Sea otter handicrafts made by Anthony Charles on display at the Arts in the Cove festival on Prince of Wales Island on Aug. 8, 2025. (Hannah Weaver/KFSK)
For about a decade, Scott Jackson had a system. He was the owner of Rocky Pass Tannery in the village of Kake on Kupreanof Island, where he and his team tanned sea otter pelts.
He can still recite the steps in precise detail. Pressure wash the fat off the pelts for four hours. Put the pelts in a pressurizing machine called an auto-tanner for three hours. Hang the pelts until they swell. Shave them with a circle beaver fleshing knife. Put in a citric acid bath for three days. Neutralize with baking soda. Oil. Dry.
“It takes a lot more than you realize to make a good, soft, supple, sewing hide,” Jackson said.
About a year and a half ago, he closed the tannery. Jackson said trying to keep up with the high demand was unsustainable. At one point, Jackson said they tanned 187 hides in a month with fewer than a dozen employees.
“Pretty soon it becomes stress, and pretty soon it becomes unhealthy,” he said.
When Rocky Pass Tannery shuttered, that left their customers throughout Southeast Alaska with few options to continue their traditional cultural practices of hunting and skin-sewing sea otters.
Access to tannery services is just one of many barriers facing sea otter hunters. Federal rules restrict sea otter hunting to those who are a quarter or more Alaska Native or an enrolled member of a coastal tribe. Federal regulations also say that hunted sea otters must be converted into “authentic Native handicrafts.” These barriers are making it more difficult for hunters to tackle sea otter overpopulation, which is threatening shellfish populations in Southeast Alaska.
Shipping out-of-state
Now, many sea otter craftspeople ship their pelts to the only sea otter tannery outside of Alaska — in southern Idaho.
Aanutein Deborah Head is a skin-sewing teacher from Craig on Prince of Wales Island and one of Jackson’s former customers. She’s an experienced sea otter hunter and skin-sewer. But she never learned how to tan.
“I could have said, ‘Grandma, show me how to tan it so the hide doesn’t fall off of it,’” Head said. “I didn’t, and that’s lost to me.”
It was more convenient when she could send her sea otters to Kake, Head said. In particular, it costs her a lot more in shipping to send the skins on a thousand-plus-mile journey to southern Idaho.
Kootink Heather Douville in her skiff with sea otters she hunted near Prince of Wales Island, in a photo posted to her Instagram account on June 13. (Photo courtesy of Kootink Heather Douville)
Kootink Heather Douville learned how to skin-sew from Head while growing up in Craig. Now, she’s an avid hunter. Like Head, she also sends her sea otter pelts to Idaho so she can make and sell handicrafts like hats, pillows and fur ball earrings.
From the time she spots a sea otter in the water and aims for its head to when she finishes the last stitch on a handicraft, just about every part of the process is either expensive or time-consuming.She hunted 200 otters last year and about 120 this year.
“For me, it’s not just an investment as far as money goes, it’s your time,” Douville said. “I think that’s why we have so few hunters out there, in addition to the blood quantum limitations through the federal agencies.”
An alternative approach
In Klawock, just six miles north of Craig, Anthony Charles has found another way to save on tanning costs — by doing the tanning himself. He’s been running a sea otter product business for about seven years with his father. He used to ship to Rocky Pass Tannery before it closed, but decided to tan himself to save on shipping. Even though Kake is significantly closer than Idaho, it’s still about 100 miles by air from Klawock.
A couple of years ago, Charles bought tanning equipment and set it up under a tent. When his setup was destroyed in a windstorm, he was faced with a difficult decision.
“I almost kind of walked away from it after that,” he said.
Instead, he decided to rebuild and keep his tanning operation going.
“I had to really bite down,” he said. “It was worth it.”
But tanning in-house doesn’t work for everyone. Douville tried tanning on her own at one point, but felt that it didn’t produce a high enough quality pelt for sewing. She also prefers to focus her time on hunting and sewing.
“If I were to hunt and tan my own pelts, I would have a big stack of pelts, but no time to convert them and sell them,” she said.
Impact on sea otter overpopulation
Jackson said that since he’s closed the tannery, it seems like sea otter hunting has slowed down in Kake.
