March 19, 2024 • 59 mins
We are joined by Denaʼina scholar and language teacher Łiq'a yes Joel Isaak to talk about language journeys, the ways that being a visual artist can help create visual representations of grammar, Tribal school and programs, and staying strong and focused through dramatic changes. Isaak is an artist and installs large level artwork, and also works in education, which are two traits that combine to create braided perspectives on understanding and teaching Indigenous languages and also Indigenizing education. The journey of the language warrior involves facing the colonial war on Indigenous languages, which requires ceremony and self-care in order to stay focused and positive in your language reclamation work.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
They tried to colonizzus, try to genocide. Yet we're still
here with the tongue on broke, and.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
To Joel Isaac Tenny, welcome everybody to the Tongue unbroken.
We are recording right near this place called set which
is on the Channel, which is a channel in between
the communities of Juno and Douglas, Alaska. And I'm excited
to be visiting with my guest and close friend here,
(00:55):
Joel Isaac. When I think of Joel, I think of
something people used to tell me, which was, you can't
do a whole bunch of things. You got to just
pick one thing and be good at it. And I
always rejected that idea because I thought, what if I
want to write stories, and what if I want to
make music, and what if I want to make artwork,
and what if I want to learn and teach languages?
(01:16):
Why do I have to just pick one thing? And
then to push back on these stereotypes that if you
don't pick one thing, you won't be good at anything,
and I don't think those things are true because I
make music, I write, I learn language, I teach language,
I do governance work and advocacy work, and so does
Joel Isaac, who's a talented, incredible artist, a dedicated and
(01:39):
wonderful language learner and teacher, and does a ton of
advocacy work statewide. But I'll let him introduce himself. So
you want to tell the people who you are to.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
Kill the Tai Vashnish, but do our Calendar Pennington Shachita
a vay Latin, Sharon Isaac Shunkta, David Isaac Shukta an
Joel Isaac go Shana Shiji. So I just want to
acknowledge those listening and appreciation for having conversation, and introduce
my family. Fodora Calendar Pennington was my grandmother. My parents
(02:11):
are Sharon and David Isaac, and my Ina name is Ayis,
which means salmon skin, and my English name is Joel Isaac.
And that's just a little bit about where I come
from as far as the people in my life. I'm
dani Ena so Echelon sheet Kina or Cotton New Shagu
Shakaya Kilanda. That's where my village is right now. My
(02:33):
grandmother originally was from Point Possession, which is just across
the water from Anchorage, one of the spots where Captain
Cook didn't come on board, but send men aboard or
off off the ship onto the land to bury some
gold quarters, to claim Alaska. And so that's a little
bit about where my family's from. And yeah, we're ocean Dene.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
People to now. The other day I was talking with
folks and I was saying I started learning sing it
in nineteen ninety six, which means this is my what's
the math? I've been doing this for almost thirty years,
and so as I get close to my thirty year
anniversary of being a language learner and maybe my twentieth
(03:16):
anniversary of being a language teacher, sometimes it reflect on
what brought me to this place. So what brought you
into language reclamation work within the ena specifically and then
also with some of the work that you do stay.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
With similar year. For me, I'm a little bit younger,
So I was in kindergarten, first second grade and around
nineteen ninety six to nineteen ninety eight, so that was
when I first wanted to learn Danina. And so that's
really where I think my journey started, was that desire
to learn it and realizing there was no access point
(03:51):
and there were things that I learned material culture that
was the classic making a paper costume at a paper
for Thanksgiving and being an Indian and my sister was
dressed up as a pilgrim. So those were the activities
we did in school, which I was actually stoked about
because I wanted to make the clothing that my people
(04:12):
would have made, and so there was an opportunity to
do that. And that's when I really realized that this
is not what was being taught to me, wasn't really
what I was interested in. And that was like in
those kindergarten first grade years and then sixth grade into
science fair project with birch bark baskets, and that was
(04:32):
something that we had a couple of birch bark baskets
in my house growing up, and I would go to
the library and check out books and so that was
like my science fair. And then when I actually got
access to the language was a resource my mom picked
up at a thrift store that was Denia keen I
keywords that doctor Carey had put together with keen I
speakers and had a CD in the back and it's
(04:55):
basically forty four playlists with ten words which are key
words that go with that sound. And when I was
at UAF and art school. I would listen to that
while making the Danina statues that I made out a bronze,
and that was the only denied audio that I'd ever
heard until twenty sixteen. After I graduated my MFA in
(05:16):
New York, I came back home and took a language
class with Sandra Shaganath Stewart and Helen Dick at the
time were co teaching, and Sondra was one of the
people who when I was back in that kindergarten first
grade zone, would come into kBT Elementary and teach cultural
things like beating that my sisters were involved with. And
(05:38):
then she was also my first college teacher for language
about twenty years later. Then she and I started teaching together,
and then I started teaching grammar classes with doctor Alan
Boris before he passed away, and then I entered an
Indigenous Studies PhD program. My segue into language was through
the material culture and the love for spending time out
(06:00):
side and be on the land, and then finding the
access point of the people who could teach, and then
very quickly jumping into that pool of teachers and kind
of teaching like one year ahead of where people are at.
And that's my segue into language was through art.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
I want to talk some of the specifics about deni Ena,
but talk about your art for a little bit, like
what kind of art work do you do, what do
you think about while you're doing it, and how do
you envision some of your next projects.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
I often there's two ways to describe my work. One
is contemporary indigenous art, the other is installation work. I
do three dimensional sculpture predominantly, and like I was talking
about before, life sized bronze statues of I've made Grandma
Olga Yazai, who's at the mouthorship Creek and anchorage putting
up fish camp. That was part of the cultural mitigation
(06:53):
for the port of anchorage being put on top of
a traditional Deniina fishing site. So if you look out
and see the port, that's burred and people fish, and
it's why people still go to that creek to fish,
it's just now there's a port on top of it.
So that's where one of my statues are that I've made.
And then in keen I at the DNA Wellness Center,
I made a family of three, so father, mother, a
(07:17):
daughter putting up fish. And then when the hospital in Bethel,
the Yukon Cost Health Corporation expansion or the IHS facility.
There there's a Yupik family of four where it's a mom, dad, son,
daughter putting up fish, pulling fish out of a net.
And so for me, what I like about the installation
(07:38):
work is that it shows our people living. The goal
is to active human beings spending time with the land.
They're not on giant plints. They're able to be. You
can put your arm around them, take a picture of them.
I love seeing kids run up to them and look
at them and stand next to them. That was really
(08:00):
fun when we were installing in Bethel, there's two the
kids are about three and a half feet tall that
I've made at a bronze and watching the kids run
out of the hospital and like go up to the
kids and feel like want to try and like lift
the fish too, was just really special because that's the purpose,
and that's the communities that are commissioning and want our
(08:23):
people to be presented as living people, not as conquerors
of the land, not as like mortuary objects. We're doing
the things we've been doing for thousands of years, and
it's monumenting that in bronze. So That's one of the
things that I've done since twenty twelve was my first
(08:44):
life size bronze statue, and that's a a big piece
of what I do, and thinking about installation of that
piece of space out as a viewer, how does a
community engage with work. My next solo show is going
to be at the State Museum here in Juno in
the fall, and that one's about fish. A giant smokehouse
essentially made out of cotton fabric that has the fish
(09:07):
count data for the river that I fish on embroidered
into it. So there's about one point three million stitches
that are tick marks or the salmon run into the fabric.
Then I smoke the fabric, it gets suspended from the
ceiling and you can walk underneath it, and then there's
about nine tons of sand on the floor, so it's
like walking on the beach and you can smell the
(09:29):
smell of the smokehouse and you can see a visual
representation of the fish going up the river. So that's
my next kind of big projects.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Chees Chnan and I think in my mind being an
artist sometimes helps you with some things. I spend a
lot of time trying to visualize the thing it language
and trying to think, Okay, it's too abstract when it's explained,
it's too abstract when you think about it in English.
And so I try to rely on visual things for
a bridge between what is thint what is English, as
(10:01):
we are trying to bring a lot of our people
back to our languages from English and then also bring
a lot of visitors to our land to our language,
and a lot of them also know English. And so
I was thinking about this because we've known each other
for a minute and we were probably in New York
City about five years ago for the Linguistic Society of
(10:21):
America conference, which was wild, Like I remember, I would
walk around, look at posters and go to presentations, and
I would think, I don't know what any of these
people are talking about, Like hardly any of this stuff
makes sense. But then there's a small pocket of people
who are working actively in indigenous languages. And I'm not
saying linguistics is not useful, but there's a part of
(10:41):
linguistics that really talks to itself as a field, and
then there's a part that really focuses on how do
you get people to learn and use languages and not
to say those things are exclusive of each other. But
sometimes I would walk around and I would think this
is really interesting. But it's trying to figure out a
lot of really deeply detailed stuff about how languages work,
and we are literally trying to survive, and so I
(11:05):
don't really have the focus and energy to do some
of that stuff. But in one of these sessions, it
might have been a had Nashoni language, but they were
showing us how they were color coding their language. And
I think you had already been thinking about this stuff.
I'd even breaking fling it into these little parts and
trying to continue to think about how do I make
these parts more accessible. And I think you had mentioned
(11:26):
something at that point, but I certainly said, I'm going
to color code cling it grammar, and from this point forward,
we're going to teach it through colors and these categories
of colors. And so what we do is we break
down all of the different parts of the verb, especially
and say, within these verbs, there's these different components, and
these components will have their own colors, and we're not
(11:47):
going to focus really on what they're called. We'll focus
on what they do and how to use them. And
then what happens when you start putting them into a
certain order. So can you talk about this kind of
work that you've been doing and how it might help
you in teaching the big scary concept of grammar.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
Yes, so I often when I'm teaching grammar class, say
dna Ena grammar or Danae Grammar is just as easy
and just as much fun as organic chemistry. They have
very similar roots and analysis, and they can have a
two inch thick manual that you need to learn how
to use and a lot of memorization, and you have
(12:29):
to figure out how neighboring things get along or don't
get along with each other, and how they react. So
I've started out my undergrad in chemistry and have a
periodic table shower curtain that I brought to every place
that I've lived since I went to college. It's a
gift Christmas gift from friends. So I'm a little bit
of a nerd. And the difference between when I think
(12:51):
about linguistics and my joy that I have in linguistics
is its analysis. It really is a beneficial tool for
mapping and charting and understanding things in an analytical way.
It's not a teaching tool. It's an important piece of
developing teaching tools. I think about another analogy of that
(13:11):
is that there is an active war against our languages,
and that's an example, like in the Civil War, the
advancement in medicine that happened through doing field hospitals was extraordinary.
It's awful how that advancement took place. So, just using
kind of different reasons why Native people and students in
(13:32):
Native or non Native might feel really strongly yucky about
the analysis of our indigenous languages is it's because it's
a product of war, and it's also something where you
can get like bonding in the trenches. So I enjoy linguistics.
