Rescuing Languages

[Andre Cramblit]

Rescuing Languages From Extinction
The Experience of the Hoopa Valley, Karuk, and Yurok Tribes
By Daniel Newberry

Nine teenagers file in to Kay Inong’s seventh period class at Hoopa  
Valley High School to learn a subject not available at any other  
school in the world: Advanced Yurok language. In the next building,  
Danny Ammon teaches the Hupa* language and Phil Albers teaches Karuk.  
This school is the center of a renaissance in the preservation and  
restoration of the native languages of these three Northern  
California Klamath basin tribes. Less than a dozen native speakers in  
each of the tribes are still alive, some live several hours away from  
their homeland, and all are elderly. Though students and teachers  
alike feel a sense of cultural pride in their native language  
studies, in the background they hear a clock ticking.

Language Loss

According to a National Geographic report released last September,  
more than half of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world  
today will likely be extinct by the year 2100, and languages are  
dying at the rate of one every two weeks. The Pacific Northwest,  
Oklahoma, the Amazon Basin, Siberia, and Australia were identified in  
that report as global hotspots of language extinction. Many languages  
die as the speakers die off. Other languages die as their words are  
replaced in the minds of their speakers with the language of a more  
dominant culture—like English or Portuguese or Russian.

In the United States, the federal government’s policy of forced  
assimilation in the first half of the twentieth century had a  
particularly devastating effect on the continuity of native  
languages. Children were forcibly separated from their families and  
sent to boarding schools where they were punished for speaking their  
own languages.

Many Hupa children were sent to a boarding school in Riverside,  
California, even though a similar institution operated on their own  
reservation. This arrangement was made apparently to prevent the  
children from staying in contact with their families. Verdena Parker,  
the most fluent of the remaining Hupa native speakers, was one of the  
exceptions. She went to the Hoopa Valley boarding school beginning at  
age six and was able to maintain regular contact with her family. At  
seventy-one years old, she is today the youngest of the native Hupa  
speakers. She credits this to being raised by her grandmother, who  
spoke only Hupa to her.

“When I went to the boarding school,” Parker said, “I didn’t know any  
English, so I just sat there and said nothing. The other kids and the  
teachers treated me like I was stupid, but I just didn’t understand  
them.” Even today, the pain and humiliation associated with speaking  
their native languages at boarding school inhibits some of the  
remaining native Karuk, Yurok, and Hupa speakers from passing on  
their languages to future generations.

Parker managed to survive that pain, and as an adult she continued to  
speak Hupa on a daily basis with her mother until the older woman  
died ten years ago. Today Parker regularly hosts University of  
California at Berkeley graduate students in her home near Roseburg,  
Oregon, where she records her native language and teaches the  
linguists the elements of Hupa grammar. She has also taken a young  
Hupa man under her wing as an apprentice.

Origins of the Klamath Languages

Historically, the population centers for the three tribes lay within  
sixty miles of each other, yet the languages are as different as  
English is from Russian. The Yurok language is part of the Algonquin  
family, one that includes languages spoken by many Midwestern and  
Northeastern tribes. Algonquin languages were spoken by the Wampanoag  
and Powhatan people, the first tribes encountered by seventeenth  
century European settlers in Plymouth and Jamestown.

The current theory as to the widespread locations of Algonquin  
languages, according to Andrew Garrett, linguistics professor at  
University of California at Berkeley, is that several thousand years  
ago, an Algonquin-speaking tribe that lived in the upper Snake and/or  
Columbia River basins split. Some went east, and others migrated  
west. Garrett, who has studied the Yurok language since 2000, has  
been compiling a comprehensive dictionary of the Yurok language and  
organizing and enhancing a collection of recordings of native speakers.

The Hupa language, by contrast, is a member of the Athabascan  
language family, which includes Navaho and Apache. Because the  
languages of many tribes in southern Oregon, British Columbia, the  
Yukon, and coastal Alaska are also Athabascan, Garrett believes the  
Hupa tribe likely arrived at its current location via a coastal route.