Douville said she feels like she’s not making much of a difference in the sea otter populations.
“They’re multiplying at a much faster rate than I can hunt them,” Douville said.
Despite the barriers, Douville remains committed to hunting and sewing as a way to connect to her Lingít culture. As she learned more about sea otter overpopulation and its threat to shellfish, she says it became even more meaningful for her.
“The last bucket of clams my dad dug was in 2011 and the last sea urchins we got was when I was a little kid,” she said. “When you remove access to a traditional food, you’re removing the ability to pass on that knowledge to the next generation on how to hunt or collect the food.”
The future of tanneries
Jackson, the former tannery owner, is unsure what the fate of local tanneries will be.
“Are we going to have tanneries around forever? I don’t know,” said Jackson. “I know that we all don’t live forever, and eventually we got to tap out.”
He’s not sure if he’ll reopen the tannery in Kake, but Jackson said he’d like to go to other towns and teach people how to set up a sustainable tannery.
“I think tanning would be number one, and teaching them how to sew is number two,” he said. “We got to open up our minds a little bit and say, let’s have a tannery in every community.”
Charitie Ropati, a young Alaska Native engineer with roots in Kongiganak, has been appointed as a youth climate advisor to the United Nations. (Photo courtesy of Charitie Ropati/KYUK Public Media)
Twenty-four-year-old Charitie Ropati is Yup’ik and Samoan, and has roots in the Bering Sea coastal village of Kongiganak. She said that the community has inspired her.
Following a flood event in 1966, many members relocated from the village of Kwigillingok to higher ground, a settlement which would become known as Kongiganak. Now, the permafrost under the village is thawing and Kongiganak is facing its own set of climate impacts.
“It really started with the story of my community,” Ropati explained. “And it’s because of that story of survival, I think, that brought me to where I’m at now.”
“Now” for Ropati means working in New York City as an engineer designing public housing infrastructure for Indigenous communities across the country. Ropati has also started her own nonprofit education organization called LilnativegirlinSTEM and was recently named to the Forbes 30 under 30 list.
Ropati said that she was back in Alaska, driving around Anchorage with her mom and her partner, when she got the news that she’d been selected as a youth climate advisor to the United Nations (U.N.)’s secretary general.
“It really meant a lot to be there, especially with my mom where these stories of survival really originated from her and specifically that story of relocation,” Ropati said. “Just our ability as Yup’ik people to do these type of things. Not only for survival, but for the love of each other and community.”
As a youth climate advisor, Ropati will be part of a cohort working with United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres to provide “practical and outcome-focused advice, diverse youth perspectives” around climate action, according to a press release from the U.N.
The youth advisor roles are pretty new to the U.N. In 2025, the number of selected advisors doubled from seven to 14. According to the press release, that’s to help support young people who don’t often have a seat at the table. Ropati is one of the first Alaska Native youth to be appointed as an advisor.
“I think this is a huge win, especially for youth in the Arctic,” Ropai said. “Because I don’t think we’ve ever been given this type of platform before.”
It’s a big year to be involved. The United Nations’ annual climate conference will take place this November in Brazil. Also this coming year, countries in the U.N. are required to submit new climate plans.
The plans will follow the Paris Agreement, a commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to keep the global surface temperature below 1.5 degrees Celsius. It’s a figure the U.N. has emphasized as a tipping point for damaging climate impacts, a point Ropati said affects the human rights of Indigenous people in the Arctic.
“We know that if that happens, and if our world does do that, that’s going to have devastating impacts, not only on these nations or states, but it’s going to have devastating impacts on Indigenous peoples, and especially on us, on Yup’ik, on Inuit, on Inupiaq, on all of us in our state,” Ropati said.
Ropati said human rights form the foundation of her climate advocacy. She said that Indigenous people on the front lines of climate change are often left out of the discussion when it comes to climate solutions. But she said they’re a group well-equipped with answers.
“When we talk about the climate work we’ve been doing, this is work that has been carried on through generations,” Ropati said. “This is work that didn’t start with me. It started with my great grandfather, to my grandmother, to my mother, and now me.”
