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Alex Little Horn is who kids might call the cool teacher. In his Pine Ridge Reservation classroom, whiteboards are sometimes swapped with Mario or Fortnite video games; he’ll publish workout videos or cologne reviews—all while speaking Lakota.

“In most other languages, say if I was Hispanic and I was holding onto my Spanish heritage . . . there’d be so much material, like YouTube videos, like video games, makeup stuff, movies,” the Indigenous language teacher says. But that’s not the case for Lakota, he says, especially for young learners. Or at least it wasn’t until Little Horn began making his own videos.

He founded the nonprofit GEN 7, creating “little gaming lessons” using the Super Mario universe. Three years later, Little Horn teaches first through eighth grade at Lakota Waldorf School.

Lakota for the Everyday

Little Horn, who is Lakota and Choctaw, grew up learning about his great-grandparents’ boarding school trauma. His father and grandparents don’t speak Lakota. He wanted to end the cultural disconnect he’d seen with his elders, learning to speak it in high school.

“As a kid growing up, I had identity issues [that were] filled by being able to speak the language. And I just wanted everybody else to have that opportunity,” Little Horn says.

So, he meets students where they are: online. Sixth-grader Malacai Snider started learning Lakota last year from Little Horn and already speaks with confidence and precision. He plays Fortnite and Roblox at home, where his grandmother speaks Lakota with him.

“It’s easy,” says Malacai, with those young brain neural connections. “It’s cool to learn the language . . . Hopefully by the time I’m in eighth grade, I’ll be fluent.”

He’s not far off.

Little Horn recalls showing Malacai’s class his Minecraft video of shopping for fruits and vegetables. “And there was no English subtitles. He just understood it,” says the educator.

Familiar and Healing

Little Horn also creates weekly Lakota phrase videos or art videos of him sketching while speaking Lakota. Many of his videos have over 1,000 views on YouTube; they’re not just for the classroom, and many adult learners use them too, he says. And it works.

“I do reinforcement [teaching] with video games and video game characters. And then there’s other lessons where I just use the video games’ characters, and I just go on and explore them, do a little bio for them. And then there’s storytelling videos [where] I’m just talking about the whole game in Lakota,” Little Horn says. He tries to use language that’s not always used in class, like words used day-to-day or in elders’ stories outside of school. Video game playthroughs make learning more accessible, Little Horn says. The learning environment is already rooted in familiarity.

“[My students] can speak [Lakota] so well, from hearing the videos and quoting those lines. It’s powerful for me. It’s very healing for me,” Little Horn says. “The Mario, the Minecraft stuff, it’s stuff that I’ve enjoyed my whole life. So, it’s kind of reconnecting with my inner child as well.”

Amy "Frankie" Felegy wrote this story for Arts Midwest.