The origins of the Karuk language and tribe are the least understood  
of these three California Klamath tribes. Karuk is a member of the  
Hokan family, and does not have much in common with other languages  
in that family. According to Garrett, the Karuk language is one of  
the oldest languages in California, and is probably 5,000 years old  
or more in its current form.

What is unique about these three Klamath Basin cultures, and is well- 
known among linguists, said Garrett, is that while the three  
languages are different, the cultures share a tremendous number of  
similarities. Many tribal legends have the same plot, and many of the  
cultural and religious ceremonies are similar. It is as if the  
culture arose from the land, while the language arose from the people.

“If you had asked me five years ago if I thought the Yurok language  
would survive,” said Garrett, “I probably would have said no. Most  
languages [with so few native speakers] rarely survive. It all comes  
down to the efforts of a few dedicated individuals. Like Carol Lewis.”

Finding Voices

Carol Lewis has the energy of three people, and most of her energy is  
directed toward her work as Education Director for the Yurok Tribe.  
It’s hard not to get excited just listening to her talk. “When we  
started the Tribal Language Program eleven years ago,” Lewis said,  
“the language was at the lowest of the six Stages of Language Health:  
obsolescence. Our goal is to get to stage one: thriving and  
flourishing.”

Lewis grew up hearing Yurok spoken at home, especially by her  
grandmother, mother, and aunt. After her grandmother died, her family  
circle stopped speaking Yurok. So when the tribe received a grant  
eleven years ago to construct a long-range language restoration plan,  
Lewis jumped at the chance to work as program coordinator. Since then  
she has served the Tribal Language Program in a number of capacities,  
including K-3 classroom teacher.

In addition to public school offerings, Yurok language instruction is  
available to preschoolers in a Head Start program, and to adults in  
community education programs in five locations from Eureka to  
Crescent City. College credit will soon be available in the Yurok  
language at Humboldt State University. In cooperation with UC  
Berkeley, the tribe maintains an interactive language website, which  
includes a dictionary with more than 6,000 entries, and an online  
searchable database of recordings by native speakers. And to simulate  
an immersion environment, “We even held a three week institute for  
teachers last summer to help improve both language and teaching  
skills,” she added.

Interest in reviving the Hupa language began about the same time,  
though independently of the Yurok programs. Jimmy Jackson and Calvin  
Carpenter, two native speakers in their eighties, began teaching Hupa  
language classes to adults and recording conversations for posterity.  
Salish Jackson, Jimmy’s grandson, then in his twenties, began  
learning the language from the elders, and eventually joined them in  
teaching others. A fast learner, he continued to teach after the two  
elders passed on. Salish, a young man with a big smile who dresses  
meticulously, is today the curator of the Hupa tribal museum. He  
works the Hupa language into many of the museum’s exhibits.

“You can harm students if you try to teach before you’re fluent,”  
said Jackson. To increase his language skills, he is currently  
apprenticing with native speaker Verdena Parker. He still teaches  
occasionally in the adult language program, but that program leader  
today is native speaker Billy Carpenter, younger brother of program  
co-founder Calvin Carpenter.

On Wednesday nights, Billy Carpenter sets up shop for whoever shows  
up in a spacious, low-ceilinged room in a prefab building on the  
Hoopa Valley reservation. In his day job he’s the Sergeant-At-Arms  
for the Tribal Council. He’s as comfortable telling traditional  
stories to his students as he is writing on the white board that  
hangs beneath the double row of the forty-two letters of the Hupa  
phonetic alphabet.

Dressed completely in dark blue, including a baseball cap with a  
white star, Carpenter makes ample use of humor as a teaching  
technique. When asked about the main differences between English and  
Hupa, he explained that in Hupa, nouns are derived from the behavior  
or quality of the thing it names. For example, he says, “The word for  
Arcata means ‘flat land.’ The word for Eureka means ‘where land  
floats around.’ Red is ‘looks like blood’ and coyote is ‘he’s out in  
the open.’” Then a big grin spreads across his face. “The word for  
fox means ‘he leaves his soft poop everywhere.‘“ He begins to laugh.  
“Once a white guy came here and asked us to give him an Indian name,  
he wanted an animal in the name. We said, ‘we’ll call you running  
fox.’ He never knew what it really meant.”

