Native Youth Lanuage Project Blog

July 11, 2013
Today we focused on finding and listing Dakota and Ojibwe: university programs, language immersion schools and language camps. We also made plans to purchase Adobe Premier for the video editing work we will do for Dakota and Ojibwe place-names. We soon will also be adding a Wiki component to our website, as well as an interactive map for the Dakota and Ojibwe place-name work. We posted 12 new resources today, which is pretty good for one session. We’ll be back together again on Thursday of next week. We really appreciate all the support people show us by signing up to follow the NYLP website and liking our Facebook page.

July 8, 2013
Today we talked about how the project is going and set a few more goals:

1. Continue doing research on what would be a good camera and video production software to purchase and use for the Dakota and Ojibwe place-name part of the project. So far software we have looked at includes Sony Vegas and Pinnacle Studio.

2. Ask the Elder Lodge staff about a good opportunity to visit the Elder Lodge, explain the project and get advice on good ways to proceed with the project. We’re also interested in the history of urbanization for communities and families and how this affected Dakota and Ojibwe language fluency. We also talked about how people can be living resources in their own communities and families if they are willing to teach others.

3. We dedicated that last part of today’s meeting to listing additional Dakota and Ojibwe language resources. We talked about how we individually judge whether or not a resource is good or nt. In general, we ask ourselves, “Can I learn something from this resource?” We also talked about how we could ask “Is this a good resource?” of others, asking them for their feedback.

July 1, 2013
Today we set goals for July, especially for getting going on the Dakota and Ojibwe place-names part of our project:
1. Get gear: camera, tripod, lapel mics, figure out what kinda software for video editing. (Check out Pinnacle studios?). Tom will check with Century College & Intermedia Arts
2. List sites to visit, or start with one site – Mounds Park.
3. List of people to interview: Ojibwe language speaker(s). SKYPE people if we need to
4. Purchase and add clickable map page to NYLP website.
5. Get a Youtube channel up for NYLP.
6. Purchase and add a Wiki page.

June 3, 2013
We’ve been meeting for about two months now and we have the Facebook group up and running (at https://www.facebook.com/NativeYouthLanguageProject/info) and are getting the website developed, starting to post some Dakota and Ojibwe language resources. We are also hoping to recruit more people for our youth team. – Tom