In This Episode
Norah welcomes Jennifer (Ptesanwin) Weston, citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and CEO of 7,000 Languages, for a powerful conversation about identity, language reclamation, and the responsibilities that come with carrying ancestral knowledge. Jennifer shares the story behind the Lakota name gifted to her by her great-grandmother and reflects on growing up between English-speaking schools and Lakota-speaking family members.
Together, they explore the lasting impact of boarding schools, the resilience of Indigenous languages, and the work being done around the world to preserve and revitalize endangered languages. Jennifer offers insight into the young leaders participating in 7,000 Languages programs—from California to Cameroon—who are using technology, storytelling, and cultural knowledge to ensure their languages endure for generations to come.
The conversation also examines multilingualism, Indigenous writing systems, data sovereignty, and the importance of allowing communities to determine how and where their languages are shared. Jennifer’s reflections reveal that language is far more than communication—it is kinship, ceremony, memory, and a living connection to the land.
You’ll Hear About
- The meaning and responsibility behind Jennifer’s Lakota name, Ptesanwin (“White Buffalo Woman”).
- Growing up on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and navigating life between English-speaking schools and Lakota-speaking relatives.
- How boarding schools and religious policies disrupted Indigenous language transmission across generations.
- The work of 7,000 Languages and its global network of language fellows and educators.
- Why young people are leading language revitalization efforts around the world.
- The Indigenous concept of thinking seven generations ahead and its connection to language preservation.
- The role of ceremony, songs, and oral traditions in sustaining cultural identity.Indigenous approaches to multilingualism and the history of trade languages across North America.
- Diverse writing systems, from Cherokee syllabaries to contemporary Lakota orthographies inspired by floral designs and lunar cycles.
- How communities balance technology, language access, and cultural sovereignty in the digital age.
Timestamps
00:00 – Introduction and Jennifer’s Lakota name
Jennifer introduces herself in Lakota and shares the history and significance of the name Ptesanwin, passed down through her family.
07:40 – The legacy of boarding schools
Jennifer reflects on how previous generations protected their children by prioritizing English while quietly carrying their Indigenous languages and traditions.
09:30 – Meeting young language leaders
From Sierra Leone to California, Jennifer describes the passion of the young people working to preserve their languages through the 7,000 Languages fellowship program.
12:15 – Language, ceremony, and identity
Jennifer explains how songs, ceremonies, and spiritual practices create connections that cannot be fully translated into English.
18:00 – Multilingual traditions in Indigenous communities
The conversation explores the long history of multilingualism among tribal nations and the possibilities offered by today’s digital tools.
22:50 – Writing systems and oral traditions
Jennifer discusses how different Indigenous communities approach literacy, orthography, and language teaching.
28:20 – The values behind 7,000 Languages
Jennifer explains the organization’s commitment to respect, collaboration, empowerment, and community-led language preservation.
35:20 – Alaska’s language revitalization efforts
A look at Alaska Native communities that have made Indigenous languages official and are restoring traditional place names.
40:15 – Why “7,000 Languages”?
Jennifer explains the inspiration behind the organization’s name and the challenge of supporting thousands of languages worldwide.
48:45 – Gratitude for generations of teachers
Jennifer reflects on the mentors, elders, and communities who shaped her path and continue to inspire her work.
Key Quotes
“I feel like that’s really what I’m engaged in in the work that I’m doing at 7,000 Languages and in my own community organizations as well.”
“Our language and our culture are like a relative to us.”
“We want to be able to pass on these aspects of our culture that don’t translate into English.”
“Young people today are just so savvy about these interconnections among our language families.”
“We want our languages to live everywhere.”
“There’s always a path forward for our language and our culture.”
Resources Mentioned
- 7,000 Languages
- Standing Rock Sioux Tribe
- Transparent Language
- Wampanoag Language Reclamation Project
- Native American Boarding School Healing Project
- Cherokee Nation
- Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians
- Cultural Survival
- Native Hawaiian immersion schools
- Alaska Native language revitalization initiatives
About the Guest
Jennifer (Ptesanwin) Weston is a citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and serves as the Chief Executive Officer of 7,000 Languages, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting Indigenous and endangered language communities around the world. She comes from a family of educators and community leaders and has spent her career advancing language revitalization, cultural preservation, and Indigenous self-determination.
Drawing on her experiences in tribal government, education, media, and nonprofit leadership, Jennifer works alongside communities across the globe to create language-learning resources that honor local priorities, cultural sovereignty, and intergenerational knowledge.
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Transcript
Norah Jones (00:01.752)
How much I want to invite you to think before you listen to this wonderful conversation with Jennifer Weston, CEO of the organization 7,000 Languages, and citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Nation. How much I invite you to consider the role of language as part of your identity as part of your personal history as part of your connection with not only those around you in the present but with those in the past.
Norah Jones (00:50.584)
Jennifer tells powerful stories of her own experience with language and naming.
She also shares powerful stories of the identity of communities through language, identification, reclamation, preservation, expansion, all parts of the work that she has done in many different areas, but in particular with a focus on the 7,000 language experience.
Start with yourself. Start with your own identity and your own connections through language. And then enjoy this powerful conversation with Jennifer Weston. Jennifer Weston, it is such a pleasure to welcome you to It’s About Language. Thank you so much for being my guest today.
Jennifer Ptesanwin Weston (01:50.742)
Happy Latanka. Thank you, Nora. It’s wonderful to be here.
Norah Jones (01:53.582)
I am so interested in talking to you about so many different things. And I have provided in the introduction to this podcast the basic information about you being a citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the CEO of 7,000 Languages, but there’s so much more. And if I may, with respect to the importance of your name.