Ropati said that climate conversations in the Western world often involve looking for quick fixes. But in Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta villages facing relocation, Ropati said that it’s understood that climate solutions can take generations. The recent relocation of the village of Newtok to a new site, Mertarvik, was one that was decades of planning and discussions in the making.
“It’s not just up to our youth to do this, and it needs to be intergenerational,” Ropati said. “I think this is something we as Indigenous people have always understood and continue to do, especially in our communities.”
In her capacity as a U.N. youth climate advisor, Ropati will work for the next three years alongside appointees from around the world, including Kenya, Sweden, and Indonesia.
Ropati said that she’s looking forward to bringing Indigenous perspectives to the forefront of the international climate discussions.
James Dommek Jr. is the executive producer of the new documentary, “Blood & Myth” (Image courtesy of Disney)
A haunting crime story and an Alaska Native legend are at the center of a new documentary that will premiere on Hulu on Sept. 4.
“Blood & Myth” looks into a real-life crime case that happened in Kiana, in Northwest Alaska, over a decade ago.
“It’s all very much rooted in reality,” said James Dommek Jr., the executive producer of the new documentary. “Incredible story of survival and legends and violence and culture.”
Teddy Kyle Smith is an Iñupiaq actor from Kiana who starred in “On the Ice,” a 2011 drama about two Utqiagvik teenagers. In 2012, Alaska State Troopers were investigating the suspicious death of Smith’s mother when he fled to a cabin and had a violent encounter with two hunters. He was later convicted of attempted murder.
In court, Smith said that Iñukuns, or Little People, guided his actions.
Dommek has been intrigued by this incident for years. When he worked at KNBA in 2016, that case came to mind when a coworker asked him if he knew any Alaska stories that would make for a good podcast.
Dommek described Smith’s story in his 2019 bestselling audiobook, “Midnight Son.” The new Hulu documentary is a movie adaptation of the audiobook, where he is also a part of the narrative, trying to uncover what happened in Kiana.
Dommek grew up in Kotzebue hearing about Iñukuns, evil creatures in the high Arctic. They came up in local stories and in conversations with Dommek’s great grandfather, Paul Monroe, who was an Inupiaq storyteller known as Palangun. Dommek said that Iñukuns exist in various legends from Inuit groups across the globe – in Siberia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland.
“If all of us had the same story, and we’re also spread out, it might have an air of truth to it, and my great grandfather’s stories were no different,” he said. “That was one of the big draws to the story for me.”
“Blood & Myth” is a true crime documentary told through an Indigenous perspective, which is rare in today’s entertainment industry, Dommek said.
“There’s the type of story I wanted to see, and no one was making it,” he said. “Everyone else is invited to listen and watch, but at the end of the day, it’s something I made for me.”
With a few exceptions, most of the filming took place in Alaska, including Kotzebue and Kiana. Dommek said it was important for him to make the story look and feel authentic.
“I took my crew up to Kiana, skeleton crew – four wheelers, and boats and village dogs and all that,” he said. “I was like, ‘We’re going to do this, and I’m an Alaskan making an Alaskan story, we can’t fake this.'”
Dommek is also a musician who has played in such Alaska bands as Pamyua
and Medium Build. He has worked in film production, but being an executive producer in his own film is a first. He said he wondered if it was his story to tell but decided to do it after talking to his family and elders in his community. He said he wanted it to be a story about staying true to your culture.
“You pull back all the layers in this story, and at the real heart of the documentary, the main message is, don’t forget who you are,” he said. “Remembering your roots, where you come from, and what makes our people strong, and what has made us survive in a place as harsh as Alaska for this long.”
The film will be streamed on Hulu in the U.S. and Disney+ internationally.
Lingít weaver Tleinax Shaawat Sydney Akagi poses with two of her creations displayed at the Sheldon Jackson Museum. (Ryan Cotter/KCAW)
Back when she was an art manager at the Sealaska Heritage Institute in 2017, Sydney Akagi would frequently spot people using weaving kits. Inspired by the weaving surrounding her, she scored a spot in Ravenstail and Chilkat weaver Lily Hope’s class, and Akagi was hooked.
