Dane Poolaw, NAS faculty, shared history and demonstrations of Plains Indian Sign Language and Kiowa Sign Language in an article by Amanda Morris of the Washington Post.
Dane started learning Kiowa Sign Language about 10 years ago, taking Kiowa language classes at the Jacobson House. Knowing the language, Dane was able to recognize and understand his great, great grandfather signing “Native American" in a video of Oklahoma Missions from 1932 (link in article).
Using the signs, Dane said, “adds more to spoken Kiowa...it adds more to who we are. There’s a little more feeling behind it.”
There is evidence of Indigenous peoples of North America using sign language as early as 2,000 - 4,000 B.C.E. Signs were used to communicate between tribes who spoke different languages.
Like spoken Indigenous languages, Native sign languages were largely lost due to assimilation and the impact of government-funded, and often church-ran, boarding schools between the mid-1800s and the 1960s.
See full article here: Native American sign language arrives at the Super Bowl
