Episode Details

Dr. Lanny Real Bird joins Mary O'Neill on the Country Outdoors Podcast for a rare conversation about Native American sign language, Crow traditions and the old ways of the Plains.

Lanny is a Crow tribal member, educator and Native American elder who has spoken Plains Indian Sign Language, or "hand talk," since childhood. He learned it from his hard-of-hearing grandmother, uncle and father along the Little Bighorn. He has since taught it in classrooms, built teaching resources for the Crow and Hidatsa languages, and worked as a sign language consultant on HBO's Lewis and Clark miniseries. He shares how tribes used hand talk to trade horses and make peace, the night a teepee full of elders told him to "go get a Masters," and why he says the land is a form of literacy.

They also talk about boarding schools and the loss of Native languages, missing and murdered Indigenous people, the reservation housing shortage, hunting antelope with his uncle Floyd, the pheasant that got away, and why the wolf has been the Crow's ally for generations. Lanny also teaches Mary real hunting signs.