Could you please share with my audience the name that you have received from your great grandmother and introduce yourself and what you’d like us to know as we begin today?
Jennifer Ptesanwin Weston (02:30.314)
Hamatakyapi Chante washte nape chiusapi kshto de sang washtewi emachyapi naha iamos lahe wichoti emataha tokoola na niyake yuzapi. So I’m Jennifer Weston and I’m from Standing Rock, and I introduced myself to you with a name that was given to me as a child from one of my great grandmothers, Annie Kills Crow, and she carried the name
It means white buffalo woman in Lakota language. And it’s a very common name across many Lakota and Dakota reservations because Dawi in our history was an important woman, very powerful woman who brought our pipe, our chanumpa, and our ceremonies to us. So she was a teacher. She was a defender of women and children. She was a spokeswoman for our ways of life and for carrying forward our teachings and living in Wola Kota or in balance and in harmony with one another. And it was a tremendous surprise to my family when I was gifted this name from one of our our grandfathers.
As a child, I didn’t understand that names were sort of assigned to us and they were often handed down intergenerationally. And I I remember my who was always my interpreter at ceremonies as a child. She was very shocked that this was the name that one of my grandfathers had chosen for me. And I think she was a little bit maybe worried as well because it brings so much responsibility and you know, obligation.
To be a good relative, to be responsive to requests from loved ones. But I’ve thought about it as a way to remain connected to my community. So because of my family’s work as educators and you know, teachers in the community, I’ve always been very focused on wanting to not only be someone who shares our history and our culture.
Jennifer Ptesanwin Weston (04:34.136)
But also provides access to generations coming after me. And that’s something that I’ve been really proud of being able to accomplish in my career so far is creating new opportunities for language learners. It wasn’t something that I grew up with. I went to a very small public high school on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, the same school, K twelve. And we did not have Lakota or Dakota language in our local school curriculum. It was a public school.
At the time it was predominantly non-native students. it’s a very different demographic today. And today Lakota and Dakota language are celebrated and very much embedded in all aspects of the school culture and curriculum. But that wasn’t my experience. And I was fortunate that my mother was a teacher, a first speaker of Lakota, and she taught at many of the tribal schools on Standing Rock through her thirty plus year career.
But for, you know, working and commuting parents, it was important that to to our parents that we could walk to school. And so we went to the local public school because it was just a few blocks away. But Standing Rock is a very large land base. Our tribal reservation spans an area probably a little bit bigger than the state of Connecticut and goes into both North and South Dakota. So I was born on the North Dakota side of Standing Rock in our tribal headquarters.
Indian Health Services Hospital, but I grew up on the South Dakota side, which is where my mom was born and raised. And so I spent most of my time in the Bear Soldier and renting and running Antelope districts on Standing Rock, but have relatives from across the entire reservation from both Dakota and Lakota speaking families. So when I introduced myself, I mentioned my shoots the enemy and taken alive relatives who really I think are the most you know the closest relatives who raised me. But I always want to mention the many other families that I descend from directly. And their names I’m going to share with you in English, but they’re beautiful names. And my cousins and I are always talking about how important it is for us to start to learn our ancestral names in our language once again, because sometimes we learn that our languages have been mistranslated.
Jennifer Ptesanwin Weston (06:36.616)
And sometimes we can even refine the the ways that we’re expressing our our family names in English. So I’ll start with just a quick list that I want to share with you because these are folks I I descend from directly. And I’ve only really had the opportunity to learn more about them since my mother passed away in two thousand twelve. And I inherited some of her land rights on Standing Rock. And so now I receive
Quarterly land statements that show me the lineage that I descend from. And so some of these names were new to me, but they’re names from the Blows Away family, the Eagle Man family, Jaw Hills Crow, Plenty Horses. That’s a name from Fort Peck in Montana, actually. The running horse family on Standing Rock, the Sitting White Cow family, the Walking Elk family, the Walks High family, the White Horse family the wind soldier family and the winged family. And so that’s in addition to the shoots the enemy and taken alive ancestors who are my closest aunts and uncles. But I just love, even in English, the sound of everyone’s names and it it brings back so many memories of the elders who surrounded me in my childhood and who I grew up hearing speak almost exclusively Lakota and Dakota. But
Surprisingly, as a young child, I was never encouraged to learn our language. And that’s something that always mystifies people. But looking back now, it makes a lot of sense because these were relatives who had experienced directly the impacts from boarding schools. Those may have been church run schools. They may have even been local day schools. But by and large, our language was not celebrated, was not reinforced as any sort of asset. And
I have very vivid memories of my mom’s mother, my grandmother, who I probably spent the most time with as a child, telling me that it was so important that I could succeed in English and that I could always come back for my language later. So I feel like that’s really what I’m engaged in in the work that I’m doing at 7,000 languages and in my own community organizations as well. But it it’s so heartbreaking to me to think that all of these generations.
Jennifer Ptesanwin Weston (08:45.014)
wanted to protect us. And so they they kept silent in their own languages and they emphasized achievement in English because of their own experiences, the stigma, the oppression, and and sometimes the abuse that they experienced because of their fluency in their first language. And that was something that even my mom would share often how when she started school, she doesn’t remember how she even learned English.
Or how she even advanced in her early grades. So she thinks she became a proficient English speaker by maybe about the third grade, but she’s not even sure how she got to the third grade because she didn’t really understand much of what was happening before that. So she spoke exclusively Lakota in her home and really emphasized our participation as children in ceremony and in those practices that as a child were still just emerging from secrecy.
