Alaska Native Arts & Culture

It’s no secret that fewer and fewer people can fluently speak Alaska Native languages. And while there’s renewed interest, it’s hard to get beyond nouns and verbs.

Southeast Alaska educators and culture bearers are using games to make learning a difficult language fun. Here’s some of what happened during a recent Sharing Our Knowledge Conference session in Juneau.

A half-dozen people stand at the front of a meeting room, ready to test their Tlingit spelling skills. 

“This is the first time we’ve ever done this as a Tlingit spelling bee,” says Linda Belarde, a culture and language expert who works for the Sealaska Heritage Institute.

She’s one of the organizers of the session, which also included math and word games.

“I really congratulate any of you who are willing to be in this spelling bee, because spelling is hard and nobody likes to make mistakes,” she tells the half-dozen contestants.

Juneau teacher Hans Chester, the bee’s pronouncer, gave contestants a practice round, with simple words.

He also provided tips on identifying some of the Tlingit letters that aren’t used in English.

Then, it was time for the real competition, with harder words that stumped most contestants. One by one, they dropped out after misspelling a word. It finally got down to two people, then one.

The winner was Will Geiger, a University of Alaska-Southeast student, who had to make it through several other words to take the title.

Tlingit used to be a spoken language, with no associated writing. Missionaries and academics came up with several rough spelling systems. The contemporary version was developed over the past half-century, through consultation with traditional speakers.

This bee was based on a Tlingit spelling book, edited by language experts Richard and Nora Dauenhauer, who have worked for and with the Sealaska Heritage Institute.

Watch a video of Cyril George Sr. counting in Tlingit and explaining the traditional number system.

Tribal leaders from Alaska and the rest of the country had a chance this week talk with the highest powers in the federal government.

Nearly all of President Obama’s cabinet secretaries participated in the annual White House Tribal Nations Conference, as did Obama himself.

This was the fifth such conference in as many years. The gathering is an Obama initiative to reach out to tribes and show his administration is listening.  It includes break-out sessions with department and agency heads, and a presidential address. Ted Mala, who in past years represented Buckland, says the value is enormous.

“We’ve never had a president or an administration pay this much attention to us,” Mala said. “It’s given us access to the secretaries, and for the first time ever we have a voice, in my opinion.”

We had a degree of it with other administrations but this one has blown the doors open, and it’s incredible.

Will Micklin came representing the Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Tribes. He says the highlight for him was hearing the president mention contract support costs. It was a reference to the decades-long failure of the government to fully pay tribes for services they provide, primarily health care.

“We require that they fulfill obligations and their commitments in order that we can most effectively govern ourselves, and it starts with paying your contractual obligations,” Micklin said.

Obama, though, only said he’d heard their call for full reimbursement and pledged to work with Congress to find a solution. Micklin says when tribal leaders show their faces every year it helps hold the president accountable for his promises. Micklin believes the conference can produce results:

“It’s beginning to. We know the president means what he says. We sometimes have difficulty with his key officials, and so we’re trying to close the gap between what the president promises and what his key officials deliver.”

Mary Ann Mills of the Kenaitze Tribe said the best part for her was a smaller session she attended with top Interior Department personnel.

“I was a little bit disappointed with the president Obama because he didn’t mention Alaska one time in his speech and we have so many issues there,” Mills said. “I thought he’d say something about our health care and about the violence against women and the high suicide rate, and I thought he would lend a little more support than he did.”

Just before the conference, Obama invited a dozen Native American leaders to the White House for a special meeting.

The only Alaskan among them wasn’t the leader of a tribe but a corporation: Chris McNeil, CEO of Sealaska. He says he focused on three issues: subsistence rights, changes to the 8a program that helps Native corporations win government contracts, and community development financing.

More resources:

Full webcast of the event

More photos are available here.

The University of Alaska Southeast will be hosting the Native Olympics this Saturday at the UAS Recreation Center. Yesterday, as preparation for the competition, representatives from the University and the community organized a demonstration of the events.

One of the demonstration’s leaders and UAS academic advisor Quentin Simeon says students will participate in several of the native games.

“The Eskimo stick pull, the Indian stick pull, the wrist carry, the scissor broad jump, the one foot high kick, the two foot high kick, the Alaskan high kick, leg wrestling, Indian leg wrestling, so those are the main ones we’re going to be highlighting on Saturday.”

Fellow demonstration leader Ricardo Worl hopes people will attend so they can learn about the games’ significance.

“They originated from the northern part of Alaska probably more than 2,000 years ago. The Eskimo and Indian people from the interior of Alaska created a series of games to teach their kids important survival skills.”

Simeon says onlookers will see a unique kind of contest.

“They help each other. It’s a different flavor of competition and so even if you’re like running head to head with somebody you will see that they will share their experiences, they will give each other advice, they will say you were running too fast when you were going up for that kick so you’re floating. You can see that competition, but it’s camaraderie at the same time, and it’s just a beautiful thing to see with the kids.”