“Weaving felt pretty, almost addictive at first. I couldn’t stop,” said Akagi. “I was up late at night. I’d be sitting in bed with tiny projects and wouldn’t go to sleep, and I kind of just lost time.”
Since then, Akagi continued to study under Hope’s tutelage as an apprentice in Juneau, mastering the intricate finger-twining steps of Ravenstail weaving and the geometric designs of the Chilkat style. As her skills improved, Akagi says she was able to find healing and empowerment in her own Lingít identity.
“I think it started to kind of heal some maybe cultural things, a little bit of cultural trauma that I had had from growing up and not feeling accepted and kind of keeping my culture kind of like just at bay and not fully accepting it,” Akagi said. “So it was kind of like my gateway into having that healing with my culture.”
With Hope’s encouragement, Akagi quit her job at the Sealaska Heritage Institute in 2020 to pursue weaving full-time. Now, with nearly a decade of weaving under her belt, she is excited to share her knowledge with Sitkans as the current Native artist resident at the Sheldon Jackson Museum.
There, visitors can view a killer whale Chilkat tunic Akagi completed in 2023. The tunic immediately captures attention as people enter the museum, with its vibrant yellows and blues blasting through its black and white borders to define the whale’s geometric shapes. The tunic’s design mirrors itself on either side in what is known as a distributive design. The tunic is a recreation of one Akagi observed at the Anchorage Museum back in 2022, in order to learn how to weave a traditional tunic.
“There’s not very many weavers that understand the process of creating the shoulders on that tunic, so it felt more almost 3-D versus the flat surface of like a robe that’s hanging on a loom,” said Akagi. “So what I really wanted to do was understand that shoulder, the techniques of creating that and that construction.”
Next to the tunic is one of Akagi’s works-in-progress – a black wall of thread with diamonds swimming across a budding yellow line below it across her weaving loom. These initial threads will eventually culminate into a Chilkat robe depicting a salmon. This robe is unique in that unlike Akagi’s previous pieces like the distributive killer whale tunic, this one will have a configurative design, or an asymmetrical design across the piece.
“So I might be a little anxious before starting that and just having that understanding, but again, that I think that’s part of my evolution as a Chilkat weaver, and like understanding that and gaining all that knowledge,” said Akagi.
Sydney Akagi demonstrates her weaving technique on her developing Chilkat robe. (Ryan Cotter/KCAW)
The salmon robe was inspired by Akagi’s experience as a resident of the Taku River near Juneau and her advocacy work as a Salmon Beyond Borders Ambassador fighting mining companies whose wastewater endangers the health of the river’s salmon.
“So I was kind of trying to figure out how the art I make, what I could make to kind of bring in a more traditional conversation to these conversations I’ve been having with the CEOs and presidents of these mining companies to ask them to respect our rivers and to do the cleanup,” Akagi said.
Akagi says the work she does, both on her loom and as an advocate for environmental justice, is connected.
“Every part of what I’m creating is from the earth, and so not protecting the Earth only affects what I am creating,” she said.
In addition to a lecture, as part of her residency Akagi will lead a sold-out weaving workshop where participants can create their very own keychains. Akagi is excited to introduce students to the wide-variety of benefits weaving has to offer.
“For kids, weaving can be used as a hands-on method to teach math,” Akagi said. “There’s pattern recognition for anybody older. Just understanding how to do this and use your hands, and even for the cultural reason of being able to connect with the culture or understand the culture. I think there’s so many things that anybody can benefit from learning about weaving.”
Amidst the chaos of balancing numerous other weaving projects with navigating grants and family life, Akagi is grateful to be present in Sitka and engage with the community, exchanging ideas like two threads being woven together to create something meaningful.
A “No Trespassing” sign hangs on a tree at the border of a Native allotment on Douglas Island on Wednesday, Aug. 6, 2025. (Photo by Clarise Larson/KTOO)
A site on Douglas Island could be the future home of a casino-like gambling hall after a proposal from the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska was approved by the National Indian Gaming Commission.
Tlingit and Haida says the facility’s approval represents a step toward economic self-sufficiency and sovereignty for the tribe.