So I was born in nineteen seventy-five and the American Indian Religious Freedom Act wasn’t passed until nineteen seventy-eight. And so until that time, people could be arrested or, you know, sanctioned locally. And there was a great deal of stigma. There was a lot of discrimination, even from our own families sometimes, because many of our reservations were almost divided up amongst different denominations. So we have just about every denomination that you can think of represented on Standing Rock.
But as much as those folks came there with, you know, Christian intentions and wanted to share their faith traditions, they often did that at the expense of our own local culture and our own sense of pride in our culture and our language. And so it’s really incredible to me that our language has survived at all, given the the the range of prejudice that our loved ones experienced, even through my mom’s generation. And she was born in the nineteen fifties.
Norah Jones (10:35.448)
Huge story right there and just just the beginning of the story. What what is especially touches your heart, Jennifer, and brings to your work? Broadly defined, we’re t we’re looking at 7,000 languages because of this podcast’s specific focus, but languages used for advocacy for our lives as and cultures. What have you found to be the most groundbreaking part for you as you have reflected on your own upbringing?
And your own opportunities and those changes that you just shared with us.
Jennifer Ptesanwin Weston (11:08.278)
I think for me, one of the most exciting aspects of joining Seven Thousand Languages as CEO just last summer, so it’s hasn’t been quite a year. but it’s been meeting our fellows and the young people who are actively engaged in language reclamation and revitalization. Right now, as we speak all over the world. We had a young man from Cameroon, another young man from Sierra Leone, young people from diverse tribes in California, in Wisconsin, joined the most recent cohort that I had the privilege of learning alongside as we’re all beginning to create courses within our technology donors software platform, Transparent Language. But some of these young folks, the passion they had to document local fishing culture, land-based education around forestry and land stewardship.
And the passion that they showed to do this work in the face of sometimes almost no Wi-Fi or satellite access. So even accessing our platform was a challenge for them. And they were navigating, you know, time zones and technology challenges. But oftentimes, one thing that was driving their passion was the reality of climate change. And so they see the culture changing before their eyes, they feel the ways that it has impacted.
Their identity, their sense of self, their sense of pride, their sense of connection to every generation who has come before them. And they want to make those opportunities available to young people coming after them. And to me, that just resonated so deeply because in many tribal cultures here in the US, we operate according to this concept of seven generations. And the the the way we keep time, it’s not just about us and the present day. It’s about
Understanding that our language and our culture are like a relative to us. They’re always present. And there are so many aspects of our cosmologies and our religious and spiritual practices that revolve around energy and the ways that we’re empowered through our spiritual belief systems.
Jennifer Ptesanwin Weston (13:21.408)
And our connection to the land and the emergence of our languages from the land around us that has taken care of us for thousands of years, tens of thousands of years. And it’s something that we want to ensure is an understanding that young people after us can experience as well.
So, even though I’ve never been a fluent speaker of either of my languages, Lakota or Dakota, I will never forget as a young person the way that experiencing ceremony in those languages made me feel. And that’s something that I think is the most important aspect of not just spiritual practice, but healing and empowerment and connection to a line of kinship that is so much greater than just one person. And that’s something that my name reminds me of all the time is that it’s a name that that seems very esoteric in some ways. It has these religious origins and these very kind of heavy aspects of, you know, responsibility that that come with it. But at the same time, it reminds me that I’m just one desanui in this time. I’m just one design.
From Standing Rock. And there are women like me all over Lakota and Dakota country who are also carrying forward names from a treasured grandmother, great grandmother, and every single one of those matriarchs and every single one of those women has their own story of power and responsibility and love, most importantly, love for our families, for our children and grandchildren. And that’s something that resonates across every young person I meet who is wanting to share their language. It’s because we want to we want to be able to pass on these aspects of our culture that don’t translate into English. And even if we’re not the most proficient speaker, it’s important for us to know the prayer songs. It’s important for us to know
Jennifer Ptesanwin Weston (15:16.78)
the seed songs, the planting songs, you know, the songs and rituals and practices that are part of every season in every community. And I think that’s so powerful that whenever young people who are working in indigenous or endangered language contexts, whenever we come together, we always find ways to uplift one another. And we find these parallels that are so striking because it it’s it’s surprising that you know, someone in Sierra Leone who’s focused on forestry stewardship and working with, you know, elementary children in 32 schools, that that young person can find resonance with a young Menominee woman working in the forests of Wisconsin or a young Kumaye language teacher who’s working on the border of Canada or sorry, in the on the border of California and Mexico. And it’s the same passion that they share for the generations before them, but also the generations to come. And it’s really wanting to preserve that that knowledge base, but also that connection to where our languages have come from. And every single different culture has a story of our languages’ emergence from the natural world around us. So in my Lakota community, we learn about the Meadowlark and how the Meadowlark has brought language to our people.
The meadow lark signals the return of spring, the Lakota New Year. In Ojibwe communities, it’s the goldfinch. The goldfinch is the keeper of language. And every community has these really unique aspects of where did language come from in our community? And how has it made us unique as people? And how has it made us diplomats and peacemakers and caregivers and stewards of our homelands and our communities?
Norah Jones (17:08.056)
How has it, Jennifer? How has it? And how do you help the communities that come together to learn of this pathway that you’ve just described so beautifully for us of reflection, learning, celebrating, and sharing?
