Published Apr 26, 2023 by Rhonda McBride Alaska Native language experts shared their personal stories at the State Capitol on Friday. They came to talk with lawmakers and their staffers about their work on the Alaska Native Language Preservation and Advisory Council, but their main mission was to inspire those at the highest levels of government to support Indigenous languages.
Dr. Walkie Charles told the gathering he was taken away from his home in Emmonak and sent to a boarding school at the age of twelve. He said his mother only spoke the Yup’ik language, or Yugtun, and didn’t understand what happened to him.
“My mother just recently, she died nine years ago, finally told me that every time she heard a plane approaching to our village, that once a week, she was hoping I would be in that plane returning home. But I never did,” said Charles, who was sent more than a thousand miles away to the Wrangell Institute in Southeast Alaska, where Native languages were suppressed.
Charles not only lost his home and family on the Yukon but also what he calls his “heart language.” It wasn’t until he took classes in college to learn to read and write in Yugtun, that he reconnected to his language. Two years ago, Charles became the first Native director of the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
X’unei Lance Twitchell, a Native language professor at the University of Alaska Southeast, now heads the council.
“Alaska for a long time had been on a path of decided elimination of indigenous languages,” X’unei told the group. “There was intention, there was purpose, there was a well-orchestrated attack on our peoples.”
He said there are four different Indigenous language families in Alaska, with a total of 23 languages that include a few which are no longer spoken.
“We don't like the word extinct,” X’unei said. “We prefer dormant, because we've seen languages come back.”
X’unei says, with only 30 fluent speakers of Lingít, it hasn’t been easy to rescue his language, but it is possible.
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