The land is on Fish Creek Road, not far from Eaglecrest Ski Area on Douglas Island. It’s just a small piece of a Native allotment owned by tribal members who lease it to Tlingit and Haida. Rumors of the tribe developing something on that property have circulated for years. The tribe first cleared that area in 2018 and has hosted fireworks shops there on and off over the years.
But, nothing substantive has been developed — until recently.
Driving past the location in August, “No Trespassing” signs lined the area and a sign at the entrance warned of construction. Excavators, trucks and building material scattered the graveled area as the structure of a building was beginning to take shape.
Construction is underway at a Native allotment on Douglas Island on Wednesday, Aug. 6, 2025. (Photo by Clarise Larson/KTOO)
In an email this week, Tlingit and Haida spokesperson Dixie Hutchinson confirmed that the tribe is developing a gaming facility. According to Hutchinson, the plan “aligns with Tlingit and Haida’s broader mission to expand revenue-generating opportunities that support essential programs and services for tribal citizens.”
The tribe intends to offer Class II gaming, which covers things like pull tabs, bingo and slot-style electronic machines. It doesn’t cover games like poker or blackjack. Pull-tab gambling is common across Alaska, but what’s less common are electronic pull-tab machines. Tlingit and Haida’s gambling hall could resemble one that’s been operating in Metlakatla, on Alaska’s only Indian Reservation, for years. There, rows of slot-machine-like devices sit in rows, with stools in front of each machine.
The National Indian Gaming Commission’s acting chair approved the tribe for site-specific gaming at the location in January. The decision came just days before President Donald Trump began his second term in office.
In Alaska, very few tribes have authority over land, so they haven’t had a way to open reservation-style casinos like tribes in the Lower 48. But many tribes in Alaska have sought to assert authority over Native allotments owned by individual tribal members.
For decades, federal officials — and state officials in Alaska — have said that Native allotments owned by tribal members in Alaska were not considered “Indian country.” Therefore, they are not under the jurisdiction of tribes and cannot be home to casinos or casino-like gambling halls under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.
That stance held firm during the first Trump Administration – the commission declined Tlingit and Haida’s request for gaming authorization at the site in 2020.
But MichelleJaagalAatDemmert, a professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ tribal governance department, says the legal interpretation of Native allotments shifted when former President Joe Biden came into office.
“During the Biden administration, there was a solicitor’s opinion that evaluated the laws and made the determination that the laws supported that Indian tribes in Alaska have jurisdiction over allotments and other land that’s classified as Indian country,” she said.
Demmert is also an attorney and Tlingit and Haida’s former chief justice. She said gaming serves as an important governmental function for many tribes in the U.S.
“People look at it that it’s just this big money-making operation, but it’s so much more than that,” she said. “It’s an opportunity to make money and an opportunity to put that right back into your governmental system, to provide essential services to your citizens.”
The change in opinion during the Biden administration provided an avenue for tribes like Tlingit and Haida and the Native Village of Eklutna to move forward. In February, Eklutna opened a gaming hall on a Native allotment near Anchorage.
However, just days after the Eklutna hall opened its doors, the State of Alaska filed a lawsuit to shut them down, arguing that the state still maintains primary jurisdiction over Native allotments. That lawsuit is still ongoing.
Tlingit and Haida President Chalyee Éesh Richard Peterson expressed his support for the Eklutna Tribe’s gaming hall and championed the benefits it brings to the tribe. He did not respond to a request for comment on Tlingit and Haida’s proposed facility.
In a statement, Juneau City Manager Katie Koester said the City and Borough of Juneau “respects the sovereignty of Tlingit and Haida, and recognizes that this parcel is not subject to CBJ jurisdiction.”
Hutchinson said the project is still in the early phases of development, and she did not offer a timeline for when it will open to the public. She said the tribe intends to reinvest the gaming hall’s revenue into essential tribal programs and services.
KUYI-Hopi Radio general manager Samantha Honani Molina on the air at the station in Arizona in June. (Photo by Deidra Peaches/High Country News)
Samantha Honani Molina was about 20 when KUYI-Hopi Radio first came on air. She was attending college, hours and miles from her home village, and every time she tuned in, she felt connected, hearing her community’s songs and language.
