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For indigenous Alaskans, language and culture is at the heart of self-identity and inner strength.

The most rewarding moments for me are when I can have conversations with elders and first language speakers.

How do you revitalize a language when fewer than 20 native speakers remain?

And what does it mean to infuse curriculum with local culture?

We'll discuss it right now on Alaska Insight.

Good evening.

Tonight, we'll talk with Alaska Native educators about how to create better outcomes for Native students by putting their language, culture and tradition into more aspects of their formal education.

But before we begin that conversation, we'll start off with some of this week's top stories from Alaska Public Media's collaborative statewide news network.

President Joe Biden has made more disaster aid available to Alaska in response to Western Alaska storm damage this month.

Biden revised the federal disaster declaration for Alaska on Thursday, increasing the federal payment to 100% of the total eligible costs for the first 30 days.

The decision means that the state won't have to pay any costs associated with initial assistance to residents and communities who suffered losses from the remnants of Typhoon Merbok After a landslide in Juneau on Monday, the city and borough of Juneau said in a Tuesday release that Gastineau Avenue residents were able to return home.

Tom Mattis, Juneau's emergency programs manager, said one home was completely destroyed by the slide and two more were damaged.

He said the city is still assessing whether it will need to do anything to stabilize the slide area.

Taylor Sosin with the Red Cross said 12 people came to an emergency shelter after the landslide.

They were given hotel vouchers for the night.

And finally, Centennial Park Campground, which has served as a makeshift homeless camp in Anchorage since late June, will close Saturday, October 1st.

City officials said Thursday they plan to move campers to the Sullivan Arena.

There are more than 200 people at the campground.

The Anchorage Assembly passed an emergency shelter plan on Monday that involves using the Sullivan, to shelter up to 150 people.

The assembly also opted to use the former Golden Lion Hotel as housing., but Mayor Dave Bronson has not said yet whether the administration will agree to that.

You can find the full versions of these stories and many more on our website.

Alaska Public dot org or by downloading the Alaska Public Media app on your phone.

Now on to tonight's topic.

Today is Orange Shirt Day.

The day memorializes the legacy of the boarding school era in Canada and across North America and is recognized worldwide as a day to remember native children who died while in government custody.

The children who survived and eventually went home to their communities often find it difficult to reintegrate.

And that disconnection affected generations of families.

Today, Native people are reclaiming their right to define curriculum and even the design of classrooms to infuse language, culture and traditions into native education.

And the urgency to do that while elder language experts are still alive, was elevated during the pandemic.

Half of the people whose first language is Kodiak Alutiiq have died over the last few years.

The Sun'aq Tribe estimates that fewer than 20 remain.

It is a heavy blow to the endangered language, but that's not stopping new speakers from learning a lot and passing along a distinct culture and worldview to the next generation.

From Kodiak, Claire Strobel and Valerie Kern, bring us this story.

(speaking Alutiiq) If you don't speak Alutiiq, you won't get the jokes at The Language House.

(speaking Alutiiq) It's a place where everything is a lesson.

Catching up on gossip, washing the dishes or making a grocery list.

Kodiak is known for bears and fish, but it's also the home of a powerful movement to bring the athletic language back into daily use.

For about a hundred years, American schools and governments suppressed the language.

Now, the last people who remember it as the language of use are almost gone.

(speaking Alutiiq) Stevi Frets works for the tribe and as a language mentor at the house.

She took a break from studying and learning the language for a few years, but now she's back as a mentor.

Heritage languages are so important, and when you learn them, it's like, "Okay, I'm part of the crew saving it now."

There's no like, "Yeah, I learned a little Alutiiq on weekends when I can."

All of a sudden you're like, "Oh my gosh, my language.

I have to save it.

I have to do everything I can."

She says there are a few elders in town she can speak with and a lot of folks who have gone through some basic language classes at the university.

So there's a lot of people that will understand me when I say, "Hi, how are you?"

And they'll say, "Hi, I'm good, how are you?"

But there's not a lot of people you can, like, have a conversation with.

Like, I think they're mostly in this room right now.

In some ways, Frets says she feels like she missed out.

The tribe estimates there are now only about 17 elders who are fluent elliptic speakers left.

It's a turning point, but the language movement isn't giving up.

It's moving forward.

Hayley Thompson says part of the Sun'aq Tribe's goal is to train fluent speakers who can in turn teach the language.