Jennifer Ptesanwin Weston (17:21.582)
So I think it’s something that’s already embedded in our language communities. And so the people who come to us, they’re I think that the young people who come to us and want to build these courses within the transparent language platform that we have been gifted with stewarding and teaching about at 7,000 languages from our technology donor and partner. These young people already have this passion. They already have this understanding of how foundational language is and how much it is at risk. And most of them, by and large, are usually multilingual. And you know, sometimes we’re building courses for French dominant speakers or Spanish language dominant speakers. Here in in tribal communities in the US, it’s often English, of course. But increasingly, one thing that has really shocked me in the last year of being at 7,000 languages is meeting so many young people who are incredibly multi-tribal and have a desire to be incredibly multilingual. So we have a new Indigenous languages advisory board, and we have one member who documents her ancestral connections to six different tribes and is impassioned as a parent that her children will be exposed to ceremony.
And learning opportunities in all of those languages. And it’s entirely possible in this digital age that we’re in. I think of some of our courses in places like the Pacific Northwest, where we’ve built a course, for example, in a trade language like Chinekwa, which is a almost like a Creole. So it was a a language that tribes adapted words from European languages, one another’s languages, but it was
Sort of parallel to the many different sign languages that also existed for trade and diplomacy across this continent, across this hemisphere. And I think that our ancestors have always been incredibly multilingual. You know, that’s something we learn about in our old traditions that in our region in the northern plains, folks spoke not only Dakota, Lakota, Nakota.
Jennifer Ptesanwin Weston (19:24.856)
But they also could speak Mandan, Hidatsa, Arika, you know, our sister languages along the river, along the waterways that connected us, that were our superhighways before colonization and before America. There was so much vitality and communication among tribal communities, trade and exchange and intermarriage were very common. And so was multilingualism. So was even knowing different regional sign languages. So that is something that I think it’s really easy to get discouraged in the current climate and in this year where we’ve experienced things like executive order around English language. But it’s just not the reality that most people live in this nation, much less in this world. You know, it’s much more common in other countries for people to speak three, four, or five or six languages. But that was a tradition here in Indian country among all of our tribal nations for millennia. And I really believe it’s something that young people today have the passion and the interest in redeveloping and reclaiming. And that that surprised me because I’ve spent so much time just thinking about my local home languages. But coming to 7,000, I’ve met folks from other Siouan languages who I didn’t even understand that we were relatives before. So I’m thinking of Siouan languages of the Southeast, for example, like the Catauban language or the Minocan language. And these are languages that folks are actively working on reclaiming and using sister language documentation to rebuild their local languages. And that’s a process I had the opportunity and the tremendous privilege to witness over about a decade of work with the Wampanoag tribes.
Here in Massachusetts, where linguists, these tremendously talented linguists and teachers and their community, have rebuilt the Wampanoag language from three versions of the King James Bible from the 17th century and through their communications and learning with sister languages that are still spoken in the Algonquian language family. So I think young people today are just so savvy about these.
Jennifer Ptesanwin Weston (21:35.744)
interconnections among our language families. And they’re also really tired of this declension narrative of always focusing on how our languages are so endangered and they’re so challenged. And they really just want solutions and access. And that’s what’s really exciting to me about being at a place like 7,000 languages, where we’ve been granted this access to this tremendously dynamic software platform from transparent languages. And we are constantly approached by communities from all over the world about ways that
They can tailor this platform to serve their local needs, their local priorities. And it might be they want to teach preschool teachers. They might want to focus on, you know, agroecology practices in the southwest, in a desert landscape. I mean, the the approaches and the focus that young people bring to our fellowship program and to our quarterly workshops that we facilitate.
It’s just tremendously dynamic to see their enthusiasm, their commitment, and their fluency in technology. That’s very humbling for the most part. I’m I’m still, you know, I haven’t been with seven thousand for quite a year yet. So I’m still learning about the platform and all of the different activities that reinforce learners’ proficiency journey. But at the same time, it’s been
So incredibly inspiring to see the ways that young people and our own team members are able to harness these local goals to build learning proficiency through a tool that is, you know, it’s accessible anywhere. And then we have lots of young people who are also working on new ways to, you know, build apps that will function offline. You know, it’s just really exciting to see the enthusiasm that young people have for language education.
Norah Jones (23:22.062)
But it’s exciting just to listen to this. And the dynamic, the word dynamic was coming to my mind, and then you said it out loud. And it it does give me a sense, and you will repair my visual here as you feel it might need. But sometimes it feels like there’s pavement being poured over a natural soil area. And these seeds are pushing their way through the things that would cover it the things that would keep it from being able to sprout and to flourish and to grow. And it’s exciting to hear that. And I I when you said young people are getting tired of this, this story that languages will be crushed, they they themselves can bring it back in multilingual format. Are we speaking here primarily when these young people are working and the work that you do with 7,000 languages and the rest of the of the impact that you have
We’re talking primarily spoken language. What role does written language play in in ensuring the strengthening and growth and resilience of a language?
Jennifer Ptesanwin Weston (24:31.018)
I think it depends on each local community. There are indigenous languages here in the US that run language schools that do not write their language. So when they focus on literacy, they may focus on English literacy, but they in some cases have prioritized orality as the means of transmission for their language. In other cases, I’m thinking of Cherokee Nation and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, for example. They have more than one way of writing their their language. So they have an entirely unique internally designed syllabary from the eighteen hundreds that brought
Cherokee Nation to tremendous rates of literacy, even during a time when they were experiencing mass relocation by then, you know, that administration who was acting in violation of Supreme Court orders that should have let
Cherokee people stay in their homelands in the southwest, southeast, but that orthography has 86 characters. And it’s something that Cherokee learners today in Cherokee Nation and Eastern Band immersion schools, they learn the orthography before they ever learn the Roman alphabet. And they also can write their languages phonetically using the Roman alphabet, but they have their own completely unique syllabary that was designed by, you know, a genius educator from within their own nation almost two centuries ago. And every community has their own local writing system. It might be an orthography based on Latin characters. During the pandemic, I had for the first time the opportunity to take sustained Lakota language courses with some education organizations on Pine Ridge and on Standing Rock. And it was so much fun to see folks logging in from coast to coast. And we all got to, you know, practice our gutturals and try to, you know, make
Jennifer Ptesanwin Weston (26:20.65)
new sounds that we just don’t get to use in English language or in Spanish language. But it was also so fascinating to see that even during that time of tremendous loss and and grief in our communities. I had one relative who came up with an entirely new writing system for Lakota language based on florals. So there’s a tradition of bead work.
