Chilkat Valley News - Serving Haines and Klukwan, Alaska since 1966

There are only three fluent Tlingit language speakers left in the Chilkat Valley — and the Chilkoot Indian Association (CIA) is working hard to develop more.

CIA in July secured a $900,000 federal grant for a three-year Tlingit language revitalization program that the tribe hopes will expand language use across the community by 20%. Tlingit is spoken across Southeast Alaska and in parts of British Columbia and the Yukon Territory. According to Sealaska Heritage Institute, there are only about 60 people who have spoken Tlingit since birth, and all are over 70 years old.

The “Tricky Raven Language Initiative” will help at least 10 Chilkoot families reach basic Tlingit fluency through an immersive curriculum combining classroom learning and at-home use. The program’s goal “is to increase Tlingit language capacity and resources for the Chilkat Valley,” according to a CIA press release.

Five families will start the program this fall and five more will begin next year, CIA cultural department director Helen Alten said. Participating families will receive a weekly stipend.

“The families will go to classes and there will be educational kits created that they can use at home — things like stickers or recipes (in Tlingit), fun activities that they can do at home,” Alten said.

The program’s classes will be held three times a week and will be free and open to the public, Alten said. The tribe is still finalizing a curriculum and several program details, including a class schedule.

“I’ve worked on a language grant before in Klukwan, but now we get to work with the whole area,” said longtime Tlingit language teacher and Klukwan resident Marsha Hotch, who will teach classes in the program. “I think it’s really important that the Tlingit language has a voice in this area. I’m hoping to see more of it out in the community.”

Hotch is one of three fluent Tlingit speakers in the Chilkat Valley, along with Joe Hotch and Ed Warren. Health issues have impaired Warren’s ability to communicate.

A CIA survey administered earlier this year indicated that 52% of Chilkoot families use no Tlingit language in their homes and most of the rest use fewer than 15 words.

According to the survey, only one Chilkoot member is fluent in Tlingit, and that person lives in Juneau, Alten said.

“The idea is to empower (students) in the language in a classroom setting and then hopefully they can go home or to their communities and use the scenarios in their own homes or communities,” Marsha Hotch said. “I think we’re all going to learn together. I’ve always learned from my students.”

Hotch grew up in a Tlingit-speaking home in Klukwan at a time, in the mid-20th century, when young people in Indigenous communities were sent to boarding schools, where they were forced to speak English. “I grew up in a Tlingit home. That’s all I heard growing up with my mom, dad, grandma and grandpa, and other elders. But the rest of my world was English,” Hotch said.

She said in her classroom she strives to create “mini immersions,” encouraging students to speak only in Tlingit for increasingly longer periods. She said living in a language is the best way to learn it. Language “is something that is a part of each and every one of us,” she said. “It’s what we do as people.”

Use of Tlingit language declined over the past century due to colonization and assimilation. At boarding schools across the country during the early to mid 1900s, young tribal members were prohibited from speaking their Native languages.

“Programs like this are important because there was a concerted effort to destroy our language and to separate us from our cultures and our land,” said X̱’unei Lance Twitchell, associate professor of Alaska Native languages at the University of Alaska, Southeast (UAS). “An effort like this speaks to trying to reclaim spaces for our languages, restore our languages and to reconnect our peoples.”

Twitchell, who teaches Tlingit language and has worked on several revitalization efforts across Southeast Alaska, helped advise CIA on its initiative.

“We’ve been really hopeful that things would start up in the community of Haines, Deishu — which has a prominent history of speakers, culture bearers,” Twitchell said. UAS will be offering free Tlingit language classes for the first time this fall. The language is taught in schools and at summer camps across Southeast, including in Klukwan.

“Knowing another language – the language of a particular area – I believe helps people to see things differently,” Hotch said.

She noted from an old elder, Tom Jimmie, that the word Chilkat — or Jilkaat, or Jilxáat — comes from a fish preservation method unique to Klukwan, thanks to its harsh winters.

“The weather, the land, the fact that we are on the river – it enables us to do this certain method of keeping fish for those lean months ahead,” she said. “That’s history there — just from asking, ‘Where does the word Chilkat come from?’  — and we miss it without the culture and language of the original people of the land.”