The Karuk tribe’s 3,000+ members are more spread out geographically  
than that of the Yurok or Hupa people, who have a defined  
reservation, so the Karuks have enlisted modern technology to teach  
their native language. Last summer they inaugurated a pilot online  
language program in response to a deluge of requests for distance  
language learning by tribal members, according to Susan Gehr, Karuk  
Language Program Director.  The twenty-five person limit filled  
early, and twelve people had to be placed on the waiting list. The  
course will be offered again in January. The online course includes  
listening to recordings of native speakers, matching pictures with  
vocabulary words, answering questions, and quizzes.

The Karuk tribal language program took shape in 1998, when it first  
received funding to hire a program coordinator. Before that language  
classes were taught on a volunteer basis for about six years. The  
tribe has since published a language dictionary, recorded native  
speakers, and has coordinated fifteen Master/Apprentice teams. This  
statewide program is funded by the state of California. The state  
pays a native speaker to spend time teaching the language to an  
apprentice, to reduce the financial hardship that comes with such a  
significant time commitment. It is intended as an immersion program,  
where the participants are expected to speak to each other only in  
the indigenous language for at least twenty hours per week. Gehr  
herself spent three years as an apprentice in this program.

As the adult education classes in all three tribes gained in  
popularity, demand grew for a program in the public school system.  
Sarah Supahan was hired as the Indian Education and Native Language  
director for the Klamath-Trinity Joint Unified School District.  
Though not a tribal member herself, her former husband and their two  
daughters are Karuk. She and her ex-husband taught their children  
basic Karuk from a young age.

District-wide, Supahan said, sixty-five high school students are  
today enrolled in classes for the three native languages, and four of  
the five elementary schools offer one or more native languages. The  
program has three goals:

To learn and/or use Best Practices in language instruction.

To assist students to progress beyond their instructor’s own language  
abilities.

To assist in creating a process that enables Native Language teachers  
to obtain certification by the State of California.

The State of California has been reluctant to certify native language  
teachers who are not already certified in a standard subject. Supahan  
has been advocating in Sacramento to allow tribes to certify their  
own teachers, a practice already adopted by many other states,  
including Oregon, Washington, and Montana.

In the elementary schools, students begin with simple games and  
songs, explained Jackie Martins, Hupa language teacher. Martins  
engages her students with Hupa Bingo, a game where the squares in the  
bingo cards are depictions of animals and other objects drawn by the  
students. The teacher calls out vocabulary words and the students  
race to win the bingo game. She has developed themed games, including  
animal bingo and weather bingo. Martins’ next project is to create a  
series of picture flash cards.

As the high school students unzip their backpacks and settle in to  
their desks, teacher Kay Inong begins belting out short Yurok phrases  
like a drill sergeant, but with a big smile on her face. The students  
answer her slowly, almost apologetically at first. After they’re  
warmed up, the phrases get longer. Kay begins most of her sentences  
with “Koo-sa‘-hey-ga-lem…“ This means “How do you say…”

“Merk, Koo-sa‘-hey-ga-lem,” she asks, ”I will build a fire tonight  
because I am cold.“ Merk, the student to whom she directs the  
question, knits his brow, then the syllables tumble out of his mouth.  
He pauses halfway through and then finishes with a smile: Kuh-tee‘-ya- 
haw-up-at-wake-who-ah-nas-cha-wen‘ ah-ku-me-pee-kay-por-reg‘-esh. Kay  
claps her hands and whoops, and a classmate yells “Good job, Merk.”  
As the most advanced student in the class, he is often called upon to  
answer the hard questions, and the others learn from him.

Unlike many teenagers, the students in this class are all engaged and  
excited to be here. Several students in this school take two, and  
even all three, of the native languages offered at Hoopa Valley High  
School. Because of intermarriages in their families, many students  
have two or three of the tribes in their family trees and view their  
language studies as a source of cultural pride. The native language  
“is all my ancestors spoke,” a student answered in a January, 2005  
survey about the language program, “I couldn’t communicate with them  
if I wanted to.” For another student, the class was “my gateway to  
the past.” For another, “I get little clues within the words to how  
the Hupa people lived their lives everyday.”

