Alaska Native Arts & Culture

It’s Valentine’s Day in Lingít Áaní and two local Lingít language learners shared their love language and the story of how it began. 

Xeetli.éesh Lyle and Daxkilatch Kolene James almost met at a party. Lyle led a group of dancers in, and Kolene was impressed.

“I claimed at the table, ‘There’s my husband,’” she said.

She approached his father at the party and asked if he was single. Lyle’s father went and told him. 

“And I never saw him,” she said.

Lyle said he lost his nerve. 

“And then I almost got the nerve to go up to her table and talk to her, but as soon as I got close, I got scared and I walked out,” Lyle said. “So I actually didn’t get to meet her that evening.”

Lyle’s father went back to Kolene and told her his son was too nervous. She said at the time, she was busy with work, school and raising her kids. She told herself she didn’t have time for romance, anyway. 

“Couple months passed,” she said. “My best friend invited me out to go dancing, and so I did, and we ran into each other again on the dance floor, and I gave him my number, and the rest is history.”

Now, after decades of being together, they use Lingít to show their love for each other. 

“When I’m at work, I’ll send her a text of ‘Ḵúnáx̱ ix̱six̱án ax̱ sháawadi á!’” Lyle said. “And what that translates to is, ‘I love you very much, my precious wife.’ And to translate it even more is, ‘You are the one I choose to stand with very much.’”

Kolene said messages like that, in their Indigenous language, make her feel precious. 

“[It] made me feel special,” she said “I know that it’s authentic. It feels really beautiful.”

A group of University of Alaska Southeast students in Ḵaakal.áat Florence Marks Sheakley’s class saw the value of saying you care for someone in Lingít, too. They made a list of other terms of endearment. 

To express care for the people you love outside of romantic relationships, Lyle has some phrases, too. 

“‘I éek’ ax̱aaheen!’ means like ‘I believe in you.’ And then ‘I tóo yei yatee!’ ‘It’s in you,’” he said. 

Kolene says those affirmations apply to anyone learning Lingít, too. She echoed the words of her teacher, who says the language belongs to everybody. 

“It’s been part of the land and part of who we are since time immemorial, and that feels really good. So keep trying,” she said.

Lyle agreed. It’s good advice in language learning, and in love.

“Don’t be afraid to make mistakes,” he said. 

Sagu ix̱six̱áni yágiyee — happy Valentines Day! 

 

Peyton Lott patiently sat on a mat in the Dzántik’i Héeni Middle School’s gym on Saturday morning, waiting for her next competitor in the Inuit stick pull event.

“I love doing these because it shows what strength [was] within the people who did them,” she said. 

The game involves two students facing each other and holding a wooden stick — one with an inside grip and the other with an outside grip with no gaps between their hands. Then, they grip and pull against one another until someone breaks free with the stick in hand, winning the match. 

Last weekend, Lott and nearly 100 other elementary-age athletes competed in that event and others as a part of the Native Youth Olympics 2025 Junior Celebration.

Lott is Lingít and Yupik, and a fifth grader at Harborview Elementary. She got involved with the games three years ago after walking past the club while waiting for her mom to pick her up from school. 

Now, she’s pretty hooked. 

“I wake up early the day of the competition — this is the only time when my parents tell me to go to sleep I will,” she said. 

The competition opened with a cultural dance and song performance. The event was hosted by the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska in partnership with the Juneau School District. 

On Friday and Saturday, students competed in six distinct events. All the games are rooted in Indigenous hunting and survival traditions used in the Arctic. Now, competitions for games like these are held across the state as a way to foster community and promote physical fitness during the cold winter months.

Kaytlynne Lewis is a coach and traditional game specialist for Tlingit and Haida.

“These games originate from Alaska, specifically and traditionally,” she said. “Long ago, before cell phones, radios, any sort of technology, hunters created these games to communicate with one another out in the Arctic.”

Just like the students, she too was a young athlete who practiced the games growing up in Alaska. She said the games are more than just about testing your physical fitness — it’s about connecting with your community and celebrating Alaska’s Indigenous traditions. 

“I’ve had some athletes say, ‘I was never rooted to my culture. I was never connected to my culture. And since I started the games, I feel more closer, and I feel a sense of identity,’” she said. “That is very impactful to me.” 

Mila Neely, a freshman at Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé, helped measure the height of athlete’s kicks during the one-foot high kick. She volunteered with other high school athletes to help with the games. 

“I’ve been doing NYO since I was in fifth grade. So like, this is my fifth year doing it,” she said. 

Neely said it’s special for her to be able to help teach the next generation of athletes. She said traditional games are unique from other sports in more ways than one. 

“It’s such a positive sport,” she said. “Like, you go to other sports and people will be talking trash about the other team, or even just wanting to win. In traditional games, so many times I’ve seen people give another person a tip that will help them succeed further than them in the games because it’s really just like being the best that you can be.”

