Living language

April 10, 2005

KATE GOLDEN/Frontiersman

CHICKALOON - At the village's all-ages Ahtna language class, kids from 6 to 60 acted out everything from fiddlehead ferns to moose calves.

Appreciative audience members called out their guesses and heckled the actors. A roster going around listed eight teachers and eight students.

As usual, neither generation nor demeanor gave a clue as to which ones were which.

"Hit me!" Calin Wade challenged his mother.

Angie Wade turned up a flash card with a fish on it. "Trout," she said.

"Tsabaey," he said. "How much you want to bet?"

The issue was solved with another flip of the cards and a word from teacher Sondra Stuart. He was right, and he gloated.

These games have serious import. Kari Johns, educational director of Chickaloon's Ya Ne Dah Ah village school, which the children attend, said, "We're doing it to keep a language alive."

Loneliness

Katie Wade, Calin's great-grandmother, has not had a full-blown Ahtna conversation in years.

"I cannot tell a story in my own language," she said. Growing up in Chickaloon, Wade acted as go-between between her traditional, Ahtna-speaking maternal grandparents and her white, English-speaking, bootlegger father. The Indian side, she said, was much richer: They sang, danced and told stories constantly.

Ahtna, she remembered, was a fun language. She and her siblings made up words, used it as a secret language and played tricks on people.

Stories were funnier in Ahtna.

Now, she is the only fluent speaker of her dialect.

At some point, she vowed, "I miss it so much I'm going to try to teach those kids to how to talk to me."

Ten years ago, Wade started teaching the younger generations of the Chickaloon tribe. Two of her earliest students, Stuart and Daniel Harrison, are now the main teachers. The kids aren't far enough along yet to shoot the breeze with Wade. And disuse has jumbled her syntax over the years. But she's hopeful that Ahtna will revive.

"I think (they) can get pretty far with it," she said.

Difficult for oldsters

Brainwise, children always have the advantage in learning languages.

There are a few things, however, that make Ahtna inherently more challenging for adults.

Once hard-wired, the alphabets we learn as children are difficult to expand. And there are some sounds in Athabaskan languages that don't occur in English. For example, where English recognizes just the letter t, Ahtna makes words with the variations t', tl, tl', ts and ts'. Athabaskan expert Siri Tuttle, an assistant professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, calls the language "smooth and lovely and musical."

Angie Wade laughed as she complained, "'Grass,' 'hand' and 'butt' all sound the same."

Both words and sentences are structured differently than English.

Tuttle said that verbs seem to be "inside out," rare among the world's languages. Wade said that translating sentences is "like unscrewing some puzzle."

And a little twist to a syllable can change the meaning of a word so drastically that the corresponding English fix would be to add a whole new sentence.

The form of a verb can vary around several dimensions, indicating time and the way an action is carried out. Take the verb "chop," for example. Dozens of variations could indicate whether the object was chopped now, yesterday, in half, or whether it was hewn into a certain shape.

"The language forces you to pay extremely close attention to the way actions are carried out," said Gary Holden, assistant professor of linguistics at University of Alaska Fairbanks.

"The way you can include nouns inside verbs, verbs inside nouns - you can make words that have really deep meaning," Tuttle said. "Ahtna … has really remarkable poetic capabilities."

Blame the white man

It's easy to point blame for the murder of Alaskan Native languages, Holden said. The history is not pretty. Nearly a century of official language policy not only favored English but in many cases forbade the use of native languages. "They made everybody so afraid," Katie Wade said.

Now, there are those who grew up hearing the language but who cut it off from themselves - "passive speakers," in linguists' argot. They understand the language, but often they can't get past their psychological conditioning to speak it.

Wade said she escaped brainwashing because she never went to school.

"I still think like my ancestors did," she said.

There's resentment, too. People sometimes feel that if their language has been taken away, they want it given back, Holden said. Which is, of course, impossible. It's been taken away, and now they have to dedicate their lives to reconstructing it. Adding speakers is a slow, one-by-one process.

But the language of the forefathers can never come back as it was.

"What comes back is something different," he said. "But it's still language."

Teaching challenges

Wade put resentment aside for the worthy cause of teaching the younger generation.

Her motivation is larger than her linguistic loneliness. The death of a language, she maintained, causes the death of the culture that's inextricably linked. Ahtna stories never translated well into English, children never gleaned the values they related, and it's time she did something about it.

"The only way you know who you are is when you know your language," she said.

Kari Johns, educational director of Chickaloon Native school Ya Ne Dah Ah, said, "People have to visualize a culture as being a lure, a thing, a basket. It's so much deeper than that … It's how we look at things."

The task for older students is to abandon their self-consciousness - of learning as an adult, of past prohibitions on the language - and those in Chickaloon has done so remarkably, according to Tuttle.

"It seems as though people in this community have just decided to give up their neuroses and just do what they can do," she said.

Teacher Stuart said it's a "humbling" process. They're all still working on basic words and little sentences, like "Black bear came to see us."

But at this point, most of the grade-school students have been exposed to the language training since they were in kindergarten.

"This is everyday life for them," said Stuart, who teaches them daily at Ya Ne Dah Ah.

They've got the tools

They may lack the usually requisite community of fluent speakers, but they have killer teaching tools.

There's a dictionary, compiled by Jim Carrey and published in 2000, for which teachers Harrison and Wade served as key informants. Syntax is more of a challenge, but Tuttle plans to put together a comprehensive grammar eventually. And there are field recordings from decades of linguistic work.

Another linguistic resource: Tuttle herself. She said her role is to suggest unorthodox solutions to problems or to act as the outsider who inspires others with her own learning - "If a stupid white lady can get it …" she laughed.

Sondra Stuart described a pedagogical gap between Chickaloon elders' traditionally hands-off teaching style and the Western-grown "But Why?" style of the youngest generation.

The elder's answer to why, she said, was often "You just do it." As a linguist, Stuart said Tuttle often can explain the 'why' in terms of the language's internal logic.

Which is something her inquisitive students are always seeking. They're constantly taking words apart, digging into the syllables to find related words that might have contributed meaning.

But as for those raw archives, as Holden said, "You really have to be a connoisseur to appreciate a Dena'ina field recording from 1972." The Chickaloon challenge is to transform technical linguistics into user-friendly teaching tools. And that, he said, is where Chickaloon natives shine. Any kid who watches cartoons can appreciate Chickaloon Native Dimi Macheras's anime-influenced illustrations. On the Chickaloon village iBook, you click the dragonfly, which looks like it flew out of a comic book, and Daniel Harrison's voice says, "Tselc'utsaey." The posters of alphabet letters adorning the walls, the animal flash cards on the table, and the other seven Ahtna CD-ROMs all bear Macheras's marks. His intricate drawings suggest new ways to use an old language. A picture accompanying the word for 'house,' for example shows a modern house, not an ancestral Athabaskan one.

Macheras said he went new-school consciously, looking for an aesthetic that "could resonate with a lot of people that are Native."

Urban Native youths are asking, Johns noted, how they can incorporate computers into their ancestral languages. That doesn't mean the old ways are dead. Angie Wade, a birder, relies on Ahtna's many subtle distinctions between chickadees.

Kate Golden can be reached

at 352-2284 or kate.golden@

frontiersman.com.