Transcript: ILLUMINATING WORLDVIEWS on Land, Language, and Love S1:2
Ayana Young Over the past few months, I have journeyed to the Yukon in partnership with Illuminating Worldviews. Illuminating Worldviews serves as a space to examine the worldviews amidst which we find ourselves and see how they actively shape the material realities of our lives. This project, rooted and colored by the land of the Yukon, makes space for questioning, examination and future visioning centered in Indigenous ideology and the sentiment of journeying. In person and on the land, I had the chance to speak with incredible thought leaders with deep connections to the Yukon—all with a live audience in the beautiful city of Whitehorse except for the last event, which was in Dawson City.
Though this series is deeply local, it has broad implications for our culture as a whole, and I'm so excited to share it with you. This series was produced thanks to the generous support of the team at Illuminating Worldviews held by the River collective and the Northern Council for Global Cooperation. We are so grateful to the organizers, speakers and audience members who made this series possible, and also a very big thank you to the land of the Yukon, the boreal forest, the rivers, the lakes. I am honored to have been asked to be part of this.
In this episode, we hear from X̱ʼunei Lance Twitchell on language, culture, and the words that tie us together. I was so sad that I wasn't able to make this one in person with Lance, but this episode holds a specific place in this series, and my heart as it centers the Tlingit language and ways love, locality, and communication can shape our futures.
X̱ʼunei Lance Twitchell, Tlingit, Haida, Yupik, Sami is a professor of Alaska native languages at the University of Alaska Southeast. He lives in Juneau with his wife and bilingual children. He speaks and studies the Tlingit language and advocates for Indigenous language reclamation through teaching, program development, legislative change, and healing. Twitchell is an author of poems, stories, and screenplays, and is a filmmaker, musician, and Northwest Coast artist.
The moderator of this conversation is Guná Jensen—a Tlingit formline design artist, oil painter, and educator. I’m so delighted to be introducing her through this incredibly insightful conversation.
X̱ʼunei Lance Twitchell But we got to support each other so we could stand with this language, not give up. [Tlingit language] You're not going to give up. [Tlingit language] You're going to succeed with love and kindness.
Guná Jensen One thing I think would be really helpful for people to know is where your journey in language started. And, you know, watching the video, seeing those moments of connection, what was that sort of moment for you in reconnecting with language? Where did that start for you?
X̱ʼunei Lance Twitchell [Tlingit language] I'm just so thankful to be here on the land of our inland relatives. You all are such wonderful stewards of this land and have endured a tremendous amount from colonization. So I just always want to be thankful for the folks whose land we're standing upon and working upon.
I'm grateful that we're talking about language. I'm so filled with courage from people who study, from our three kids who are raised in the language and have responded well to being raised in the language. My journey began when I was....It was 1996, and my grandfather, his name was Gushta hin. His namesake is over there. His other name is Kaja. He and I were always close. They say when I was real little, I would cry. They'd put me on my grandpa's lap, and I would stop crying. His Guitar Hero—I can't remember his name—he was one of these real old cowboy type of guys, and we were at Disneyland, and I was just barely big enough to walk, and they said, "There's your guitar hero. You should go say hi to him." My grandpa said, "No, he's too shy," and they weren't looking and I walked over there, and then that guy carried me over to my grandpa, and he got to meet him.
So we're always closely connected, and he got really sick. He had something in his stomach, and so I came home from college to stay with him. And we'd watch baseball game after baseball game, which was fun, but after a while, you know, 20 baseball games later, you got to do something else. And it was his sister Kathy, who said, "You know, he's the only one in our family who could speak Tlingit." And I said, "Oh, what?" And I didn't know a word of Tlingit. And so I said, "Teach me. Teach me Tlingit." And he pointed at the salt shaker. He said '[Tlingit language]," and I tried to say it, and he'd laugh at me. And I thought, "Well, I'm gonna get him to stop laughing at me." So that was goal number one: get grandpa to stop laughing at me when I speak the language.
But it made a connection because no one else in our family at that time was learning. And so I went back to college. I said, "Grandpa, I got one more semester of college. Why don't I just stay here through the winter? You and I will study Tlingit." He says, "No, just go finish. You got one semester left. Go finish." So I go back. And he calls me, and he says, "You should come home. I said, "The semester is almost over, and then I'm done. Then I'm done." And he got real sick, and I had to come home, and he died. And I thought, I didn't answer his call, and I should have.
