MANHATTAN — Kansas State University has partnered with members of the Kaw Nation and the Kansas Studies Institute at Johnson County Community College to produce the documentary “Creator Gives Us Language: A Story of Rematriating Kaáⁿze Íe,” which shows how members of the Kaw Nation are working to awaken their native language, Kaáⁿze Íe.
The video is the first in a series of short documentaries being produced as part of the Kansas Land Treaties Project to tell the history of Kansas and the Kanza Níkashinga, or Kanza people, known today as the Kaw Nation. The project is led by Lisa Tatonetti, Coffman University Distinguished Teaching Scholar and Donnelly Professor of English at K-State.
The video features James Pepper Henry, vice chair of the Kaw Nation, and Desiree Storm Brave, director of the Kaw Nation Language and Revitalization Program. They talk about witnessing Kaánze íe become a sleeping language, or a language with no living speakers, and their efforts to wake it up.
In the film, Pepper Henry recalls how his great grandfather, Ralph Pepper, one of the last fluent Kaw speakers, would sit on the porch speaking Kaw all alone. His grandfather, Gilbert Pepper, who grew up speaking English in boarding schools, explained to him that Pepper wasn’t talking to himself; he was talking to God because he had nobody else to speak Kaw with.
Brave and her team teach the Kaw language and culture to children and others. These children are the first in several generations to grow up with the language, according to Pepper Henry.
“It wasn’t that long ago that powwows and dances and ceremonies and things were taken away from us,” Brave said. “Now, it’s important for this generation to pick that back up and carry that forward so that we’re able to stay the Kanza Níkashinga and stay strong.”
The second film in the series, “Kansas Without the Kanza: The Treaties That Built This State,” is due out next year and tells the story of the 1825, 1846 and 1859 treaties between the Kaw and U.S. government, and the Kaw’s subsequent expulsion from their Kansas homelands in 1873.
“Although it shares difficult histories, it ends by showing present-day Kaw resilience and sovereignty,” Tatonetti said.
The third documentary will tell the story of how the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers flooded the town of Washunga, Oklahoma, the location of the Kaw Tribal Council House and cemetery, in the 1970s.
“We produce these documentaries to honor those whose land we now occupy and to serve our state by sharing knowledge and expertise on past events that socially, politically, economically and environmentally impacted our current communities,” Tatonetti said.
“Creator Gives Us Language” will be shown at 11:30 a.m. Monday, Oct. 14, in the K-State Student Union Ballroom as part of K-State’s ninth annual Indigenous Peoples Day sponsored by the K-State Indigenous Faculty and Staff Alliance.
The Kansas Land Treaties Project is also producing annotated treaties, lesson plans, timelines, maps, interviews and other materials and tools to promote understanding of Indigenous peoples and related histories of the region and Kansas State University, the nation’s first operational land-grant university. The materials are already being used in K-State’s first-year writing program, and more are being developed for high school curricula.
Collaborators include Alex Red Corn, associate vice chancellor for the Office of Sovereign Partnerships and Indigenous Initiatives and director of the Indigenous Studies Program at the University of Kansas; C. Huffman, a Kaw citizen and Potawatomi descendent; Tai Edwards, director of the Kansas Studies Institute; and Mary Kohn, director of the Chapman Center for Rural Studies at Kansas State University.
The project is supported by the College of Arts and Sciences Integrating Engagement Across All We Do Grant offered through the Chapman Center for Rural Studies and K-State’s Office of Engagement, and by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Kansas Institute and Humanities Kansas.