I find it fascinating, it's interesting. I think there's beauty
(13:53):
in it, but there's also this underbelly of it that
can be really yucky, and if you read through historical
linguistic accounts, there's some nasty stuff. I also have some
very good friends who I really enjoy who are linguists,
and apparently I'm also a linguist, I've been told. So
I just putting that with a grain of salt. The
flip side from taking the analytical piece and figuring out
(14:15):
how things come apart is then putting them together, and
I think that's where the teaching thing is really exciting,
and that's where using the color coding. When we were
in New York talking about that, what I'd been thinking
about is taking the template that is basically about fourteen
prefixes for deniana of slots that you plug in things
similar to like building molecules. The different elements off the
(14:37):
pairic table react differently when you put them next to
their neighbors. We have a chart that does the same
thing for morphemes or little parts of words, and how
to color code that and then also use imagery. So
what I'd worked on at that time was drawing out
the spruce tree and its environment onto about one and
(14:57):
a half inch squares of paper, and thinking about a
tree is a thing that's made up of individual parts.
And you can look at a tree and see, like
spruce needles are really can be beneficial, but you can't
have needles without a branch, and you can't have a
branch without a trunk, and the trunk can't survive without bark,
(15:18):
and the tree can't live if it doesn't have roots
in a cambium. Later and you don't really see the
roots under the ground, but you know they're there because
the tree is not falling over. And looking at that
analogy of a tree being made up of small individual
things that relate and are connected. And that's like our
verbs are made up of these things called morphemes that
are all interconnected, and they react to each other differently.
(15:41):
And sometimes you see evidence of something without seeing the thing.
So like when a wind is blowing through the tree,
you can't see the wind, but you see evidence of
the wind. And our words have features like that in them.
So I drew the tree in black and white about
two years before that conference on a flight to going
down to the Day Language Conference in the Talawa Nation
(16:03):
area of northern California, southern organ and then on that
way to New York, I was thinking a lot about
the color coding and it color code the chart and
putting those images with the colors so that something tactle
so people can pick up and build. And then you
can assemble a tree and you can add things to
it like spiders or birds nests, or it could fall over,
(16:25):
or someone might cut the tree down, or you could
make a fish trap out of the tree. You could
put fish up. Taking the poles and making a drying rack,
like all these things you can do with trees. That
that's all the prefixes. There's an analogy to a spruce
tree and the spruce tree story our Chivala sukdua or
spruce tree story Virdenina is a story about how the
(16:46):
animals divide it up into pairs, and how the plants
divided up into pairs. But the spruce tree didn't have anyone,
and the cotton tree cottonwood tree didn't have anyone. But
the spruce tree is all gnarly and has like pus
coming out, which is that the jach the pitch, and
the cottonwood tree is all straight and pretty and said, no,
you're ugly, I'm not going to be your partner. And
the cottonwood tree is not a very useful tree in
(17:10):
comparison to the spruce tree, which is like every single
part of it's useful. And so there's a lesson to
be learned about that. And then it also the story
has a song and it talks about the dog also
didn't have a partner, and so it was going to
be the partner for the campfire people, which is the
plants and animal's name for dan ena and that's why
dogs are given the same agency in pronoun configuration as people.
(17:35):
And so it's this really foundational story that is thousands
of years old that I started to think about how
our language has that deep seated connection and that's how
I teach grammar.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Now, wow, and I think, as you're sharing that you
gave me some language. A few years ago, I was
writing an episode from Oliv Danale and I think there
was an episode where they're using spruce pitch to sometimes
they call them like an indigenous band aid because there's
a lot of healing that can happen through spruce pitch.
So I think we use maybe if I remember right,
(18:08):
so dena ena words for spruce in that episode. So
it's really neat when these things come full circle because
I think a lot of the work that we do
is we're rebuilding this whole ecosystem, like a language has
an ecosystem, and one person is a part of that
ecosystem and they have to learn how to get along
with other beings that are in that ecosystem and also
(18:29):
to communicate, and a lot of that does involve building
an entire grammar structure within a human being, which sometimes
can feel really artificial, like emberone else learning Hawaiian. One
of our instructors would say, this is an artificial form
of Hawaiian, and you should know that. You shouldn't be
embarrassed by it. You shouldn't be afraid of that. If
people say, boy, you don't sound like someone who's been
(18:50):
speaking Hawaiian for eighty years, is because you haven't. But
if you stick to this method, you can naturalize the language.
And I think sometimes for some of our people's and
for people who come to our languages, it's very different
than what they might expect. Once they get going, they're
probably learning how to make sounds, and then they're learning
lists of words and phrases and things that you can memorize.
(19:13):
And it feels good because you know a response for
this type of thing, but you're really sort of just
recalling this entire phrase, which is not nothing. It's a
complicated process. It's a big accomplishment. But once you start
getting into communication, looking out the window and telling someone
what's going on, hearing some information and giving your opinion
(19:33):
about it, suddenly that becomes something that's very difficult for
people to assemble. And a lot of that has to
do with our languages being incredibly flexible in terms of
how they shift once things start moving around conceptually. So
I think it's important to look at grammar because a
person cannot memorize a DNA language. You just cannot. You
(19:56):
have to figure out how these parts go. And maybe
there's a path forty years from now, or there's multiple
paths forty years from now where we say, okay, you
don't have to do this particular method. But I'm still
I always struggle when some people say I think I'll
just skip the grammar. I don't want to do the
grammar stuff. But that's the whole thought world of the
language where those stories that you mentioned, some of those
(20:17):
stories are just built completely into the language. Like the
ocean where the ocean meets the land is built into
the thing at language because we are ocean going people.
So I think it's important to do that, but also
to do it in a way that is intentionally decolonial
and inclusive and making sure that people aren't overly scared
(20:40):
and that they feel confident and that they know it's
going to be okay, even though their English brain is
probably going to either reject a lot of concepts or
get mad because it's assuming okay, because this is this.
If I change this, it will be this other thing.
And sometimes the language is like, no, it's a completely
different thing. And so as we build those patterns and
indigenous languge, which is it's exciting to see how other
(21:02):
languages are doing that. For Dinnaa and shing It, we
were the same language probably thirty thousand years ago, but
we were completely different languages now. But we can still
share a lot of tactics and techniques that work in
terms of figuring out how our language works and then
figuring out how we can nest that whole thought world
into wonderful human beings. So with that thought, we're gonna
(21:24):
take a little break and we'll be back right after this.
Gonna cheese taine chenan.
Speaker 4 (21:42):
One or two.
Speaker 5 (21:43):
Or three times you try any DNA friends, you run
around without joy, struggle yesterday, you struggle still today now,
but you'll find a broad away. My brother sisters, don't
(22:08):
you know what about the way to wait it back?
Speaker 4 (22:13):
For those who came.
Speaker 5 (22:18):
Believe in yourself now blieve in us somehow dona de.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Calornasy predict the goot you do a song? Question, wait
do teine Joey Wilcock on a Shukkie tea. The word
(22:45):
for the eclipse and clink it is predict the goot,
which means that it walked into oblivion. And when I
think of the eclipse, I think of that as cling at.
People were really scared of the eclipse long time ago.
We thought it would turn people stone. We also thought
Raven would turn people to stone, which he did. He
turned this guy walking his dog to stone. He turned
(23:07):
Russians to stone. But I think about that because stepping
out of the colonial process, which you had accurately described
as a war against our languages, sometimes we have to
go into some of the systems that exist and adjust
those systems. And so you are a person who wears
(23:29):
many hats, and I'm not going to ask you to
detail the internal workings of all these things that you do.
But I guess I want to just have a loose
conversation about government work and education and what kinds of
things we're doing, because I remember I was talking quite
a bit at this program in Stanford where there was
(23:49):
it was called the First Nation's Futures Program. There are
Alaska natives, there are Hawaiians, there are Maori people, and
I was just talking about some ideas about developing specifically
an Alaska Native Languages school Board or Schools Consortium, which
would be a statewide governing body for language medium schools
(24:10):
and language nests. And someone looked at me and I said, well,
didn't education destroy your languages? Why is that the thing
that you think is going to help you? And I said,
because I've never seen a language that was threatened come
to a healthy place without taking control of their education,
at least in some ways, they got to share that control.
(24:31):
And so you do a lot of work in education
and in governance, and I just was curious about your
thoughts on the role that we do and the work
that we do in those arenas.
Speaker 3 (24:43):
Jnan, That's a great question. I think there's two hats
that I wear that kind of speak to this question.
One is as a doctoral student working on how to
do reading instruction, which in paramount to what we do
in western education model is learn to read and then
you learn through reading. And that shift happens right now
(25:03):
in our country in that third to fourth grade zone,
about nine to ten year olds are making that shift.
And we have a choice, as indigenous people across the
country across the world if reading is something that is
going to be a part of our tribal or our
indigenous education systems that we're building, and there are pockets
(25:24):
around the country that choose to not write down their
languages and maintain a very oral based language literacy instead
of going text or alphabetic or syllabary language literacy. In Alaska,
a lot of our languages have in some way or
form embraced an alphabetic writing system. And I think about
(25:48):
that for how to use this tool that has been
a weapon against our people in reshaping it and that
bronze work, the metal urgy stuff of like how do
you take something that's a weapon and turn it into
a tool. Steel can be very destructive if you have
as a sword and chop and hack at people. But
(26:10):
if you make needles out of it, you can also
sew things back together and construct them. So I think
about that where if we have a system that's based
off of the intent of healing and being additive and
constructive and not a deficit model, there's a lot of
strength there. And that's the way that I've approached my
(26:31):
research on reading in developing a deny on a culturally
based approach for reading instruction. I think about that for
how do we bring our native community along in our
education system that's a Western based structure, which is text
based and reading based. One of the pieces if you
look into the history of reading in the last fifty
(26:52):
years around the world and the English speaking world is
going back to the war analogy, there's the reading wars,
and so we have very critically endangered languages that have
been attacked on multiple fronts and then being boisted into
this reading war arena. That's not our war, and so
I think what's really exciting to me is that it
(27:14):
presents an opportunity for Indigenous people to show how there's
space in reading and in language that's not a deficit model.
Multi lingual learning makes stronger cognitive human beings, and so
there's a different shift thinking about it from a monolingual
approach versus a multi lingual approach. So that's in a
(27:38):
lot of the university system research that does multi lingual
learning research is based off of colonial dominant languages like Spanish,
Chinese English are the ones that I've looked at the
most for my research, and that's part of thinking how
do we have space in our Western higher edgycation systems
(28:00):
of research where tribes indigenous people feel like they want
to engage in that research because it benefits the community
that they're from, is really how that shift happens in
a positive way. So I think that's one of the
pieces around that research higher education piece. The other one
is in that K twelve or that preschool through twelve arena,
(28:22):
and that's where I think the conversation around private education
compacting between the State of Alaska and tribes within Alaska
is really making some very interesting conversations, and really it's
about the additive approach and thinking. All of the five
tribal compacting partners who are going through the pilot phase
(28:44):
of in the demonstration phase have language as a core
piece of their education models. It's in all the mission statements.