But after I got through the hardships, and it was such a...I really felt his death, like I felt it on the earth. There was this place I like to go to in Skagway, and I went out there, and I watched the fog roll in real fast and go out real fast. And I thought, Okay, it's gonna happen. And I go home, and there's ravens in all of the trees around my grandma's house. And I said, "Okay, it's gonna happen." And I walked in, and five minutes later, he was gone, but I held his hand when he left. We shared a meal before he went to sleep, and it was blueberries—frozen blueberries—and sugar and canned milk, which we both loved. I was gonna give him the last bite, and he said, "It's your turn," and it was the last thing he ever said, and I watched him go to sleep.
But after I dealt with sadness for a while, I tried to go to Ketchikan and learn some Tlingit. And it was wonderful, but my life there didn't work out. And I got back to college, and I'd found these tapes called Beginning Tlingit by Keixwnéi Nora Marks Dauenhauer and X̱waayeenáḵ Richard Dauenhauer and G̱unaakʼw Fred White. And I would just walk around and listen to them, listen to them, listen to them. I had these two little books—a yellow book with verbs and an orange book with nouns—and I learned all the nouns. I couldn't figure out how the verbs work. I was like, Well, I can learn all these nouns. I can learn all these names. I can learn how to say them all.
And then I came home and I met Nora, and I met Richard, and they were legendary—just the amount of work they did recording—the making of 500 different tapes of our language, making all these different language materials. And I looked at them, and I said, "I want to be you." And then that became my journey. And as I started to learn how to speak, I decided I don't care if I sound bad. I'm going to speak Tlingit whenever I meet someone who knows how to speak it, and I'll see if they will talk to me.
Guná Jensen Wow. I want to thank you for sharing that story and certainly the synergy between learning something new and vulnerability is really important. And that, you know, the walking into the language immersion camp, or the introduction when your sort of voice is shaking—all of those pieces come together, and so thank you for acknowledging that. And for also being vulnerable and sharing some of your story and in the film, particularly. And seeing some of the carving that was happening and the kids dancing and the paintings being held up. There's this connection that will be really great to hear from you with respect to language and healing and how those two are going down that river almost at the same time. And so interested, if you could share with those the connection perhaps with the film, any observations that stuck out for you with respect to healing and language?
X̱ʼunei Lance Twitchell Yeah, [Tlingit language] the film was incredible. It was just incredible to watch. I had consulted on a couple of the language things, and then just to see what they had made of it. We filmed this part in Juneau, which is very fun. I look kind of like a dork when I'm speaking and teaching Tlingit, but that's okay because I'm having fun.
But what I think about is all these people who talk to me, and I think especially over the last two decades, as I've learned to speak Tlingit, and I would just go to people who knew how to speak it, and who are always so kind. I have a colleague named Ronalda Cadiente Brown, and she was one time talking to me about wanting to become an elder with the soft eyes, who's always kind, because this world can be a really hard thing. It could be a really, really hard life. And I always think, How can I continue? And what I want is hundreds of years from now for our descendants to look at us and say, "Gee, our ancestors were kind. They were such kind people." Because I think sometimes the way things are written about us, we're always out here, Oh the Tlingits are coming. They're so tough and they're so mean. I think you just don't even know us. Good grief, you know, like people point out one of our aunties and say, "Oh, she's so mean." I was like, No she's so nice.
You know, I was teaching Tlingit one time, and this lady came up, and her father was a teacher at Sheldon Jackson, probably at a time when it wasn't a good place to be—when they actively prohibited language use. And she was having a bit of dementia as well so I think maybe her filter was not quite installed that day. And we're teaching Tlingit, and she came up after she said, "I didn't know that anybody could learn Tlingit." I said, "Well, you live on Tlingit land, so you should learn the Tlingit language. It's just… Everybody should learn it and speak it. It'd be great." And she said, "I also didn't know that Tlingit People laughed." And I said, "Oh, well, when you were young, like, your people were taking our land and, like, prohibiting our language, and it was really not a very fun time, but we were still over here telling jokes, and so I don't—" You know?
And I think about…As I was able to communicate with people, and then raise children, who through a series of incredible blessings, I watched our kids sit down with these elders. And I thought, That elder has probably been waiting their whole life to have new people to talk to, and now they're speaking Tlingit with that little kid who can understand them. And I just thought, What a beautiful moment. And I thought as I continued to come to these people, these old people. And it's a dangerous thing to make, if all your friends are 90 years old. I tell my learners...I said, "You're gonna learn this language. You're gonna learn how to understand what these people are saying. They're going to share some wonderful stuff with you as one of the few people in the world who could really understand them, and then you're going to lose them." But I said, "We are the bridge. We're the bridge between these people at this point where we almost lost everything. And look at us now." Look at us now. There's such a bright and amazing and inevitable future of language reclamation that's going on right now, and it's because of the courage of people.
