Camaay! (as they say in Alutiiq, here in Kodiak)I'm waiting in the airport drinking my kufiaq, and thought I'd write up a report of the trip. Gary and I came here because I was invited to give a two-day workshop for the Alutiiq language program, sponsored by the Alutiiq Museum. We arrived Thursday night, and were picked up at the airport by April Laktonen Counsellor, who was my contact and the person in charge of the Alutiiq language program. Friday morning I went with her to her language lesson with the elders who are teaching her; Friday night was a potluck and public introduction of the master-apprentice teams, and I gave greetings to everyone in the name of the Advocates. Saturday and Sunday was the workshop. Monday morning we had a follow-up language meeting at the museum to discuss the workshop and next steps, and to play a game of Alutiiq Go Fish. Alutiiq is called "Aleut" by the elders, but it is not an Aleut language, but an Eskimo language, closely related to Yupik Eskimo. "Alutiiq" is a kind of language engineering, a name that the language program folks decided on that was a compromise between "Aleut" and a complete renaming. The story of how the Kodiak Eskimos came to be called "Aleuts" in the first place is that when the Russians were exploring the Aleutians, at the first island they came to the people called themselves Aleuts -- so they just started calling all the island people Aleuts (even though Kodiak is not even part of the Aleutians, which are volcanic islands -- Kodiak is part of the tectonic archipelago, which includes the Kenai Peninsula.) The language program has already solved some important problems, especially that of the writing system. The linguist Jeff Leer had developed a writing system that is published in his dictionary and grammar, and although the group went through several other systems, they ended up going back to that one. Gary and I came in to Kodiak Island Thursday night (04-NOV), changing planes in Seattle and again in Anchorage. From Anchorage to Kodiak I didn't see a single light until we arrived in Kodiak-- it is still a very wild land. Kodiak Inn (Best Western) where we stayed is central to town. This time of year it is mainly hunters coming to visit the island, mainly hunting deer. The deer, called Sitka deer, were only brought to Kodiak in 1933 according to April. Before that there were no grazing animals on the island. Only 8 deer were brought in, so they are now very inbred and showing problem signs such as ambiguous sex with nubby horns -- so they are considering bringing in more to increase the gene pool diversity. We saw a couple of deer close up -- very small, compact and thick-boned compared to our California deer. Bear are hunted here too --Kodiak bears are the largest grizzlies in the world. When I went to the home of Florence, one of the Alutiiq elders, she had several pictures on the wall of her various relatives with their rifles standing over bears that they had just killed. Alaskans get a bear hunting permit by lottery, which is tightly controlled; and non-Alaskans have to pay $12,000 for a guide when they hunt bear. Some Alutiiqs still hunt seal, but most Alutiiqs are either fishermen or just hunt deer. On the other hand, someone brought whale blubber to the Friday night potluck, though everyone was saying they must have gotten it from somewhere else. The blubber was cut into small sticks, about the size of french fries, white (the blubber) with a black end which consists of a half-inch of thick, leathery skin -- and that is only the inner skin, someone says. April is a 24-year-old woman born and raised on the island, to an Alutiiq father and a Dutch mother. She went to college at Brown University, in Rhode Island, and hated being away. Having had her experience away from Kodiak, she is here to stay -- married to a carpenter, who built their cozy one-room cabin where they live with their two huskies. She had taken a year off in the middle of college and worked at the Alutiiq Museum, and they pretty much promised a job to her when she graduated -- so here she is. She is running the language program, and has organized it beautifully, based on The Green Book and How to Keep Your Language Alive. I was there to give a workshop to everyone on the master-apprentice program, but the teams had already been working for over a month with the guidance of April and other people at the museum. The program is funded by a three-year grant from the Administration for Native Americans. One great idea was that every team got a "kit" consisting of a copy of How to Keep your language alive and several puppets, dolls and toys coming from the local Salvation Army. I want to implement that practice with our own teams in California. There are 6 master-apprentice teams, some