Having Their Say

By Kari Lydersen

Young marvels at the words that don’t have translations in English, like a word meaning “descending through forest to the sea.”

UNESCO lists almost 2,500 languages worldwide as “endangered,” meaning they are at risk of falling out of use and even disappearing as fluent native speakers die and younger generations fail to take up the language. A bulk of endangered languages are the tongues of indigenous groups who have been colonized or encroached upon by a dominant culture and forced or coerced to give up their native language. In the past, students were beaten for speaking their language in strict boarding schools in the United States and Australia. More recently in parts of the U.S. and countless other regions worldwide, people feel cultural and economic pressure to switch to the dominant language, seeing it as a means of opportunity and feeling a sense of shame in their indigenous identity.

But recent years have also seen a resurgence in the interest to preserve indigenous languages among academics, nongovernmental organizations and indigenous communities. In many cases, young people, who did not grow up speaking their native language, are now studying and embracing it as a way to understand and celebrate their heritage and connect with their elders.

Benjamin Young is a perfect example.

Young heard some of his community’s native Haida language while growing up in a small town on Alaska’s panhandle. But the program to teach the Alaska Native language at his elementary school was discontinued when funding was cut. Although Young’s grandfather and other elders in the village were fluent speakers—it was his grandfather’s first language—they would usually switch to English whenever a youth was listening. When Young, now 22, began to really learn about his family’s native language while at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, it was like new worlds were opened to him.

“They were talking about endangered languages, and Haida was one of them,” he said. “I didn’t realize it. You don’t think about that when you’re a teenager.”

Young studied with linguistics professor Kathy Sikorski, who had developed a program to help students learn and preserve their native languages. She helped Young develop an independent study course that he pursued in his hometown in 2006. He began to memorize key phrases. He recorded his grandfather with a digital recorder and DVD camera and played the tapes over and over. Now, Young speaks in Haida all the time, whether people understand him or not. It is partly an effort to normalize the language and to counter the painful reality his elders experienced when they learned to silence themselves around non-Native speakers.

Young is studying education, and his goal is to be a Haida teacher and specialist. His grandfather, who turns 99 this year, is proud of Young and now speaks the language more himself. Young marvels at the words that don’t have translations in English, like a word meaning “descending through forest to the sea.”  

Another of Sikorski’s students, Rochelle Adams, did a similar project with her grandfather, who speaks Gwich’in, the language of their Alaska Native community. She immersed herself in her traditional language, undertaking a project recording and translating stories told by the elders. When she finishes her degree, she will move back to the town where she hopes to run Gwich’in culture and language workshops.

“I’m very proud of who I am, but I’ve learned so much from learning the language,” said Adams, 29. She appreciates that “we don’t have a word for goodbye, we have a word for see you later” and the word for “green” is the word for goose grass, which grows at the edge of the water.

Sikorski herself grew up hearing her family speak Gwich’in until “the schoolteachers came around and said, ‘Don’t speak Gwich’in to your children, only speak English, so when they grow up they’ll be acculturated, they will be able to get jobs and not live off the land.’”

She didn’t learn the language as a child, but set out to study it about 15 years ago, in her mid-30s. At that time, fluent speakers were full of contempt for their own language. Sikorski remembers a relative even faking Spanish ethnicity on her birth certificate because she was embarrassed by her indigenous roots. But now she sees that attitude changing.

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