Members of the Lakota nation and Marvel Entertainment have teamed up to provide a dub of 2012’s The Avengers in the Lakota language, with the core cast—Chris Evans, Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, Chris Hemsworth, and Jeremy Renner—coming together to take part.
“Our ancestors, they were punished for speaking our language,” Executive Producer Eugene “Ray” Taken Alive said in a video Marvel put out about the collaboration. He added, “Our language, it went underground. It was spoken in bedrooms when the matrons weren’t there at boarding schools. It was spoken in dark rooms where nobody could hear them, but it was still spoken.”
The initiative is part of The Lakota Language Reclamation Project, and aims, as Project Executive Producer Cyril “Chuck” Archambault says in the video, “to put the language back in the homes of our people—to be able to have them bond in such a way where they’re having fun watching a movie, and be totally integrated with the language of our people.”
The video shows Downey, Johannson and Ruffalo practicing and recording their lines with their Lakota partners. The project took over fifteen months and involved sixty-two Lakota-Dakota language speakers and the original Avengers team.
This dubbing project comes after Marvel released the What If…? episode, “What If… Kahhori Reshaped the World,” which had characters speaking Mohawk and Spanish with English subtitles. The Disney+ series Echo, which stars Menominee actor Alaqua Cox as the deaf Choctaw fighter Maya Lopez, also has a dubbed version in the Choctaw language.
The Lakota dubbed version of The Avengers is now available on Disney+, and you can watch the video about the process below.