We have a lot of motivation to learn Alutiiq.

People want a little preschools and elliptic language classes at the high school and elliptic language class at the college.

And, Teach us Alutiiq.

Teach this.

Teach that."

But the problem is, is we don't have the teachers to teach those classes and workshops.

This isn't Kodiak's first mentorship program.

A solid foundation of language revitalization exists here.

But Thompson says those efforts were under different circumstances.

There were a lot more elders then.

(speaking Alutiiq) The next wave of what it looks like is building resources, archiving things that we know we're going to need, spending the time that we know we can get with elders.

That's what it looks like right now, just cherishing all the resources we can get before we know that they're gone.

Would you say it like that or?

(speaking Alutiiq) The stakes are high, but the rewards are immense.

Frets and the others are building fluency to be able to teach the next generation of Alutiiq speakers.

I would like you to pull on your little Allutiiq hats.

turn your little Alutiiq ears up, turn your Alutiiq voices up.

About a dozen preschoolers are enrolled in the Alutiingcut Child Care Center.

They learn numbers in Alutiiq and Alutiiq versions of popular kids songs.

(singing in Alutiiq) There probably won't be any birth speakers left by the time they're older, but the language movement is working to ensure they'll have instructors.

The tribe hopes to put 18 people through the intensive program over the course of its three year grant.

Dehrick Chya is the Alutiiq language and living culture director at the Alutiiq Museum, as well as a mentor at The Language House.

And then can you say, "(speaking in Alutiiq)."

He leads the session with apprentice speakers and elders.

It feels great to be able to speak, and the most rewarding moments for me are when I can have conversations with elders and first language speakers.

Alutiiq is Chya's full time job, and you can hear it.

But, even he has a lot to learn from elders.

I never heard it like that.

They meet up once a week to speak and learn.

(speaking Alutiiq) He says, three of the elders that joined these sessions died during the pandemic.

But, he's been recording them, so new listeners and descendants of the speakers can hear their stories.

Florence Pestrikoff didn't grow up speaking Alutiiq, even though most people in her village did.

Her parents encouraged her to speak English instead.

In the past, people were ashamed of the language.

She understood the language and began to speak in the first wave of language revitalization.

(speaking Alutiiq) For the last couple of decades, she's been an active speaker and teacher.

Oh, I love speaking my language.

I really do.

I feel complete.

She answers her cell phone in Alutiiq and speaks it with her husband.

And, that's the vision of the language movement.

To have the language be in use at home, in the grocery store, on the street and to carry the values that are embedded in the words.

We never say goodbye.

There is no goodbye in Alutiiq.

You say, ""Tang'rciqamken".

I will see you.

"Camiku".

Later.

I like that.

Reporting in Kodiak.

I'm Claire Stremple.

What a nice way to end that story.

No word for goodbye.

Just see you later.

Joining me tonight to discuss what it means to take control of Native education to create a strong foundation of language and cultural identity, is Ethan Petticrew, executive director of Cook Inlet Native Head Start, and Paul Ongtooguk, former director of the Alaska Native Studies Department at UAA.

Welcome, both of you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

So, you know, this is Orange Shirt Day, as I noted at the beginning.

And, Paul, when you reflect on the solemnness of that memorial time and day, and then think about the story that we just saw about a note for the future, what what's going through your mind right now?

It's hard to be a cautious optimist about Alaska Native education and about our future as Alaska Native people.

The caution comes from some very troubling, tough, traumatic history.

The optimism comes from where I see us moving forward in ways that are remarkable.

We're punching well above our weight.

And, as they would say it in boxing about moving forward to a better future than I think most people would have anticipated.

For say, in the 1960's.

Ethan, as an educator, working on the very issue of cultural revitalization and the importance of native language education, how are you thinking of that painful past and the hopeful story that we just saw?

Well, I think that we all need to recognize that painful past and come to terms with it.

I think everyone needs to understand their story and what that whole story has caused.

I think we also need to realize that it hasn't just simply ended with the closing of the boarding schools.

We've got generational trauma and patterns that have developed from that that families carry on today may not always be good behavior.

We also, we think that public school systems are void of this, and they're not.

There's still issues we're dealing with assimilation in those, and primarily with curriculum, things like that.

And, the way we're teaching, what we're teaching and the perspectives that are being taught, which then I'll boil down to values and whose values are children being inculcated into, I guess, is a question I have.