The games begin at 5 p.m. on Saturday at the UAS Recreation Center.

Like many other indigenous languages, Tlingit is in survival mode. Revitalizing the language was the focus of this year’s Tlingit Tribes and Clans Conference held in Juneau last week.

A Juneau resident has one solution for how to keep the language alive. During a conference session, realtor and assemblyman Carlton Smith gave participants a lesson in how to teach Tlingit to children with puppets. And he does it with the help of a special guest.

Charlie introduces himself in Tlingit to the room. As is traditional, he recognizes his mother’s relatives, his fathers’ relatives, then his grandparents, and finally, he recognizes everyone else.

Charlie’s Tlingit name is Shanak’w Uwaa. He identifies his moiety (Eagle), his clan (Keet Gooshi Hit’), and where he’s from (Klukwan, or Jil’ kat kwaan).

Charlie is wearing grey Carhartt overalls, long underwear, a green and white flannel shirt, and tan work boots. He has a full head of grey hair, dark bushy eyebrows and mustache, and black-rimmed glasses.

He’s roughly three and a half feet tall and can only talk when he’s sitting on Carlton Smith’s lap.

Smith got into ventriloquism fifty years ago as a ten-year-old boy living in Haines. When Smith was bedridden with hepatitis for four months, his father bought him his first puppet from a Sears-Roebuck catalog – a red-headed figure wearing a green suit named Jerry.

“There were children walking below my bedroom window and Jerry and I were talking to them as they would walk home from school,” Smith tells the audience. “The first day or two, there were five or six children, the second day there were eight or nine. By the end of the week, there were 20 children that came to see this little green man that wanted to talk to them from a second story window.”

Like many childhood toys, Jerry was eventually forgotten, until three years ago when Smith rediscovered Jerry in a trunk.

Then, another discovery on a flight to Anchorage.

“I was looking out the window and I realized I could count to ten without moving my lips in Tlingit. And then I was going right down the list of clans and place names and I thought, ‘Oh, this is kind of cool.’”

That’s how Smith got the idea of doing Tlingit ventriloquism, but he wasn’t sure how the community would receive it. So he went to the late Tlingit elder and religious leader Dr. Walter Soboleff for advice. Soboleff liked the idea but said it couldn’t be done with Jerry. He advised Smith to create a new figure – a Native one.

“My namesake, Shanak’w Uwaa, means ‘in the image of the ancient people.’ Walter said, ‘He was one of my best friends from Kilisnoo.’ He said, ‘What you do is you create a brand new figure in the image of the person you’re named after.’”

As Smith looks at Charlie, he says, “That’s who this is – Shanak’w Uwaa.”

Shanak’w Uwaa is the Tlingit name of Charlie James of Klukwan, who would be 108 years old if he were alive today. Smith never met his namesake.

Using photos of Charlie James, Smith worked with a figure maker in Michigan on details like skin tone and hair color.

Charlie, says Smith, was created for one main purpose, “This is really about children.”

For a year and a half, Smith and Charlie went to Tlingit and Haida Headstart every Friday. “These little kids would just want to grab him, claw him,” Smith recalls.

Charlie would sing songs in Tlingit and count to ten.

Smith says children are captivated by the animation which makes learning Tlingit easier.

Later on in the conference session, participants are asked to pair up and make basic Tlingit dialogue with sock puppets, an activity that can be done with children. Two Tlingit teachers – Roby Littlefield and Bessie Jim – pair up.

“She asked me what my name was and I pretended not to hear her,” Littlefield says, interpreting. “So she asked me louder. One of us asked where do you live?”

Neither has spoken the language with puppets before, but both like the idea. Jim plans to bring the technique back to her students in Carcross, Yukon.

“I think they’ll get a lot more out of it and it’s more fun. And my brother used to say, ‘The language is fun.’ He said, ‘They’re always laughing,'” Jim says, laughing herself.

Littlefield says teaching with puppets can help her middle school students in Sitka with something they’re working on right now, “We’re learning the animal names and we have little stuffed animals and little hard animals. So they’re going to learn the name of the animals and then talk to each other in whatever puppet voice they choose.”

The most important thing, says Smith, is having fun. His goal at the conference was to share a different way of teaching Tlingit to children, a way that might breathe new life into a challenging task. And he hopes Charlie will help accomplish that.

Most Northern Native people have had their traditional spirituality squeezed out of them.

That’s according to Jana Harcharek, director of the North Slope Borough School District’s Iñupiaq Education Department.

She spoke Nov. 12 as part of the Sealaska Heritage Institute’s Native spirituality lecture series.

Harcharek told her audience that her culture, including its spirituality, was almost destroyed by churches and schools.

