The number of Alaska Native language speakers has been declining over the years including speakers of Alutiiq. But a new language class that’s live streamed from the Kodiak Archipelago community of Port Lions aims to combat that trend locally.
Every Thursday students from the school in the Native Village of Port Lions discuss Alutiiq culture and language. That’s in preparation for class lessons and conversations in Alutiiq that are live streamed online, through Facebook and YouTube, twice a month.
It’s the Port Lions students’ first time speaking their Native language within school through the Alutiiq Culture class. That includes practicing everything from weather reports to animals and place names in Alutiiq.
Jess Eggemeyer II, who works for the Native Village of Port Lions as the Project Manager for the Language Department, teaches the class and hosts the livestream.
“I really saw a need for content that was focused on the local community and that would include current events happening in the village and at the school," Eggemeyer said. "A local safety bulletin, the weather forecast, as you’ve seen.”
The Port Lions school is Kindergarten through 12th grade and has 26 students total. And the Alutiiq Culture class is a multicultural elective under the Kodiak Island Borough School District’s curriculum with support from the school’s head teacher, Shayla Deming and secondary teacher, Ken Stockard.
Elementary aged students take the class on Mondays along with practicing Native Youth Olympics events and the middle school to high school aged students do the same on Thursdays. Both come together roughly twice a month to host the livestream.
Eggemeyer said the livestream, which is called Kings Corner after the school’s mascot, is a product of Elders and the previous generation laying the groundwork for language revitalization in Port Lions and around Kodiak Island. That multi-year-long effort by multiple organizations and individuals has led to Alutiiq textbooks, digital audio recordings of Native speakers and language courses for college students or even adults.
Many of those resources are available online through Alutiiqlanguage.org and the AlutiiqMuseum.org.
“It means a great deal that we are able to provide that language learning to the next generation," Eggemeyer said. "If we don’t teach our children now, this is how languages die and it’s unfortunately not uncommon.”
Alaska Native languages in general are at risk of being lost or going extinct as Elders who speak the language are passing on, along with the lasting harm caused by colonization and the boarding school era as documented by the Alutiiq Museum.
For Koniag or Kodiak Alutiiq, which is the dialect mainly spoken in the Kodiak Archipelago,less than 20 fluent first language speakers are still alive today.
In 2018 the State of Alaska declared a statewide linguistic emergency due to the documented loss and “potential extinction” of the 20 official Alaska Native languages spoken in the state. The Alaska Native Language Preservation & Advisory Council urged Governor Mike Dunleavy to reissue the declaration last year.
Eggemeyer himself grew up speaking the language with his grandmother Sophie Katelnikoff Shepherd, who died in 2021. They both were a part of Kodiak’s language revitalization effort more than a decade ago.
One of the ways to continue to keep the language alive is through teaching the next generation and new speakers Eggemeyer said. And the Native Village of Port Lions is hopeful that the classes at the school will help both Native and non-Native students contribute to the preservation and promotion of Alutiiq culture.
The livestream also has the potential to reach far beyond the community or even the island to share the language and culture with the rest of the world. Eggemeyer said the school has tapped into Starlink for high speed internet , since GCI’s new subsea fiber line still hasn’t quite been linked up to the village.
“And it’s really sort of changed things in the villages, certainly in ours, as far as connectivity goes," he said. "I mean, gosh, we’ve been dealing with almost dial-up speeds before that.”
Eggemeyer said the class will go through the rest of this semester and he hopes to continue it this summer and next school year too.