It is inherently connected to who we are as Native people.
It's the way we think, it's the pedagogy, it's all
the different approaches that go into how you instruct and
it connects us to land in this place that's across
(29:07):
the state of Alaska. And that's one of the things
that I think is that transformational piece of it is
that it leans into our strengths in the state, so
education systems we have local control and is really what
the foundation of Alaska's public education system is based off of.
(29:27):
And tribes are inherently part of that local control consideration.
So those are some of the ways that I think
about the education and the power to transform education. If
we look at the history around Sheldon Jackson planning for
the boarding school era that swept across North America, including
(29:48):
Canada and US. The US version started in Alaska and
it was a strategically planned initiative to eradicate our people
both physically, spiritually, and linguistically, and it was found to
be illegal shortly after it started. Congress said no, you
actually can't do that with the funds because it was
(30:10):
contracting children for religious purposes, and you can't use public
funds to have church run schools, and you can. The
primary sources from eighteen eighty five in that plus or
minus ten years are pretty horrific, and so I think
that's part of thinking about transformation is moving from a
(30:30):
model that puts dog tags on children so you can
track where they are in the community to make sure
they're not at home and they're captured at school because
the parents were punished and fined and other forms of
torture administered to the parents and the child if the
child wasn't in school, to be forced to eradicate Native
(30:51):
culture and language. Going from that model to something where
you have tribes developing the educational model is really exciting.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
And just to give this thing a bit of a
framework in case folks don't know. So there are federally
recognized tribes in the United States, and then in Alaska
you also have corporations that were formed both at the
regional and village level because of the Alaska Native Claimed
Settlement Act. And so within those frameworks you also have education,
(31:24):
which I think was a church run institution, and then
it gave way to both what became public education in
Alaska and then a separate strand which was the Bureau
of Indian Education, which ran schools also in Alaska, and
then that transition to what is basically public education in
(31:45):
Alaska today, which is made up of school districts, charter schools,
and correspondence schools, and then you also have private schools.
You have other options from there, and so what has
been developed simply has been the concept of tribally compacted education.
So a tribe has the right to compact, which is
(32:08):
usually a term where the tribes says, okay, the government
would use this amount of money to run this type
of program for our tribal members, our tribal citizens, so
we will take that money into it ourselves. And there's
a lot of different arenas where tribes have the right
to do that and do that. It takes capacity, it
takes another a number of other things, it takes negotiation
(32:28):
with the government. But in education, that's an area in
Alaska where you haven't really seen that outside of Chickaalan.
I don't think outside of there you have too many
actual tribally run schools where the federally recognized tribe is
the one who is running the school. So it works
in partnership all throughout Alaska. But as we sort of
look at the possibilities, so in Pai they have a
(32:52):
charter school, so they have a K through twelve charter
school and it's Navehy, and you could have a charter
school in Alaska. But one of the difficulties that I've
found with talking about charter schools is you have to
get permission from the district to become a charter school,
and then that takes money away from the other schools
operating within the district. And so if you are teaching
(33:13):
an endangered indigenous language that has historically been under attack
bicolonial forces, and you have a school board, odds are
pretty good that that school board is not going to
be a majority Indigenous board. And also what are the
odds that someone on that board is going to speak
your indigenous language. And so we've had instances here in
(33:35):
the community on ak quan Ani also known as Juno,
where they had a proposal ready to go for a
charter school that would be in thing it it would
be in a language medium school. They had already looked
at what Hawitu was doing. They're going to try to
replicate that. And the school board, from what I've heard
from folks who were there, the school board said, okay,
so we're considering this proposal for a Clinket language charter
(33:57):
school and we're done with that. The next them on
the agenda and they didn't even put it on the floor,
they just rolled right over it. So when we look
at the possibility of tribal compacting, it brings in more money,
and it also brings in a word that some people
in Alaska don't like, but it brings in tribal sovereignty,
which I think is important.
Speaker 3 (34:16):
And that really is the premise. Alaska does have very
successful charter schools and if you look at where they're
located across the state, the places that and part of
what makes Alaska successful with charter schools that are approved
and up and running is that they really have that
local buy in and it's based off of the strengths
(34:38):
of the community. And when for example, one of the
compacting partners is operating a charter school and with Kinnik tribe,
So looking at Kinnick has the charter school in their
community and one of the other so you mentioned yayida
On a school at Chikalong, which is a tribally operated
school that has a connection with the Matsuberrow through homeschooling
(35:02):
as a part of the connection for the accreditation for that,
and then also the tribe very firmly has established the
tribal process for accrediting. So you could really consider that
a dual accreditation model because it has the tribal peace.
And then the other school in the last couple of
years that's come online as a tribal school is the
Kutagi Academy up on the icas the nw Pat community
(35:25):
the Artic Slope, So they have a tribal school that
does not have state funding coming to it that they operate,
and then one of the other all of the five
tribal partners, have some form of public education that they're
engaged with right now. That really the peace about it
is even if we had stellar schools in our public
system existing today all across the state, available to every student,
(35:47):
we'd still be having the conversation around tribal compacting because
it's part of that government to government relationship and the
authority that tribes have to inherit currently provide for the
rights of their tribal citizens. So it's not meant to
be something that's penalizing the existing system. It's really about
(36:08):
acknowledging that there is a partner who is missing at
the table right now, and that's our tribal partner. And
so I think that's the piece that allows for transformation
when talking about compacting, is that it allows for the
positive innovations that's been made through chartering, through homeschooling, through
school within school models like what's happening in Ketchikan. It
(36:29):
allows all of that good work to continue and then
amplify through transforming by having the tribe really direct the
education and also thinking about the long standing nature of governments.
You don't have it be individual based. So if you
have an awesome school, if it's running and you have
(36:50):
that elder or that champion who's been there for thirty
fifty years, when they depart for whatever reason, whether we
retire or they pass away, and it's based on apear person,
it's it's very fragile, but when it's with a tribal government,
it stands the test of time. And I think that's
one of the other things about it is it helps
because it's the individuals are connected to a community, and
(37:13):
that tribal community as a government, is able to help
weather the changes that happen as individuals move back and
forth or pass away. Their stability that's created and that's
really important for kids for learning. Is that stability.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
Yeah, exactly. And one of the things that we've been
talking about with some of the teams that are working
in can Get Language schools is trying to develop like this,
multiple schools within a school, so like a little school
universe or a little multiverse.
Speaker 3 (37:42):
I guess.
Speaker 2 (37:43):
So on the outer rim you would have English medium
education with a lot of cultural components that are built
into it. And then inside of that you would have
a language immersion program. So in the English medium program,
they are teaching the language, but it's probably just a
little bit some pieces nouns, colors, numbers, phrases, and probably
(38:06):
not a high percentage of high fluency speakers that are
coming out of that. But inside of that you would
have a language immersion program which prepares it's like a
decompression chamber. It prepares people to move into this universe
where the language is now going to become a medium
of education. So instead of teaching the language, we're going
to use the language to teach you about the world.
(38:28):
And so the next level inside of that would be
a dual language school, which would spend some portion of
its day in the indigenous language and then some portion
of the day in English. And so usually use two
numbers to quantify that, so you can say we're a
twenty eighty school, So I mean it's twenty percent of
our time is spent in thing get eighty percent in English.
And sometimes we're teaching the same content in two different languages.
(38:50):
You could go to fifty to fifty, and you can
go higher. And then on the inside of that would
be a language medium program. Your children who seem to
really be picking up the language, your students who are
really picking it up, you move them to the inside
where all content is taught through the language and all
communication is made through the language. We're not there yet,
but that's the sort of model that we're exploring, and
(39:12):
I do believe that compacting and education is going to
help people get there. And I also think we do
have models in Alaska as well. So in Bethel there
is a language medium program. We know in other communities
that are developing language nests, which is a preschool that
operates entirely in the language, and then those nests can
transition to language medium programs. And so language medium is
(39:35):
the word that I think is used in how I
need to talk about a school where the language of
the whole place is the indigenous language. That's what's expected
in the hallways and the front office when you call
the school. And to try and get to that level,
I think it's important to have stages so you could say, Okay,
if you're not there yet, you can start here. Then
(39:55):
you can work towards this step. They you work towards
this step, then you can work towards this step. And
part of that does involve where does the money come from,
because those are that's a spectrum of danger because if
you take that money from state, from governments, then you're
usually taking their obligations of how things are supposed to be.
But then if you don't take that money, then you've
(40:17):
got to kind of come up with your own money.
And you're also sort of saying it's not the responsibility
of everybody, when it is the responsibility of everybody to
ensure that indigenous languages are healthy and secure and growing,
and that we're not relying on just one person. Like
so there's been language movements who have sort of been
crushed because they had this one speaker they worked with,
(40:40):
and maybe they didn't get enough time and energy and
support to figure out what to do when that person
when they lost that person. Well, we'll talk about that
right after our second break. So we're going to take
our second break. Now we'll be back with Joel Isaac,
and we're going to talk about how to navigate loss,
how to stay positive and motivated, how to not quit
(41:01):
and how to look way into the future when we're
the elders, and what we'll do when we retire or
what other people will do when we retire. Good is
cheeh to nan, We'll be right.
Speaker 4 (41:12):
Back he he.
Speaker 6 (41:27):
Ah yah yah, not say oh god oh ah.
Speaker 4 (42:03):
Carna is away.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
One conains art yeah at a school? Who are yeah?
Has character ket your cask katars and how one collains
you wish you wouchin, has a tea yeah, tongue e tem.
(42:58):
Sometimes the people that we work with the leave us.
Sometimes there's incredible wisdom bearers who walk off and they
leave this box of wisdom in our care. But when
we're doing this work, it's important to know that we're
not alone. That we have previous generations, our ancestors, we
have future generations, our descendants, and we have pockets of
(43:20):
people that hopefully are working with love and generosity and kindness.
But I wanted us to talk a little bit on
this last segment about how to prepare yourself for the
loss of elders. So when I started learning thing it,
there were hundreds of people who could speak like they
were all over It seemed like you would hear it
(43:40):
in post office. You would hear it in grocery store.
You would hear the language on the land. But one
of the things that has happened over these past nearly
thirty years is there's a lot of people who've taught
me the language and I've had a chance to speak
with that are no longer here. And so some of
the things that I would try to do is docus
meant them and just ask them a whole bunch of
(44:02):
tough questions. And some of the groups that we work
with that we partner with here, they would host these
elder luncheons, and there was one elder Here's name is
Banach Fred White, and he would just say, what do
you not hear anymore? What are the things that you
used to hear that you're not hearing so much? And
I'm so glad he would ask that question because we
have a whole bunch of phrases and things that we
(44:22):
still hold on to because he was asking those questions.