I was sitting next to Ka’seix Selina Everson, and we're arguing for legislation, and I was ready to fight with all these legislators who were saying silly things, like they just don't know. But I think ignorance is not always a good excuse. So one of them said to me, "Well, you guys are doing so much for your language, but when my ancestors came here, they stopped speaking Russian, and they started speaking English." And I said, "Okay, well, Russia still exists. And if you don't speak it, you could go there and you could learn. But if these languages stop being used, we'll never recover them. There's nowhere else we can go. This is where they belong." And so sometimes they get so angry, and I was so thankful to have an elder next to me because she was my calming force. And one time I listened to her give testimony, and she said, "[Tlingit language] Our language saved us." And I thought, Of course it did, and it will again.
Ayana Young The following audio excerpt is from the premiere of the powerful short film, The River That Untangles One’s Mind, by Skaydu.û Jules, Guná Jensen, and X̱’unei Lance Twitchell, produced by Douglas Joe/Creative Crow Media. We hope you enjoy it as an addition to this incredible conversation.
Film: The River That Untangles One’s Mind My name is Wayne G. Price my Tlingit name is Kaajis.yoodzi.áxk, Wooshkeetaan from Kake, Alaska—Thunderbird House, Shark House, and my dad's side, a Raven Frog from Klukwan...
The connection with the Stand Talls, Western Red Cedar, thousands of years old, goes wayyyy back. Our connection to the Stand Talls is from the beginning of who we are as Tlingit people, Haida people, Tsimshian people, all the nations on the Pacific Northwest Coast. We should not lose that connection. The Totems—they were our history books. That's how we kept track of our legends, stories, our history, family. Many reasons for a Totem. We didn't have a written language. We didn't have the books. We had Stand Talls and carved the Totems, and excelled to a very high degree in our ability to work with wood, And the dugouts—how we got around for thousands of years, and it's coming back. We're bringing a lot of that back. We're starting to see more and more people having a wonderful time talking about the journeys they've been on on the water. And it's not just one dugout anymore. It's many dugouts. It's time to transfer that knowledge so you know how to build your own dugout, and then a story will go on, will keep going. And it is my journey in this lifetime to bring the healing dugouts into a reality amongst our people. That's the way I see it is for thousands of years, our culture and our arc went like this through time. And then the sailing ships showed up in our lifetime, when they went like this—this big separation—loss of language. We live in a time now where we can start to bring some of that back. I truly believe, the closer we can bring the culture and our lives together so that all of us participating in a journey. We're all looking for that same thing with the same calling. We all have it. You know, it's really great that we can live in a culture that did survive. Now we can work together and bring some of that back. You start writing a new chapter of journeys and healing, working together, pursuing the language, pursuing the dance, finding that oneness that we all feel. You know, that's what we're talking about. Now we have new stories, a new community—can bring a dugout into their lives, and the young people be right there and do the journeys. And we're doing it one dugout at a time. I want to see subsistence journeys done only speaking the language. You know the joy of cutting that sail up. You know what I'm talking about. There was just no feeling like that. You got to be there. If you haven't been there, don't wait too long to get there because that space provides healing for everybody involved.
Cyril George Formangoon, the Basket Bay people. He told it to us that, "In our Tlingit ways of being, the way we are taught, respect for each other, love for each other. There is a spirit in everything," they say. "We are taught, the Salmon in the Water, the Ones Who Roam in the Interior, the Brown Bear—them too. They have a spirit just like us. Don't any of you say the wrong things to them. All of you respect them."
When we speak our languages, we're engaging with a distinct worldview, one that is intrinsically and holistically connected to our environments, our ancestors, our non-human relatives and our communities.
