Coeur d’Alene Tribe Launches Coyote Stories App as Part of Language Revitalization Efforts

This article was originally published in the Underscore Native News.

The Coeur d’Alene Tribe has launched a user-friendly app to help restore their traditional language, Snchitsu’umshtsn. The app, named Coyote Stories after the Native American mythological trickster, features flashcards with audio pronunciations, illustrations, quizzes, and stories read by elders and Coeur d’Alene app developer, Kenny Louie-McGee. 

“What I love about it [the app] is that to create an app, most people are like, ‘Oh, it takes 100 developers and millions of dollars,’” Louie-McGee said. “But we’re two people, and we got it done, and that’s all it took.”

Over several years, tribal leaders discussed wanting to tackle a larger project to help engage their citizens in easy-access language programming, said LoVina Louie, natural resources, education, and outreach manager for the Coeur d’Alene tribe. When Louie got hired, she reached out to her nephew Louie-McGee, who has a bachelor’s degree in computer science, and they got to work.

“We needed access to our language on a larger scale,” Louie said. “This app is a gateway for all of our people to be able to stand up and say who they are and introduce themselves in their language.”

For Louie, the teaching of coyote and his stories were an important part of growing up and giving her guidance on life. 

“Coyote stories are such a huge part of our teachings and our stories. Everything we ever learned as children, we learned because of what coyote did,” Louie said.

Louie-McGee, who also serves as the public relations and digital media director for the Coeur d’Alene Tribe, spent months building the project, filling it with tens of thousands of lines of code.

To create the content for the app, Louie-McGee worked with the tribal language program, which had a catalog of around 1,000 Snchitsu’umshtsn words. The department also had videos of elders telling stories such as “Coyote and the Man,” “Four Smokes”, and “How We Got the Chipmunk.” But for the stories that had no one to tell them, Louie-McGee stepped in and recorded the rest, hoping to provide resources for the next generation.

Inclusive Art

For Louie-McGee, the code writing and reading stories wasn’t the difficult part of the project — that was designing elements to engage children with the app’s content.

“We have to start creating those types of media that our kids will just watch over and over and over,” he said. “But I think this is a start.”

The app features a cartoon coyote that Louie-McGee made, which syncs up with his words as he tells stories such as “The Trickster’s Path” and “Conditions in Mythological Times.”

Louie-McGee knew visual design was going to be a large part of the success of the app. Originally, he and Louie tested AI-generated imagery for the app, but tribal officials wanted to see artwork created by tribal members, leading them to hire Coeur d’Alene artists.

Valerie Adrian is known in Coeur d’Alene as an entrepreneur, mental health advocate, and, largely, as an artist. Adrian, who also uses dance to express herself artistically, said she recently fell in love with digital art when she had her son four years ago. After suffering from mental health issues post birth, Adrian lost herself for a bit of time until she found digital art and began to create it as a coping mechanism.

“I discovered combining positive self-affirmations and the way I feel into art pieces helps me cope with whatever I’m going through,” Adrian added.

Adrian, who worked on 15 different digital art pieces for the flashcards, said she’s thankful for the opportunity to help restore the Snchitsu’umshtsn language. While she was creating art and reviewing flashcards in the app, she began learning pieces of her language — something she’s struggled with in the past. 

“We have language classes here which are awesome, but it’s more convenient to have it in your hand whenever you want,” Adrian added. “And you can actually hear the person saying the word correctly, so you know you’re actually saying it right.”

While flipping through flashcards, Adrian said she wanted Coeur d’Alene tribal members to feel represented and to see themselves in her art. From head scarves to traditional plateau-style fringe dresses, boys with braids and cradle boards, Indigenous people of all ages can be seen throughout the lessons, making Adrian feel proud to share her work.

“I feel lucky. This is going to be around for my children’s lives and throughout their children’s lives,” she said. “And it’s awesome to know that the future generations can look back on this and know who the artist is. It makes me proud.”

Future generations

When he came home from college, Louie-McGee had a goal — to use his degree to help his people and revitalize their culture. His first project, which didn’t come to fruition, was a video game about stickgame, a traditional Indigenous game. 

“I knew I wanted to do something for at least our people,” Louie-McGee said. “That was my first goal: to make a game. And then I started falling in love with making apps.”

With the lengthy catalog of Snchitsu’umshtsn words at his disposal, Louie-McGee is excited to continue making flashcards and quizzes for future use. As the app continues to grow and fill with content, he and Louie hope to add components such as sentence structure and grammar.

“We can get our kids, who are on phones and tablets 24/7 already, we can give them a tool to connect them to our tribe and to learn our language so our language doesn’t die,” Louie said. “We want the kids to be able to say ‘hi, good morning,’ and ‘how are you?’ So we definitely want to move into that next process of sentences.”

As Louie-McGee continues to spread the word about his app to other tribal nations, he hopes they, too, will build something like Coyote Stories to revitalize Indigenous languages. As of now, the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes are working with Louie-McGee to develop a similar app for their community.