On June 14, Disney+ releases the Lakota-dubbed full-length version of the blockbuster Avengers movie, marking a milestone for Indigenous representation in mainstream media.
This project is the result of painstaking and groundbreaking work by Grey Willow Music Studios and Production, a Native-owned sound company, along with the help of the Lakota Reclamation Project, students from McLaughlin school, elders from the Standing Rock community, and others.
“Our goal is to bring the Lakota language into living rooms and give our community something to be proud of. This project is not just ours; it’s for the people,” Cyril “Chuck” Archambault (Standing Rock), executive producer of the Lakota dub of Avengers, told Native News Online.
Translating an action movie like Avengers into Lakota presented unique challenges, and elders played a crucial role in this process, helping to create new terms for concepts. “Lakota is a very descriptive, verb-based language, which made translating certain words tricky,” Ray Taken Alive (Standing Rock), executive producer of the Lakota dub of Avengers, told Native News Online. “For instance, the word tank in English is one syllable, but in Lakota, the translation was a phrase describing its characteristics, which took about 17 syllables. This created timing issues, since a single word in English could take several seconds to say in Lakota.”
Taken Alive and Archambault plan to create curriculum materials based on the film and incorporating Lakota language projects into popular media to promote and preserve the Lakota language and culture.
“The potential for educational use is vast. One of my dreams is to incorporate this work into Marvel Comics, creating educational resources that are freely available to our Indigenous people,” Archambault said. “This project is just the beginning, and there’s so much more we can achieve together.”