So part of it is just writing down what they say.
But that's sort of that's the paper part of it.
That's the building lists. There's there's an emotional and spiritual
journey that comes with receiving information and strength from people
who held on to this stuff through the wars on
(44:43):
our languages, and as we sort of worked with them
and for Shinge, it it gets down to there's these
seven to ten people who can really speak this language,
and that's what we got right now, and we have
to sort of do a lot of work to prepare
our people so that they see the bright light that's come.
But I guess I want to just chat with you
for a little bit about navigating that loss and also
(45:06):
keeping your language movement, keeping the momentum going even though
sometimes you are in a moment of incredible sadness.
Speaker 3 (45:14):
I think for me this is very much a lived
experience in the last month for me and the eclipse happening,
it reminds me of talking with a group of elders
documenting star knowledge and sky knowledge, and for where I'm from,
which other people have different traditions around eclipses, you are
(45:38):
supposed to go outside when it's happening and prepare yourself
mentally and be there with intention, because it's a ceremonial
time and space where you need to be really really
listening in all forms of listening, and an opportunity to
(46:00):
have that clarity to have that connection. It's often something
that you do with a family, so there's a ceremonial
process of that. And thinking about the way that you
prepare yourself for a celestial event like that is similar
to the type of preparing when you can you know
(46:22):
something is going to be happening with someone passing. The
other way that I think about preparing in more of
the community sense is most places around the state have
fish come from fishing people, caribou herd people. We have
these mass abundance historically of being there in a specific
(46:44):
place and being ready because you have a two week
window to get this species of fish, because they're coming
to you and you need to be ready for them.
So I think about that work with working with elders
is that you have to be ready in that moment
because it is a narrow window and time and you
have to align your life to that for that season,
(47:06):
and if you don't, then you're gonna be hurting when
it comes winter and you don't have fish. You also
have to take care of the land and be part
of it throughout the year to know how to watch
and listen for like when are those fish coming, what
are the birds that's sing that you know the salmon
are coming, and it can be hard when there's also
disruption in the fish not returning for all the different reasons.
(47:29):
And I think about that. We talk about that in
my language family a lot. What do we strategically have
to do to be prepared That includes taking care of
each other and ourselves as we deal with that loss.
It's a way to think about the importance of ceremony.
It's one of the things that we've done is document
(47:50):
our ceremonies in the language and then also have to
recreate by talking with many people. What do we do
for potlatching, for example, So our language community spearheaded with
my tribe, the Caninans Union tribe, the first potlatch we
had in like thirty years, and that process of bringing
people back to this specific place at the beach where
(48:11):
our fish come. It was the first fish potlatch is
what we had, and that's one of the ways that
we prepare. The other thing that happened for my language
family is we got up the elders who were first
language speakers both in Ana and any together and had
them basically like professional development for elders. It was kind
(48:31):
of a teasing thing like, oh, we need professional development
for the elders to get together, and like, how do
you deal with being an eighty year old and you
have no one to talk to? How do you teach
when you're an isolated person and you're trying to figure
out how to bring your language back when you're an elder.
So we created space for elders to talk about their
work without us in the room. So we had a
(48:52):
series of things that we did, but we made sure
we had time for them to have their peer group
talk without us in the space, and then we came
back in and listen to what they wanted to share out.
So that's part of that preparing for like knowing they know,
we know they're not going to be here for forever,
and just navigating that that lost piece, I think is
(49:14):
a really hard thing to consider. I've been feeling about
like going to throw up for about three weeks straight,
and so thinking about spending time intentionally to walk outside
every day and to try and surround myself with people
who are there for me in a judgment free kind
of way because I'm not a best version of myself.
(49:37):
That's a really important piece to be careful about. What
kind of energy you invite when you're going through that
kind of grief and that transition. And I go back
to that like the eclipse concept of you have to
be careful what you're going to invite around you when
you're in those moments, because it can have a really
(50:00):
dangerous effect on your life. And I think that's one
of the things that we've seen historically for Native people
overrepresented in negative statistics, is we have not had that
opportunity to have safe spaces with this happening for so
many years. And that's part of what we navigate for
(50:20):
each other with each other, and it's not an easy thing.
The other thing that I think is really powerful is
songs and singing. That's one of the things that's been
really helpful for me to escalate the emotion so I'm
still feeling and processing what I'm going through, but not
having it overpowered to the point where I can't function.
(50:43):
Song is a very powerful tool and part of our
ceremonial practices, not just for Native people. People around the
world sing. That's why humans sing, but we've not been
allowed to sing in my community. That was part of
the residential schoolsidential school would literally come by windows and
look in our houses to make sure that my ancestors
(51:05):
weren't singing in our homes. And so that's one of
those pieces of feeling that ancestral connection to song to
bring that back and doing the potlatching for opposite clans
one of the things. I think the winter before last,
there was a thing Get elder who passed away in
my community and there wasn't the opposite clan to take
(51:29):
care of what need to be taken care of, and
so I built a casket for the elder, and that
was part of the I'm not the opposite clan, but
in some ways being Danina, I'm not thing Get, We're
still part of that bigger language family and thing like
how do we take care of each other when we're
on each other's homelands and away from home and having
(51:50):
that connection to community. For me, that's part of my
role as an opposite clan person that I might not
get to do that I need to be able to
do being an opposite and knowing that other people will
do that for me, like when I'm here in Juno
or if I'm out in y Delta area, people have
done that for me, and so I think that's It's
(52:12):
can be a really beautiful thing to see that kind
of connection that it transcends time and location, but it's
also really rough and taking that time trying to be
gentle on yourself with your family. There's some people that
I tell and I'm just trying to let people know, like, hey,
I'm having a hard time. I might be not my
(52:32):
usual self. So that there's that being honest and that connection,
I think is an important piece of just navigating that.
Speaker 2 (52:42):
Janeah for sharing that, because I think it is important
to consider that. So this what does the collective need
and what does the individual need? And how do you
communicate that with a group. I really recommend folks who
are doing this work have a crew of people that
you can really trust, but just be cautious of it
so that it's not like where this team that's that
(53:04):
other team, because it's so easy to fall into these
kind of traps that I think are just out there.
But just to say, okay, can you take care of
me for a second, because I want to be I
was talking with a friend and a mentor the other
day and she was saying, well, I always think of
those elders who always had the soft eyes and so
they're always looking at things without judgment, and it seemed
(53:26):
like they were just ready to engage in forgiveness and
just calmness, which sometimes I'm not there. And so as
you do this work, I think sometimes in these colonial
spaces which we have to navigate, so in boardrooms and
meetings and school boards and all this other stuff, and
sometimes when I'm in those environments too much, I start
(53:49):
to think, I don't think this is possible. But if
I get out on the land the other day, we're
out in a canoe and we're paddling and the water
was so flat, and we're out on the ocean, we
see these seals popping up and we're singing songs, and
then I think I don't see any future except for
an indigenous future, like just a place where our languages
are living and breathing. So as we kind of wrap
(54:10):
up this conversation, I would like to focus on what
keeps you. You know, we've talked about how you can
just make it through some things, but also like what
are those key things that keep you motivated and inspired
and that you like to share with others because you
feel like that will motivate and inspire them.
Speaker 3 (54:29):
I think spending time with kids is so important, and
that's for me one of those pieces that recharges. And
it's a tricky thing for language work, because we're operating
in two arenas of time is precious and it will
never be the same again as the part of sending
(54:51):
someone on who's no longer with us in the same way.
But then also you have children who are developing and
you have the need to like catch them while they're
still developing as a human being. And kids grow so
stinking fast, and that piece of seeing the joy of
that child and the energy that you get from working
(55:14):
with kids is really really helpful for me. I think
about Helen, the elder who I work with and mentor
with her. Form of compensation that she inherited from her
cheetah from her grandma is you need to teach somebody
else this knowledge. That is the expectation, whether or not
(55:34):
money has exchanged hands or however. All of that works
as well, because that's very appropriate also. But the premise
within our culture is that I'm showing you something so
that you can show somebody else, and that makes space
for everybody, and it's done with intentionality. It's a way
to stay positive, and that also brings us back to
(55:56):
the land. Two summers ago, I was able to bild
a birch bark canoe with a group of people. And
I've been looking for a birch tree for making a
canoe out of for about fifteen years, I think with
thirteen fifteen years, and one came to us, and so
it was a tree that we had missed. We didn't
think we were able to harvest that one highway was
coming through. We were on a clock and saw it.
(56:19):
It was perfect, and came back and worked on it
till midnight to get the bark and everything we needed
to do. And I think those are those kinds of
things that really help stay positive, keep motivated and thinking
about what you've learned from spending time out on the land.
It was such an amazing thing to be in a
birch bark canoe on the water and that hasn't been
(56:41):
done in like one hundred and twenty years in my area.
And so knowing that we can do that with a
young group of people, we also had hell in there
with us. It's not perfect. If a paddle on one
side you go straight, but it floats, it holds, holds
me as an adult male who's able to paddle it
(57:02):
and it works. So that's our first one. I made
a model one. We're going to make another one this summer,
and so that's part of that. That hope piece, that
motivational piece is its interesting work and it's hard work.
It's connected and there's that connection to the land is
also very helpful and.
Speaker 1 (57:22):
Feeling chana.
Speaker 2 (57:26):
Y shite yahyaguy shitaya hayagu Our canoe is really gliding along.
So that's I love that verb. It just really talks
about when you're really paddling in that canoe is just
cutting through the water. So that's what we're going for
when we have these conversations. So thankful to be here
with Joel Isaac to talk about these things, these these
(57:49):
thoughts and all these different realms and all these different
ways that we're doing this work. So as you find
ways to recharge and reconnect and build possibilities where you're
language is continuing to gain strength, gain possibilities, just know
there are other people out there who are doing these things.
We will continue to make positive, lasting connections where we're
(58:13):
reaching across time and space because we're decolonizing this stuff
that's why I show up late for meetings, and so
as we sort of engage in these things, the future
becomes much more possible and we become much less frustrated.
But I really want to echo, get out on the land,
sing your songs, speak your language, engage with children. I
(58:35):
remember being in Hawaii and I thought I was getting
pretty good at Hawaiian and we go into their language
medium school and this six year old has to tell
me ten times that his brother had the same laptop
as me.
Speaker 4 (58:46):
And I got it.
Speaker 2 (58:46):
I finally got it. But I was actually happy. I
wasn't frustrated that I had to listen so many times.