That is called Dakota and Lakota Florals in our community. And he invented a new way to write our language using florals. He sent me a graphic the other day of Desanui in Dako his Dakota Florals orthography. And it it just, it’s a work of art. And I think he was inspired by an elder from our neighboring reservation from Cheyenne River from the Curley family, who previously had made a writing system based on phases of the moon. And so
Every I think every community is is capable of that genius. And sometimes as educators, there can be a tendency to think, we have to standardize, we only have to we should only write this one way. And it reminds me of the debate around, you know, standard American English and how we just sort of accept that there’s Australian English and English that’s spoken in the UK, and there’s American English. And every local community in many of our nations has come up with their own unique writing systems. Sometimes they’re linked to tribal colleges, tribal universities. Sometimes they’re linked to a particularly powerful local tribally operated school that just, you know, had a base of elders who are really dedicated to curriculum development. I think among the Chickasaw Nation, I learned from some of their linguists that they have twenty three different ways of writing Chickasaw language. I think in Lakota country we probably have a similar
Norah Jones (28:03.448)
Wow.
Jennifer Ptesanwin Weston (28:07.822)
Proliferation among Dakota and Lakota and Nakota, you know, sister languages, some of which are are mutually intelligible. So there’s tremendous diversity in the ways that we write and express our languages locally. But to me, that’s again a sign of vitality. It’s a sign of the tremendous passion that we have for our languages. And in this era of coding languages and, you know, we take for granted the technology that we’re communicating on right now and the languages that are embedded within our technology. And so I don’t think it’s beyond the realm of daily functioning or daily education that we can’t learn more than one way to write our languages locally as well. And I think again, young people are willing to embrace that. And when I see, you know, a five year old at Cherokee Nation who already knows the syllabary clue. That is that is so inspiring to me that they
Norah Jones (28:59.294)
Okay.
Jennifer Ptesanwin Weston (29:03.934)
have, you know, mastered this eighty six character work of art essentially that comes from their own local history. And then they’re also gonna learn the Roman alphabet. And that’s gonna be no big deal ’cause that’s, you know, a third of the number of characters that they’ve already mastered as a kindergartner.
Norah Jones (29:21.592)
There’s there’s so much here of the again, energy and joy and the plasticity of human beings, then the very natural language center that we all have and how it can blossom fully. On the site of seven thousand languages, Jennifer, there is a five step values and visions here, including respect and collaboration and
Maybe if you can help us to understand what those values and visions are in 7,000 language and why those are the values and vision. And what might that have to say to what dominant languages in various cultures might be considering if they have not already done so?
Jennifer Ptesanwin Weston (30:04.374)
Yeah, I think I’m just so grateful to our board. And I was a member of our board a number of years ago. but I was not part of these discussions that developed and defined our values and our vision. So you started with respect and collaboration, but we also foreground empowerment and ownership, diversity and inclusion, technology and community access and vision. And the ways that we are in and living our values, I think is going to vary in every community, but we’re always going to follow the lead of the local community. We’re always going to rise to meet their priorities. And their priorities may have nothing to do with our current strategic focus or our goals for launching new language courses. Their local priority could be around youth leadership. It could be about empowering a new generation of ceremonial leaders, or it might be about passing on traditions revolving around planting and irrigation in some of the most arid climates in this country. I mean, I think that very often language education in the contemporary context for Indian tribes has been placed in school settings almost exclusively. And that’s I think a reaction to this devastating impact that boarding schools had on our communities. There’s no denying how devastating that was intergenerationally, you know, the the impacts of the suffering that our parents and grandparents were subjected to, they still endure and they are they’re tremendously painful. And I think, you know, we’re we’re witnessing now the work of the Native American Boarding School Healing Project and the recent apology from the Biden administration and the work.
Of Secretary Holland, who launched this full-scale federal inquiry into documenting these boarding schools and their impacts and the deaths of young people in these institutions. So that part is it’s it’s horrifying. And I think that sometimes we have reacted to that by wanting to transform every school into a place where language is going to be offered as a subject of instruction. And
Jennifer Ptesanwin Weston (32:16.854)
It’s not always practical and it’s not always welcomed in some communities. So for example, there are many places in tribal communities where there may be language that is part of ceremonial practices or annual gathering or planting or kinship or medicine societies, all of these different local cultural institutions, they may not feel welcome in a public school setting.
They may not feel safe in a federally funded school space. They may want to keep knowledge private to their community. And that’s okay. I think that we sometimes have this sense of academic inquiry as needing to be open access and available to all. But in our communities, knowledge is earned in the local tribal space. It’s it’s granted to you because you’re going to put it to use, because you’re taking the responsibility to carry it forward and to give it meaning through your life and your actions. And sometimes a school is not the only place that language should be taught. And so so we are definitely seeing, I think, increasing numbers of local partners who want to build courses for an immersion camp or with a land-based education focus where they can maybe scaffold content from a school setting.
