The first step towards a just future

The Future of Indigenous Languages requires an adjustment to the ways things currently are, because the death of most Indigenous languages is guaranteed by the pathways built by colonizations. School systems and social structures have been built to naturally exclude Indigenous languages from their core daily operations, so if we do what seems “normal,” then we will watch in this current set of generations, the near-completion of a linguistic genocide.

When the wooly mammoth was walking around, and the saber-toothed tiger, Indigenous languages were on the lands we live on in Southeast Alaska. It is often challenging for a person of today to think of that kind of longevity. First contact in Southeast Alaska with non-Indigenous peoples was less than 300 years ago, and settlements in Alaska by non-Indigenous peoples was less than 250 years ago. Colonization has been a little more than 1% of human history in this area, but has tilted the land and its people towards an impending and deliberate language death.

The first boarding schools in North America were built in Southeast Alaska, and one of the intentions was to eliminate Indigenous languages with a variety of violent methods of child abuse, ranging from threats to hitting to hair-pulling to putting chemical-soaked rags in the mouths. Because education in Alaska includes a deliberate attempt to enforce genocidal policies, we cannot actually embrace the living and healthy futures of Alaska Native languages without educational reform.

One of the most difficult parts of this process is an American sense of denial and separation from a history of inhumanity and racism. Of the non-Indigenous peoples who lived in Southeast Alaska from the 1700s until the 200s, there were fewer than 10 newcomers who who became able to communicate in the Lingít language while living on Lingít lands. This means hundreds of thousands of peoples lived and died on these lands without ever learning the language of the place, and to be honest they never even had to think about it.

But compassion is the opposing emotion of colonization, and humanity is the counterweight of a violent and racist history that is America in this place where we find ourselves living today. For Indigenous peoples, living languages requires a reconnection to a language that was denied to peoples for generations, and the shame and fear of not knowing often presents a barrier to learning. For non-Indigenous peoples, the incredible collective lack of accountability and responsibility for an attempted genocide shrouds itself in freedom of choice and freedom to exist without being connected to a history of annihilation.

A school is what we know it to be, which is a place where Indigenous languages must be pushed by persistent change in order to be at the center of education. At countless meetings of school boards and statewide education boards, budgets are negotiated and operations are managed in ways that also guarantee language death. The dollars are spent, the curricula are rigid and full, the classrooms are spoken for, and everyone is stretched thin in terms of time and space and being. This is the colonial mechanism that guarantees death.

But how do we, the peoples of today and the agents of change, create something different? If only you could feel the joy of an elder — who waited her entire life to have a child she could speak to in her language — have a deep conversation with a child who understands her. If only you could hear an elder say “it is like the only Christmas I ever known to have you here speaking to me today” because they sit in a room, lonely for someone to speak to in the language they know best. If only you could feel that reconnection and the salvation that comes in listening, speaking, and taking a deep dive into an Indigenous language.

And you can. Change begins with the individuals who reject a determined outcome in systems that continually refuse to adapt to becoming non-genocidal. When it comes to education on Indigenous lands — and these are Indigenous lands — it will take a courageous and determined group to do something other than the typical institutionalized English-only ways of going at things. There is a reason that Ḵaajaaḵwtí Walter Soboleff once said, «hél aadé chʼas dleit ḵáax̱ haa unax̱sateeyí yé» (there is no way we can only be white people). That does not mean that the descendants of colonizers live a life that must be abandoned, or that English is the language that has to die now. Colonization is an abstract principle rooted in a need to dominate everything and make it mirror the self in order to survive, but that is ineffective when it comes to being human and loving one another for who we are.

I speak Lingít. I think Lingít. If you are living on Lingít Aaní, then you should as well. Doing otherwise is inadvertently signing off on the death of Indigenous languages. We find ourselves in a difficult place because we inherited systems that are already killing off entire groups of peoples. It is as if we walked into a room where someone has nearly been killed, and now we have to make moves in order to keep them alive. But imagine just carrying on while someone dies and you could do something about it. We allow ourselves to do that with entire languages, which are deeply connected to the health of Indigenous peoples.

We could let them live, but we choose to ignore the pathways that have been built for us, a road that is inhumanity and cruelty. And for many people, you don’t even have to think about being a genocider, you just try to live normally and do the expected thing: keep things the way they are because that is how they are.

In recent conversations with the Juneau School District Board of Education, I realized that less than one percent of the school budget is dedicated to Lingít language, and there are zero standards of knowing within the district. If you ever tried dushóoch, bathing in the cold waters for strength, you probably know that you cannot do it unless you take the first step. For those in control of budgets for schools, you could take that first step and say “five percent of our budget” will go towards Indigenous language education and we will determine expected fluency rates for grade levels in our schools.

That would be change. That would be decidedly non-genocidal. I doubt it will happen, but maybe somehow we will find the courage to be the change our little grandchildren deserve.

• X̱ʼunei Lance Twitchell is an associate professor of Alaska Native languages at the University of Alaska Southeast.