“Haa yoo x̱ʼatángi káx̱ ḵunaylagaaw!
Ḵúnáx̱ a káx̱ ḵunaylagaaw!
Hél daa sá a yáx̱ koogei haa yoo x̱ʼatángi.”
– Shaksháani
“Fight for our language!
Really fight for it!
Nothing measures up to our language.”
– Marge Dutson, Ishkeetaan
The preceding quote was born out of a project led by Dr. X̲ʼunei Lance Twitchell, Professor of Alaska Native Languages at University of Alaska Southeast (UAS). For Dr. Twitchell himself, a cornerstone of language vitalization throughout Alaska, they’ve seemingly become words to live by.
Recently nominated for an Emmy for his writing on “Molly of Denali,” a children’s show on PBS about Alaska Native culture and life, Dr. Twitchell has worked for years at the intersections of art and language preservation to breathe life back into the Tlingit-speaking community around Southeast Alaska. His own journey, influenced by his interests in writing, visual arts and poetry, stems from his relationship to his grandfather.
“I was always connected to him,” Dr. Twitchell said of his grandfather. “My parents said I used to cry a lot, but then they’d hand me to Grandpa and I’d be just fine.”
While studying at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Twitchell received the news that his grandfather had gotten sick and decided to head back home to help – unbeknownst to him at the time, this sojourn back with his grandfather would send him down a path he still walks today. After learning from his great aunt that his grandfather was the only Tlingit speaker in the family, Dr. Twitchell saw an opportunity to connect.
“One day I just said: ‘Hey, you should teach me Tlingit,’” he said. “He pointed at the salt shaker on the table [and said the Tlingit word for it]. When I tried to say it he laughed at me, which is just how he was. He loved to laugh at folks.” This interaction, however congenial, was the first step down the path that Dr. Twitchell has since found himself on. “I set a goal,” he says fondly of that time, “which was to get him to stop laughing at me.”
After the passing of his grandfather, Dr. Twitchell returned back to the University of Minnesota with a new interest in language preservation and stabilization. However, in line with many of the narratives heard from Indigenous language speakers today, he struggled with not having anyone to speak and engage in Tlingit with. “The language, for me, filled a gap after my grandpa died,” he said. “I would just walk around the University of Minnesota and study flash cards. I didn’t have anybody to talk to.”
Upon returning home and joining in on a language camp hosted by Sealaska Heritage Institute (SHI), he began to understand where his place in this world might be.
“I met this group of people who were learning and these teachers, and I was hooked,” he said of the Elders he met. “When I realized that some of these older people didn’t have anybody new to talk to,” he said, “my goal was to become someone they could talk to.”
Exterminating Native languages was at the foundation of the colonial project. To successfully disconnect Indigenous Peoples from their language was to sever them not only from their means of expressing themselves, but from their knowledge of land, cultural history and stories, and larger group identity.
“You sort of banish them to this existence that they can never really have,” Dr. Twitchell says.
This work was orchestrated in this area through the 1900s in boarding schools by people like Sheldon Jackson, who sought to tear Alaska Native children from their culture and sense of self through erasure.
“The connection of people and language and the ways that it’s been under attack, there’s been a war on our language for 100 years now and we’re just now sort of ending that war and trying to move towards a place where we can rebuild and restructure,” he said.
Luckily, he’s not alone. Dr. Twitchell views language through a metaphor shared with him by Daanaawáaḵ Austin Hammond.
“He would say that if you look up on the mountains, especially in the winter time, and you see these little patches of trees, you might ask yourself how could they just be up there in the steep snow and cold wind. How can they even survive?,” he explained. “He says it’s because underneath the soil their root system is intertwined, and that’s how our hands are together. When we’re in our language, in our culture, it’s like this root system.”
Dr. Twitchell himself has been at the very front lines of the fight to rebuild what was devastated throughout the colonial period. With only 10 fluent speakers of Tlingit left,the current moment is pivotal for the future of the language.
A talented writer and artist, Dr. Twitchell sees poetry, screenwriting, and fiction as natural extensions of the type of long-form storytelling that are naturally occurring in Tlingit.
“There was an Elder I used to work with named Ḵaaklig̱éi Norman James, and he used to say, ‘I could tell you a story that takes 10 days to tell,’” he said.
A natural conduit has opened up for Dr. Twitchell between his love for storytelling and his Tlingit roots, which among many other projects has most recently led him to write for the Emmy-nominated “Molly of Denali.” Pivotal in putting the narrative back in the hands of Alaska Natives, this show celebrates Alaska Native culture and, in stark contrast to the messaging older generations grew up with, gives children reason to be proud of their heritage. During a screening alongside his own three children, Dr. Twitchell found himself overwhelmed with emotion.
“I was in tears,” he said. “I said [to my children], ‘When I was your age, we didn’t have any Native Americans on television. It was like Bugs Bunny was murdering them, those are the only ones we saw.’ To see the narrative change as my kids are coming of age was incredible.”
With the episode he wrote, Dr. Twitchell addressed the legacy of early colonial photographers who always captured stoic Indigenous folks and contributed to larger false narratives about who Indigenous People were.
“The whole premise of this episode is Native people like to laugh and smile, like that’s really what it’s all about,” he said. “In the episode, Molly has an auntie who’s very stern, and everybody’s kind of scared of her, and then when she learns that that auntie is the funny face contest champion she’s just shocked. I want to just break this stereotype that, you know, sometimes people just have a certain look on their face, but also the world is a very mean place when it comes to how it treats Native people.”
Looking into the future, Dr. Twitchell’s relationship with his own children and their relationship to living in Tlingit gives huge hope to the stabilization of the language. While in Sitka teaching with his family, Twitchell tells a story of his then eight-year-old daughter who was playing with some friends when he spoke to her in Tlingit to tell her that it was time to go. When one of her friends asked which language they were speaking, Dr. Twitchell says his daughter shrugged and said matter-of-factly, as children do, it’s human language.
Rachel Levy is a Juneau-based photojournalist whose work culminates at the intersections of environmental justice, arts and culture, and sustainable tourism. A 2022 graduate of Harvard University's Environmental Policy program, she is also the director of the award-winning documentary "Hidden in Plain Sight" that exposes the labor exploitation and colonial framework burdening Tanzania's safari industry.
