Advisory council report warns Native languages at risk

Before an advanced Tlingít language class, Raven Svenson and her classmate discussed how to conjugate the verb "boil" in the context of cooking. The University of Alaska Southeast class in Juneau was headed into finals last week and students were preparing for dialogues that will test their conversational skills.

Professor X̱'unei Lance Twitchell walked in and suggested the specific verb for cooking meat by boiling. He answered a few questions in English, then switched to Tlingít as he started class on April 29. All his students switched languages, too. For the next hour, conversation was almost exclusively in the original language spoken throughout Southeast Alaska and the foundation for Tlingít cultural identity.

The classroom is a microcosm of the change that Twitchell and other members of the Alaska Native Language Preservation and Advisory Council have called for statewide: An Alaska committed to increasing the number of Alaska Native language speakers and promoting common use of the languages.

"Tlingít, the thing that it has in common with most of the other languages in Alaska is that there's fewer than 50 speakers remaining," he said. "The majority of Alaska's languages are severely endangered."

The group has issued biannual reports to advise a dozen years of Alaska governors and lawmakers, but this January it issued a call to action instead. The document is titled Ayaruq, the Yup'ik word for walking stick, to reflect that it is a guide on the path forward. It asks Alaskans and lawmakers to affirm the right to Indigenous education, acknowledge oppression and intergenerational trauma, commit to language equity and normalize the use of Alaska Native languages.

"We wanted to make sure that at least we would challenge people to not just receive it and move on. However, there hasn't been any real action on it," Twitchell said.

Council members made specific policy suggestions, including that one semester of an Alaska Native language be a prerequisite for high school graduation in the state, but none of them have yet materialized in proposals from lawmakers.

"If we want something other than language death, which I think is guaranteed for probably 20 of the 23 languages - just guaranteed - but if we want something different, then we have to have systemic change," he said.

A decade has passed since the last legislation to support Alaska Native languages became law. In 2014, the state updated a 1998 law that recognized Alaska Native Languages as official state languages.

Twitchell said part of the difficulty in implementing what he acknowledged are "pretty significant changes" is that a history of violence and colonial oppression underlie the shift from Alaska Native languages to English. Decades of colonial influence and Alaska Native boarding schools have steadily and often painfully reduced the number of fluent Alaska Native language speakers.

"It's very hard to push through political noise, and to talk about just trying to survive the brutality of colonialism, which is what a lot of people don't want to sort of talk about and face," he said.

He observed that Alaska is conceptually built on an idea of the prospector, a newcomer, and that it has a very white identity. He pointed to the state seal, which depicts a farmer, a train and boat; its motto, "North to the Future;" and its license plate, "The Last Frontier."

"I think to ask Alaska as an entity to see itself as something more than just whiteness is a big ask," he said. "But I think it has to happen, if you're going to have the diversity that should be here."

Members of the council have cautioned for years that swift state action is needed to support language teaching and use, since many first-language speakers have died.

For example, half of the people who spoke the Kodiak dialect of the Alutiiq language died in the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Twitchell estimated that there are seven Tlingít speakers left who can "do everything" in the language and another 20 who have a high level of fluency. "It drops off pretty dramatically after that," he said.

But as the Alaska Native language community loses its older generation, Twitchell sees an exponential increase in the number of young people interested in learning. By his count, there are about 100 active Tlingít learners who ask questions and use the language.

"The reality is there are just not very many places to speak this language," he said. Twitchell said he is starting to see a shift in Juneau, however. Many of the elders he used to speak Tlingít with have died in the past 20 years. He remembered feeling worried that one day he would have no one with whom to speak the language. But then, on a trip to the post office, somebody walked by and greeted him in Tlingít: "Yak'éi yee x̲wsateení."

The Alaska Beacon is an independent, donor-funded news organization. Alaskabeacon.com