“As has been the case with many indigenous peoples across the world, the attempt through education was to assimilate the Iñupiaq into mainstream society. And a variety of methods were used, including the oppression of language, the oppression of spiritual beliefs, the oppression of song and dance, which resulted in varying degrees of success on their part,” she said.

That led to pressure on the school system to teach what many had lost.

“It’s their birthright to know their history. And as a school district, we had been depriving them of their history. And through the loss of our storytelling, we had been deprived them of our creation and origin stories,” she said.

Harcharek said about six years ago, educators decided to reach out. They traveled to North Slope communities to confer with elders. (Link to the North Slope Iñupiaq Education Department.)

“We were able to go back where we had been, before schools were ever established, before missions ever came to the arctic, and confer with our elders about how it is and what it is that we did to instill beliefs, to instill the sense of being a contributing member of society, before schools ever came,” she said.

An Iñupiaq education initiative was formed. It included a cross-generational panel that came up with what a young adult should know about their people’s spirituality, culture and history.

It also included contemporary Native history and roles in a modern world.

New curriculums were developed, and continue to be added to students’ class work.

Harcharek said that includes training for new teachers without an understanding of the culture.

The program has not been without controversy, since some see it as going against Christian values. She said that’s not the case.

“We’re not preaching – or teaching – kids how to be shamans. In the same way that in school we don’t teach children how to be a Catholic or a Muslim or a Hindu,” she said.

Harcharek said the program teaches students about traditional spirituality and they make their own choices.

A tribal house in the former home of Southeast Alaska’s Huna Tlingits will go out to bid this winter. It’s part of an effort to restore Native traditions to what’s become a national park and preserve.

Glacier Bay was the traditional home of four Tlingit clans.

Then the ice that gives the bay its Western name started advancing. The people moved and built new villages. Hoonah, about 30 miles to the Southeast, is the largest.

“The Huna folks have talked about living in Glacier Bay since time immemorial,” says Mary Beth Moss, the tribal house project leader for Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve.

She says about 5,000 years ago, the bay’s main glacier began advancing rapidly. It created an outwash plain, which became inhabitable about seven centuries ago.

That’s where Hoonah Tlingits built a large village.

“We know that from Tlingit place names for the area. We know that from oral history. We also know that from geological research and tree-ring data analysis,” she says.

Eventually, the glacier advanced enough to push them out. The ice later receded. But the bay became a national park and preserve, blocking resettlement.

Now, the park is working with Huna leaders to construct a building to recognize and commemorate their place in the bay. (Read more about plans for the house.)

“We’re calling it a tribal house. Traditionally it would be a clan house,” says master artist Gordon Greenwald, a retired Hoonah shop and art teacher who is heading up the carving effort.

“They’re only building one and we needed to represent the four original Huna clans. We’re trying to the best we can to represent our people in our homelands,” he says.

(Watch a video of Greenwald unveiling and explaining the house screen. Click the link here, then scroll down for the video link.)

Greenwald and Moss provided a project update during the recent Tlingit clan conference in Juneau.

Plans to build the tribal house were made in the late ‘90s. The effort has picked up speed in recent years.

Moss says the contract for the $4 million project will go out to bid this winter. Construction in the park’s Bartlett Cove area will start in the spring. And it should be completed in the spring or summer of 2016.

But she says some details still need to be worked out.

For example, Tlingit tradition calls for open fires in such a structure. But Moss says since it’s a federally-owned building, and that’s not allowed.

“We did see some pretty funky-looking fake logs that were first rolled by us that that we didn’t approve of. So we’re still continuing those discussions,” Moss says.

Most other parts of the design are complete.

Greenwald led the carving team creating a 16-by-30-foot inside screen depicting the history of the area and its people.

“I had many visits from ancestors through the nights. So there were many additions and deletions from this as I went along,” Greenwald says.

“And I always joked with my assistants that every now and then they would knock on my door in the middle of the night and say, ‘Young man, you thought you knew what you were doing. No, you don’t. You need to change this.’ ”

The finished cedar-plank screen has formline design images including icebergs, the glacier that forced them out of the bay, canoes and seabirds.

Four clan posts have also been completed. And work on a separate exterior screen is underway.

Before coming up with the plans, Glacier Bay park officials held community meetings.

Moss says people made it clear that the house should follow Tlingit traditions as much as possible.

“We used photographs, old published literature. And then Gordon and the other carvers working on the project and park service architects and landscape designers traveled throughout Southeast Alaska and also into British Columbia to look at other tribal houses so they could beg, borrow and steal from places that have gone before us,” Moss says.

And that’s not all.

Greenwald, the lead carver, says local experts provided instruction.

“Throughout this process, consultation with elders was a must. I could not go forward on my own. I had to have the guidance of my elders to help me get to where they felt I needed to get,” the carver says.

The tribal house will be open to summertime visitors and be used by the Huna people year-round.