Sitting in a classroom hundreds of miles from her storm-ravaged Alaska Native village, 10-year-old Rayann Martin lifted her fingers to show her age. Her teacher followed up with a question in Yup’ik.
“Ten — how do you say 10 in Yup’ik?”
“Qula!” the children answered together.
Martin is one of hundreds who were airlifted to Anchorage after the remnants of Typhoon Halong flooded several small coastal villages along the Bering Sea last month. The storm washed away dozens of homes — some carrying occupants inside — and destroyed or severely damaged nearly 700 others. One person died and two remain missing.
As evacuees adjust to life far from their traditional communities, some displaced children are finding comfort in a Yup’ik language and culture immersion program — one of only two in Alaska.
“I’m learning more Yup’ik,” Martin said, adding that she now uses the language with her mother, teachers and classmates. “I usually speak more Yup’ik in villages, but mostly more English in cities.”
Yup’ik, spoken by roughly 10,000 people, is the fifth most common home language in the Anchorage School District, where more than 100 languages are represented. The district launched its first immersion program — in Japanese — in 1989, later adding Spanish, Mandarin, German, French and Russian. After years of requests from parents, the district secured a federal grant and opened a K-12 Yup’ik immersion track nine years ago. Its first cohort is now in eighth grade, with classes based at College Gate Elementary and Wendler Middle School.
A principal’s connection shapes the response
College Gate principal Darrell Berntsen, who is Alaska Native (Sugpiaq) from Kodiak Island, has personal ties to communities uprooted by natural disasters. His mother was 12 when the 1964 Great Alaska Earthquake and tsunami devastated her village of Old Harbor, forcing an evacuation to Anchorage before the community was rebuilt.
Berntsen, who grew up living a subsistence lifestyle, said he understands what evacuees from Kipnuk, Kwigillingok and other villages have lost. He also has long been invested in preserving Alaska Native languages — a passion shaped in part by family history. His ex-wife’s grandmother, Marie Smith Jones, was the last fluent speaker of the Eyak language when she died in 2008; his uncles were punished in school for using their Indigenous Alutiiq language.
Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket launches NASA’s twin Mars spacecraft
When evacuees began arriving at an Anchorage shelter after the October floods, Berntsen greeted families, listened to their stories and encouraged them to enroll their children in the Yup’ik program. Many showed him photos of traditional foods — duck, goose, moose, seal — they had saved for winter but lost in the flood.
“Listening is a big part of our culture,” he said. “Letting them know, ‘You’re welcome at our school. We’ll do everything we can to make you comfortable in the most uncomfortable situation you’ve ever been through.’”
Displaced children enter immersion classrooms
About 170 evacuated students have joined the Anchorage School District, including 71 in the Yup’ik immersion program. Once the smallest immersion offering, it is now “booming,” said district world language director Brandon Locke.
At College Gate, students spend half the day learning literacy, science and social studies in Yup’ik, and the rest studying English, math and language arts.
Among them is 10-year-old Ellyne Aliralria of Kipnuk, whose family’s home floated upriver during the early October floods. She said the rising water also swept away her sister’s grave.
Aliralria enjoys learning more Yup’ik phrases, though she notes the dialect differs from the one spoken back home. “I like to do all of them, but some of them are hard,” she said.
Adjusting to city life is also challenging. She and her family now live in a motel nearly 500 miles (800 kilometers) from their southwest Alaska village.
“We’re homesick,” she said.
The program also draws non-Yup’ik participants like 10-year-old Lilly Loewen, whose parents enrolled her because they thought the opportunity was “really cool.”
“It is just really amazing to talk to people in another language,” she said.
Restoring culture and reconnecting generations
Berntsen plans additional activities — gym nights and Indigenous games — to help students adjust. One event will feature the “seal hop,” which mimics the movement of hunters approaching seals on the ice.
He believes the immersion program is helping repair damage caused when earlier generations of Alaska Native children were discouraged — even punished — for speaking their languages.
It is now creating new connections, Locke said: some children can speak with great-grandparents whose own children were never taught Yup’ik.
“I took this as a great opportunity for us to give back some of what the trauma took from our Indigenous people,” Berntsen said.
Source: AP