Culture, in so many words — Saving Dena’ina language helps preserve heritage

By Jenny Neyman

Redoubt Reporter

What do a person, a dog, a shaman effigy and a crucifix have in common?

Nothing obvious, to most people. But to traditional Dena’ina speakers, all four are in a linguistic classification that categorizes them as sharing a similar essence — of being alive, in a sense, or having a soul.

The idea doesn’t quite translate to English. It’s a facet of culture embedded in language, as subconscious as the grammatical structure a baby learns as they absorb the dialogue around them. It’s the cultural equivalent of, “You had to be there,” when the humor of a story doesn’t quite land for someone who wasn’t witness to the event being described.

Without speaking a language, without knowing it to the point where it is language — the ability create an infinite number of sentences without having heard them before — there’s a barrier to knowing the culture, as well.

“Embedded in the grammar of the language is messages that aren’t always there in the English translation. What is it that’s embedded in the grammar of language, Dena’ina in this case, that conveys a message, a point of view, a feeling, that is difficult put into English? I’m not saying impossible, but difficult. And often is lost, as they say, in translation,” said Dr. Alan Boraas, anthropology professor at Kenai Peninsula College, while giving a presentation on empowerment through a deeper understanding of cultural perspectives Thursday at the Kenai River Campus as part of the college’s observance of American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month.

The problem of “lost in translation” is much more significant than just ordering something you didn’t quite expect in a foreign restaurant or the potential for making a slightly awkward cultural gaffe.

In linguistics, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis holds that the structure of a language determines or significantly influences the modes of thought and behavioral characteristics of the culture in which it is spoken. So for a Native Athabascan of the Cook Inlet region, Dena’ina isn’t just the language of their people, it is a portal to the full depths of their cultural heritage.

“The relationship between language and how you organize the world is subconscious as you learn language, and would become what we sometimes call human nature, which is why one culture’s human nature is not another culture’s human nature because the language is different. You can argue all you want what human language is but it really has to do with how you understand the grammar of the language as a filter for the world,” Boraas said.

And that portal has almost been lost. According to anthropologists, Dena’ina has been one of the world’s most endangered languages. Early territorial schools in Alaska didn’t let Native students speak in their own language as a way of assimilating students to Western culture, even meting out corporal punishment for infractions. The policy was crushingly effective in Kenai and across the Cook Inlet region. Within one generation, a language that had been spoken for a thousand years was caught on the tongues of elders who were too traumatized to teach it to their children.

And there wasn’t any other avenue of education available for the youth, as there wasn’t a written version of the language at the time. By the 1970s in Kenai, less than 10 speakers of the Outer Inlet (Kenai Peninsula) Dena’ina dialect remained.

Linguist James Kari did extensive work on the language in the 1970s, helping codify a written version of Dena’ina. He and Boraas worked with the remaining fluent elders, especially Peter Kalifornsky, to preserve the language, much of it in the form of traditional stories and making recordings of the elders speaking in their Native tongue. All of that knowledge has coalesced into curriculum for language classes, such as a beginning Dena’ina class, primarily focused on vocabulary, taught this fall at KPC, and another on grammar this spring to teach how to put words together.

That’s no easy feat in Dena’ina. It’s part of the Athabascan language group, which is one of the most complex in the world. (As an indication, the Code Talkers in World War II were Athabascan speakers.) For a child growing up among fluent speakers, the language and the cultural nuances it conveys would come naturally.

“The grammar of a language is subconscious. You all knew it in your head, somehow, and it is culturally significant. Grammar influences the way we organize the world and it does so in subconscious ways,” Boraas said.

There in spirit — Kalifornsky Village leaves rich legacy

Photos by Jenny Neyman, Redoubt Reporter. Dr. Alan Boraas, professor of anthropology at Kenai Peninsula College, leads a tour of Kalifornsky Village last month. The Native settlement was abandoned in the 1920s but is still home to a rich cultural history.

By Jenny Neyman

Redoubt Reporter

These days, there isn’t much to see of Kalifornsky Village. An unmarked footpath leads away from Kalifornsky Beach Road into the woods, single-file and nondescript. You wouldn’t know it was there unless you knew it was there.

Dead trees and undergrowth have been cleared recently along the muddy path winding toward the bluff overlooking Cook Inlet, affording a clearer view of more branches and tree trunks, sprouting among indentations in the undulating ground.