Like the Yurok high school classes, the Hupa language is offered both  
at beginning and advanced levels. Danny Ammon teaches the Hupa  
language. A quiet, thoughtful teacher, he moves around his classroom  
with a casual confidence based on eighteen years of studying the  
language. He begins his classes with translations, and manages to fit  
a game into each class to make sure the students enjoy themselves— 
games like bingo and spin-the-bottle. His version of this age-old  
adolescent game has a different twist: whoever the bottle points to  
must answer the next question in the Hupa language.

Ammon apprenticed for three years with the late native speaker Calvin  
Carpenter in the state-funded Master/ Apprentice program. During  
those three years, Ammon ate his meals with his teacher and they  
spent many hours just hanging out and speaking Hupa. Carpenter often  
attended Ammon’s high school classes and helped teach the students.

Students learn the Karuk language from Phil Albers. With his short  
dark hair and trim muscular build, Albers could easily pass for a  
professional athlete. His goal is to provide students with language  
fundamentals, primarily conversation and vocabulary they can use in  
everyday life.  For this reason, and because historically Karuk was  
not a written language, in Albers’ classes students learn speaking  
skills only, not reading or writing. He has received praise and  
criticism for this approach. All his exams are oral: he tests on both  
word/sentence recognition and on pronunciation.

The Work of the Future

Like Hupa museum curator Salish Jackson, Phil Albers grew up with a  
native speaker for a grandfather. Albers’ grandfather is still alive,  
though because the elder lives more than one hundred miles away, they  
don’t see each other as much as they’d like. Albers got interested in  
learning and teaching Karuk as an undergraduate at Southern Oregon  
University. There he met his wife Elaina, also a Karuk tribal member.  
Elaina’s father and mother (school district language director Sarah  
Supahan) taught her from infancy what little Karuk they knew.  
Together the two college students supported each other in their  
language studies. They then began offering a beginning Karuk adult  
education class. “Elaina has a better vocabulary than I do, but my  
grammar skills are better,” Albers said. “We make a great team. Eight  
students came to our first weekly classes and we soon had to work  
hard just to stay ahead of our students.”

Phil and Elaina have undertaken a new level of native language  
instruction that may be the only truly effective method of saving  
their tribe’s language. Since the birth of their four year-old son,  
they have spoken only Karuk to him in the home. The boy has now  
surpassed his parents in his Karuk language skills, and has become  
undoubtedly the first native Karuk speaker born in more than seventy  
years.

The child’s name is Machnátath, which means “little flash of light.”  
According to his father, he is named after a man from Karuk history  
who moved quickly, not so much physically as spiritually. Little  
Machnátath now has a two year-old brother. His parents hope that in a  
few years, the two boys will speak to each other in Karuk, enlarging  
their language support network. Until last year, the family lived  
next to Violet Super, one of the Tribe’s last native speakers, and  
their son had the opportunity to learn from her. For many years Super  
worked with linguists to pass on her knowledge of the Karuk language.  
Tragically, Super was killed a year ago in a house fire.

UC Berkeley Linguistics professor Andrew Garrett believes that the  
responsibility for continuing the native languages is not on the  
shoulders of the elders, regardless of their language abilities.  
“It’s the young adults who need to speak the language to their  
children, to provide a true immersion setting, said Garrett. “If the  
tribes can do this, they can succeed.” On this point, Garrett and the  
Albers family agree. But with so few native speakers remaining to  
teach the teachers, the schools and the tribal governments are racing  
against time.

Fortunately, there is a growing enthusiasm, a hunger among tribal  
members to reconnect with their culture through language. Attendance  
is climbing in all native language classes. Many tribal members greet  
others in their native language, even if that is the only phrase they  
know. According to the old adage, “When the student is ready, the  
teacher will appear.” The experience of the Karuk, Hoopa Valley, and  
Yurok tribes, however, seems to be the reverse: when the teacher is  
ready, the students will appear. The biggest challenge now seems to  
be keeping up with demand, and that’s a challenge the tribes embrace.



Daniel Newberry is a freelance writer who lives in the Applegate  
Valley. He may be reached at dnewberry at jeffnet.org.
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