Speaking "Tlingit" with Class

Every Tuesday and Thursday at 11::45 I walk to Andrew’s school to attend his noon language class. For a half hour Mrs. Wright teaches us the Native American dialect of Tlingit. I wanted to share with you some of what I’ve learned about the history of the Tlingit people and their language.

The Tlingit people are one of 500 Native American communities spread throughout the United States. It is difficult to say how many Tlingit people lived in southeast Alaska before the Europeans arrived in the 1700’s, but today there are about fifteen thousand Tlingit living in the Alaska region, some even as far south as Seattle. Hoonah’s population is 80% Native American Tlingit.

The history between the Tlingit and the Euro-American settlers unfortunately reads the same; injustice and cruelty that affected our more high profile U.S. Native American communities. The Russian’s arrived in the 1700’s and Orthodox Priests learned the native tongue to convert the Tlingit to Christianity. In the process they converted everything from their clothing to their hairstyles; dolling them up in European frilly white dresses and black tailored suits. Sweeping the native women’s hair into updos and cutting the men’s hair short. The Russian’s settled on their land, mined for gold and built shops in their communities. But not until the 1800’s did Hoonah feel impact of the “white-man.”

American bought Alaska from the Russians in1867. Now it was American’s turn to bring their version of civilization and organized religion to the Native people. In 1878, an American missionary, Rev. S. Hall Young of Sitka, happened upon the small Alaskan village of Hoonah and wrote…

“We next visited the Kowdekan (Hoonah’s “original” name), the largest village of the Hoonya tribe. It is located on a deep bay on the North-East shore of Tchitchagoff Island. The population is 625. They are simple hearted, primitive people. The women are comparatively unpolluted and the children numerous. They have constant communication by canoe with Sitka and Fort Wrangell. We should make this one of our chain of mission stations among the Tlingit people.” Later he added, “We found the Hoonahs about the most receptive of all the Alaskan; and this was the beginning of what has been one of the finest and largest of our Alaska missions.”

The missionaries gave little care to the twenty-five hundred year old Tlingit culture and banned most everything that resembled or alluded to the native traditions including their language. As mission schools were erected in 1881, all students were punished heavily if they spoke their native tongue. They too were forced to shed their functional clothing and wore uniforms of dresses, white shirts and pants. In addition, families were split up and children were dispersed to residential mission schools on surrounding islands.

The elders preserved the Tlingit language in their homes but after almost a hundred years of American influence there were several generations that grew up barely able to speak or understand their native tongue. By the 1970’s schools weren’t run by missions anymore and a resurgence of the Tlingit culture began to grow. Some of the elders started to teach classes and share the old stories. For thousands of years the Tlingit language was passed on orally. It wasn’t until 1972 that linguists began to interview and record Tlingit families to create a written documentation of the sounds, words and stories. In 1990 the Sealaska Heritage Institute made language restoration a priority and began to teach Tlingit to a growing body of students. Entirely funded by grants, Tlingit has been taught in Hoonah schools since that time.

It is a complicated language. A simple sentence is full of pinched consonants, whispers, plosives and glottal attacks. The written text is based on our standard alphabet but added are a series of accent marks, periods, under linings, apostrophizes and capitals that change the pitch, the letter sound and the meaning of the word.

They have fourteen different adjectives to explain snow, six different verbs for putting on different articles of clothing, five different ways to make the “k” sound. It is not an easy language to learn.

Over the last month-and-a-half Andrew and I have been practicing the names of different articles of clothing and how to say the item is mine.

My computer can’t show all the accents over certain letters but I will do my best to give you a sense of it…

Ax Naa. Adi Aya. ( ack na adee ayah) = These are my clothes.

L’aak aya. (pinched “l” makes a clicking sound…klagk ayah) = Dress

L’ee x’wan aya. (klee kwan ayah) = socks

S’aaxw aya. (saackww aya) = hat

Ax tuk’ataali aya (ack took a tah klee ayah) These are my pants.

They have wonderful names for the months…

July, August and September are one long month on the Hoonah calendar.
It is called Distlein (dis-klane) – “the big month, time to gather everything, time to keep busy.”

October is called Shaanax (shah-nuck-dis) – “the month to go to the mountain to get mountain goat”

November is called Kukahaa Dis (koo-kuh-hah-dis) – “the month in which you shovel snow”

December is called Lkeeyi kei u.eix (Lh-kee-yee-kay-oo-ake) – “the month when you can’t see the corners of the house.”

Because the Tlingit people live in a rain forest, they are expert wood carvers. They are especially famous for carving totem poles. A totem pole can honor a person who died, help people remember a story or stand as a welcome in front of a house, school or community center. They are not used as religious objects. The Tlingit people have never worshipped the poles or the symbols on them.

This is one of the totem poles in front of the school and it tells a story of a fisherman who is holding a halibut hook to catch very big and heavy fish. The eagle figure also displayed at the school was originally a bottom of a house post. House posts were built into the walls at either end of a clan house to give clan recognition and to support the roof…early functional art.

I have enjoyed learning a new language and understanding more about the Tlingit people and their history. Steve, Andrew and I are the minority in Hoonah, treading lightly in wounded streets, ever aware of the past discrimination. Yet as Steve sets out every day, he strives to prepare these young students for a world of limitless potential, where the past does not equal the future and all can come together for a better world.

It drives home the unique opportunity that my family is experiencing. I am grateful for the lessons that I am learning and the awareness that would otherwise be void to Steve, Andrew and me. I am thankful that Andrew is learning respect for another culture, not from a book or a movie… but from playing baseball with Austin, speaking an ancient language to his Tlingit partner Brandon, and slapping high fives as he and Randy finish the ultimate race car ramp. To me, I believe, that is how God’s mission is truly served.