And, so what we are doing at Cook Inlet Native Head Start is we've taken this, you know, terrible, traumatic past that we've all shared and had and have this story.

And, we're looking forward to the future now and a future where our children don't have to carry this burden anymore.

And so the way we see that happening is to, in essence, decolonizing education or another way of saying it is indigenizing our education, recognizing that we have Indigenous practice in education for thousands of years before Western contact.

And, so bringing those things back into our children's educational life.

And I'm not saying forget all Western standards, for instance.

So we still have to meet the Office of Head Start Early Learning framework, which are a set of standards.

How we get to those standards, though, is the difference.

And, so we use a very cultural perspective or lens into our activities, primarily, our activities that are Indigenous activities that build upon those standards that are expected of every child in Headstart.

And, we're going to talk a little more about that in a moment.

But, when you think about the legacy of the past, how and when do you think that should be taught?

Head Start seems a little too young for something of that magnitude.

But, how should educators approach it?

Well, I think, first of all, we need to look at and not just look at our program, Cook Inlet Native Head Start.

We don't look at just the little children.

We look at the whole family.

So we're looking at the little children between birth and five years old.

We're looking at young parents of these children and we're looking at their parents, even the grandparents who are often heavily involved and sometimes many of those grandparent generation or the generation right before them were the boarding school children that were involved in boarding schools.

And, so we work with in trying to do in our program is with the whole family.

And with that, I agree.

Our little kids have no understanding of what boarding school experiences were.

We can, though, teach our children the wonderful beauty behind our cultures, the Indigenous cultures and the world view that is held within them.

That, we can expose our children to.

We can work with our parents on the intergenerational trauma that they can probably recognize once they're exposed to this history.

And once they realize that we've developed things in our lives that came out of this past that probably we don't want to continue.

And, we don't even really recognize it in ourselves.

I think a lot of times I know that my own family coming out of World War II experience and the internment, we had dysfunctional patterns that I never recognized.

I mean, I knew there were problems, but I realize now later on, I think this is where this came from.

That connection.

Yeah.

And, so I think that is healthy for all of us as Indigenous families and people to recognize or to be able to look at.

And, so the story can't be forgotten.

And, I think it's something that especially young people within, especially high school, can begin to process.

That middle school can process that story that took place that happened.

It's something we cannot forget it, but we can't be stuck in that rut either.

We have to move forward.

And, I like the idea of first helping young people feel the strength from their culture before you have to move on to some of the more painful legacies, so that they're well grounded first before the shock of of understanding the past.

Paul, earlier this week on Talk of Alaska, you said you'd like to see a similar system in native education to the federal tribal compacting for health care.

Describe what you're thinking about in that respect and how you think that could work.

Well, briefly, the transformation actually, I would say a revolution that's occurred in Alaska Native health care, has come from the federal trust responsibility to provide for education and health care as a part of the treaty obligations that the federal government continues to have.

As long as the United States keeps indigenous lands that were taken under treaty, the flip side of that contract is, well, they also have an obligation to continue their side of the treaty, which was to provide certain obligations.

And, those have been sort of congealed by the Congress and to primarily education and health care.

The tribes, primarily under Nixon, started to say, "Well, we think we can take those federal funds and contract to deliver those for our tribes in a way that's more effective than what the federal bureaucracy can do."

And so out of those pilot programs, we now have this transformation that's occurring in health care.

So the Alaska Native Medical Center is sort of the the trophy of example of what we have that has not occurred in education.

And, there's a key reason why, with what was called the Molly Hootch Case in which the gross inequity that was existing between non-Native and Alaska Native high school education was that if you were a non-Native and a non-Native community in Alaska, there was an expectation that you would have a local high school education.

But for Alaska Natives, if you wanted a high school education, you were taking these 13, 14-year-olds and taking them out of the communities and sending them to these mandatory boarding schools.

If they were going to receive an education, a high school education.

And, that had traumatic implications for communities and for the students in many, many cases.

So, the Molly Hootch Case was saying, "We're going to have a local education, high school opportunity for education, for every Alaskan."

And, so that was the settlement.

The State of Alaska was happy to do that because they had what was then, heroin levels of oil money.

So, they suddenly could afford to provide a high school local education for everyone, including Alaska Natives.

The flip side of that, the problematic aspect of it, was that on both sides of the Molly Hootch Case, where non-Natives negotiating one side in this class action lawsuit, was representing Alaska Natives and communities.

