Last Saturday, 65 people crowded into the Alaska Native Brotherhood and Alaska Native Sisterhood Hall in Haines to share food, Tlingít language and to learn more about each other.
The celebration was, essentially, a practice ku.éex’, a place where people were given clan names, and where language learners formally introduce themselves – and the stories of their lives, families and communities – to others. They learned the appropriate protocol to do all of this under the watchful eye of their teacher Marsha Guneiwtí Hotch.
Hotch said learning the protocol is critical because those social norms “kept them sustained here on this land for centuries upon centuries.”
The celebration is part of an immersion language program called the Tricky Raven Language Initiative that includes nearly a dozen Chilkat Valley families.
A mini-ku.éex’
It wasn’t all protocol and formal speeches. The group also ate salmon donated by the Haines Packing Company.
Hotch said the fish was cooked over an open fire – and people who came brought their own dishes as well. She didn’t hesitate when asked to name her favorite dish, herring egg salad.
Often when a ku.éex’ occurs now, it’s to memorialize someone. But Hotch said they can also occur after marriages, or when someone is coming of age, or for name giving.
“Those were the times when people got together and those are some of the things that kind of went off to the wayside as the culture began to change,” she said.
In this case, the program was supposed to go for 3 hours and though it ran over that time by more than an hour, it was a tiny fraction of the length of a full ceremony.
“People just didn’t want to leave,” said Chilkoot Indian Association Tribal Administrator Harriet Brouillette.
Brouillette said people in her generation struggled with the proper protocol because western ways of living became a priority.
“I remember my mother telling me that there was no benefit in my understanding Tlingit protocol. She told me this because that was the message that she heard from church and school,” Brouillette said.
So that was one aspect of the ceremony. The other, she said, is that there are more and more children who are born into Native families who are not given a name for a variety of reasons.
“We have more children who were born to a non-native mother. They do not have a clan, because we’re matrilineal,” she said.
So, before the ku.éex’, Brouillette said they made sure the families in the program knew which clan they came from, using a patrilineal lineage to track those matrilineal links and match people with the proper clan.
That way people could learn more about their family connections and clans.
“That’s a big deal,” Brouillette said. “We have families who have been trying for years to figure out what their lineage is. That is like going through life without an identity or an ancestral connection.”
Once they have those clan connections and knowledge, then the language students learn to introduce themselves. There are formal ways to do it in a place like a ku.éex’. Often, in Tlingít language classes students must learn to introduce themselves, explain where they’re from and who their family members are. It can be stressful to do that in a language you’re not fluent in.
Hotch said she has pushed her students to step beyond the memorized introduction and to incorporate new information about themselves and their communities as they learn it. Each person’s story “holds within it history and clan history. The songs that belong to certain claims, certain stories, certain crests and names,” she said.
A different kind of language program
Hotch is the only remaining birth speaker who can teach Tlingít in the Chilkat Valley. She has been leading the Tricky Raven language program since it launched in 2022.
Brouillette said the idea was to build ambassador families, essentially people who can bring more language into the community at many levels. And, to give them a language community to lean on.
“They can support each other, talk to each other, work issues out about class … or tweak something as a group,” she said. “Building a relationship between all of their families and children, so no one feels like they’re isolated.”
Parents, and their children, are learning the language alongside each other, and they get a weekly stipend and resources to help them continue the language use in their homes.
Brouillette said the idea for building a program to learn language this way came through a committee of people, including language learners, speakers and teachers, and Hotch, who has been teaching for decades.
“We decided we’re going to do something different and try different ways to teach and learn – not the traditional western style,” Brouillette said. “More of a traditional way of learning Tlíngit.”
That plan worked well for Hotch, with her teaching experience. She has seen a lot of efforts fail, particularly in schools where new Tlingít teachers are having to do it on the fly, moving their materials from classroom to classroom rather than having a space for kids to come learn in an environment built specifically for learning Tlingít.
“My saying is, the language is just a guest in that classroom, in that school,” she said. “I’ve seen it happen. Then our language learner teachers hit a ceiling. There’s nothing provided really for them to continue learning their language, and they want it so bad.”
So in this program, Hotch said she has been focused on teaching using real-life scenarios, the way people would likely learn the language at home when surrounded by fluent speakers.
Both Hotch and Brouillette said they can see the program working.
“Before, I would come into the [Chilkoot Indian Association] office occasionally, and I would hardly hear Tlingít. But I hear Tlingit two years later, you know, in the hallways,” she said. “I’m hearing more Tlingít out in the community.”
For Brouillette, the realization came when people in the program started correcting her Tlingít.
“It just makes me so happy when I can turn to one of those family members and say ‘how do you say this?’ Then they will answer me. To me, that’s a success,” she said.
And, she added, some children are thinking in Tlingít.
“They start sitting with the adults, and you can hear children using Tlingít phrases or words without even thinking or missing a beat,” she said.