Guná Jensen I was looking at Guná to also do like a foot stomp there because that was incredibly powerful, the way that you describe those relationships. And in language—learning from many who are doing the work, the heavy work, the heart work on the ground, as you alluded to, it's also not easy work. That is one part of it, right? But also, as you describe, the challenge to move beyond perhaps the [Tlingit language] baby Tlingit, as Guná described, to having conversations with other people or describing feelings, putting things from English to Tlingit And you and I have talked about this. There's just...I don't remember what the conversation was, but you're like, Well, there's not, it's not quite there, but let me, let me share something with you that's close to what I think you're thinking. And when we're talking about what you're talking about, language is going to save us. What are some moments that you've seen that sort of have brought life to what the late Selina—and I don't recall her Tlingit name—but what are some of those moments that have really, you've been like, wow, like, This is it. This is what we've needed, or this is what people need to know or need to see.
X̱ʼunei Lance Twitchell Yeah, [Tlingit language] Ka’seix Selina Everson. So well, I think of…There's another elder I worked with, her name is Shaksháani Marge Dutson.
And I remember I was in Hawaii, and someone was talking about this linguist named Dr. Michael Kraus. I was like, "I love his work. His work is so amazing. I've really studied it." And they said, "There he is. Go talk to him." I was like, "What?" And so, we went and talked to him, and he said...He was a really, really neat guy. I embarrassed him one time because he came to Juneau for a conference, and I was talking about this wonderful moment when I was talking to him. Because he had written a lot about how we're probably going to lose all these languages, like he was...And as he looked at it, he said, "We stand to lose more languages in the next fifty years than in the entirety of contact with European nations." And it's incredible to think about. It's very challenging to not say, "Okay, well, it's all over. " But instead, to sort of...I was so thankful to sit in his kitchen at one point and say, "Yeah, I know a young person who who's speaking Eyak and learning Eyak." He said, "I'll be damned." And I said, "And I've got these three kids, I'm raising and I could say anything I want to them and Tlingit, and they can understand it." And he said, "I'll be damned." I said, "Well, my goal is to keep him cussing." So I understand like we're doing this thing that people thought was would be impossible. But I think colonization tries to get you to believe that it is impossible, that it's already over, that these things already happened. And it also removes the human agency from it, and to say, like, Oh, these languages just...it's real sad what happened. It's like, well, it's tragic and it's horrible and people did this to our people. We never asked people to come and to take our land and to keep people from speaking languages.
Because one of the things that Michael Kraus told me to do. He said, "Here's what I want you to do. I want you to go to these old people who went to these residential schools, went to these boarding schools, and I want you to get them to tell you in the language what happened to them. Because nobody's going to believe you, but you're going to have the story directly told." And so I…—Marge Dutson had told me the story— and I said, "Would you tell it and Tlingit, and would you let me record it?" And she said, "Let me think about it." And so one day she called me and she said, "Okay, let's do it." So I went to her house and we made this incredible recording and there was just a few things I remember about it. One is: she talked for about twenty minutes, and then I stopped the camera and she said, "Tell me the first thing that I said," and it's a sweating— [laughter]. There was something about [Tlingit word] and I could hear it, but I couldn't understand all of it. And she said, "[Tlingit language].” I said, "Okay, I don't know if I understand that."
And so, I went to three of the most advanced language learners that I knew, and I said, "Do you guys know what this is?" And they didn't know. And when I...And Marge, she told me. She said, "Well if I was going to tell you the story? I had to start it with that sentence, which is, 'It's impossible for you to feel how much we suffered when nobody wanted our language.'" And then she proceeded to tell the story about being a five year old girl. First day of school, her oldest sister said, "Don't speak Tlingit at the school. Don't do it. You'll get in big trouble." But she's five years old, and this is the language that she knows. All the kids in the 1920s, they know that language. All the Tlingit kids that go to this ...They had to go to their own school there. And so she goes, and she's speaking Tlingit with her friends. And the school teacher—she said she was a big lady—she calls her up in front of the class, and she grabs her by her hair and lifts her off the ground and shakes her violently, saying, "I'm going to hit you if you do that again," and drops her on the ground. She's hurt. She's scared. She's crying. She goes and grabs her stuff. She's embarrassed. And she makes this long walk home crying and so, so terrified. And then she watches her parents get into this giant fight because her father is going to go murder that teacher for hurting his child, and the mother had to stop him. And then, she told me about how she survived all these things, and she told me. She said, "They tried to scare it out of me. They tried to beat it out of me. They tried to shame it out of me, but I held on to my language," and that courageous, beautiful woman taught me so much stuff. And I was able to be a person that she could communicate with, and I would be able to tell her, "[Tlingit language]. I said, "Anything you want your grandkids to know, tell me, and I will try to teach them." And so I was able to make that connection and let her know. I said, "[Tlingit language]. I feel good that you were stubborn." Because there's this phrase [Tlingit phrase] which means to have fortitude, to have determination, and that's what we inherit from our ancestors to keep going. And as we look towards what's going on in the world now, we could challenge people to say, "What if all of our languages were equal?"