But they’re not building a course to be taught in school because we want our languages to live everywhere. We want our languages to be in media, on the radio, in podcasts, in film and television. We want our young people to be empowered to write poetry and produce plays and perform opera in our languages. Like there’s there’s just endless possibilities for the ways that our languages can and will continue to thrive in this new digital space and schools and standardized languages are not always the most direct or respectful approach for some of these dimensions of language proficiency, language leadership. I think they’re important places for fostering culture-based education and multilingualism and respect for one another’s values and our differences in the ways that we worship.
Jennifer Ptesanwin Weston (34:27.094)
I mentioned when I was introducing myself that Standing Rock where I grew up has been influenced by many denominations of religious practice. And that’s not that’s not a bad thing for us. You know, it it brought a new kind of diversity into our communities. And I have loved ones, friends and loved ones who are Catholics and Episcopalians and Congregationalists and Baha’is and you know, from all these different world religions, but many of them also feel very strongly that they are lakota and dakota first and they want to pray in that language, they want to worship in that language, and they want to practice our traditional ceremonies as well. And sometimes that that aspect of our languages doesn’t have to live within a school. We also have many partners who
Are focused on medium education, so immersion education, where they want to teach every subject in their language. And that is incredible and powerful. And the communities that are able to pull that off, I think we all are just blown away by their capacity for teacher training. And we would love to emulate that. I’m thinking, of course, of the native Hawaiians and their network of preschool through postdoctoral study opportunities in their language. And I think they’re coming from a very unique history where one language was spoken on their their network of islands. And they were uniquely impacted by US imperialism and had this incredibly powerful generation of young parents and elders who came together and changed their state constitution to make Native Hawaiian an official language after it had been outlawed.
And so they are really a focus of goal setting for many of us. Many folks in Indian country at tribal colleges and universities have visited native Hawaiian immersion schools or Hawaiian medium schools, but we may not all have the capacity to emulate those similar classrooms. But at the same time, we can integrate language into many other aspects of our lives and many aspects of our communities.
Norah Jones (36:30.488)
that that’s a that’s such a wonderful and balanced story. What other experience in a particular linguistic group, cultural group here have you seen that you’re like, this is a wonderful story to tell too. This is an inspiration for others. You’ve mentioned many inspirational things. Is there another area where you like and here’s another example of the kind of creativity and dedication that is an inspiration and for those who wish a potential opportunity to emulate.
Jennifer Ptesanwin Weston (37:02.7)
As you were talking, I started thinking about all of our teacher partners in Alaska. So Alaska has over 200 tribal nations or Alaska native village communities that are all self-governing. And because of the vastness of their geography and their tremendous linguistic diversity, they have been able to make all of their Alaska native languages official languages of the state. So that mandates interpretation, translation from everything when it comes to public meetings to voting to public notices of all types, you know, healthcare services. That is a tremendously inspiring process that I don’t think many other states have that kind of standing. I I know in South Dakota, for example, there was a movement several years ago to make our languages official indigenous languages, but not official languages of the state. And that was only changed very recently within the past year, that now interpretation is required for Lakota language, for example. But that’s existed in Alaska for for decades. And they have some of the the strongest speaking communities in public schools and charter schools, in you know, small village-run schools. And they also have come up with, even just within the past maybe two years,
They’ve added new official languages because they’re they’re delineating between what maybe some linguists might call dialects, but the communities are saying, no, these are distinct languages. And this language is part of this river watershed. And it’s completely distinct from this watershed over here. And it’s important that we document this in policy, in state law. And they’ve also been tremendously creative in in putting together these regional frameworks for supporting one another and for creating digital resources. So I think that has been a really rich source of of of partnership but also inspiration for 7,000 languages. We learn so much from the native Alaskan teachers who have been doing work in the digital space for
Jennifer Ptesanwin Weston (39:11.032)
For decades in some cases. They might even be, you know, the second generation in their family to be designing digital language tools. And sometimes that’s driven by a sense of urgency because it it may be young people who grew up learning from a relative who’s no longer with us and that relative was a first speaker. And, you know, so there’s a sense of urgency in wanting to to create these tools and preserve those voices so that other young people can learn from them. But at the same time, it’s also it’s also a sense of not just responsibility, but also
A sense of wanting to communicate that that joy and that connection to younger people and to say that there’s a deeper history to our landscape. Every mountain peak, every waterway, every watershed in Alaska has been treasured and cherished in these local languages for tens of thousands of years. And English and Russian are brand new baby languages in those spaces. And they don’t, they don’t have the right to re-inscribe and remap and create completely reshape those landscapes. And I think young people in Alaska are so impassioned about returning Alaska native names to sacred spaces, to state and national parks. And that’s something that is really inspiring as well. Not just, you know, the educational tools that they’re developing, but also the ways that they’re so committed to re-inscribing indigenous languages on their ancestral landscape because those mountain peaks or those waterways, those are considered relatives as well. And
You know, I think in many, many indigenous languages we we talk about mountains or hills or or mountain chains as ancient ones and there are stories about how they emerged and you know, they’re they’re part of our families too. And so when I think about a region that I think is really leading the way in the US for tribal communities, I definitely think about all of these tremendously talented educators across the state of Alaska.
Norah Jones (41:06.926)
It is inspiring indeed. And I I’m I’m thrilled, frankly, that that very important I aspect of dialect is a language. And when it refers to a segment of beloved ancient family geography in this case, too. That’s absolutely essential. That’s wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. The 7,000 languages as an organization. And folks go to my website Fluency.consulting to see information from you and links that you’ve provided and go to the website here for it’s the number seven thousand dot org. Seven thousand is a number that has meaning for as a warning as well as a celebration. Can you make sure that all the listeners know what that seven thousand is standing for?