“I was struggling to find my place, because when you’re coming from the rez, you’re trying to find your space in a city or town, and there’s nothing of who you are and where you come from. You feel the sense of, not lost, but just uncertainty, and missing home and stuff like that,” said Molina. “By hearing language on the radio, it brings the sense of cultural identity that almost highlights and strengthens that — no matter where you are, even here at home. If you don’t hear yourself represented in large spaces, you’ll just get enveloped and folded into the mainstream.”
After graduating, she returned home and later became general manager of KUYI-Hopi public radio, a position she’s held for three years. Previously, she was the program director for the Hopi Foundation, the station’s radio licensee and parent nonprofit, which provides several year-round programs on topics ranging from youth leadership to community development. The station — located in Lower Sipaulovi, below Second Mesa on the Hopi Reservation in northern Arizona — made its on-air debut in 2000 and began broadcasting online in 2010. It is the only news outlet of its kind that focuses on the Hopi community, and uses the Hopi language, Hopìlavayi.
And now, as it celebrates its 25th anniversary, KUYI has to contend with the reality of losing a significant portion of its funding, possible cuts and changes to the ways it operates.
Currently, 42 Western radio stations are considered vulnerable because over 30% of their annual funding comes from the Corporation of Public Broadcasting. Twenty of those stations serve Indigenous communities and are located in the rural reaches of reservations and Alaska Native villages.
In May, President Donald Trump signed an executive order ending CPB’s congressionally approved funding of National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service. NPR, PBS and various local stations filed lawsuits in response. In early June, Trump asked Congress to claw back the $1.1 billion it had already set aside for public media. The House of Representatives narrowly approved that legislation, which the Senate approved in mid-July despite receiving pushback from both Democrats and Republicans.
Molina said the bill would be “devastating” to KUYI.
“KUYI radio capacity is at a place where we’re able to provide all these avenues of service, which is safety, education and entertainment. We’re finally just beginning to really explore its possibilities,” Molina said. “If pulling public media funding is done, it would destabilize not only the progress made but also jeopardizes the essential safety and cultural services we provide daily.”
“By hearing language on the radio, it brings the sense of cultural identity that almost highlights and strengthens that …”– Samantha Honani Molina, general manager of KUYI-Hopi Radio
The station, which has five full-time staff members and a newly built modular studio, broadcasts at 60,000 watts across northern Arizona down to Winslow as well as online on its website. CPB funding accounts for over 48% of its operating budget, according to a June 30 letter the Hopi Tribe sent to the Senate, urging it to preserve funding for public media.
Native Public Media and the National Federation for Community Broadcasters have held summits over this, and Molina said that many broadcast organizations are already planning for cuts, regardless of whether the legislation is ultimately passed.
The immediate and significant budgetary impacts are obvious, but the long-term losses and their ramifications are incalculable. Stations like KUYI provide more than news and information: They’re community hubs where Indigenous languages can thrive, a space to preserve and grow Indigenous people’s connection to their culture and their own place within the world.
At KUYI, volunteer DJs host music and news segments, often providing bilingual weather and community updates, even a “Hopi Word of the Day” that introduces new words and tells listeners how to use them in conversation — mavasta, for example, which means “to aim” in the Hopi language.
KTNN in St. Michaels, Arizona — “The Voice of the Navajo Nation” — not only broadcasts sports events and other announcements, it also delivered essential information during June’s Oak Ridge Fire, all in Diné Bizaad, the Navajo language.
In Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost community in the United States, KBRW offers an hourlong five-day-a-week program called Uqalugaat Inupiat Stories that also teaches Inupiaq words and phrases. The late Fannie Kuutuuq Akpik-Piquk gave lessons on-air, explaining that misiġarriuq means “to make seal oil from blubber.”
Every day, the Talking Drum and Language Hour show on KWSO in Warm Springs, Oregon, plays Indigenous drum music and offers language lessons featuring the Ichishkin, Kiksht and Numu languages of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs.