I remember I was somewhere and I saw a little information graphics that said "The official languages of the Yukon are English and French." I thought, Well, you're missing about a dozen of them. So fix your face, Yukon, so that we can sort of just be equal.
Audience Owww! [Applause]
Guná Jensen I love that. I'm gonna actually, next time I have a meeting with one of our federal government officials, I'm gonna say, "Fix yo face.”
X̱ʼunei Lance Twitchell [Tlingit language!]
Guná Jensen But going going back to so many parts of what you had just shared, and again, that sort of...You know, on this river journey tonight, that pattern of vulnerability matched with courage, that has been what has continued to be showcased through our people—meaning not just Tlingit People or People Inland, but Indigenous Peoples all around the world. And that's where when we're talking about language, I recall—a quick anecdote for those of us here in Canada aye—but you know, admittedly, I do speak French. That's not something that's widely shared. But at the time, my mom, when putting me into kindergarten, there was an opportunity for me to learn another language. And so she jumped on that. And there wasn't, you know, the same option to have done [list of Indigenous languages], Tlingit. But oftentimes, it's having other people understand your point from that place of empathy, that example you shared from the Russians who want to learn Russian, but for people who are French speaking to understand that, who would you be as a Francophone person if you didn't speak French? Is very much similar to, like, who are you as a Tlingit, Southern Shonone woman if you don't speak your language, right? Like, that's a hard truth. And to your point one that is a truth or reality that we did not ask for, but that has been pushed upon us for generations of people.
So in this work that you're doing, one theme that I've noticed has been about empathy and about love and about compassion and how and why is that so important? I mean, for some of us who are on the train, right, we might have some examples or thoughts or reflections around why that's important, but there's a whole lot of people out there that need to know, right? A whole lot of Yukoners need to know that there needs to be all nine Yukon First Nation languages acknowledged in the same way that Northwest Territories acknowledges all of their Indigenous languages as official languages. For the record, that is the only region that does that. So what about empathy? What about love? What about compassion in this work?
X̱ʼunei Lance Twitchell So coming back to love and compassion, like I really...A lot of my work is everyday I try and think, How do I improve the lives of indigenous Peoples? How can I make the lives of Indigenous Peoples better? I don't want people to feel ashamed because they don't know their language. I don't want them to feel scared. Sometimes people see me and they say, "I was going to speak Tlingit, but I was too nervous because you were there." And then I thought, Well, I want you to feel nervous to speak English in front of me, like, I must be doing it wrong. Like, what am I doing?
But the way I think about it was how Kaalkáawu Cyril George used to tell this story all the time. He was such a beautiful storyteller, such an amazing person. And Kathy Ruddy, she was a person— She brought him to my classes all the time. She brought him to these recording sessions, and it was the only time I think people recorded him telling stories in Tlingit. And we were able to do that about a year before he passed away. He was 92.
But he would say in their village of Angoon, “One time, the village got raided, and people were going there to take people to be slaves. And this man, he got away. He escaped, and he was feeling a sense of relief. It was so scary. And then he hears the cries of his son who got captured, and he didn't think about it. He just ran straight down there. ‘I'd rather be with my son than have him be a slave by himself.’”
And I think about that love we have for our people, and that love we have for ourselves, and that respect, this—so much of a balance, I think that comes back into being when we speak our languages. It's very hard to be—In English, it's just...It's easy to be very disrespectful, very mean, very harsh. And I think in our languages, it requires us to think a lot more about our relationships with everybody around us. And then I think as well, like, How do we replace what's been taken when it's been taken so harshly?
