Standing Rock
Creating a storytelling platform to support language revitalization for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.
Client Overview
In an effort to preserve language, wooyake.org is an online archive of recordings (some from 1910) made in Dakota/Lakota by the fluent speakers of the past and present. The word “wóoyake” refers to stories, tales, and teachings, like those found within the recordings. The project welcomes donations of additional recordings, and Dakota/Lakota language learners are encouraged to join cataloging and transcription efforts to help expand the archive for everyone.
Services provided
Standing Rock Mobile Gallery
The challenge
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe needed a way to preserve and share Dakota and Lakota stories, language, and cultural knowledge in a digital environment — one that didn’t compromise the community’s authority over how that content was accessed and shared. Standard content management platforms weren’t built with Indigenous cultural governance in mind, making it difficult to enforce community-defined protocols around who could view, contribute to, or steward sensitive cultural material.
The Tribe needed a solution that would reflect and respect the values of the community it was built for, not simply digitize content without that context.
The solution
We implemented a Mukurtu CMS platform (a platform built for Indigenous digital stewardship) to create a culturally governed digital storytelling environment. The platform was configured to support community-based permissions, steward approval workflows, and structured story collections, ensuring that all content is managed and shared in alignment with community protocols. Built on Mukurtu 3 (Drupal 7), the implementation gave the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe meaningful control over their cultural heritage, with contributor workflows and access models defined by the community itself rather than by default platform settings.
The project was structured in two coordinated phases — Project A and Project B — both launching in 2023.
Project A covered discovery, planning, and creative work. We began by defining user stories to clarify requirements, align stakeholders, and prevent scope creep. A technical audit was completed before any implementation work began, establishing a clear baseline and surfacing any risks early.
Project B extended into development and implementation. Configuration and all custom workflows — including community governance models and culturally defined access permissions — were built and tested in a staging environment prior to launch. Risks were tracked through structured reporting and milestone reviews throughout both phases, and a rollback plan was defined and documented before go-live.
This project demonstrates our familiarity with Mukurtu architecture and Drupal 7 foundations, as well as our ability to support clients as they plan modernization paths to newer Drupal versions.
The result
The platform successfully launched in 2023, delivering a living digital archive of Dakota and Lakota cultural knowledge governed entirely by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s own protocols and values. Community stewards have meaningful control over how stories and language materials are accessed and shared, with structured approval workflows that put decision-making authority in the right hands.
The project also positions the Tribe well for future platform evolution. With Mukurtu 4 not yet released, we worked with the client to evaluate their modernization roadmap — including a potential transition to a Drupal 11 implementation — ensuring the work done today doesn’t create barriers to where they want to go tomorrow.