In 2024, the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization conducted a study recommended by the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. UNESCO’s report highlighted the need for developing accessible Indigenous-produced media that provides news, entertainment and cultural programming. The report found that radio is the most widespread media and accounts for 34% of Indigenous media use. Indigenous media in general contribute significantly to the preservation and promotion of Native languages, cultural practices and traditional knowledge, helping “foster a sense of belonging and recognition.” But there are still barriers to providing Native language content on the radio, including technical hurdles, programming quotas and the heavy reliance on voluntary efforts that require long-term support.
Altogether, Indigenous radio and media help Indigenous communities engage and grow in their understanding of their language and show them how they can better connect with their culture.
Tiffany Lee, a Native American studies professor at the University of New Mexico, researches language reclamation and identity for Native youth. She promotes the benefits of immersive bilingual education for Indigenous students and adults, noting that having access to learning one’s language is key to revitalizing it.
“The number-one issue for language revitalization today is making sure our youth, our families, all have access to learning in some way and in multiple ways,” said Lee. “Just one isn’t going to work and isn’t always the best method for learning, so you need a diverse array of accessing the language and learning it.”
“If pulling public media funding is done, it would destabilize not only the progress made but also jeopardizes the essential safety and cultural services we provide daily.” – Samantha Honani Molina, general manager of KUYI-Hopi Radio
Indigenous language use on the airwaves bolsters the other places where Native languages are spoken, including schools and other immersion language programs. Examples in the Southwest include organizations like Saad K’idilyé — of which Lee is a board member — and Hopitutuqaiki, which teach Navajo and Hopi respectively in culturally relevant ways.
For Lee, learning one’s language is not just about being able to communicate within the community.
“I have this shirt that says ‘Indigenous language education is education,’ and I love that shirt and that saying because it’s so true,” Lee said. “It’s not just learning the mechanics of speaking your language — it’s an education unto itself. You’re learning your community and your culture’s worldview; you’re learning how language is tied to cultural practice, how it is cultural practice.”
No one understands the impact of sending Indigenous languages out onto the airwaves more than Navajo radio broadcaster L.A. Williams.
Williams, who’s been a radio broadcaster for 32 years, is widely known for reporting Phoenix Suns games in Diné Bizaad, providing play-by-play commentary, making the sport more accessible for people who speak only that language. Williams said the language continues to thrive largely because of its continued use.
“We’re not losing our language,” she said. “Our language is what puts us further in life as it makes us live longer into life by knowing the Navajo language.”
Throughout her career, Williams has seen broadcast opportunities as another way of encouraging use of Diné Bizaad at home, bridging the connection between elders who are fluent and youth who lack full command of the language. This creates a connection between past and future, reminding people that tribal history and culture will continue.
KUYI-Hopi Radio staff (from left) Darion Kootswatewa, Samantha Honani Molina, Brennyn Masawytewa, and Josh Sakenima. Molina and Masawytewa hold dolls of the station’s mascot. (Deidra Peaches/High Country News)
Despite the national threat to public media and funding cuts’ impact on rural and tribal stations, Williams is confident of the persistence and resilience of Indigenous languages.
“As far as the language, the tradition, the culture, that goes on,” she said. “That life goes on into the future.”
Meanwhile, Molina and Lee remain hopeful that current U.S. policy, including proposed funding cuts to Indigenous public media, won’t derail the conviction and resilience of people who are determined to preserve and reclaim their traditional ways of life.
“The number-one issue for language revitalization today is making sure our youth, our families, all have access to learning in some way and in multiple ways.” – Tiffany Lee, a Native American studies professor at the University of New Mexico
“Thankfully, we have a good parent organization, the Hopi Foundation, who is stepping up to see how they can supplement during this loss,” Molina said. “But they can’t carry us for that long. We’ll see what they’re able to do to help us fundraise or carry us for a little bit, but it’s not going to sustain — it won’t sustain.”
Despite the uncertainties and hardship, Molina said it’s been humbling to witness the outpouring of support from other radio stations and their listeners. The station’s 25th anniversary in August serves as a reminder of what really matters.
“That’s a really pivotal point for us to reflect on,” Molina said. “Then go forward with strength and resilience, just like our people have always done. It’s an opportunity for us to really show what we can do to support something so important, and I’m really excited to see what that looks like.”