So there was a person a long time ago, you can find them in the history books—I'm not going to name them—who said, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." Then there was someone else who said, "Well, this guy said that, it was really cool, but actually, you could kill the Indian and save the man." And then someone after that thought, Well, what if we built a school and we put them in the school and we made them speak only English, and we cut their hair, and we get them different clothes, and we forced them to be what we are? And that was [Tlingit town name], this town on “sheet-kah”—in Sitka, Alaska, the boarding school movement in North America begins. And it's the residential school movement here in Canada. These places of such horror, of such suffering, and such intense inhumanity that I think we have so much work to do right now collectively. When I say 'we,' this is everybody who lives on these lands. These are all Indigenous lands. Everybody is accountable and responsible, and that's a blessing. It's a blessing to be alive right now, and to say we could forge a different future than one of genocide by being aware and alert, and saying we need to put just as much energy into language reclamation as the people who were here a hundred years ago did into trying to kill off every single one these languages. But through these conscious efforts, we can find the erasure of inhumanity because the type of colonization that happened here required the colonizer to see the Indigenous as nonhuman. And they also had to become inhumane themselves, to torture children...They put chemicals in their mouths. They hit them. They did so many horrible things. But that doesn't mean that we have to accept those things as what should have happened, and we should not accept the results as what should happen. But instead, we say, "We all have the future of these languages firmly in our hands, and if we can be compassionate people, [Tlingit language]." To say, like, we feel pity in ourselves—not to feel sorry, not to make people feel bad, but to say we can be courageous human beings who can do something better than that. Who could do something to counter all of those decades and decades and generations of inhumanity by saying, "There's a coexistence that is healthier for the entire Earth and for all of the humans who live on that Earth."
Guná Jensen And it's that coexistence, right, that you talk about—the interconnection between all living beings. An elder had once said...We were talking about declining moose populations, particularly in my community. I unfortunately don't spend as much time there as I'd like, but the reality is people just aren't getting the same amount of moose. And so, as an elder was saying, you know, we're talking about the impacts, what that means, dzisk’w, right? Moose, I guess.
X̱ʼunei Lance Twitchell Dzisk’w
Guná Jensen Okay, Tayana has a little dzisk’w. Like anyone seen those things that you pull, the little antlers go, "Doo doo, doo?" Anyway, point being, the moose isn't like an American moose or a Canadian moose, right? Like the moose is a moose and it moves around and it does what it needs to do, and that's its job—is to do what it needs to do. This language works, right?
We've got, you know, lots of people in here who are doing the work, and would be remiss if I named—started to name—people because there's so many of you, and I don't want to miss anyone, but you know who you are. People that are doing this work in Alaska, in Yukon, and Northwest Territories, and Nunavut in BC, Northern Manitoba. Wow, have you seen those connections? How have you seen this, I would say, resurgence, right? Like I forget who the young woman...I think it's Jacey Firth, right? It was like, "Speak Gwich'in to me." And so she started this whole sort of movement there. How have you seen those connections being forged, and like opportunities to grow and learn together? Really curious about that because it sometimes can feel, as I've heard from people who are in this space, kind of isolating, right? Like you're doing all this work. There's not a lot of people you can talk to all the time. Some people have cohorts and groups that they're connected with. Others might be living in their community, trying to do this with maybe one other person and one language speaker. That's the reality that we're in. So how have you seen these connections form?
X̱ʼunei Lance Twitchell Well, I understand that some people smuggle things across the border, and I might have brought some butter up here when I came. But sometimes I'll get asked so many quite—like they're really trying to grill me on these questions. I'll say, "Well, you come here a lot, don't you?" I say, "Yeah." And they said, "Why?" I said, "Because this is all our land. This is Tlingit-ani right there, right there." And so sometimes I think it's hard for people to conceptualize what longevity is when it comes to languages. Like, if you just hopped in a time machine and you went back 500 years and tried to speak and found someone who spoke English, I don't even know if you could have a converse— It would take so long to have a conversation because you'd be saying, "Skippity toilet riz," and you know, they'd be like, What is even a toilet? Right?
And so...But for Tlingit, you're talking about a language that has been in its same place. And this is not our land, this is our relatives', our Northern relatives who we love and respect. But if you go down to Tlingit country and you say, "Well, what if I went back 15,000 years?" And you could speak, you'd have to learn the language. But if you went back…We listened to these tapes of a hundred years ago, and we're like, Listen to them. They're speaking the same way we are. Look at this name [Tlingit name]. Look at this name, [Tlingit name]. This goes back ice ages. We're talking geologic time, and our language was still here. So who on Earth is qualified to say this language should go away now? Nobody.
And so I don't have any hatred for English. I think it's fun. I think it's a great language. It's a great tool. But you know, one of the things I guess, I want to share with folks is sometimes people talk about how difficult our languages are to learn. And I remember us visiting with King̱eestí David Katzeek, and he said, "[Tlingit language.]" He said, "Tlingit is not hard. It's not difficult if you have Tlingit thinking. But if you're thinking about it in English all the time, it's going to be difficult because you don't want to have to translate it to your other brain. Because if we just keep speaking Tlingit, it's going to be easy."
