota Nation and MICA professor of Language, Literature and Culture. He has been an Andrew Mellon Fellow, Fulbright Lecturer and American Philosophical Society grantee. His writing in the endangered Dakota language has been read at the Mashantuckett Pequot Tribal Museum and published by the Minnesota History Center, American Indian Quarterly and Studies in American Indian Literatures.

Work Cited

Valiquette, Hilaire Paul. “Community, Professionals, and Language Preservation: First Things First.” Endangered languages: What role for the specialist. Proceedings of the 2nd Foundation for Endangered Languages Conference, Edinburgh, Ed. N. Ostler. Bath, U.K.: Foundation for Endangered Languages, 1998. 107-112.

Original CAN/API publication: July 2008