Kiowa Elder Dorothy Whitehorse Delaune listening to a 1935 recording of her father “Charley Whitehorse” singing Kiowa songs for ethnographer Jane Richardson Hanks.
Kiowas, listen.
“KHOIYE GOO, BAY THAW HAHDLE,” or “Kiowas, listen,” is a traditional way of calling the community together for a conversation. While this website and broader project is called KHOIYE TDOEN GYAH, which means “Kiowa Talk” or “Kiowa They Said,” sustaining the Kiowa language begins with listening to it. This website offers one way of hearing the language in order to learn it and relies on the knowledge of fluent Kiowa speakers, now mostly elders in the community. This project is dedicated to the ongoing strength and cultural persistence of the Kiowa people.
Kiowatalk.org is a project of the Kiowa Clemente Course in the Humanities, an Indigenous humanities course offered by the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma, sponsored by the Oklahoma Regional Writing Project, a 501c3 incubated by the University of Oklahoma Writing Center and dedicated to sustaining diverse community and cultural literacies in Oklahoma and the surrounding region.
For more about the project and project staff, please visit the “About this Project” and “About Us” pages.