So one of the things I think we really need is to develop safe spaces of language use—a place where we can walk in that door, and it's going to be to Shoshone, we walk in that door, it's going to be Tagish, we walk in that door, it's going to be Tlingit. So our languages have a space and have a time and that we can go there and celebrate and be joyous with each other. Because, you know, talking about connections.
One time, I went to Teslin, and it was a very difficult situation because one of their elders was going to pass away. And I came up here, and they told me a friend of mine, she said, "My grandma's passing away, and she's only speaking Tlingit, will you come and talk to her?" I said, "I would love to," and I went, and I had this very intense conversation with her. But then, you know, when we got done, I said, "[Tlingit language]." "I have to go." And she held my hand, and she said in English, "Now I know I'm not alone," and I was able to be there and make that connection. And then we went to Teslin and to take care of some business. And it was their clan, and they were [Tlingit language], and they went to talk about their clan business. And then there was an elder there, and she said, "What are you here? What are you here for?" I said, "I'm gonna teach Tlingit." And she says, "You know Tlingit?" I said, "Yes," and she started speaking to me, and I was like, Ooooh. And we had this wonderful conversation. And they came out of the back room, they were done with their clan business, and I said, "Oh, well, we're gonna go." And she said, "I haven't talked like that since my dad died, and it's been almost 20 years." And it was just just to make that connection, and just to see that these elders would be able to find someone else to talk to after going probably 60 years without having new people to talk to. So that's the connection that we look at. That's the medicine. That's the energy that we hold on to.
[Musical break]
Moderator Geez, that was beautiful. I thank you. Lots of really moving reflections that you've shared tonight, that we've seen through the video. And I know that there may be people who are here tonight who are curious, who maybe have wanted to connect with you before, or if there's a question from the crowd, per se?
X̱ʼunei Lance Twitchell Yeah, [Tlingit language.] So the question is, how important are verbs to Indigenous languages? Yeah, so we love verbs in Tlingit. We're like...We love them so much that we've got special verbs for certain things like...And so, as a learner, you're always going to encounter this because they're like, “Okay, so I'm going to take the guts out of this fish.” It's like, "We got a verb for that". And like, "Okay, I'm out of breath." "We got a verb for that." And so one is: we got a verb for so many different...And some of them, you're like, "Really, we got our own?" "Okay, fine. Okay, Ancestors, okay."
But so, a verb goes through so many different changes in Na-Dene languages, and Tlingit is the one that I can speak. But one of the things that we say is we say, "Well, our verbs don't change for time. They change for events." So time is not the driving factor for language. And I think that takes a while to just wrap your head around because it's not about when it happened, it's about whether or not it did happen.
But then we have a whole bunch of things that pop up in the front of the verb. So you're going to have this verb root, which is going to be this little short part. Like you might say "ti"—to be. "Yá ti," right? And so they're like, "Oh, well, Hamlet was like 'to be or not to be.'" We're like,"Well, Hamlet, what is it being? Is it being alive? Is it being like something?" We have to know more information. And so you could say 'Yá ti,' to be. [Tlingit] to 'not be.' And that's not the only question because you have more questions beyond that because the verb could change so much. You could say [Tlingit phrase]. "It cannot be."
And so, one of the things with their language programs—I remember, I was in Hawaii, and they would have these phrases up. And they're sort of like, have this...Say, "This is our phrase of the year." And the phrase of the year that year was: Go for the deep sea fish. Don't just live on all the fish that you can grab right off the surface. So learn some nouns. Learn to count. Learn some colors, but if you want to sit down with an elder and talk to them, you are going to have to change the verbs around. But so this is where we have to build up an entire consciousness inside you. And I just want to say this will not hurt English or French in any way. But also, I think as an individual, I think people get nervous about fully speaking in an Indigenous language because it requires you to let go of what you've always known a language to be.
And this is the situation we often find ourselves in. We might have someone who's very smart, very capable, but as they learn another language, they have to change their whole way of thinking. And it doesn't mean you're going to lose your sense of self. This is not going to damage you. This is an additive thing. Because colonization also tricks us into thinking there's not enough time, there's not enough money, there's not enough of anything, except for everything that's already there, but I think that's a mythology. But we do have to change our approach. We have to say, "Okay, what are the top five things in my life? One of them is going to have to become number six, and language will take its place." And that just means, every single day, go, go, go.