with more than one apprentice, and some with more than one master, depending on the situation. Some speakers are very fluent, others less so. At this workshop each team was also given a case with a video camera, mini-disc recorder and tape recorder. The tape recorder is for the teams to record anything the apprentice wants to practice; but the mini-disc and video camera are for documentation, and those recordings will become part of the Museum's language archives. At the workshop, everyone introduced themselves, and then I talked about the main points of the master-apprentice program and did some exercises. The full agenda is appended to the end of this report. The museum itself is wonderful, involved in many projects, and the winner of the 2000 Award for Museum Service. The director is Sven Haakanson, also an Alutiiq, whose nickname is "Fisherman." Sven has a PhD from Fairbanks, and worked with the Alaska Native Language Center while he was there, making recordings of elders having informal conversations together. At the time, he says, his professors thought conversation to be not very valuable, compared to word lists and paradigms -- but of course now recording conversation is state-of-the-art documentation. Sven got his nickname as follows: he is the youngest of 7 children, the rest of whom are all girls. When he was born, his father slapped his thigh in relief and yelled "There's my fisherman!" Sadly, the Kodiak fisheries were badly impacted by the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Most of the people who had made their living fishing have had to find another line of work. Our cab drivers were former fishermen; April's father, a fisherman before the oil spill, now makes his living as a native artist, but has to live in northern Washington in order to do it. The summer of the spill, most able-bodied adults were hired to clean up the beaches. April and her sister were sent to spend the summer with their grandparents in Oregon while her parents worked on the cleanup. But out of tragedy always comes new opportunity -- the settlement funds from Exxon were what built the Alutiiq Museum. Kodiak has had other catastrophes too, the worst being the huge earthquake of Good Friday 1964, which rung the Earth and triggered tsunamis that devastated the city of Kodiak. We see pictures of the aftermath in the Kodiak Inn, where big fishing boats are lying amongst the ruined houses throughout the lower city streets. There is a plaque several blocks inland commemorating where the 86-foot fishing vessel Selief came to rest. Several other villages were almost completely destroyed, and adjacent Afognaq Island was abandoned for some time. Since then, several Kodiak Island villages are virtual ghost towns. Another big event was the 1912 Katmai volcanic eruption (on the Alaskan Peninsula), which put up to 3 feet of ash all over the island. One old man says his father used to tell him about how for 3 days they had to have a rope going from their house to the creek to get water, because the ash in the air made it pitch black, and they could not see anything. The ash is still easily seen in roadcuts and creek banks. That ash fertilized the land, and vastly increased the rapid growth and expansion of the Sitka Spruce, which had just begun to colonize the island. Some of the fluent speakers gave great soliloquies during the workshop, carried on conversations in Alutiiq, and enjoyed each other's company enormously. Phyllis is one of the very fluent speakers, and knows songs, and jokes a lot. Yet she cried when talking about language loss and how important it is that young people now want to learn. Clyda is especially fluent, outgoing, and clear-speaking; but in her small town there is no-one to be an apprentice. Still, she came to the workshop, and was a great addition to it. Most of the apprentices are very strongly motivated to learn the language. Some of the apprentices are not native, but people don't seem to mind. Although it might be there under the surface, I don't see the anger and mistrust here of non-natives or linguists that I see in California -- though there is much to be angry at, if they were of that mindset. The history of oppression and genocide is as bad here as elsewhere in Native America, including the Massacre at Refuge Rock by the Russians. Hrdlicka, the physical anthropologist who received Ishi's brain from Kroeber in 1915, had some years before that come to Kodiak and unearthed a giant collection of human remains and took them back to the Smithsonian. These were the first major return of human remains back to their tribes under NAGPRA. I think the positive feelings toward linguists here might be because linguistics is more recent in Alaska -- the first intensive linguistics was done by linguists that