Jennifer Ptesanwin Weston (41:55.802)
Yeah, so linguists in recent decades have put a tremendous amount of research effort into documenting the world’s languages and to delineating the world’s languages and framing different aspects of language vitality and language survival odds sometimes, which I think is is not always helpful in terms of focusing on endangerment. But of course, we all want to know.
You know, what’s the what’s the starting point? What is the number of Yeah, I and I think it’s a bigger number than seven thousand actually. There there are more than seven thousand languages in the world. And so we have a very ambitious number that’s part of our name. And and I I d I think we’re at just over we’re closing in on ninety five language courses this this year. But I think the number of distinct languages that we’ve worked with is still hovering around sixty or sixty five. so I was very humbled recently when I met with some high school students who quickly did some math and and told me the very tiny percentage of the world’s seven thousand languages that we have addressed so far.
Norah Jones (42:59.694)
Getting there. Getting there.
Jennifer Ptesanwin Weston (43:02.594)
But I think that the number of courses that you see on our website, it’s misleading in some ways because we do have this tradition of facilitating quarterly workshops that are free for community members to come in and start learning about the platform and they can actually start building their core their own course by participating in a workshop. And, you know, the reality is that it’s a tremendously painstaking process and it does also require a lot of technical support and and a certain level of skill around understanding foundations and linguistics and the writing system if there is one. And so there’s there’s just so many layers that go into creating these courses. And so they really benefit from being able to find, you know, some some funding sources that can really support people’s time to to put into developing really in-depth courses that are going to lead to proficiency.
And we don’t always get there with all c all of our communities. But I think when I started last June, we had maybe sixty or seventy different language courses sort of in the queue. So in some stage of development. And maybe forty of those have advanced in some significant way over the past year. So it’s a lot of different communities to track.
There’s a tremendous range of approaches that people are taking. And so our lead project coordinator and our assistant project coordinator, who’s been with us since I think she was an intern, like they are just, you know, they’re both trained linguists. One is working on her her second master’s degree in computational linguistics.
So they’re tremendously dedicated. They live and breathe world languages and they are so committed to the work in every community and meeting every community where they’re starting from. And sometimes communities are, you know, they’re just sort of getting a feel for what might it look like.
Jennifer Ptesanwin Weston (44:54.808)
To entrust one of our most precious resources into this technology platform. And so they may not get very far for maybe even a year or two. And others come in with a full textbook or a mentor apprentice guide and they have a whole plan. And, you know, they just crank it out because they have a fantastic funder or, you know, support of a school system or maybe a, you know, community development corporation. So we have all different kinds of partners.
Sometimes it’s a tribal college or university. And then overseas, I think that our partnerships are even more diverse in places like Latin America and Africa because languages are still emerging into digital spaces. There’s so much less representation in the digital space for indigenous and minoritized languages. In some cases, languages have been deliberately separated.
We worked with a young woman of years ago before my arrival who was working on the Gagawiz language from Ukraine. And, you know, that is an area where, you know, we haven’t really been able to maintain regular contact with that community. There are other places in, you know, Afghanistan, for example, where we’ve had course partnerships start and stop many times through the years. So obviously technology access is is it’s a blessing and a curse. You know, it can be a a barrier, a tremendous barrier. And so I’m really grateful to our network and family of language fellows who really seem to stay connected after their time with us and find ways to continue building and improving their courses. Often there’s a lot more content than you’ll see that’s accessible to the public on our website because folks are are granted back end access. So they can continue to add new units, new lessons, and they can set their pr the permissions for their community. So we’ve had some communities recently that have made prayer courses because 2026 just felt like a really challenging time for many reasons in some of our communities. And I was pleasantly surprised when some of our partners said we’re going to create a prayer course and we’re going to operate this
Jennifer Ptesanwin Weston (47:07.992)
virtually for our community, maybe through Teams or Zoom or something like that, but they’re using the content and the platform, but they don’t want it to be public. And that’s okay with us. That’s completely fine with us. And we would, you know, never violate that trust or you know, we do the best we can to protect the public language content even from data scraping and, you know, all the ways that large language models and and AI are increasingly invading indigenous language spaces without permission. And we’re seeing now that tribal nations, tribal governments are are drafting and enshrining their own local policies around data sovereignty and the use of AI, because there is a tremendous fear of misrepresentation based on centuries of misrepresentation of indigenous languages and cultures in the research, literature and popular cultural culture, et cetera, et cetera.
So we’re we’re very focused on, you know, which whichever aspect of the platform communities want to use. And we always ask that there be some public course that we can make available, but that doesn’t always happen. We we do our best because we do want to also be a space for cross-cultural appreciation. And we do find that many communities want to see visitors and guests come to their homelands and show the respect of having learned a greeting or learned the significance of local place names. So I think there there are a lot of opportunities for the public to visit our site and learn, you know, local alphabets, local greetings, kind of, you know, survival language. But there’s there’s also a lot more content that’s really, you know, behind the back end that
You know, we may never have access to, and that’s a hundred percent okay with our team because we want to support again the local communities and and their priorities. And that’s part of our commitment to data sovereignty and to respecting local leadership, whether that is a tribal council or an institutional review board or you know, whatever the local framework looks like, we do our best to ensure that we’re respecting what the local practices are around.
Jennifer Ptesanwin Weston (49:25.046)
languages and language access.
Norah Jones (49:27.082)
There’s so much insight into the very deepest nature of language that you’ve shared here, Jennifer. It just it blowing my mind. The the sense of first of all the treasuring of language, what it is used for, how sometimes it is private, the dangers that it that it faces when it’s when it can be scraped by the the technological tentacles that are out now, all of these things. Such a deep insight.
