Alaska Native Arts & Culture

Speaking an endangered language at home is the essence of language revitalization, according to author Leanne Hinton. She’s written the book Bringing Our Languages Home and was recently in Juneau for the Tlingit Tribes and Clans Conference.

Mischa Jackson and her husband are speaking Tlingit to their 10-month old baby Michaelyn.

“We do little words and phrases and commands at home and try to expose her as much as we can to elders that speak conversationally, so she can just hear it. And she loves to hear it. It gets her attention better than English does,” Jackson says laughing.

Jackson herself doesn’t speak the language well. Her family has roots in Klukwan, but Jackson grew up in Anchorage, then lived in southern California. Her mother taught her Tlingit songs, and that’s about it.

By speaking Tlingit at home, Jackson wants to give her daughter something she didn’t have. Jackson’s husband, on the other hand, was exposed to the language growing up in Kake. “Her dad got to listen to his grandparents and he’s a much better speaker because of it, whereas for me, I can’t make the same sounds as easily as he can, so I know it makes a huge difference,” says Jackson.

Jackson is doing exactly what Leanne Hinton recommends for parents who may not speak a language but want to make it a part of their home.

“All it really takes is dedication to the language. It doesn’t even take fluency because you can be learning with your children,” Hinton explains. “Like many of the families I know started from scratch when their children were already born and as they learned, they were bringing it home bit by bit and making it more and more the language of their home.”

Hinton is professor emeritus of language at the University of California Berkeley. She specialized in American Indian languages, sociolinguistics, and language loss and revival. She’s written a number of books on keeping endangered languages alive and says speaking the native language at home is the key.

Home, she says, is the last place where it disappeared.

“To get it back into the home again is the one time that the language is actually going to become naturally acquired again by children so that actual native speakers are occurring. Once people are learning it at home and using it, then you feel like you’re beginning to be out of danger for the language,” Hinton says.

Hinton says ideally parents would only speak the endangered language at home, but that’s usually not the case. “Most of the people that I’ve interviewed are lucky if they use it 50 percent of the time, and 50 percent of the time is actually a fairly good ratio,” she says, “but you want more for an endangered language if possible.”

Parents, like Jackson, who speak their Native language at home will likely face some challenges when their children go to school and their peers and teachers are speaking English. Hinton says children may then refuse to speak the Native language at home, but there are ways to tackle this problem.

“One way is to start trying to talk about how important it is to use the language but that may not go over with a 5-year-old,” says Hinton. “Some parents just simply won’t respond to their kids if their kids talk to them in English. They’ll talk to the kids in their endangered language and if the kids talk back in English, they just say, ‘I don’t understand.’ Sometimes that works quite well.”

Another option is making language a game. Imagine jars with pennies inside. Every family member gets one. If a person catches another saying something in English that could be said in their indigenous language, that person gets to take a penny out of the other’s jar and put it into their own jar.

At this point, Jackson doesn’t have to worry about those challenges yet. She says her daughter Michaelyn isn’t saying much, in English or in Tlingit, “Every once in a while we laugh because it sounds like she’s says, ‘dlaa,’ like she’s saying, ‘haa dlaa,’ so we crack up whenever she does that.”

That’s Tlingit for, ‘Gee whiz.’

David Katzeek spoke Tuesday in the final installment of Sealaska Heritage Institute’s Native American History Month Lecture Series.

“We have words for it,” Katzeek said, speaking the phrase first in Tlingit, then English. “I have the spirit within me.”

In the Tlingit tradition, Katzeek said the words he spoke came not from him, but from his teachers and ancestors.

“Because the spirit of humbleness is acknowledging those who taught you,” he said. “Those who loved you enough to sit with you, and share with you beautiful jewels that you can experience, that you can have, that you can enjoy, that you can use, that you can apply.”

Katzeek was the first president of the Sealaska Heritage Foundation (now the Sealaska Heritage Institute), serving in that job from 1982-1992. He’s a Chilkat Eagle of the Shangukeidí Clan from the Thunderbird House.

Navajo code talkers were recognized more than a decade ago for their service in World War II.

They used their Native language as a code that the enemy was never able to crack, but until recently, no one knew that Tlingits from Southeast Alaska also served as code talkers.

They got their due Wednesday when Congress awarded a gold medal to the Tlingit and Haida Central Council. Much of their story remains a mystery.

