Efforts being made to save Han Athabascan language

[Linda Lanz]

http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/rural/story/8423899p-8318227c.html


Efforts being made to save Han Athabascan language
ENDANGERED: Only seven or eight Natives fluent in Han remain.
By LOUISE FREEMAN
Fairbanks Daily News-Miner

Published: November 19, 2006
Last Modified: November 19, 2006 at 01:25 AM



EAGLE -- The language of the Han people of the upper Yukon basin will  
be preserved in dictionary form thanks to the efforts of Belgian  
linguist Willem De Reuse and the Alaska Native Language Center.

Han Athabascan is one of the most endangered Native languages in  
Alaska, with only seven or eight fluent speakers remaining in Eagle  
Village, and two more in Dawson, Canada.
Larry Kaplan, director of the Alaska Native Language Center, said the  
language has been long ignored and is only now getting the attention  
it deserves.
"For us it is a very high priority project to get it documented for  
future generations of Han people, as well as for linguists who might  
be interested in the language," he said.
De Reuse spent much of the summer and fall in Eagle Village working  
with elders to document the vanishing language.
Conan Goebel, first chief of Eagle Village, said they have been  
trying for several years to obtain funding for such a project.
"So we got lucky with the university contacting us and asking if  
Willem could come here and do this," he said.
Ruth Ridley welcomed the opportunity to help De Reuse document the  
language. She previously worked with the ANLC in the 1980s to produce  
a book of stories in Han.
"They call me the youngest fluent speaker of our language. And I'm  
56, so you can see it needs help," she said.
Ridley, with her older sisters Ethel Beck and Bertha Ulvi, grew up  
speaking Han as their first language.
According to Beck, the children of the Paul family had to learn Han  
so they could communicate with their grandmother, who didn't speak  
English.
Michael Krauss, ex-director of the ANLC who initiated the project now  
being funded by the University of Alaska system, attributes much of  
the success of the project to the three sisters.
"The Paul family especially understands the stakes and are actively  
contributing everything they can," he said.
De Reuse is also working on a dictionary of Apache, one of the  
languages of the Southwest that is related to Northern Athabascan  
languages such as Han and Gwich'in.
Han, long considered a dialect of Gwich'in, has more recently been  
recognized as a separate language. The languages are enough alike,  
however, that De Reuse has been using words from a Gwich'in  
dictionary to help Eagle elders recall similar-sounding words in  
their own language.
A list of Han nouns was compiled by linguist John Ritter of the Yukon  
Native Language Center in Whitehorse, Canada, in 1980, so De Reuse is  
concentrating on words for actions such as throwing, hitting and  
walking.
De Reuse explained that many of the verbs are "pretty precise terms"  
that describe a very specific action. For example, there is a  
particular word meaning to "throw a solid roundish object like a rock  
or chunk of bone."
For terms describing traditional male activities such as hunting and  
fishing, De Reuse turned to Tim Malcolm, who at age 69 is the oldest  
fluent speaker of Han in Eagle Village.
Like other Alaska Natives over the past century, the children of the  
Paul and Malcolm families were discouraged from speaking their  
language once they entered school. De Reuse attributes much of the  
loss of the Han language to formal education, but, he said, Eagle  
Village's relative isolation protected their culture from outside  
influence to some extent.
The Han language fared less well in the Canadian village of Moosehide  
due to its proximity to Dawson, two miles upriver.
De Reuse plans to spend time in Dawson next summer working with the  
two remaining speakers of Han, who are both more than 70 years old.  
He will also return to Eagle to continue his work there, which  
includes recording not only words and phrases, but also stories told  
in Han.
Although the dictionary won't be completed for several years, Eagle  
Village is already benefitting from the project. Joanne Beck, tribal  
administrator, said that since working with De Reuse, "The elders  
have started speaking our language more and remembering stories that  
were passed on to them. It's exciting."
The next step in preserving the language is to develop a curriculum  
so the language can be taught. Ethel Beck said, "I'd love to teach  
the language to anyone who wants to learn it, adults or children."
First Chief Goebel, 25, would like to learn Han himself, but he  
recognizes it will be of limited value. "You can't go down to the  
Lower 48 and use it, like Spanish. You've got to do it for yourself,  
to keep it alive."
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