are still alive, and the work has been run by the Alaska Native Language Center at Univ. of Alaska at Fairbanks. The linguists there have generally been expected to learn the language fluently that they are studying, meaning that the relationship with the community has been close and long term. The Univ. of Alaska has also been attended by many native people, and there have been a number of native linguists educated there and native-speaking language teachers trained and hired. ANLC has also done many projects for local pedagogy and language revitalization. Thus linguistics in Alaska has throughout its history been more in the spirit of cooperation with native communities than early linguistics in California was. ANLC is cooperating closely with the Alutiiq Museum on the Museum archive: they will be holding copies of the Master-Apprentice Program tapes and CDs for safekeeping, but all access rights and conditions will be set by the Museum. People in Kodiak wear western clothing in their everyday life -- I saw no-one wearing parkas -- except Susan, a white teacher at the school. Music among the Alutiiq is strongly European in style, influenced by the Russians, though they still have a more indigenous dance tradition -- Sperry Ash danced a seagull dance for us at the workshop, accompanied by a CD of guitar music played by his brother (the piece was somewhat reminiscent of the "Spanish Fandango" that my father plays. Another brother plays the accordion, and someone said that yet another plays the Alutiiq drum, and apparently that trio plays for the dance group Sperry has organized. Alutiiq songs are mostly hymns and lullabyes with European-style melodies. So the typical revitalization pattern of making up nursery rhymes and re-lexifying "itsy bitsy spider" and Christmas carols, is in keeping with the general native song tradition here. There is lots of Russian influence visible -- some of the elders speak Russian, and Sven Fisherman himself does too, having spent three years in Russian; Alutiiq has many loanwords from Russian, and the Museum is filled with books on the history of the Russians in Alaska. Most of the Alutiiqs are Russian Orthodox, and many of the ministers are from Russia. One of the best scholars in Kodiak is Lydia Black, a Russian woman who has done a great deal of scholarship on the Russian presence in Alaska. Of course much tradition is still active -- the Alutiiqs still gather seaweed and chitons on the beach for eating, and I am sure much else as well. Many of the practices followed by all Alaskans are of course carry-ons of indigenous subsistance, such as berrying and salmon fishing -- albeit with a different technology. Kayaks, though not usually made with wood and skin anymore, are common in summer. In the workshop, as part of a planning session, I asked everyone to think of one thing they'd like to learn about this week that could serve as both an activity and a language lesson - and Sperry said he'll focus on the traditional kayak -- it's parts, and how to make it. Carving is another native craft, and Dennis and his apprentices may focus on that. Some people still make baskets, and then there's the "banya" -- the sweathouse, that several people talked about. Kodiak is quite multicultural. There is a strong Phillipine presence, and lots of Mexicans and Chinese. In the grocery store, one whole aisle is Mexican, one aisle plus part of the produce section is Chinese, and one aisle is Russian (though the Russian aisle was all 20% off -- a symbol of diminishing influence?) The best restaurant in town is Japanese-- called the Old Powerhouse Restaurant, out on the industrial edge of downtown, and indeed, occupying what used to be the powerhouse, and next to a field of transformers. The stars of the show at Kodiak were a couple of visitors from Namaluk, an Alutiiq village on the Kenai Peninsula near Homer. These are the aforementioned Sperry Ash and his mother Sally Ash. Sally is only in her 40's or so, and is of the last generation of fluent speakers of Alutiiq in Namaluk. (Here in Kodiak, the last generation of speakers is much older -- in their '70's and '80's.) I love to hear Sally and Sperry speak their very distinctive, lilting variety of English. Sally is a gifted immersion teacher. At the workshop, each team had to do a language teaching/learning demo, and Sally's group did a demo of folding a paper airplane. It was fabulous. Sperry's generation does not speak the language, but they must have good passive knowledge, because Sperry is trying to learn, and speaks it very well already. Sally has an eight-year-old daughter that she is trying to speak to in Alutiiq most of the time. Sally was trained in immersion techniques and teaches in an immersion preschool there. But the elementary school