And you, also, even as an adult, don't be afraid of sounding silly. I remember someone they made fun of me one time, they said, "He used to stand up and nobody could understand what he was saying, but he just kept talking." And I was like, Well, yeah, that's how I got here. You know, it's not like I just stepped on the court and was Michael Jordan day one. And so, like...But believe in the long term goal. Believe in yourself. Support each other. If you see someone else who's learning an Indigenous language, don't stop them. Sometimes we do, we'll say, "Don't say it until you could say it right." Which I thought, How strange. Like convention. If you talk to babies like that, "Stop your babbling baby," right? I mean, just to sort of be kind to people and have an expectation that it's going to get there.
I was giving a talk on a reservation, and afterwards, the principal came up to me, and he said, "Thank you. Thank you. What you said was really great. I tried to get someone to teach the language in here, but you know what? They wanted to get paid." And I said, "Well, if you love this language, wouldn't you do it?" I said, "Okay, I bet you. In your school, you got someone who teaches history. What I want you to do is I want you to call them into your office and say, 'Okay, next year we want you to teach the same classes, but we're not going to pay you any money. But if you love history, you'll teach these children for free,' and just let me know how it goes because that's what you're saying to us."
So some of the things that we do have to do is we should say being a language teacher should be a six figure salary. It should be a career that you can live off of and be comfortable. We should look at our elders, and we should buy them nice houses and move them in—the ones who could speak.
Like when I was doing work in Juneau 15 years ago, there were probably five people I went to. I went to their homes on a regular basis. And they lived in one bedroom apartments, and they lived in trailers, and they were poor people because they decided to hold on to our language. And I thought, Well, it's been so deliberately devalued that what do we do to put value onto our language? What if someone becomes a speaker of our language? Cut them a check? I don't know what to do. Give them $100,000. Just do something. But also like we have to consciously put value onto it in ways that we might feel are odd and foreign to us, but it's because we have to demystify the illusion that this is not something useful. This is essential to our survival as Indigenous Peoples. It doesn't mean you're not Indigenous if you don't speak the language. What it means is this whole identity of being Tlingit is in jeopardy if we all don't start speaking the language.
And this means we're all going to have to take a close look at ourselves, but not be judgmental and not be harsh with ourselves, but to be kind and to say, "Hey, let's build a house," and anytime you go in that house, you speak the language. Let's fill it full of wonderful food, great coffee. Let's make it a place where people want to be, and let's be honest about being good, healthy people who don't cause harm. And now let's spend time together. Make this our thing. Because, again, colonization is going to want us to be like a little mouse in a wheel. Run, run, run, run, run, run, until you just die. But it can be something different, and that doesn't mean well...What it means is our identity does not have to be only what is prescribed to us, but we have to create those safe spaces of language use, and we have to make it places that people want to be and where people feel welcome. And this, you know, we're going to have to be kind, we're going to have to be loving with each other.
But this one elder, like I was working with him, and I packed up all my recording gear, I was getting ready to leave, and said, "Let me tell you something my mom used to always say." And he said, this wonderful thing in Tlingit. I understand it all, and I took out my phone and I hit record, and I said, "Could you say it one more time?" And it's such a beautiful thing and it comes down to—do not speak with ill will and do things with ill will to the people of the world who are just like you. Just put love and kindness in your heart. The world spins around, and what you put out there is going to come back, and if you're causing harm, then maybe a big sickness is going to come upon you. But if you just put love and kindness in your heart when your life is spinning out of control, those people you are kind with, maybe they will help you. And it's just such a core thing of who we are as people—to be kind people, to pay attention to each other, to help each other out. So as we're raising babies...Like this, is what they did in Hawaii, is they raised babies. They thought, Let's just do this together. And I don't know what we do. Like, maybe we all move somewhere, and we all just live somewhere, and we just be Tlingit and we just figure it out because we got groups here, groups there, groups here. But we got to support each other so we could stand with this language, and not give up [Tlingit language]. You're not going to give up. [Tlingit language]. You're going to succeed with love and kindness.
Victoria Pham Thank you for listening to this episode of For The Wild's collaboration with Illuminating Worldviews made by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Julia Jackson, and Victoria Pham. The music from this episode is from Cole Pulice's new album, Lands and Eternal, courtesy of Leaving Records, Cory Feder, and Palo-Mah. To learn more about this series and access the study guide, please visit forthewild.world/i-w. Thanks for listening.
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