I was happy that I can have this high fluency
child and I could talk to them. And so engage
with people in positive, in productive ways. Get them talking,
get them listening, keep them motivated, and just do it
with love and respect and kindness in these acts of
(59:11):
decolonization and unity. The Tongue Unbroken is a project of
the Next Up Initiative on the iHeartMedia network. Check out
other Next Up podcasts that are coming out and support
Indigenous languages and Indigenous voices on indigenous lands. Yeah Oway, Benna,
cheesh Chennan,
They tried to colonizzus, try to genocide. Yet we're still
here with the tongue on broke, and.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
To Joel Isaac Tenny, welcome everybody to the Tongue unbroken.
We are recording right near this place called set which
is on the Channel, which is a channel in between
the communities of Juno and Douglas, Alaska. And I'm excited
to be visiting with my guest and close friend here,
(00:55):
Joel Isaac. When I think of Joel, I think of
something people used to tell me, which was, you can't
do a whole bunch of things. You got to just
pick one thing and be good at it. And I
always rejected that idea because I thought, what if I
want to write stories, and what if I want to
make music, and what if I want to make artwork,
and what if I want to learn and teach languages?
(01:16):
Why do I have to just pick one thing? And
then to push back on these stereotypes that if you
don't pick one thing, you won't be good at anything,
and I don't think those things are true because I
make music, I write, I learn language, I teach language,
I do governance work and advocacy work, and so does
Joel Isaac, who's a talented, incredible artist, a dedicated and
(01:39):
wonderful language learner and teacher, and does a ton of
advocacy work statewide. But I'll let him introduce himself. So
you want to tell the people who you are to.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
Kill the Tai Vashnish, but do our Calendar Pennington Shachita
a vay Latin, Sharon Isaac Shunkta, David Isaac Shukta an
Joel Isaac go Shana Shiji. So I just want to
acknowledge those listening and appreciation for having conversation, and introduce
my family. Fodora Calendar Pennington was my grandmother. My parents
(02:11):
are Sharon and David Isaac, and my Ina name is Ayis,
which means salmon skin, and my English name is Joel Isaac.
And that's just a little bit about where I come
from as far as the people in my life. I'm
dani Ena so Echelon sheet Kina or Cotton New Shagu
Shakaya Kilanda. That's where my village is right now. My
(02:33):
grandmother originally was from Point Possession, which is just across
the water from Anchorage, one of the spots where Captain
Cook didn't come on board, but send men aboard or
off off the ship onto the land to bury some
gold quarters, to claim Alaska. And so that's a little
bit about where my family's from. And yeah, we're ocean Dene.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
People to now. The other day I was talking with
folks and I was saying I started learning sing it
in nineteen ninety six, which means this is my what's
the math? I've been doing this for almost thirty years,
and so as I get close to my thirty year
anniversary of being a language learner and maybe my twentieth
(03:16):
anniversary of being a language teacher, sometimes it reflect on
what brought me to this place. So what brought you
into language reclamation work within the ena specifically and then
also with some of the work that you do stay.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
With similar year. For me, I'm a little bit younger,
So I was in kindergarten, first second grade and around
nineteen ninety six to nineteen ninety eight, so that was
when I first wanted to learn Danina. And so that's
really where I think my journey started, was that desire
to learn it and realizing there was no access point
(03:51):
and there were things that I learned material culture that
was the classic making a paper costume at a paper
for Thanksgiving and being an Indian and my sister was
dressed up as a pilgrim. So those were the activities
we did in school, which I was actually stoked about
because I wanted to make the clothing that my people
(04:12):
would have made, and so there was an opportunity to
do that. And that's when I really realized that this
is not what was being taught to me, wasn't really
what I was interested in. And that was like in
those kindergarten first grade years and then sixth grade into
science fair project with birch bark baskets, and that was
(04:32):
something that we had a couple of birch bark baskets
in my house growing up, and I would go to
the library and check out books and so that was
like my science fair. And then when I actually got
access to the language was a resource my mom picked
up at a thrift store that was Denia keen I
keywords that doctor Carey had put together with keen I
speakers and had a CD in the back and it's
(04:55):
basically forty four playlists with ten words which are key
words that go with that sound. And when I was
at UAF and art school. I would listen to that
while making the Danina statues that I made out a bronze,
and that was the only denied audio that I'd ever
heard until twenty sixteen. After I graduated my MFA in
(05:16):
New York, I came back home and took a language
class with Sandra Shaganath Stewart and Helen Dick at the
time were co teaching, and Sondra was one of the
people who when I was back in that kindergarten first
grade zone, would come into kBT Elementary and teach cultural
things like beating that my sisters were involved with. And
(05:38):
then she was also my first college teacher for language
about twenty years later. Then she and I started teaching together,
and then I started teaching grammar classes with doctor Alan
Boris before he passed away, and then I entered an
Indigenous Studies PhD program. My segue into language was through
the material culture and the love for spending time out
(06:00):
side and be on the land, and then finding the
access point of the people who could teach, and then
very quickly jumping into that pool of teachers and kind
of teaching like one year ahead of where people are at.
And that's my segue into language was through art.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
I want to talk some of the specifics about deni Ena,
but talk about your art for a little bit, like
what kind of art work do you do, what do
you think about while you're doing it, and how do
you envision some of your next projects.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
I often there's two ways to describe my work. One
is contemporary indigenous art, the other is installation work. I
do three dimensional sculpture predominantly, and like I was talking
about before, life sized bronze statues of I've made Grandma
Olga Yazai, who's at the mouthorship Creek and anchorage putting
up fish camp. That was part of the cultural mitigation
(06:53):
for the port of anchorage being put on top of
a traditional Deniina fishing site. So if you look out
and see the port, that's burred and people fish, and
it's why people still go to that creek to fish,
it's just now there's a port on top of it.
So that's where one of my statues are that I've made.
And then in keen I at the DNA Wellness Center,
I made a family of three, so father, mother, a
(07:17):
daughter putting up fish. And then when the hospital in Bethel,
the Yukon Cost Health Corporation expansion or the IHS facility.
There there's a Yupik family of four where it's a mom, dad, son,
daughter putting up fish, pulling fish out of a net.
And so for me, what I like about the installation
(07:38):
work is that it shows our people living. The goal
is to active human beings spending time with the land.
They're not on giant plints. They're able to be. You
can put your arm around them, take a picture of them.
I love seeing kids run up to them and look
at them and stand next to them. That was really
(08:00):
fun when we were installing in Bethel, there's two the
kids are about three and a half feet tall that
I've made at a bronze and watching the kids run
out of the hospital and like go up to the
kids and feel like want to try and like lift
the fish too, was just really special because that's the purpose,
and that's the communities that are commissioning and want our
(08:23):
people to be presented as living people, not as conquerors
of the land, not as like mortuary objects. We're doing
the things we've been doing for thousands of years, and
it's monumenting that in bronze. So That's one of the
things that I've done since twenty twelve was my first
(08:44):
life size bronze statue, and that's a a big piece
of what I do, and thinking about installation of that
piece of space out as a viewer, how does a
community engage with work. My next solo show is going
to be at the State Museum here in Juno in
the fall, and that one's about fish. A giant smokehouse
essentially made out of cotton fabric that has the fish
(09:07):
count data for the river that I fish on embroidered
into it. So there's about one point three million stitches
that are tick marks or the salmon run into the fabric.
Then I smoke the fabric, it gets suspended from the
ceiling and you can walk underneath it, and then there's
about nine tons of sand on the floor, so it's
like walking on the beach and you can smell the
(09:29):
smell of the smokehouse and you can see a visual
representation of the fish going up the river. So that's
my next kind of big projects.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Chees Chnan and I think in my mind being an
artist sometimes helps you with some things. I spend a
lot of time trying to visualize the thing it language
and trying to think, Okay, it's too abstract when it's explained,
it's too abstract when you think about it in English.
And so I try to rely on visual things for
a bridge between what is thint what is English, as
(10:01):
we are trying to bring a lot of our people
back to our languages from English and then also bring
a lot of visitors to our land to our language,
and a lot of them also know English. And so
I was thinking about this because we've known each other
for a minute and we were probably in New York
City about five years ago for the Linguistic Society of
(10:21):
America conference, which was wild, Like I remember, I would
walk around, look at posters and go to presentations, and
I would think, I don't know what any of these
people are talking about, Like hardly any of this stuff
makes sense. But then there's a small pocket of people
who are working actively in indigenous languages. And I'm not
saying linguistics is not useful, but there's a part of
(10:41):
linguistics that really talks to itself as a field, and
then there's a part that really focuses on how do
you get people to learn and use languages and not
to say those things are exclusive of each other. But
sometimes I would walk around and I would think this
is really interesting. But it's trying to figure out a
lot of really deeply detailed stuff about how languages work,
and we are literally trying to survive, and so I
(11:05):
don't really have the focus and energy to do some
of that stuff. But in one of these sessions, it
might have been a had Nashoni language, but they were
showing us how they were color coding their language. And
I think you had already been thinking about this stuff.
I'd even breaking fling it into these little parts and
trying to continue to think about how do I make
these parts more accessible. And I think you had mentioned
(11:26):
something at that point, but I certainly said, I'm going
to color code cling it grammar, and from this point forward,
we're going to teach it through colors and these categories
of colors. And so what we do is we break
down all of the different parts of the verb, especially
and say, within these verbs, there's these different components, and
these components will have their own colors, and we're not
(11:47):
going to focus really on what they're called. We'll focus
on what they do and how to use them. And
then what happens when you start putting them into a
certain order. So can you talk about this kind of
work that you've been doing and how it might help
you in teaching the big scary concept of grammar.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
Yes, so I often when I'm teaching grammar class, say
dna Ena grammar or Danae Grammar is just as easy
and just as much fun as organic chemistry. They have
very similar roots and analysis, and they can have a
two inch thick manual that you need to learn how
to use and a lot of memorization, and you have
(12:29):
to figure out how neighboring things get along or don't
get along with each other, and how they react. So
I've started out my undergrad in chemistry and have a
periodic table shower curtain that I brought to every place
that I've lived since I went to college. It's a
gift Christmas gift from friends. So I'm a little bit
of a nerd. And the difference between when I think
(12:51):
about linguistics and my joy that I have in linguistics
is its analysis. It really is a beneficial tool for
mapping and charting and understanding things in an analytical way.
It's not a teaching tool. It's an important piece of
developing teaching tools. I think about another analogy of that
(13:11):
is that there is an active war against our languages,
and that's an example, like in the Civil War, the
advancement in medicine that happened through doing field hospitals was extraordinary.
It's awful how that advancement took place. So, just using
kind of different reasons why Native people and students in
(13:32):
Native or non Native might feel really strongly yucky about
the analysis of our indigenous languages is it's because it's
a product of war, and it's also something where you
can get like bonding in the trenches. So I enjoy linguistics.
