The Lakota people can now enjoy the beloved superhero movie “The Avengers” in their traditional language.
Star Mark Ruffalo worked with the community to have audio of the 2012 Marvel film redubbed in the traditional language of the Lakota people, whose scant number of native speakers puts the dialect in danger of extinction.
Ruffalo, who produced the 2022 documentary “Lakota Nation vs. United States,” enlisted his “Avengers” co-stars, Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson and Chris Evans, to rerecord their dialogue for the Lakota version of the film, which also features voice performances from Lakota actors for the more minor characters.
“This project came out of my relationship with the Lakota people,” Ruffalo said in a video posted to Marvel Entertainment’s official YouTube channel on Friday.
“And it was this fun thing that they wanted to do, where they wanted to take ‘The Avengers’ — this crazy idea — let’s do a Lakota dub of ‘The Avengers.’”
While Lakota is one of the most widely spoken Indigenous languages in the United States, only 2,000 people are fluent in the dialect, which is spoken across the northern plains states of North Dakota and South Dakota.
Lakota was almost entirely lost after decades of the U.S. government’s policy of forcibly removing Native American children from their communities, dividing them from their language and culture in an effort to assimilate Indigenous youth into American society.
Revitalizing the Lakota language has been a huge focus for the community, and they hope the Lakota version of “The Avengers” will be used to bring younger generations closer to their culture.
“A big question we had was how can we get our language in our homes,” Ray Taken Alive, a citizen of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, told the Lakota Times back in May.
“The elders always tell us that it starts in the home,” he continued. “So how can we get the language in the home but in a way that the kids would be interested in? This was an idea, but we never thought it would turn out like this.”
The Lakota translation of “The Avengers” is just one piece of Disney’s plan to help preserve Native American languages.
Disney is also working on an Ojibwe language dub of “Star Wars: A New Hope,” according to a report from the BBC earlier this year. A Navajo version of the first “Star Wars” was released in 2013.
The Lakota dub of “The Avengers” is now available to stream on Disney+.
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