Because the language is treasured for so many specific, very precious personal cultural reasons. Thank you for sharing that. What else before we end today would you like to reiterate for my listeners or that you feel like you haven’t yet said that you don’t want us to end without you saying? However, we would like to interpret that. What do the listeners need to hear from you before we end today?
Jennifer Ptesanwin Weston (50:23.756)
I think I just wanna wanna share my gratitude for all of my teachers. Within the past year, as I’ve joined 7000 or rejoined 7000 in this new role, I’ve learned so much from my colleagues on our board, on our advisory board, among our fellows, but I’ve also thought so much about the tribal communities who I have been in contact and in learning spaces with since maybe 2006 or so when I first took on professional roles that involved language education and language resources. And that was around documentary production at that point and, you know, translating interviews and creating curriculum resources. But I just think that
As a young person from a tiny community on Standing Rock, I think my hometown was about eight hundred folks. And I said at the start that I went to the same school, K twelve, and I had so many tremendous teachers in my home community. And when I first began working in tribal government, I just think of those policy giants who were shaping l and even national policies around food sovereignty and around water rights and land stewardship and environmental protection.
And taught me so much about navigating state and federal and even county and municipal jurisdictions that aren’t meant to protect indigenous rights or respect indigenous languages or even acknowledge us as an ancestral presence that extends into deep time. And so I just I’m so grateful for having the the mindset that I do that.
I’m a very cross-cultural cross-cult cultural person. My father is non-native. He came to Stanny Rock when he was a teenager and never left. He still works for our tribal government. So I I don’t consider myself to be, you know, an a Lakota expert on anything because I’m a very cross-cultural person. But I I am just so grateful for the trust that my elders and my teachers, and not just in the education system, but within our system of tribal government.
Jennifer Ptesanwin Weston (52:35.244)
the ways that they have showed me through their own courage and tenacity and resilience, how to rebuild institutions that, you know, just weren’t meant to survive in our in our local spaces. And then having had the opportunity to work through the years with organizations like Cultural Survival, for example, or the Wampanoak Language Reclamation Project, I was just so deeply mentored by so many giants in Indian country who I think have just been exemplary models of compassion and just a willingness to to give of their own life experiences and to just always emphasize that there’s always a path forward for our language and our culture. The odds always feel really long. And you know, we we are bombarded constantly with
This idea that our languages don’t have relevance in the modern world. And I think if I had not had all of these incredible teachers through the decades, I turned 50 very recently. And I and I’m so humbled looking back and thinking about these giants who I learned from, you know, people like Wilma Mankiller and Billy Frank and Red Gates and, you know, people from many different reservations and walks of life who made a path for our tribes and our tribal governments to thrive in policy spaces, but also to reclaim resources that were promised to us in treaties. And we do also have a very strong tradition in my family of remembering our ancestors who did not ever sign treaties, who refused to acknowledge those sessions of land or of rights. And I think that’s an important aspect of our communities as well to keep in mind.
But yeah, I just I just have so much gratitude that I was so nurtured and loved by all the families who I mentioned at the the very beginning. There’s so many powerful lineages that span far beyond Standing Rock, you know, into Minnesota and Montana and Canada. And, you know, those are are very real kinship networks that I encounter every time I travel. And it might be, you know, meeting somebody from an ally nation like
Jennifer Ptesanwin Weston (54:55.808)
among the Cheyenne people or the Nezpers or in my work with the Wampanoag, we learned so much from folks at Penobscot and Pasmaquadi and Mi’kmaq and Sacondox and Muskaki. And it’s just always been tremendously uplifting to be able to step into spaces and to be welcomed as somebody who’s there for language and somebody who’s there, you know, carrying forward ancestral names that that really, you know, they’re part of they’re part of my core. And yeah, I just have so much gratitude for all of those generations of teachers. And I hope that, you know, the resources that we’re making accessible for young people online. I think we at last count, we have about twenty eight thousand language learners in our network. And I hope we can continue to grow that exponentially because I like I said, I’ve experienced so much passion and interest and enthusiasm from young people for not just one mother language, but you know, a half dozen or more mother languages. And I think that being a multilingual person is entirely possible for for these younger generations. And it is really exciting to see them embracing these opportunities. So thank you for this opportunity to visit with you. And I’ve just really appreciated you know, this opportunity to reflect on the work of this past year and, you know, the the things that have led me to this place today.
Norah Jones (56:21.016)
Weston, thank you. Thank you for sharing so deeply and so fully. And as you continue to invest and to receive, thank you for what you’re bringing to the world. Thanks. Thank you for for all the gifts that are being given to everyone through what you’re opening in all of your work. Appreciate you being my guest. I hope that you enjoyed this fascinating conversation with Jennifer Weston.
Jennifer Ptesanwin Weston (56:40.533)
Thank you, Nora.
Norah Jones (56:47.254)
And I hope that you will check out her information, resources, links, and insights on my website, fluency.consulting. Please continue the journey yourself of considering your personal identity and history and the connection of language in your community, in your life, and in the lives of all of us in these societies, we call the nations.and communities of the world. Until next time.
S6E10: Language, Identity, and the Power of Reclamation with Jennifer Ptesanwin Weston – It's About Language, with Norah Jones
- S6E10: Language, Identity, and the Power of Reclamation with Jennifer Ptesanwin Weston
- S6E9: Finding Voice, Connection, and Curiosity Through Language with Milton Alan Turner
- S6E8: The Courage to Be Seen with John Tessitore
- S6E7: Onward Together: The Energy Behind Language Advocacy & Collaboration with Joy Peyton
- S6E6: Power of Young Voices | Students at Language Advocacy Days
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