I find it fascinating, it's interesting. I think there's beauty
(13:53):
in it, but there's also this underbelly of it that
can be really yucky, and if you read through historical
linguistic accounts, there's some nasty stuff. I also have some
very good friends who I really enjoy who are linguists,
and apparently I'm also a linguist, I've been told. So
I just putting that with a grain of salt. The
flip side from taking the analytical piece and figuring out
(14:15):
how things come apart is then putting them together, and
I think that's where the teaching thing is really exciting,
and that's where using the color coding. When we were
in New York talking about that, what I'd been thinking
about is taking the template that is basically about fourteen
prefixes for deniana of slots that you plug in things
similar to like building molecules. The different elements off the
(14:37):
pairic table react differently when you put them next to
their neighbors. We have a chart that does the same
thing for morphemes or little parts of words, and how
to color code that and then also use imagery. So
what I'd worked on at that time was drawing out
the spruce tree and its environment onto about one and
(14:57):
a half inch squares of paper, and thinking about a
tree is a thing that's made up of individual parts.
And you can look at a tree and see, like
spruce needles are really can be beneficial, but you can't
have needles without a branch, and you can't have a
branch without a trunk, and the trunk can't survive without bark,
(15:18):
and the tree can't live if it doesn't have roots
in a cambium. Later and you don't really see the
roots under the ground, but you know they're there because
the tree is not falling over. And looking at that
analogy of a tree being made up of small individual
things that relate and are connected. And that's like our
verbs are made up of these things called morphemes that
are all interconnected, and they react to each other differently.
(15:41):
And sometimes you see evidence of something without seeing the thing.
So like when a wind is blowing through the tree,
you can't see the wind, but you see evidence of
the wind. And our words have features like that in them.
So I drew the tree in black and white about
two years before that conference on a flight to going
down to the Day Language Conference in the Talawa Nation
(16:03):
area of northern California, southern organ and then on that
way to New York, I was thinking a lot about
the color coding and it color code the chart and
putting those images with the colors so that something tactle
so people can pick up and build. And then you
can assemble a tree and you can add things to
it like spiders or birds nests, or it could fall over,
(16:25):
or someone might cut the tree down, or you could
make a fish trap out of the tree. You could
put fish up. Taking the poles and making a drying rack,
like all these things you can do with trees. That
that's all the prefixes. There's an analogy to a spruce
tree and the spruce tree story our Chivala sukdua or
spruce tree story Virdenina is a story about how the
(16:46):
animals divide it up into pairs, and how the plants
divided up into pairs. But the spruce tree didn't have anyone,
and the cotton tree cottonwood tree didn't have anyone. But
the spruce tree is all gnarly and has like pus
coming out, which is that the jach the pitch, and
the cottonwood tree is all straight and pretty and said, no,
you're ugly, I'm not going to be your partner. And
the cottonwood tree is not a very useful tree in
(17:10):
comparison to the spruce tree, which is like every single
part of it's useful. And so there's a lesson to
be learned about that. And then it also the story
has a song and it talks about the dog also
didn't have a partner, and so it was going to
be the partner for the campfire people, which is the
plants and animal's name for dan ena and that's why
dogs are given the same agency in pronoun configuration as people.
(17:35):
And so it's this really foundational story that is thousands
of years old that I started to think about how
our language has that deep seated connection and that's how
I teach grammar.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Now, wow, and I think, as you're sharing that you
gave me some language. A few years ago, I was
writing an episode from Oliv Danale and I think there
was an episode where they're using spruce pitch to sometimes
they call them like an indigenous band aid because there's
a lot of healing that can happen through spruce pitch.
So I think we use maybe if I remember right,
(18:08):
so dena ena words for spruce in that episode. So
it's really neat when these things come full circle because
I think a lot of the work that we do
is we're rebuilding this whole ecosystem, like a language has
an ecosystem, and one person is a part of that
ecosystem and they have to learn how to get along
with other beings that are in that ecosystem and also
(18:29):
to communicate, and a lot of that does involve building
an entire grammar structure within a human being, which sometimes
can feel really artificial, like emberone else learning Hawaiian. One
of our instructors would say, this is an artificial form
of Hawaiian, and you should know that. You shouldn't be
embarrassed by it. You shouldn't be afraid of that. If
people say, boy, you don't sound like someone who's been
(18:50):
speaking Hawaiian for eighty years, is because you haven't. But
if you stick to this method, you can naturalize the language.
And I think sometimes for some of our people's and
for people who come to our languages, it's very different
than what they might expect. Once they get going, they're
probably learning how to make sounds, and then they're learning
lists of words and phrases and things that you can memorize.
(19:13):
And it feels good because you know a response for
this type of thing, but you're really sort of just
recalling this entire phrase, which is not nothing. It's a
complicated process. It's a big accomplishment. But once you start
getting into communication, looking out the window and telling someone
what's going on, hearing some information and giving your opinion
(19:33):
about it, suddenly that becomes something that's very difficult for
people to assemble. And a lot of that has to
do with our languages being incredibly flexible in terms of
how they shift once things start moving around conceptually. So
I think it's important to look at grammar because a
person cannot memorize a DNA language. You just cannot. You
(19:56):
have to figure out how these parts go. And maybe
there's a path forty years from now, or there's multiple
paths forty years from now where we say, okay, you
don't have to do this particular method. But I'm still
I always struggle when some people say I think I'll
just skip the grammar. I don't want to do the
grammar stuff. But that's the whole thought world of the
language where those stories that you mentioned, some of those
(20:17):
stories are just built completely into the language. Like the
ocean where the ocean meets the land is built into
the thing at language because we are ocean going people.
So I think it's important to do that, but also
to do it in a way that is intentionally decolonial
and inclusive and making sure that people aren't overly scared
(20:40):
and that they feel confident and that they know it's
going to be okay, even though their English brain is
probably going to either reject a lot of concepts or
get mad because it's assuming okay, because this is this.
If I change this, it will be this other thing.
And sometimes the language is like, no, it's a completely
different thing. And so as we build those patterns and
indigenous languge, which is it's exciting to see how other
(21:02):
languages are doing that. For Dinnaa and shing It, we
were the same language probably thirty thousand years ago, but
we were completely different languages now. But we can still
share a lot of tactics and techniques that work in
terms of figuring out how our language works and then
figuring out how we can nest that whole thought world
into wonderful human beings. So with that thought, we're gonna
(21:24):
take a little break and we'll be back right after this.
Gonna cheese taine chenan.
Speaker 4 (21:42):
One or two.
Speaker 5 (21:43):
Or three times you try any DNA friends, you run
around without joy, struggle yesterday, you struggle still today now,
but you'll find a broad away. My brother sisters, don't
(22:08):
you know what about the way to wait it back?
Speaker 4 (22:13):
For those who came.
Speaker 5 (22:18):
Believe in yourself now blieve in us somehow dona de.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Calornasy predict the goot you do a song? Question, wait
do teine Joey Wilcock on a Shukkie tea. The word
(22:45):
for the eclipse and clink it is predict the goot,
which means that it walked into oblivion. And when I
think of the eclipse, I think of that as cling at.
People were really scared of the eclipse long time ago.
We thought it would turn people stone. We also thought
Raven would turn people to stone, which he did. He
turned this guy walking his dog to stone. He turned
(23:07):
Russians to stone. But I think about that because stepping
out of the colonial process, which you had accurately described
as a war against our languages, sometimes we have to
go into some of the systems that exist and adjust
those systems. And so you are a person who wears
(23:29):
many hats, and I'm not going to ask you to
detail the internal workings of all these things that you do.
But I guess I want to just have a loose
conversation about government work and education and what kinds of
things we're doing, because I remember I was talking quite
a bit at this program in Stanford where there was
(23:49):
it was called the First Nation's Futures Program. There are
Alaska natives, there are Hawaiians, there are Maori people, and
I was just talking about some ideas about developing specifically
an Alaska Native Languages school Board or Schools Consortium, which
would be a statewide governing body for language medium schools
(24:10):
and language nests. And someone looked at me and I said, well,
didn't education destroy your languages? Why is that the thing
that you think is going to help you? And I said,
because I've never seen a language that was threatened come
to a healthy place without taking control of their education,
at least in some ways, they got to share that control.
(24:31):
And so you do a lot of work in education
and in governance, and I just was curious about your
thoughts on the role that we do and the work
that we do in those arenas.
Speaker 3 (24:43):
Jnan, That's a great question. I think there's two hats
that I wear that kind of speak to this question.
One is as a doctoral student working on how to
do reading instruction, which in paramount to what we do
in western education model is learn to read and then
you learn through reading. And that shift happens right now
(25:03):
in our country in that third to fourth grade zone,
about nine to ten year olds are making that shift.
And we have a choice, as indigenous people across the
country across the world if reading is something that is
going to be a part of our tribal or our
indigenous education systems that we're building, and there are pockets
(25:24):
around the country that choose to not write down their
languages and maintain a very oral based language literacy instead
of going text or alphabetic or syllabary language literacy. In Alaska,
a lot of our languages have in some way or
form embraced an alphabetic writing system. And I think about
(25:48):
that for how to use this tool that has been
a weapon against our people in reshaping it and that
bronze work, the metal urgy stuff of like how do
you take something that's a weapon and turn it into
a tool. Steel can be very destructive if you have
as a sword and chop and hack at people. But
(26:10):
if you make needles out of it, you can also
sew things back together and construct them. So I think
about that where if we have a system that's based
off of the intent of healing and being additive and
constructive and not a deficit model, there's a lot of
strength there. And that's the way that I've approached my
(26:31):
research on reading in developing a deny on a culturally
based approach for reading instruction. I think about that for
how do we bring our native community along in our
education system that's a Western based structure, which is text
based and reading based. One of the pieces if you
look into the history of reading in the last fifty
(26:52):
years around the world and the English speaking world is
going back to the war analogy, there's the reading wars,
and so we have very critically endangered languages that have
been attacked on multiple fronts and then being boisted into
this reading war arena. That's not our war, and so
I think what's really exciting to me is that it
(27:14):
presents an opportunity for Indigenous people to show how there's
space in reading and in language that's not a deficit model.
Multi lingual learning makes stronger cognitive human beings, and so
there's a different shift thinking about it from a monolingual
approach versus a multi lingual approach. So that's in a
(27:38):
lot of the university system research that does multi lingual
learning research is based off of colonial dominant languages like Spanish,
Chinese English are the ones that I've looked at the
most for my research, and that's part of thinking how
do we have space in our Western higher edgycation systems
(28:00):
of research where tribes indigenous people feel like they want
to engage in that research because it benefits the community
that they're from, is really how that shift happens in
a positive way. So I think that's one of the
pieces around that research higher education piece. The other one
is in that K twelve or that preschool through twelve arena,
(28:22):
and that's where I think the conversation around private education
compacting between the State of Alaska and tribes within Alaska
is really making some very interesting conversations, and really it's
about the additive approach and thinking. All of the five
tribal compacting partners who are going through the pilot phase
(28:44):
of in the demonstration phase have language as a core
piece of their education models. It's in all the mission statements.
