Dena'ina: 'The language of their place'

Last week we read about the extinction of the Eyak language of southcentral Alaska, as Eyak elder Marie Smith Jones, the last native speaker, died at the age of 89. Today we'll read about efforts to revive a related language, spoken by the Dena'ina (d'NAY-na) people whose ancesteral home includes Anchorage and Cook Inlet, the body of water that leads out from Alaska's largest city to the Gulf of Alaska and the Pacific Ocean.

Most logical place to start is the Dena'ina Qenaga portal page. Let's translate. "Dena'ina" is the name the Dena'ina people give to themselves. It means, simply enough, "the people." In Dena'ina, "Qenaga" means language. Dena'ina Qenaga is a project of the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and it is funded in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation. The ANLC has done a lot of work not only to record and preserve the language for scholars, but to bring it alive for the Dena'ina people.

Linked to it is a website called Kahtnuht'ana Qenaga: The Kenai Peoples Language. It's about the dialect of Dena'ina spoken by members of the Kenaitze Indian Tribe on the Kenai Peninsula along Lower Cook Inlet south of Anchorage.

(A tangent, as long as we're talking about languages. "Kenaitze" may look Native American, but it's an English version of the Russian name for the people of lower Cook Inlet. Alaska, of course, was first explored by the Russians and was a Russian colony for a hundred years. "Kenatsy" in Russian is the word for a flat, barren landscape, and it gives its name to the Kenai Penninsula [pron. Keen-eye], too. The Dena'ina call it "Yaghanen," which means a good land.

(Or is it a tangent? If the Russians and the Americans can't get a tribal people's name right, who's going to?)

Let's surf around the Kenai website. A map showing Images of Dena'ina Territory shows why the Dena'ina think theirs is a good land. Click on the yellow dots to see photos, and the place names in Dena'ina and English. Cook Inlet is the body of water that stretches north and east from the Gulf of Alaska, at the bottom of the map. One of the dots at the end of Cook Inlet shows you Anchorage (you'll recognize the one with buildings), and the Kenai Peninsula is the landmass south and east of Cook Inlet that looks like a splayed-out baseball glove.

Lots of other information on the Kenaitze website, including a pull-down menu with a lot of vocabulary lists. Check out the ones on mammals, fish, "houses, shelters & caches" ... how does language reflect the way they live? How does the way they live reflect language? There's a lot of information about Dena'ina subsistance traditions in those words.

Also linked to the Dena'ina Qenaga website is an Alaska Public Radio Network show on tape recordings of traditional music dating back to the 1950s. Listen for the plank drum. It's a traditional Athabascan instrument, and it has a harder, sharper "clack" than a skin drum, at least to my ears. You'll also hear about Dena'ina traditions and how they've changed since the 1950s, when the tapes were made.

If you want to know more about how a non-English language works than you ever imagined was possible, open Peter Kalifornsky's story of "Putting Up Fish" and click on the explanations of the Dena'ina sentences. See how they take a word and add on meaning with different prefixes and suffixes? Amazing! Then consider most human children are already fluent in their native language, meaning they can form complete sentences even though they continue to learn more vocabulary lifelong, by the time they are 5 or 6.

But maybe the best place to get a feel for the Dena'ina language is a story that anthropologist Alan Boraas tells of the time he and a Dena'ina elder named Peter Kalifornsky recited the Pledge of Allegiance at a school assembly, Kalifornsky in Dena'ina and Boraas translating, and how the children reacted to hearing their language spoken, some of them for the first time. Here's Boraas:

Two hundred grade schoolers make a lot of noise even when being shushed by their teachers, and I was a little ambivalent when we stepped to the microphone. I cleared my throat, Peter cleared his, and we began:

"Dek'nesh'uh bet'uhdi_t'ayich"' Peter read. "I pledge allegiance" I repeated. "Naq'ach' k'iniyich'," "to the flag," "ts'e_q'i k'i_anich'ina," "of the United States of America."

As we read, the children became curiously silent. Johnny stopped pulling Sally's pigtails, Betty and Amy stopped giggling, and Ricky, off in his own space, suddenly was captivated. As one, they stared intently at the frail old man speaking a strange language they didn't understand. They were not confused, but awed. Even the school district administrators paid attention.

The children seemed to sense that this was the language of their place. An ancient language with ancient roots. Though they came from many backgrounds, subconsciously they seemed to want to connect to those roots. After the program was over I stood to the side talking with some acquaintances, and I happened to look over toward Peter. Forty or so kids had gathered around him. They were quiet and respectful with a look not so much of admiration, but of wonder. It was as though there was something missing in their lives that this mysterious old man and his ancient language could satisfy. They would draw near and reach out their hand, and he would reach out his and touch them. Then they would drift away and others would press to the front for a chance to touch the hand of a man who held the secret to their connection to their place.

Finally, check out a 2004 public radio story on the Dena'ina Language Institute at Kenai Peninsula College. You will hear the sound of a language slowly coming back from the brink of extinction.