In 2012 Puffin West was a sponsor for the Lakota Language Consortium’s multi-year project to dramatize and translate into Lakota several Trickster tales from their storytelling tradition, featuring the charming and deceitful character Iktomi. PFW’s 2014 Grant helps to sponsor a new play “Iktomi’s New Wife.” In this production Iktomi he leaves his wife to find a new one and after much deception and trickery he himself is tricked into marrying his original Wife all over again. The play is written to be performed entirely in Lakota, with careful attention to Lakota cultural values and relationship traditions, in particular, traditional personal and social relationships between the genders. Among buffalo-hunting Lakota, the genders were so strictly separated that the women developed their own patterns of speech, and so proficiency in the Lakota language is central to the play’s action: Iktomi’s deception is exposed when he, disguised as a woman, is found out because he cannot speak like a woman. High School teachers will take the play back to their classes as a language teaching aid after it is performed this June by Native American theatre professionals on the Standing Rock Reservation in ND.
