Ex-Minister Translates the Bible Into Lakota
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RAPID CITY, S.D. — Jerry Yellowhawk, a member of the Cheyenne River tribe and retired Wesleyan minister, spends much of his time at a computer translating the Bible into Lakota, a dialect of the Teton Sioux tribe.
Yellowhawk has completed Psalm 23 for use at funerals and is nearly done with the Gospel of Luke. The work is painstaking, Yellowhawk said, because Lakota uses a lot of imagery and is quite different from English. He said many Indians are wary of Christianity because their ancestors were put in government boarding schools and given church memberships that separated them from their culture.
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