Alutiiq language study gets a helpful boost (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Alutiiq language study gets a helpful boost

Article published on Monday, Nov 08th, 2004
By DREW HERMAN Mirror Writer
http://www.kodiakdailymirror.com/?pid=19&id=672

A wave of rejuvenation for the Alutiiq language brought more than 30
people to Kodiak for a Master-Apprentice training conference Nov. 5-7.

“We are very very pleased with how it went,” said Alutiiq language
coordinator April Laktonen Counceller of the Alutiiq Museum.

With as few as 50 fluent speakers, most of them over 70 years old,
Kodiak’s Native language is in danger of dying out. The
master-apprentice program administered through the Alutiiq Museum seeks
to preserve the language by creating a base of younger fluent speakers.

A three-year grant from the Administration for Native Americans, part of
the federal Department of Health and Human Services, provides funding
for six learning teams. Elders who speak Alutiiq fluently serve as
masters to apprentices willing to devote the years necessary to achieve
fluency themselves.

Although the grant conceived of teams having one master each, the
Alutiiq language masters decided to double up and split the grant
stipend.

“Around here people really like to be together and spark each other’s
memory,” Counceller explained.

The Alutiiq teams consist of two masters and three apprentices. There
are two teams in Old Harbor, one in Port Lions and three in Kodiak, but
the program includes representatives of all the island’s Native
villages.

They began meeting in early October, but this weekend’s conference
provided an opportunity to meet with all the program participants and
some guests, discuss learning methods, and have some fun.

The interested guests included Sally Ash, a driving force behind an
immersion school for the closely related dialect of Nanwalek on the
Kenai Peninsula, and her son Sperry Ash, a graduate student with the
Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

During the conference the teams heard talks by Elders in Alutiiq, sang
traditional songs, and even danced the “Hokey-Pokey” in Alutiiq.
Counceller, herself an apprentice on one of the Kodiak teams, felt a
burst of energy to “push through to the next level.”

Another guest at the conference was language preservation expert Leanne
Hinton of the University of California Berkeley. She developed the
master-apprentice learning model to help preserve endangered Native
languages in California.

“Just the fact that she came here says a lot about our program,”
Counceller said.

Alutiiq program organizers read Hinton’s book “How to Keep Your Language
Alive” and invited the author here. Impressed by the wide support from
tribal councils and regional corporations, and the level of community
involvement, Hinton agreed to visit.

Hinton has visited Alaska before to work with other Native languages in
the central Athabaskan area and Southeast. She praised the Alaska
Native Language Center for its work with Alaska’s 20 Native Languages,
all of which are endangered.

“ANLC is real active both in documenting and in working with people
trying to do revitalization,” she said.

This weekend’s training sessions in Kodiak had two goals, Hinton
explained: to get the teams better acquainted with each other and
motivated for their work; and to explore the best methods for
transmitting a language without formal classes or professional
teachers.

She called the master-apprentice method “an informal kind of immersion”
where the teams “live their lives in the language together.”

Conference participants practiced staying in Alutiiq despite strong
temptation to switch to English.

“Just to begin with we teach the learners how to ask questions in
Alutiiq,” Hinton said, comparing the approach to the way a child learns
their first language.

Knowing how to ask, “What is this?” or “Please say that again” is
helpful. The request “show me” can make learning a new word active,
Hinton said.

The effort surrounding Alutiiq is one of the “pioneering movements” to
preserve the world’s endangered languages.

During the 20th century hundreds of indigenous languages disappeared.
Historically, it was almost never possible to turn around a dying
language of such small groups, Hinton said.

“That’s something that’s happening now for the first time,” she said.

It helps to have a whole state or nation behind the attempt, as when
Hebrew revived as a living language with the founding of Israel, and
great progress has been made in reviving Hawaiian and the Maori
language in New Zealand.

But for Alutiiq and most Native American languages, the situation is
critical.

“When a language is as far gone as this, it’s always a question of
what’s going to happen next,” she said.

“California is in really sad shape as far as the languages go,” Hinton
noted. In most cases there the population of Native speakers is too
small and the remaining speakers too old. As in Alaska, whole
generations have grown up without learning Native languages.

Even with master-apprentice programs in place, languages lose speakers
faster than they gain them.

The best method to counter the attrition is with immersion schools,
Hinton said. Counceller hopes that will come for Kodiak’s Alutiiq, so
that young children will learn to use their Native language with each
other.

Meanwhile, the master-apprentice method takes root in Kodiak, giving the
Alutiiq language a chance to find new generations of speakers.

Susan Malutin of Kodiak is one of the new apprentices. She spends two
hours per day, five days per week with her master teachers, Sophie
Katelnikoff and Dennis Knagin.

“This will be for the next three years,” Malutin said.

Malutin believes the language will die out if people do not make the
effort to revive it. She wants to pass it on to her own grandchildren
and to the area schoolchildren she annually instructs in traditional
fish skin sewing.

“It’s certainly part of our culture,” she said.

Hinton thinks Alutiiq’s chances are good, given the devotion of the
masters and apprentices she met this weekend.

“They really consider it a central part of their lives,” Hinton said.

Mirror writer Drew Herman may be reached via e-mail at
dherman at kodiakdailymirror.com.