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beginning of November on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in southwestern South Dakota. Hill's mission is to immerse children in the language as infants so that Lakota becomes their first language rather than a second language.
• It's a lofty goal but something that parents want, even if they cannot speak the language fluently themselves. There's already a waiting list of 10 children.
• Hill previously worked at the Red Cloud Indian School on the Pine Ridge reservation. He's searching for another caregiver besides him, preferably a woman who is fluent in Lakota and has experience working with children.
• He describes the ideal candidate as "someone who is young enough that they have the energy and the charisma to sort of handle all these toddlers but also old enough that they are a ... genuinely fluent speaker."
• The plan it to expand the program to include elementary school curriculum as the initial children reach school age. The early childhood component will be retained permanently.
• Other initiatives are under way to start teaching Lakota at a younger age. Twenty episodes of the Berenstain Bears cartoon have been translated into Lakota, and an app geared toward kids learning the language has been created.
• And on the Standing Rock reservation, which straddles the North Dakota-South Dakota border, an immersion nest for 3-year-olds called the Kampus Kids Lakota Immersion program started in September.
• Project director Sacheen Whitetail Cross said the program uses basic early-childhood teaching methods and a concept called total physical response, which uses action to teach. For example, Whitetail Cross said, students will use the language to describe their actions of passing out utensils at meal times or brushing their teeth.
• The immersion nest is part of the Lakota Language Education Action Program, which is aimed at trying to increase the number of young teachers capable of teaching Lakota as a second language. The Action Program offers tuition, room and board to qualified language students at the University of South Dakota or Sitting Bull College on the Standing Rock reservation. Once completed, students are required to teach Lakota in a classroom for the same amount of time they received funding.
• So far, immersion nest parents say they are seeing noticeable differences in their children.
• Mary Wilson and her husband had been trying on their own to teach Lakota to their daughter, Tiwakanna Mentz, but the 3-year-old showed little interest in learning it. The Fort Yates, N.D., couple enrolled Tiwakanna in the day care and now she's surrounded by other 3-year-olds, being taught by a fluent Lakota speaker and learn

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