It is inherently connected to who we are as Native people.
It's the way we think, it's the pedagogy, it's all
the different approaches that go into how you instruct and
it connects us to land in this place that's across
(29:07):
the state of Alaska. And that's one of the things
that I think is that transformational piece of it is
that it leans into our strengths in the state, so
education systems we have local control and is really what
the foundation of Alaska's public education system is based off of.
(29:27):
And tribes are inherently part of that local control consideration.
So those are some of the ways that I think
about the education and the power to transform education. If
we look at the history around Sheldon Jackson planning for
the boarding school era that swept across North America, including
(29:48):
Canada and US. The US version started in Alaska and
it was a strategically planned initiative to eradicate our people
both physically, spiritually, and linguistically, and it was found to
be illegal shortly after it started. Congress said no, you
actually can't do that with the funds because it was
(30:10):
contracting children for religious purposes, and you can't use public
funds to have church run schools, and you can. The
primary sources from eighteen eighty five in that plus or
minus ten years are pretty horrific, and so I think
that's part of thinking about transformation is moving from a
(30:30):
model that puts dog tags on children so you can
track where they are in the community to make sure
they're not at home and they're captured at school because
the parents were punished and fined and other forms of
torture administered to the parents and the child if the
child wasn't in school, to be forced to eradicate Native
(30:51):
culture and language. Going from that model to something where
you have tribes developing the educational model is really exciting.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
And just to give this thing a bit of a
framework in case folks don't know. So there are federally
recognized tribes in the United States, and then in Alaska
you also have corporations that were formed both at the
regional and village level because of the Alaska Native Claimed
Settlement Act. And so within those frameworks you also have education,
(31:24):
which I think was a church run institution, and then
it gave way to both what became public education in
Alaska and then a separate strand which was the Bureau
of Indian Education, which ran schools also in Alaska, and
then that transition to what is basically public education in
(31:45):
Alaska today, which is made up of school districts, charter schools,
and correspondence schools, and then you also have private schools.
You have other options from there, and so what has
been developed simply has been the concept of tribally compacted education.
So a tribe has the right to compact, which is
(32:08):
usually a term where the tribes says, okay, the government
would use this amount of money to run this type
of program for our tribal members, our tribal citizens, so
we will take that money into it ourselves. And there's
a lot of different arenas where tribes have the right
to do that and do that. It takes capacity, it
takes another a number of other things, it takes negotiation
(32:28):
with the government. But in education, that's an area in
Alaska where you haven't really seen that outside of Chickaalan.
I don't think outside of there you have too many
actual tribally run schools where the federally recognized tribe is
the one who is running the school. So it works
in partnership all throughout Alaska. But as we sort of
look at the possibilities, so in Pai they have a
(32:52):
charter school, so they have a K through twelve charter
school and it's Navehy, and you could have a charter
school in Alaska. But one of the difficulties that I've
found with talking about charter schools is you have to
get permission from the district to become a charter school,
and then that takes money away from the other schools
operating within the district. And so if you are teaching
(33:13):
an endangered indigenous language that has historically been under attack
bicolonial forces, and you have a school board, odds are
pretty good that that school board is not going to
be a majority Indigenous board. And also what are the
odds that someone on that board is going to speak
your indigenous language. And so we've had instances here in
(33:35):
the community on ak quan Ani also known as Juno,
where they had a proposal ready to go for a
charter school that would be in thing it it would
be in a language medium school. They had already looked
at what Hawitu was doing. They're going to try to
replicate that. And the school board, from what I've heard
from folks who were there, the school board said, okay,
so we're considering this proposal for a Clinket language charter
(33:57):
school and we're done with that. The next them on
the agenda and they didn't even put it on the floor,
they just rolled right over it. So when we look
at the possibility of tribal compacting, it brings in more money,
and it also brings in a word that some people
in Alaska don't like, but it brings in tribal sovereignty,
which I think is important.
Speaker 3 (34:16):
And that really is the premise. Alaska does have very
successful charter schools and if you look at where they're
located across the state, the places that and part of
what makes Alaska successful with charter schools that are approved
and up and running is that they really have that
local buy in and it's based off of the strengths
(34:38):
of the community. And when for example, one of the
compacting partners is operating a charter school and with Kinnik tribe,
So looking at Kinnick has the charter school in their
community and one of the other so you mentioned yayida
On a school at Chikalong, which is a tribally operated
school that has a connection with the Matsuberrow through homeschooling
(35:02):
as a part of the connection for the accreditation for that,
and then also the tribe very firmly has established the
tribal process for accrediting. So you could really consider that
a dual accreditation model because it has the tribal peace.
And then the other school in the last couple of
years that's come online as a tribal school is the
Kutagi Academy up on the icas the nw Pat community
(35:25):
the Artic Slope, So they have a tribal school that
does not have state funding coming to it that they operate,
and then one of the other all of the five
tribal partners, have some form of public education that they're
engaged with right now. That really the peace about it
is even if we had stellar schools in our public
system existing today all across the state, available to every student,
(35:47):
we'd still be having the conversation around tribal compacting because
it's part of that government to government relationship and the
authority that tribes have to inherit currently provide for the
rights of their tribal citizens. So it's not meant to
be something that's penalizing the existing system. It's really about
(36:08):
acknowledging that there is a partner who is missing at
the table right now, and that's our tribal partner. And
so I think that's the piece that allows for transformation
when talking about compacting, is that it allows for the
positive innovations that's been made through chartering, through homeschooling, through
school within school models like what's happening in Ketchikan. It
(36:29):
allows all of that good work to continue and then
amplify through transforming by having the tribe really direct the
education and also thinking about the long standing nature of governments.
You don't have it be individual based. So if you
have an awesome school, if it's running and you have
(36:50):
that elder or that champion who's been there for thirty
fifty years, when they depart for whatever reason, whether we
retire or they pass away, and it's based on apear person,
it's it's very fragile, but when it's with a tribal government,
it stands the test of time. And I think that's
one of the other things about it is it helps
because it's the individuals are connected to a community, and
(37:13):
that tribal community as a government, is able to help
weather the changes that happen as individuals move back and
forth or pass away. Their stability that's created and that's
really important for kids for learning. Is that stability.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
Yeah, exactly. And one of the things that we've been
talking about with some of the teams that are working
in can Get Language schools is trying to develop like this,
multiple schools within a school, so like a little school
universe or a little multiverse.
Speaker 3 (37:42):
I guess.
Speaker 2 (37:43):
So on the outer rim you would have English medium
education with a lot of cultural components that are built
into it. And then inside of that you would have
a language immersion program. So in the English medium program,
they are teaching the language, but it's probably just a
little bit some pieces nouns, colors, numbers, phrases, and probably
(38:06):
not a high percentage of high fluency speakers that are
coming out of that. But inside of that you would
have a language immersion program which prepares it's like a
decompression chamber. It prepares people to move into this universe
where the language is now going to become a medium
of education. So instead of teaching the language, we're going
to use the language to teach you about the world.
(38:28):
And so the next level inside of that would be
a dual language school, which would spend some portion of
its day in the indigenous language and then some portion
of the day in English. And so usually use two
numbers to quantify that, so you can say we're a
twenty eighty school, So I mean it's twenty percent of
our time is spent in thing get eighty percent in English.
And sometimes we're teaching the same content in two different languages.
(38:50):
You could go to fifty to fifty, and you can
go higher. And then on the inside of that would
be a language medium program. Your children who seem to
really be picking up the language, your students who are
really picking it up, you move them to the inside
where all content is taught through the language and all
communication is made through the language. We're not there yet,
but that's the sort of model that we're exploring, and
(39:12):
I do believe that compacting and education is going to
help people get there. And I also think we do
have models in Alaska as well. So in Bethel there
is a language medium program. We know in other communities
that are developing language nests, which is a preschool that
operates entirely in the language, and then those nests can
transition to language medium programs. And so language medium is
(39:35):
the word that I think is used in how I
need to talk about a school where the language of
the whole place is the indigenous language. That's what's expected
in the hallways and the front office when you call
the school. And to try and get to that level,
I think it's important to have stages so you could say, Okay,
if you're not there yet, you can start here. Then
(39:55):
you can work towards this step. They you work towards
this step, then you can work towards this step. And
part of that does involve where does the money come from,
because those are that's a spectrum of danger because if
you take that money from state, from governments, then you're
usually taking their obligations of how things are supposed to be.
But then if you don't take that money, then you've
(40:17):
got to kind of come up with your own money.
And you're also sort of saying it's not the responsibility
of everybody, when it is the responsibility of everybody to
ensure that indigenous languages are healthy and secure and growing,
and that we're not relying on just one person. Like
so there's been language movements who have sort of been
crushed because they had this one speaker they worked with,
(40:40):
and maybe they didn't get enough time and energy and
support to figure out what to do when that person
when they lost that person. Well, we'll talk about that
right after our second break. So we're going to take
our second break. Now we'll be back with Joel Isaac,
and we're going to talk about how to navigate loss,
how to stay positive and motivated, how to not quit
(41:01):
and how to look way into the future when we're
the elders, and what we'll do when we retire or
what other people will do when we retire. Good is
cheeh to nan, We'll be right.
Speaker 4 (41:12):
Back he he.
Speaker 6 (41:27):
Ah yah yah, not say oh god oh ah.
Speaker 4 (42:03):
Carna is away.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
One conains art yeah at a school? Who are yeah?
Has character ket your cask katars and how one collains
you wish you wouchin, has a tea yeah, tongue e tem.
(42:58):
Sometimes the people that we work with the leave us.
Sometimes there's incredible wisdom bearers who walk off and they
leave this box of wisdom in our care. But when
we're doing this work, it's important to know that we're
not alone. That we have previous generations, our ancestors, we
have future generations, our descendants, and we have pockets of
(43:20):
people that hopefully are working with love and generosity and kindness.
But I wanted us to talk a little bit on
this last segment about how to prepare yourself for the
loss of elders. So when I started learning thing it,
there were hundreds of people who could speak like they
were all over It seemed like you would hear it
(43:40):
in post office. You would hear it in grocery store.
You would hear the language on the land. But one
of the things that has happened over these past nearly
thirty years is there's a lot of people who've taught
me the language and I've had a chance to speak
with that are no longer here. And so some of
the things that I would try to do is docus
meant them and just ask them a whole bunch of
(44:02):
tough questions. And some of the groups that we work
with that we partner with here, they would host these
elder luncheons, and there was one elder Here's name is
Banach Fred White, and he would just say, what do
you not hear anymore? What are the things that you
used to hear that you're not hearing so much? And
I'm so glad he would ask that question because we
have a whole bunch of phrases and things that we
(44:22):
still hold on to because he was asking those questions.
So part of it is just writing down what they say.
But that's sort of that's the paper part of it.