But, we weren't actually at the table.

And, something that slipped from that table was that federal trust responsibility to provide for the education of Alaska Natives and under the similar guise as health care.

The consequence is that we really don't have the same on ramp that would allow us to transform education in the same way that we've transformed health care.

So, a big disconnect.

It's a big disconnect.

And going forward, I think that needs to be reconsidered.

It's in the interest of the state to do that from a fiscal standpoint.

But, I think even more importantly, it's in the interest of our tribes and ultimately our students for that trust, responsibility to be revisited concerning Alaska Native education at the federal level.

Well, thank you for clarifying that concern for the future and I'm sure it's something that we'll want to revisit and discuss going forward.

But, I want to look at a classroom that is getting it right.

That's the Cook Inlet Native Head Start.

Let's look at some of your classroom features.

You have a fire pit.

Tell us about how you use and talk about this.

Here it is.

So, yeah, most classrooms are in historic classrooms.

Your story time and, you know, discussions about weather or what they typically call calendar time are done up against the wall, which is a Western classroom.

In our case, we wanted our classrooms to be, we know that we live in a modern world, but we wanted to go back to a time when our people sat children in a traditional clan house, for instance, and you did your learning.

If it wasn't outdoors and you were indoors, it would be around this fire pit or in some of our culture, you see the smoke pit, smoke hole, even we have on the ceiling in all of our classrooms.

We also have seal oil lamps.

So if you're from one of the seal oil cultures, we can set the lamp down instead of the fire pit.

But, the whole point is for us to be gathered as a group of people in the center of this house learning in a more relaxed environment.

You'll know there's no rows of chairs or anything like that.

It's more a traditional looking environment in a very modern classroom.

And, you also have the outside playground area also reflects aspects of culture and tradition.

So describe how you decided on those designs.

Yeah, well, what we're teaching in in the classroom is all about culture, our cultures.

And, we focus either on, we felt we teach the Alaskan Native the ten universal values of the Alaskan Native cultures.

And then by month, we focus on different subsistence cycles from different cultures.

That's what drives our curriculum.

And, so when we're teaching about, for instance, whaling in Up North with the St Lawrence Island people or with Inupiaq people, our children then have to have that opportunity when they go out to play in the playground.

They can play that very easy because in the playground we have whales, we have skin boats.

Of course, they're playground equipment made, we have sod houses, we have traditional southeast style house, etc.

So, it's all made to be part and in sync with each other.

So what they're learning indoors, they can go outside.

And I mean, we have in one playground, we have a food cache that's an Athabaskan food cache.

So, they can go out and actually play, reenact these things that they've been learning about in the classroom.

Is the Cook Inlet Native Head Start open to all kids or do you just primarily have Alaska Native students?

Our students right now are Alaska Native, American Indian.

We're a tribal program, so we're tribally funded.

That doesn't mean we won't take non-Native children.

If there were children.

What we focus on are under income, tribal children.

And then if we have applicants, if we run out of tribal children, then we are expected to take on more applicants and we would not have a problem with that.

The problem for us is that we're funded for 259 children.

There are over 4,000 eligible AIAN children in this age category just in Anchorage alone who are eligible for the services.

And, that means that they're under, in the lower income areas.

So, there's a vast amount on the waiting list is the point.

There's so many that it's going to be hard to get anybody else in at this point.

So we're about out of time, but thank you so much to both of you for the work that you do on behalf of Alaska Native children and American Indian children, especially as we're reflecting on the solemn day.

It's good to know that the future certainly looks much brighter and there is still work to do.

As you noted, Paul.

But heading in a good direction.

Teaching language, culture and tradition helps young people feel connected, confident and sure of who they are and where they come from.

It's that strength that can give them the tools and ability to have success in any modern setting.

Finding pathways to ensure that education honors and includes all cultures will help children face the future with more resilience through knowing the full story of their own history.

That's it for this edition of Alaska Insight.

Be sure to tune in daily to your local public radio station for Alaska Morning News and Alaska News Nightly every weeknight.

Be part of important conversations happening on talk of Alaska every Tuesday morning and visit our website alaskapublic.org for breaking news and reports from across the state.

While you're there, sign up for our free daily digest so you won't miss any of Alaska's top stories of the day.

Thanks for joining us this evening.

I'm Lori Townsend.

Good night.