Culture & Language: Honoring Traditions and Empowering Generations

Running Strong for American Indian Youth has made an extraordinary and lasting impact through its Cultural and Language Preservation Programs, advancing the survival and renewal of Indigenous identity across more than forty tribal nations.
Over four decades, the organization has revitalized endangered languages, ceremonies, and cultural lifeways through long-term community partnerships and youth leadership initiatives.

Strengthening Community-driven Culture & Language Revitalization

Programs such as the Hupa Language Immersion Nest have reestablished intergenerational fluency among the Hoopa Valley Tribe, while partnerships with the Yuchi Language Project in Oklahoma and youth-led revitalization projects across Native communities have trained new speakers, teachers, and cultural leaders.

"In traditional Yankton Sioux culture, everyone had a niche, a role. One of the roles of the women who were part of the Brave Hearts was to retrieve the dead and wounded from the battlefield and help the families. In a way we are doing the same thing today with the modern-day Brave Hearts -- bringing back our people from emotional death.”

Running Strong also sustains ceremonial and intergenerational cultural programs through its support of the Brave Heart Society and Afraid of Bear American Horse Tiospaye, which restore Dakota and Lakota rites of passage, storytelling, and sacred food traditions. These initiatives connect youth and elders in practices like the Isnati Coming of Age Ceremony and the Sacred Foods Workshops to prepare traditional foods like buffalo, corn, and chokecherries. 
On the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, Running Strong’s investment in centers like the Oyate Ta Kola Ku Community Center has created year-round spaces for families to practice traditional arts, foods, and ceremonies. These programs ensure cultural skills—from beading and quillwork to preparing wasna and buffalo meat—are preserved and passed on to future generations.

Youth-led Culture & Language Revitalization Through Mentorship

Through our flagship Dreamstarter® Program, over dozens of Native youth leaders have launched projects that modernize cultural preservation—reviving art, dance, and storytelling as tools of education and identity. 
  • Jenna Smith (Osage Nation) founded Artmaker Dance Studio to bring Osage fables into schools through ballet;
  • Hokani Maria (Native Hawaiian) built a traditional canoe to teach youth ancestral navigation;
  • Lourdes Pedroza-Downey (Round Valley Tribes) researched Wailaki artifacts to restore basketry traditions; 
  • Kyle Swann (Piscataway Conoy Tribe) created the first Tribal Data Sovereignty System to safeguard cultural archives and governance autonomy.
Youth-Led Culture & Language Programs
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New Culture bearers and language learners
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Spotlighted Programs

The Euchee (Yuchi) are a small band of Native Americans originally from the Southeast region of Georgia.  When they were forcibly removed to Sapulpa, Oklahoma, the federal government placed them under the Muskogee Creek Nation.  Though they are separated from their homeland, they have maintained their cultural ways and continue to practice their traditions. The Euchee (Yuchi) Language Project is one illustration of this, as it their method for preserving the tribal language, an integral part of their identity. 

Euchee is an incredibly unique language.  Experts consider it an isolated language, meaning it did not derive from any other language or cultural group.  Beginning with approximately ten fluent speakers, local Euchee tribal members formed the Euchee (Yuchi) Language Project in efforts to preserve the language and pass it on to their children.  The project has produced recordings of elders speaking the language, archived words in writing and created different types of teaching materials. In efforts to teach the language, they facilitate children’s immersion programs, master-apprentice teams, and language camps.  Fluent elders hold classes on a daily basis to share the language breath-to-breath.  

See the Yuchi Language Project come to life here!

stagOt’A gOk’û: How to build a snowman in Yuchi!

 

Located in Lake Andes, South Dakota on the Yankton Sioux Reservation, Brave Heart Society’s mission is to enhance and preserve the Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota culture for coming generations, thereby creating strong, competent, worldly families with a strong foundation of values, morals and worldview. Their programming includes Isnati Coming of Age Camps, intertribal lacrosse teams, community gardens, the Waterlily Storytelling Institute, and the Dakota Language Nest.

At the Sacred Healing Circle in Keystone, South Dakota, Lakota master teachers are brought together with young women and girls to teach the art of making sacred foods, the prayers and ceremony behind this sacred art, as well as other cultural teachings that are foundational to the Oglala Lakota Peoples.

Events include: medicinal plants teachings, chokecherry picking, as well as the making of wasna (dried buffalo meat) and campá (ground and dried chokecherries.) Young men will help to prepare the necessary set up so that young girls and women are able to learn in a safe and culturally appropriate manner and environment.

Read more about culture and language preservation here!