In early April, Neely and other high school and middle school students in Juneau — and across the state — will compete in their own traditional games as a part of Sealaska Heritage Insitute’s 2025 Traditional Games. 

This is Lingít Word of the Week. Each week, we feature a Lingít word voiced by master speakers. Lingít has been spoken throughout present-day Southeast Alaska and parts of Canada for over 10,000 years.

Gunalchéesh to X̱’unei Lance Twitchell, Goldbelt Heritage Foundation and the University of Alaska Southeast for sharing the recorded audio for this series.

This week’s word is kaxwaan, or frost. Listen to the audio below to learn how to say kaxwaan.

The following transcript is meant to help illustrate the words and sentences. 

Keihéenák’w John Martin: Kaxwaan. 

That means frost.

Here are some sentences:

Keihéenák’w John Martin: Kaxwaan ḵusi.áat’.

Frost is cold.

Keiyishí Bessie Cooley: Kaxwaan chukwán káa yéi nateech, ḵoos.áatʼi.

There is always frost on the grass when itʼs cold.

Kaxwaan Éesh George Davis: T’áa ká ḵukawdlixwán.

The frost is on the ground.

You can hear each installment of Lingít Word of the Week on the radio throughout the week. 

Additional language resources:

Find biographies for the master speakers included in this lesson here.

Learn more about why we use Lingít instead of Tlingit here.

Watch a video introducing Lingít sounds here.

One of Alaska’s most famous bands, Portugal. The Man, joined Native American Music Awards winner Samantha Crain and Lingít artist Ya Tseen for two sold out shows in Juneau and Sitka last weekend. They were raising money and community awareness for an effort to rebuild a Kiks.ádi clan house in Sitka.

The event was called Hít Wóoshdei Yadukícht, which means “Dancing Our House Together.” Each ticket was a donation toward the goal of rebuilding a Sitka clan house, called the Point House. 

After the music faded, the lights dimmed and the hall cleared out, Kiks.ádi clan member and organizer Lduteen Jerrick Hope-Lang said the event was a success. 

“By broadening the audience with music as the vessel, you are able to bring a large, mixed group of people into a room and say, ‘This is worth fighting for, and you can be an ally,’” he said. 

Lgeik’i Heather Powell Mills is a member of the X̱aay Hít clan house in Hoonah. She helped organize the fundraiser, and for her, it’s personal. She grew up with a clan house — a community home that unites all generations of a clan, and holds their stories — and she wants others in her community to have that resource. 

“The benefit of that is the strength of identity, the strength of community, the strength of family,” she said. “And being able to have a place that you can walk into and feel like it’s a safe place to be who you are.”

Powell Mills said clan houses hold clan history, and allow members like her – and ones yet to come – to understand their identity and know that they belong. 

“They carry the names of our ancestors within their walls. They hold our most precious objects: our at.oo,” she said. “The stories and the names and the spirit that’s  put into these places is such a powerful, immensely knowledgeable way of being.” 

Point House originally sat along the water in downtown Sitka. Hope-Lang said Sitka had 43 clan houses at one point, and few remain standing and in tribal hands. Colonialism and the attempted eradication of Lingít communities left generations of children with only bread crumbs, he said — pieces of language, arts traditions and family history. 

“Those bread crumbs were the pieces that we had to pick up and put back together for ourselves, nourish ourselves with,” he said.

Now, he said he’s seeing those crumbs turn into full loaves through language and cultural revitalization efforts across Southeast Alaska, but he wants to go further. He wants future generations to have the tools to make their own nourishment, and rebuilding the Point House offers that chance. 

“My ultimate goal for this whole project is that we don’t just give them bread, that we give them the whole kitchen. That we give them all the opportunity to be who they are, not bits and pieces,” Hope-Lang said. “You don’t have to go here to get language. You don’t have to go here to get art. You don’t have to go here to get your stories. That they become centralized.”

Hope-Lang said they don’t know the final amount last weekend’s shows raised yet, but he’s still working to raise everything they need to start construction. Point House is just the beginning, he said. 

The show also benefited a fundraiser for researching rare disease, made on behalf of the daughter of two Portugal. The Man members, Frances. Hope-Lang says this was an act of reciprocity, as a “thank you” to the band for donating their time. 

Learn more about the Point House project at pointhouse.org. 

This is Lingít Word of the Week. Each week, we feature a Lingít word voiced by master speakers. Lingít has been spoken throughout present-day Southeast Alaska and parts of Canada for over 10,000 years.

Gunalchéesh to X̱’unei Lance Twitchell, Goldbelt Heritage Foundation and the University of Alaska Southeast for sharing the recorded audio for this series.

