Director, Culture & Language Dept. Sahnish-Nueta, Hidatsa
Nueta (Mandan), Sahnish (Arikara) and Hidatsa gathered together to form the Three Affiliated Tribes in North Dakota. I am enrolled member of the MHA Nation (what we call the Three Affiliated Tribes).
Currently, I am the director of the Culture & Language Department, which has a primary mission of language revitalization on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. Each of our languages was suppressed and is in a state of emergency. It is the Culture & Language Department's mission to turn this trend around though language mentor-apprentice programs, creation of new and more effective curriculuum and the promotion of the languages within the MHA Nation. It is a difficult mission, but one that I believe in completely.
In my past life, I was an online journalist for nearly 19 years. I began here, on the reservation, and moved to the Grand Forks (ND) Herald, then to the Charlotte (NC) Observer, where I stayed for most of that time. I taught myself Flash programing and made a few games for the papers, including a hurricane tracking map and a Friends quiz for the TV show's final season.
I was in a 100 years flood in Grand Forks, two different riots in Charlotte and watched as the newspaper industry was nearly swallowed whole by the advent of the Internet. And I've seen YouTubers immerge who are carrying the ideas of journalism forward.
I have a Bachleors of Fine Arts degree from University of Virginia in Richmond and I think, making art will always be apart of my work. I'm glad that it is so easy to incorporate drawing and painting into new technologies, such as my current goal of learning full-stack development.
We are hoping to create our own language applications which we can update and administer locally. Too often when outside companies develop something for the Tribe no one really know how it works, how to fix it if it breaks or how to update it. We are determined to be the programmers of our own language apps and hope this BootCamp will be a jump start to getting this accomplished.
Photo: Indiana University