only allows half-hour sessions in Alutiiq, and is one of many schools obsessed with worry over test scores, with the sanctions imposed by the No Child Left Behind Act. Because of this, the school is getting even less cooperative about Alutiiq language issues than before. Sperry's generation, then, is the generation that tries to speak and gets criticized by the elders for not speaking right. He says the elders in Namaluk don't seem to care about the language, and don't want to talk to him. He feels the elders here in Kodiak are much more friendly, and he feels totally relaxed talking with them. Sperry is a graduate student at U of AK right now, and plans to be an educator -- hopefully a language educator. He's studying language planning and curriculum development now. He bemoans having no one to talk to there in Alutiiq-- his only Alutiiq-speaking companion is Jeff Leer, the linguist who has studied the language and learned it proficiently. Jeff was in Kodiak for the workshop. He has developed a grammar and a dictionary that have been used intensively at the museum -- though it is all written in Linguistese. People here seem to eat fish at every meal. Breakfast Saturday was rolls and deliciously-cooked salmon. Lunch Saturday was a giant sub that was half tuna (though that half disappeared before I could get to it), and Sunday's lunch was halibut. The Friday night potluk included baked salmon, smoked salmon, salmon cakes, salmon casserole, pasta with salmon, and halibut -- and a little chicken. And of course the blubber sticks. The Monday post-workshop meeting was a gathering of about 15 people, some from the museum, and some master-apprentice teams that had stayed in Kodiak long enough to attend. The rest had gone home already to their various villages elsewhere on Kodiak Island or Afognak. Besides ideas on what to do next and how to improve the gatherings, two items of interest were brought up. (1) The Shoonaq' tribe (the local tribe in the city of Kodiak) wanted to get a letter of support from the Museum to change the spelling of their name to fit the current spelling system -- Sunaq. The initiative will go on the tribal ballot at the next election. (2) a letter of support was also sought from the Museum for a teenager in Old Harbor (one of the other villages on the island), whose mother wants him to learn Alutiiq for his highschool language credit, instead of a foreign language. His mother is one of the apprentices in the program, and he would learn with her. The Museum will support both these requests. Once the workshop and post-workshop meeting were over, Gary and I had two and a half free days, and used it to explore part of the Kodiak and do some birding. Kodiak is the 2nd biggest island in the United States, after Hawai'i, but only 80 miles of roadway . Most of Kodiak has no roads at all, and can only be reached by air, boat, or, for intrepid backpackers in summertime, by foot. Birders on Kodiak say things like "this is the best place for eider ducks on the road system," meaning that most of the best places for anything are inaccessible. Patrick Saltonstall, an archaeologist at the Museum, took us out on Monday, lent us his Leica viewing scope, which ranges from 20x to 60x -- and I don't know how we ever thought we could watch birds without one of these! Gary and I are thinking we will give each other a viewing scope for Christmas this year. Patrick also gave us the phone number of Richard MacIntosh, the local birding expert who writes a monthly column in the Puffin, the local Audubon newsletter, and told us to call him. Rich decided to go with us on Wednesday, so thanks to him, we had great birding adventures! Tuesday was cold and windy and raining much of the day, but we still braved the elements and saw many species of birds; and Wednesday was mostly clear. Without Rich, we never would have seen the in-town birding sites, or most of the Air Force Base; and might well have missed the identification of some species, too. Here is the list of sightings, many of them new to our lifelist!
Rich says we'll get our 5 minutes of Audobon fame in his next column, listing the bird sightings we did together Flying home we took off at dawn (8:30 a.m.) from Kodiak; cloudy most of the way to Anchorage. But we managed to get clear skies much of the way from there to Seattle, so that we could see glaciers, and the magnificent mountains and islands, good views of Juneau area, Sitka, Ketchikan, Prince Rupert, Prince of Wales Island. Changing planes in Seattle, we flew on at dusk, seeing Rainier, and in the distance the ash plume from Mt. St. Helens. On to Mt. Hood, and then it got dark before we landed in Oakland. Nunaniqsaq! (We had a good time.)
APPENDIX Kodiak Workshop
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