This week’s word is dleit, or snow. Listen to the audio below to learn how to say dleit.

The following transcript is meant to help illustrate the words and sentences. 

Kooshdáakʼu Bill Fawcett: Dleit. 

That means snow.

Here are some sentences:

Kooshdáakʼu Bill Fawcett: Ḵúnáx̱ áwé daak wusitaan wé dleit.

It’s really snowing. 

Keiyishí Bessie Cooley: Dleit shaa shakée yéi yatee.

There is snow on the mountaintop.

Ḵaakal.áat Florence Marks Sheakley: Dleit daak wusitán.

It is snowing. 

Kaxwaan Éesh George Davis: Dleit g̱aadlaan.

The snow is deep.

You can hear each installment of Lingít Word of the Week on the radio throughout the week. 

 

Additional language resources:

Find biographies for the master speakers included in this lesson here.

Learn more about why we use Lingít instead of Tlingit here.

Watch a video introducing Lingít sounds here.

Poldine Carlo, an Athabascan elder from Nulato, was in her late nineties when she performed her Denali song in 2017 at a conference in Holy Cross on the Yukon River. In a raspy, aging voice, she did her best to belt out the song. The refrain, which she sang in her Koyukon dialect, was “Say Denali. Say Denali.”

Angela Gonzales remembers hearing the song when Carlo sang it for President Barack Obama during his visit to Alaska in 2015, the summer his administration changed the name of the nation’s tallest mountain from McKinley back to Denali.

“It just felt so good,” she says. “And it was healing.”

That year, Gonzales wrote about the joy she felt over the return of the ancient name in her blog, Athabascan Woman.

“It felt like Alaska Natives were given back something taken away from us,” she wrote. “People may think colonization is just something that you read about in textbooks. It is a very real thing when you see names like Mount McKinley take over our place.”

Then, earlier this month, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to once again rename the mountain as Mount McKinley.

“We will restore the name of a great president, William McKinley to Mount McKinley, where it should be and where it belongs,” he said at his inauguration.

Gonzales says she felt hurt and angry after Trump’s order, if not defiant.

“What I call it is not going to change. And a law or an executive order is not going to change my relationship to it,” she said. “But to see it go back – it’s disappointing. Because I feel like we’re going back in a direction that we don’t want to go.”

For Gonzales, the name Denali looms large in her own family history. Her maiden name is Yatlin, which means “runner” and refers to her family’s long history of running on foot to trade goods with other peoples.

“We were people who traded everywhere,” she said. “We have artifacts that are from other locations.”

Gonzales says, even today, the name Denali stirs so many emotions, mainly the feeling of living in a great land with “untold stories from our ancestors,” stories that speak to their relationship to the mountain, even how it determines the weather around the whole region.

She says there are also stories about the vast network of trails that weaved around a group of mountains.

There is Mount Foraker, which was originally Sultana, Denali’s woman, or wife. And there is Mount Hunter, which was Begguya, their child. Like Denali, Mount Foraker — Alaska’s second-tallest peak — was renamed after an Ohio politician, Sen. Joseph Foraker.

Elders like Wilson Justin are familiar with these mountains. He grew up in Nabesna, east of Denali, which was an important landmark for hunters who sometimes had to travel far and wide to find food. He says the original names for this family of mountains explains why they are regarded as relatives in his Ahtna Athabascan culture.

From his childhood, he remembers stories about how the trail system went all the way up to Siberia and Canada and all the way down the coast to California.

“It represents something that was a part of our medicine people’s trails from as far back as we know,” Justin said.

He says there really isn’t a word for “mountain” in his Ahtna dialect, Each one was called by a given name, and they were thought of as spiritual points of light — maybe because of how the ice and snow on their peaks sparkled in the sun.

“You didn’t want to refer to those places in kind of a low way, a dismissive way,” Justin said.

He says elders spoke of them with reverence.

“Northern Lights are like, in the old stories — not the newer stories, but the really old stories of Ahtna — are messengers,” Justin said. “And in places like Denali, being a place that messengers would like to stop and touch.”

Wilson says he was taught never to act if he were entitled to the sky. For his people, Denali exists beyond space and time and is a way to connect to the universe.

“When you’re in that place, that location, the mountain will speak to the sky for you,” he said. “A really fascinating way of Indigenous people to be able to express continuity, to connect to your past and future generations.”

Attempts to dismantle that continuity are already underway. The U.S. Interior Department has begun to take steps to designate Denali as Mount McKinley, and Google is changing the name on its maps.

Justin says it may be hard for Trump to understand the heart-and-mind connection his people have with Denali, but he says that no matter what comes of the president’s orders, it won’t change how he feels.

“To me, it’s never going to be anything else,” he said. “Taking Denali down is his way of saying we don’t count.”