Animated student film project brings Crow language to the big screen

When a Hardin Public Schools instructor asked Darrin Old Coyote if he’d volunteer as a voice actor and help translate a student animation project, Old Coyote, a Crow language speaker, said he didn’t hesitate. 

“Anytime the youth ask me to be a part of something, I don’t ever deny them,” he said. “But, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.”

For almost a year, beginning last fall, Hardin High School students worked with elders, Crow language speakers, and a California-based media company to create a short animated film featuring the Apsáalooke (Crow) language. The 33-minute movie, titled “The Sacred Culture of the Apsáalooke Nation,” will premiere at Harriet’s restaurant and theater in Hardin on Thursday, Aug. 27. 

If Old Coyote didn’t know what he was getting into when he committed to the project, neither did many of the students, teachers and elders who worked on it. Producing the film was more difficult and took much longer than anyone expected, due primarily to the particular challenges of incorporating an endangered language into a contemporary script and modern storytelling format. 

From the 1800s to the 1970s, the federal government coerced many Native American children nationwide to attend boarding schools, where they were punished and physically abused for speaking their languages. Those schools and other assimilative efforts contributed to widespread language loss among tribes nationwide. The United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) classifies the Crow language as “definitely endangered,” meaning children no longer learn the language “as a ‘mother tongue’ in the home.” Today, tribes everywhere are working to preserve and revitalize their languages to promote healing and instill pride in Indigenous identity. 

“There’s no other Crow Tribe in the world,” said Old Coyote. “We’re it. And if we don’t do anything to preserve and perpetuate it, then it dies. Our language dies, our culture dies, our way of life dies. If there’s no culture, there’s no meaning.”

Written by the students and animated by a Los Angeles-based production company, the movie opens with a teenager, Wayne, playing video games in his bedroom. He becomes distracted when his grandmother walks in to say goodnight and appears uninterested when she speaks to him about the importance of connecting with Crow culture. 

When Wayne falls asleep that night, he’s taken on a “vision quest,” where various characters, including a medicine man voiced by Old Coyote, take him to multiple locations, including a buffalo jump, sweat lodge and the North American plains prior to European contact, where he learns about Apsáalooke culture. In the beginning of the film, characters speak almost entirely in English, and when Wayne visits various cultural sites, the characters speak in the Apsáalooke language. By the end of the movie, the dialogue is mostly spoken in Apsáalooke. Students worked with Wonder Media, a Los Angeles-based animation production company that works with schools, to animate and produce the film. 

Riley Ramsey, a business teacher at Hardin High School who helped students direct the project, said students initially wanted to write the film entirely in the Crow language. But most students in his class are not fluent in Crow, so trying to translate a draft of the script, Ramsey said, proved “pretty difficult.” That’s when Bianka Rock Above, Hardin Public Schools’ director of Indian education, began reaching out to Crow elders and community members like Old Coyote, who had more experience with the language. 

Old Coyte said when he saw an initial draft of the script, his first reaction was, ‘We can’t do this.’” 

“I told them we can’t translate what’s written here because it won’t make sense in our language if we translate it literally,” he said. 

Part of the issue, Old Coyote said, is that the Apsáalooke language is more descriptive than English, meaning Apsáalooke words often do not have one-to-one synonyms in English.

“You can say ‘car’ [in English] and you know the meaning,” he said. “To translate that [in Crow], I would have to say ‘the object that moves on its own,’ and that’s not the same. That’s the tough part.”

With feedback from Crow speakers, the students rewrote the script, though translation challenges persisted. 

In Crow, some words are different depending on whether a man or a woman is speaking. A man addressing his father would say “aaxè,” while a woman would address her father as “baasakaà,” according to Old Coyote. A man referring to his father would say “Iilapxè,” and a woman would say, “ihsaahkè,” he said.

One student, Rock Above said, asked his grandmother to help translate the grandmother character’s lines “because he couldn’t do it, because he speaks the male form” of the language.

Another challenge was transcribing the translation so the movie could include subtitles. Lavonna Little Owl Real Bird, who voiced the film’s grandmother character, said she asked an elder to help her write the Crow translation. The script, she said, included words she wasn’t used to speaking. 

“I speak Crow every day,” she said. “I consider myself fluent, but there are some words that we hardly use, and those kinds of words were challenging to translate. And if I did say it, I thought, ‘Am I pronouncing this right?’”

Because not all English words, particularly those that describe modern life, have a direct Crow translation, different speakers may use different Crow words in their translations. Because there is no specific Crow word for “microwave,” Old Coyote said he translates it as aahpiishiiashià Iiakaatè. “Aahpiishiiashià,” he said, describes heatwaves coming from the ground on a hot day, and “Iiakaatè” means small. “Microwave” becomes “heatwave that is small.” 

Though the project took longer than expected, those who worked on it say they’re thrilled to see it premiere on the big screen this week. Rock Above said the project has instilled a sense of pride in Hardin students and helped forge new intergenerational collaborations in the community. Little Owl Real Bird said she hopes the film will be used in schools as a resource for students and teachers. She expects many people will relate to Wayne, a character who is disconnected from his culture, but wants to learn more about it. 

“I think it’s going to open doors for people,” she said. “They’re going to start realizing they’re interested in their culture and they’re interested in speaking Crow. They’ll learn things and want to do it themselves.”

Old Coyote anticipates some criticism of the film’s translations and the spelling of certain Crow words, but said he is proud of the students for engaging with the language. 

“I know we’re going to get some flak,” he said. “But we’ve done something that has never been done before. It’s going to be the start of something good.”