That's the building lists. There's there's an emotional and spiritual
journey that comes with receiving information and strength from people
who held on to this stuff through the wars on
(44:43):
our languages, and as we sort of worked with them
and for Shinge, it it gets down to there's these
seven to ten people who can really speak this language,
and that's what we got right now, and we have
to sort of do a lot of work to prepare
our people so that they see the bright light that's come.
But I guess I want to just chat with you
for a little bit about navigating that loss and also
(45:06):
keeping your language movement, keeping the momentum going even though
sometimes you are in a moment of incredible sadness.
Speaker 3 (45:14):
I think for me this is very much a lived
experience in the last month for me and the eclipse happening,
it reminds me of talking with a group of elders
documenting star knowledge and sky knowledge, and for where I'm from,
which other people have different traditions around eclipses, you are
(45:38):
supposed to go outside when it's happening and prepare yourself
mentally and be there with intention, because it's a ceremonial
time and space where you need to be really really
listening in all forms of listening, and an opportunity to
(46:00):
have that clarity to have that connection. It's often something
that you do with a family, so there's a ceremonial
process of that. And thinking about the way that you
prepare yourself for a celestial event like that is similar
to the type of preparing when you can you know
(46:22):
something is going to be happening with someone passing. The
other way that I think about preparing in more of
the community sense is most places around the state have
fish come from fishing people, caribou herd people. We have
these mass abundance historically of being there in a specific
(46:44):
place and being ready because you have a two week
window to get this species of fish, because they're coming
to you and you need to be ready for them.
So I think about that work with working with elders
is that you have to be ready in that moment
because it is a narrow window and time and you
have to align your life to that for that season,
(47:06):
and if you don't, then you're gonna be hurting when
it comes winter and you don't have fish. You also
have to take care of the land and be part
of it throughout the year to know how to watch
and listen for like when are those fish coming, what
are the birds that's sing that you know the salmon
are coming, and it can be hard when there's also
disruption in the fish not returning for all the different reasons.
(47:29):
And I think about that. We talk about that in
my language family a lot. What do we strategically have
to do to be prepared That includes taking care of
each other and ourselves as we deal with that loss.
It's a way to think about the importance of ceremony.
It's one of the things that we've done is document
(47:50):
our ceremonies in the language and then also have to
recreate by talking with many people. What do we do
for potlatching, for example, So our language community spearheaded with
my tribe, the Caninans Union tribe, the first potlatch we
had in like thirty years, and that process of bringing
people back to this specific place at the beach where
(48:11):
our fish come. It was the first fish potlatch is
what we had, and that's one of the ways that
we prepare. The other thing that happened for my language
family is we got up the elders who were first
language speakers both in Ana and any together and had
them basically like professional development for elders. It was kind
(48:31):
of a teasing thing like, oh, we need professional development
for the elders to get together, and like, how do
you deal with being an eighty year old and you
have no one to talk to? How do you teach
when you're an isolated person and you're trying to figure
out how to bring your language back when you're an elder.
So we created space for elders to talk about their
work without us in the room. So we had a
(48:52):
series of things that we did, but we made sure
we had time for them to have their peer group
talk without us in the space, and then we came
back in and listen to what they wanted to share out.
So that's part of that preparing for like knowing they know,
we know they're not going to be here for forever,
and just navigating that that lost piece, I think is
(49:14):
a really hard thing to consider. I've been feeling about
like going to throw up for about three weeks straight,
and so thinking about spending time intentionally to walk outside
every day and to try and surround myself with people
who are there for me in a judgment free kind
of way because I'm not a best version of myself.
(49:37):
That's a really important piece to be careful about. What
kind of energy you invite when you're going through that
kind of grief and that transition. And I go back
to that like the eclipse concept of you have to
be careful what you're going to invite around you when
you're in those moments, because it can have a really
(50:00):
dangerous effect on your life. And I think that's one
of the things that we've seen historically for Native people
overrepresented in negative statistics, is we have not had that
opportunity to have safe spaces with this happening for so
many years. And that's part of what we navigate for
(50:20):
each other with each other, and it's not an easy thing.
The other thing that I think is really powerful is
songs and singing. That's one of the things that's been
really helpful for me to escalate the emotion so I'm
still feeling and processing what I'm going through, but not
having it overpowered to the point where I can't function.
(50:43):
Song is a very powerful tool and part of our
ceremonial practices, not just for Native people. People around the
world sing. That's why humans sing, but we've not been
allowed to sing in my community. That was part of
the residential schoolsidential school would literally come by windows and
look in our houses to make sure that my ancestors
(51:05):
weren't singing in our homes. And so that's one of
those pieces of feeling that ancestral connection to song to
bring that back and doing the potlatching for opposite clans
one of the things. I think the winter before last,
there was a thing Get elder who passed away in
my community and there wasn't the opposite clan to take
(51:29):
care of what need to be taken care of, and
so I built a casket for the elder, and that
was part of the I'm not the opposite clan, but
in some ways being Danina, I'm not thing Get, We're
still part of that bigger language family and thing like
how do we take care of each other when we're
on each other's homelands and away from home and having
(51:50):
that connection to community. For me, that's part of my
role as an opposite clan person that I might not
get to do that I need to be able to
do being an opposite and knowing that other people will
do that for me, like when I'm here in Juno
or if I'm out in y Delta area, people have
done that for me, and so I think that's It's
(52:12):
can be a really beautiful thing to see that kind
of connection that it transcends time and location, but it's
also really rough and taking that time trying to be
gentle on yourself with your family. There's some people that
I tell and I'm just trying to let people know, like, hey,
I'm having a hard time. I might be not my
(52:32):
usual self. So that there's that being honest and that connection,
I think is an important piece of just navigating that.
Speaker 2 (52:42):
Janeah for sharing that, because I think it is important
to consider that. So this what does the collective need
and what does the individual need? And how do you
communicate that with a group. I really recommend folks who
are doing this work have a crew of people that
you can really trust, but just be cautious of it
so that it's not like where this team that's that
(53:04):
other team, because it's so easy to fall into these
kind of traps that I think are just out there.
But just to say, okay, can you take care of
me for a second, because I want to be I
was talking with a friend and a mentor the other
day and she was saying, well, I always think of
those elders who always had the soft eyes and so
they're always looking at things without judgment, and it seemed
(53:26):
like they were just ready to engage in forgiveness and
just calmness, which sometimes I'm not there. And so as
you do this work, I think sometimes in these colonial
spaces which we have to navigate, so in boardrooms and
meetings and school boards and all this other stuff, and
sometimes when I'm in those environments too much, I start
(53:49):
to think, I don't think this is possible. But if
I get out on the land the other day, we're
out in a canoe and we're paddling and the water
was so flat, and we're out on the ocean, we
see these seals popping up and we're singing songs, and
then I think I don't see any future except for
an indigenous future, like just a place where our languages
are living and breathing. So as we kind of wrap
(54:10):
up this conversation, I would like to focus on what
keeps you. You know, we've talked about how you can
just make it through some things, but also like what
are those key things that keep you motivated and inspired
and that you like to share with others because you
feel like that will motivate and inspire them.
Speaker 3 (54:29):
I think spending time with kids is so important, and
that's for me one of those pieces that recharges. And
it's a tricky thing for language work, because we're operating
in two arenas of time is precious and it will
never be the same again as the part of sending
(54:51):
someone on who's no longer with us in the same way.
But then also you have children who are developing and
you have the need to like catch them while they're
still developing as a human being. And kids grow so
stinking fast, and that piece of seeing the joy of
that child and the energy that you get from working
(55:14):
with kids is really really helpful for me. I think
about Helen, the elder who I work with and mentor
with her. Form of compensation that she inherited from her
cheetah from her grandma is you need to teach somebody
else this knowledge. That is the expectation, whether or not
(55:34):
money has exchanged hands or however. All of that works
as well, because that's very appropriate also. But the premise
within our culture is that I'm showing you something so
that you can show somebody else, and that makes space
for everybody, and it's done with intentionality. It's a way
to stay positive, and that also brings us back to
(55:56):
the land. Two summers ago, I was able to bild
a birch bark canoe with a group of people. And
I've been looking for a birch tree for making a
canoe out of for about fifteen years, I think with
thirteen fifteen years, and one came to us, and so
it was a tree that we had missed. We didn't
think we were able to harvest that one highway was
coming through. We were on a clock and saw it.
(56:19):
It was perfect, and came back and worked on it
till midnight to get the bark and everything we needed
to do. And I think those are those kinds of
things that really help stay positive, keep motivated and thinking
about what you've learned from spending time out on the land.
It was such an amazing thing to be in a
birch bark canoe on the water and that hasn't been
(56:41):
done in like one hundred and twenty years in my area.
And so knowing that we can do that with a
young group of people, we also had hell in there
with us. It's not perfect. If a paddle on one
side you go straight, but it floats, it holds, holds
me as an adult male who's able to paddle it
(57:02):
and it works. So that's our first one. I made
a model one. We're going to make another one this summer,
and so that's part of that. That hope piece, that
motivational piece is its interesting work and it's hard work.
It's connected and there's that connection to the land is
also very helpful and.
Speaker 1 (57:22):
Feeling chana.
Speaker 2 (57:26):
Y shite yahyaguy shitaya hayagu Our canoe is really gliding along.
So that's I love that verb. It just really talks
about when you're really paddling in that canoe is just
cutting through the water. So that's what we're going for
when we have these conversations. So thankful to be here
with Joel Isaac to talk about these things, these these
(57:49):
thoughts and all these different realms and all these different
ways that we're doing this work. So as you find
ways to recharge and reconnect and build possibilities where you're
language is continuing to gain strength, gain possibilities, just know
there are other people out there who are doing these things.
We will continue to make positive, lasting connections where we're
(58:13):
reaching across time and space because we're decolonizing this stuff
that's why I show up late for meetings, and so
as we sort of engage in these things, the future
becomes much more possible and we become much less frustrated.
But I really want to echo, get out on the land,
sing your songs, speak your language, engage with children. I
(58:35):
remember being in Hawaii and I thought I was getting
pretty good at Hawaiian and we go into their language
medium school and this six year old has to tell
me ten times that his brother had the same laptop
as me.
Speaker 4 (58:46):
And I got it.
Speaker 2 (58:46):
I finally got it. But I was actually happy. I
wasn't frustrated that I had to listen so many times.
I was happy that I can have this high fluency
child and I could talk to them. And so engage
with people in positive, in productive ways. Get them talking,
get them listening, keep them motivated, and just do it
with love and respect and kindness in these acts of
(59:11):
decolonization and unity. The Tongue Unbroken is a project of
the Next Up Initiative on the iHeartMedia network. Check out
other Next Up podcasts that are coming out and support
Indigenous languages and Indigenous voices on indigenous lands. Yeah Oway, Benna,
cheesh Chennan,
Host
X̱ʼunei Lance Twitchell
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