User:Urve/Iapi Oaye

The Iapi Oaye, also known for a time as the Iapi Oaye/The Word Carrier, was a Dakota-language newspaper published in South Dakota and Nebraska, United States, between 1871 and 1939.

History
The Iapi Oaye was established by John P. Williamson and Stephen R. Riggs, two American missionaries to the Dakota people, and was first published in May 1871 in Greenwood, South Dakota. It was primarily written in the Dakota language, especially its first issues; a year and a half after the paper began, its title changed to the bilingual Iapi Oaye/The Word Carrier and the final page of the newspaper was dedicated to English-language news. Around 1877, the paper had a circulation of some 800 Dakota readers, and it reported about 600 paying Dakota subscribers; Dakota readership extended from North and South Dakota into Minnesota and Manitoba. It also had around 200 paying white readers.

The Dakota-language Iapi Oaye and English-language The Word Carrier were separated and published separately beginning in March 1884. During the late 1870s and early 1880s, the paper began strongly advocating for the Christianization of native populations, and it denounced the "lawless"—including Sitting Bull and the rest of the Lakota people—who the United States government had failed to control. The paper argued that "Sitting Bull and his people must be humbled and beaten and captured", though it did not support the killing of innocent women and children.

The paper ceased publication in March 1939. According to the historian Todd Kerstetter, it "ran longer than any other native-language periodical in America".