Robert Jeff David Senior of Haines was a basketball legend in Southeast, a top fisherman and one of the first Sealaska board members. Charismatic and confident, he wasn’t one to keep his mouth shut when he had something to brag about. But his son, Jeff Jr., says he never said much about his service in the war.

“He told us he was in the Philippines during part of it; he said special services,” he said. “That’s probably all he could say.”

Jeff Junior says he only learned a few weeks ago that his dad, who died in the 1980s, was a Tlingit code talker.

At a Congressional ceremony attended by hundreds today, the Tlingits and 32 other tribes received congressional gold medals for their service to the nation as code talkers. They worked in pairs, usually over a radio.

During 48 hours on Iwo Jima, they say, 800 Native-language battle communications were received and translated. It took seconds, at a time when decoding by machine could take half an hour. House speaker John Boehner said the men undoubtedly saved lives.

“And after serving with honor they did the honorable thing, they kept their service a secret – even to those that they loved,” Boehner said.

The Defense Department declassified the Navajo program only in 1968. No one apparently, told Jeff David of Haines he could finally tell his story.

Former State Legislator Bill Thomas heard a few years ago the Defense Department was researching Tlingit code talkers. A few weeks ago he learned his old friend “Big Jeff” was one of them. Exactly what he did still isn’t known. Thomas says one of the mysteries is how the outspoken Jeff Sr. was able to keep quiet about it.

“I mean, I knew the guy all my life and I never knew, and my uncle Evans Willard was his best friend and I don’t think Evans knows. And we were talking last night, Evans is probably rolling in his grave or in heaven laughing at Big Jeff for having kept a secret for that long.”

Ozzie Sheakley received the Congressional Gold medal, on behalf of the Central Council of Tlingit and Haida. Five individual Tlingit men, all deceased, were honored with silver medals. They are Jeff David, Richard Bean Sr., George Lewis, and brothers Harvey Jacobs and Mark Jacobs Senior.  A little more of the service history is known of the Jacobs, who were from Sitka and Angoon. According to a history published in 2008, the brothers joined the Navy and skipped basic training to serve on picket boats, first in Southeast Alaska and the Aleutians, then in the South Pacific.

Their work started earlier this year, and sprang out of the trial of George Zimmerman for killing unarmed Florida teenager Trayvon Martin, as well as a series of local events that had been building up for years.

The group held a panel discussion last Friday at the University of Alaska Southeast called “Deconstructing Racism: Power and Privilege in Our Community.”

UAS Professor Sol Neely started by setting the scene for a short skit by local writer Christy Namee Eriksen: “Act One: “If Racism Was a Burning Kitchen.” An Asian and a Caucasian are standing in a kitchen. The kitchen is on fire.”

Lance Twitchell and M.K. MacNaughton acted out the scene:

Twitchell: “Whoa! Is the kitchen on fire?”
MacNaughton: “Are you calling me an arsonist? I am not an arsonist.”
Twitchell: “I am literally burning up. I’m pretty sure the kitchen is ON FIRE.”
MacNaughton: “I didn’t build this house, I just live here.”
Twitchell: “Let’s leave and build a new house.”
MacNaughton: “I’m not going anywhere, this is my house.”

Twitchell is a Tlingit speaker and a professor of Alaska Native Languages at UAS. MacNaughton is an artist and social justice activist. They were joined by Neely, Alaska Native storyteller Ishmael Hope, and Northern Light United Church Pastor Phil Campbell.

Twitchell acknowledged many people prefer to avoid talking about race and racism. He said the panel’s discussion was not the beginning of the conversation, nor should it be the end.

“It’s important that this conversation occurs throughout our community on a regular basis,” he said. “So that we can become more aware of the types of things that create oppression.”

Like the Asian character in Eriksen’s play suggesting they leave the burning house and build a new one, the panelists suggested tearing down social systems that create racism. Hope said too often people of color are marginalized.

“And in fact, often get thrown into jail, targeted, not supported for success, put in the area where they are denied access to success, and to power, and to privilege, and any kind of authority,” Hope said.

He pointed to the Alaska Native dropout rate, which is often cited as an example of inherent racism in the education system. According to the National Indian Education Association, Alaska is one of 14 states where the Native American graduation rate is lower than 60 percent.

“There’s something wrong there,” Hope said.

The panelists said an incident last April during the Alaska Folk Festival sparked them to begin talking about racism locally. A group of revelers at the annual bourbon brunch, which is not officially part of Folk Festival, dressed up in Asian-themed garb. Pictures of the event were posted on social media, leading to questions about whether it was racist.

