Agwadeyësta’ Do:gë:h (We Learn Together) Update
By Flip White
“With little kids, you speak the language to them and they get it.” Xh’unei Lance Twitchell envisions building an entirely new system in which everything is taught through the medium of Alaska Native languages. “We’re going to teach all of the content that a typical school would, from a much more cultural perspective, and we’re going to teach it all through the Tlingit language. The goal is to start with kindergarten in the fall of 2017 and then to build it one year at a time, because we’re going to have to build curriculum, train teachers to teach this method, recruit students. I believe that this is the surest path to language revitalization.”
“We’re down to about 100 speakers now, but I think if you look at Hawaii, they were in a similar situation about 30 years ago and now they have 4,000 people learning the language in college, or in their preschools, or in their K through 12 schools.”
Founded in 1994, the Nawahi Immersion School provides instruction for nearly 200 preschool through 12th grade students in everything from science to math. All classes are taught in Hawaiian. It has a 100 percent high school graduation rate with 80 percent going on to attend college.
In Alaska, as in Hawaii, it will all start with little kids coming to a preschool where only their mother tongue is spoken. “Really you’re just practicing being in a home environment where Tlingit would be the first language. It’s been 50 years since we’ve had kids who were raised in the language.” A lot of them say things like, “You know, it’s been 20 years and I’ve hardly spoken the language at all.”
Twitchell remembers how his grandfather pushed him to learn, imparting a sense of urgency about learning that he never forgot. “He really seemed in a hurry to tell me a lot of things. I noticed that it went from us conversing to him talking and then me beginning to talk and then him just talking right over me. And I was okay with that because I felt like he had things that he needed to let me know. So he was setting me up for a life where I was going to go and be walking with our culture and with our language, which is a tough thing to do.”
In his role as an Alaska Native language instructor, Twitchell has often confronted the pain his adult students feel when trying to learn their mother tongue. “Sometimes there’s going to be all these different triggers that emerge because our language is slipping away from us. As we sort of emerge and we try to reclaim this identity, we’re going to find so many different points of pain and shame, all this array of feelings. A lot of them are very negative. We’ve got to face those things.”
Students often give up and quit when confronted with their own negative feelings. Instead of working through them, they simply ignore or deny the feelings and abandon their studies. “But the problem with forgetting and just not looking at it is that you just get absorbed into this assimilation machine. Our elders say, ‘Our language is like medicine.’ There’s so much power in the language and we’re trying to tap into that.”
By recognizing this quality of Native languages, tribal-run Native language immersion schools bring healing to young children who will pick up the language naturally, to their parents who can use the opportunity to overcome the demons of assimilation, and to the elders who will see from the fruits of the program their way of life is not lost.
(Credit and thanks for this article goes to Alaska Native Languages Assistant Professor Xh’unei Lance Twitchell and Frank Hopper)
Agwadeyësta’ Do:gë:h will continue to share stories of other Nations and their language revitalization efforts. We hope you find them helpful. If there are constants in successful language initiatives they are, a long term strategic plan, a progressive curriculum, professional development, and perseverance.
Please encourage and continue to support our speakers, language activists, language departments, and new learners. Even if it’s one word, one new phrase, one new learner at a time, ‘We’ can do this!
We appreciate your time and consideration. Nya:wëh.