MacNaughton says she found the photos “mildly to wildly offensive.”

“Mostly focused on really sexually demeaning, stereotypical, female images of Asian women,” MacNaughton said.

She decided to speak out after playwright Eriksen was attacked on Facebook for pointing out how the party was offensive. MacNaughton said it can be difficult for white people to admit that something they have done is racist, or to speak out when they witness racism taking place.

“And I don’t mean to pick on other white people,” she said. “I have said racist things naively. I haven’t spoken up every time I’ve heard or seen something racist. Sometimes people take your breath away. Sometimes you just don’t have the words or know how to respond in the moment.”

The Reverend Phil Campbell has taught social justice classes at universities and theology schools. He says white people have work to do when it comes to talking about race.

“We’re not very skilled at understanding ourselves as ‘raced,'” he said. “And therefore, racism is someone else’s problem that we might help with, when, in fact, I would posit it is primarily, in this society, a white problem.”

Toward the end of the discussion an audience member asked the panelists if they were optimistic about the future. Twitchell said he was cautiously optimistic, noting that Alaska Natives still have higher suicide rates, and higher rates of being victims of violent crime than other races.

“But I am optimistic, because we can have these conversations and they occur on a larger level,” said Twitchell.

Sol Neely responded to the question by quoting African American philosopher and activist Cornel West, who said: “I cannot be an optimist but I am a prisoner of hope.”

The conversation about race and racism continues Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. at Northern Light United Church, which has been hosting similar conversations monthly since September.

The Tlingit people of Southeast Alaska no longer practice shamanism, but elements of it still exist in their culture today.

That’s according to Anthropologist and Sealaska Heritage Institute President Rosita Worl, who spoke Monday as part of SHI’s Native American History Month Lecture Series.

Worl says shamanism used to be a major component of Tlingit life. She says every clan had a shaman before Russian and American colonization largely forced the Tlingit people to abandon their traditional religion.

“Shamanism is generally associated with hunting, fishing and gathering societies that often migrate with seasons to follow their food sources,” says Worl. “To bring food, health and protection from evil, shaman seek connections with animal powers through their rituals.”

Worl says the shaman’s responsibilities included maintaining the well-being of the clan; acting as a military advisor; assuring hunting and fishing success; predicting future events; and curing illnesses. To do that they performed rituals designed to ward off hostile and dangerous spirits, and call upon good spirits to support the clans’ welfare.

Worl says Tlingits believed that great shaman traveled in both the physical and spiritual world, and that spirits chose certain people to be shaman.

“The majority of spirits with which the shaman makes his alliances are animals, animal spirits,” she says. “This reflects a widespread belief by cultures that practice shamanism that animals inhabited the world long before human beings and are essential to people because of the unique knowledge that animals possess.”

She says Tlingit clans last practiced traditional shamanism in the 1950s, but she argues it still pervades the rituals and beliefs of Southeast Alaska Natives today. For instance, Worl says Tlingits – including the late-Reverend Dr. Walter Soboleff – still believe that all objects possess some sort of spiritual essence.

“I’ve had meetings here in this room, where people like our spiritual leader, Dr. Soboleff, has pounded on the table and says, ‘Everything has a spirit! Even this table has a spirit!'” Worl says, pounding her own fist on the podium.

About 15 years ago at a clan conference organized by the heritage institute, Worl says several elders attributed modern social problems, such as alcoholism and suicide, to Tlingit societies being out of balance.

“In our society we have a number of practices to ensure both social and spiritual balance, and they were holding that we were out of spiritual and social balance, and this was the cause of the social illnesses that affect our society,” Worl says.

She says that discussion led to some of SHI’s most successful cultural programs.

Worl says the influence of shamanism on modern Tlingit life is perhaps most evident in the use of sacred objects and regalia in ceremonial acts, including memorial celebrations.

“When our ceremonial and sacred objects are brought out and the spirits are addressed or called upon in the same way as they were in earlier times,” she says.

Worl says many Tlingit elders are reluctant to discuss shamanism, perhaps due to the punishment Native people endured at the hands of colonizers for practicing their religion.

She says its unlikely traditional shamanism will ever be completely revitalized, but some Tlingits are looking at ways to incorporate more of the old practices in modern ceremonies.

The next talk in SHI’s Native American History Month Lecture Series happens Tuesday at noon. Professor Alan Boras of Kenai Peninsula College gives a lecture on “Salmon and Indigenized Orthodoxy on the Nushagak River.” The theme of this year’s series is Native spirituality.