The structures have long since been dismantled or disintegrated, and the Dena’ina Natives who once lived here were the original “leave no trace” campers, considering it bad form to leave much of anything behind.

Farther along, near the slowly, steadily eroding bluff, there’s two obvious indications of human habitation, or, at least, expiration — a hand-hewn, falling-down fence ringing a cemetery that contains 16 graves, with another just outside, the paint flaking off the whitewashed Russian Orthodox crosses with their telltale slanted bars. Just beyond it, closer to the bluff, is another fence, surrounding the site of an old Russian Orthodox chapel.

But who had lived here? Who had died here? Who is buried here? There is no explanation as far as the untrained eye can see. But on April 15, there was plenty of history for the ears to hear and the mind to ponder. A group of about 15 joined Kenai Peninsula College anthropology professor Alan Boraas on a tour of Kalifornsky Village, to get a sense, through senses beyond just sight, of what is so special about the place.

“How many times have people driven by here — going to wherever they’re going, doing whatever — tucked away in this woods, this remarkable place, this powerful place. That we hope will continue to be a powerful place,” Boraas said. “I’m not saying it will be spiritual to everyone, but it’s a place where we can tell the story of the Kenai Peninsula in many different ways, in dimensions that are far beyond the, ‘Gosh, that’s interesting. Hey, that’s interesting,’ but really get to the core of the relation between people and place. That’s what’s important.”

Kalifornsky Village, or Unhghenesditnu, meaning “farthest creek over” in Dena’ina, was founded by Qadanachen Kalifornsky in about 1820 on the Cook Inlet bluff four miles north of the Kasilof River mouth. Qadanachen had just returned from working at Fort Ross, about 100 miles north of San Francisco, built by the Russian American Company to grow grain to feed Russian colonies. The grain was a bust, rotted by the damp climate.

Qadanachen’s heart was likewise deteriorating, from sadness at being away from home. He had brought a bag of soil from his home village of Ski’tuk at the mouth of the Kenai River, which gave him some comfort of connection. He wrote a song about his homesickness.

“‘Another dark night has come over me, we may never return to our home, but do your best in life, that is what I do.’ When your break down the third line, ‘do your best in life,’ it could easily be translated as, ‘live to enhance your soul.’ ‘Another dark night’ — we all have them, and will have them. Do what you can to live to enhance your soul,” Boraas said.

When Qadanachen returned home, he found disputes in the Kenai village and decided to establish a new village with his clanspeople, choosing an old village site dating back to prehistoric times. Dena’ina thrived here long before European explorers came to Alaska, living in multifamily log houses, called nichił, which were partially dug into the ground, with a hearth in a large room for sleeping, warming and cooking, and smaller rooms along the sides. Scattered around in the woods were food cache pits, in which Dena’ina would preserve the summer catch of salmon to sustain them through the winter.

In the second occupation of Kalifornsky Village, they built new houses and planted gardens. And there was a log Russian Orthodox chapel, where a priest from Kenai would visit periodically to tend to the spiritual needs of the villagers. Dena’ina spirituality and the imported Russian Orthodox religion were an amicable fit.

“Spirits and angels, powers of place, powers of ritual — all of these things would have been common, and just as many Dena’ina and Yup’ik today do not see serious conflict between the orthodoxy that they practice and the traditional ways,” Boraas said.

Display of life — Dena’ina winter gathering, Kenai museum exhibit celebrate today’s thriving culture

Photos by Jenny Neyman, Redoubt Reporter. Alexandra “Sasha” Lindgren, with the Kenaitze Indian Tribe, tells the “Chuda Fiona Goes Berry Picking” story at a Dena’ina Heyi Winter Celebration held Friday at the Kenai Visitors and Cultural Center, amidst the “Dena’inaq Huch’ulyeshi: The Dena’ina Way of Living” exhibit on loan from the Anchorage Museum.

By Jenny Neyman

Redoubt Reporter

A museum exhibit is typically about history — descriptions of already happened events, depictions of olden-days practices, displays of long-ago artifacts — preserving the past through research, recollections and re-creations.

That’s part of what “Dena’inaq Huch’ulyeshi: The Dena’ina Way of Living” is about. The Anchorage Museum exhibit, on loan to the Kenai Visitors and Cultural Center until May, is a cataloging of the history and traditions of the indigenous Athabascans of the Cook Inlet region.

But it’s not just a static look at a once-upon-a-time culture. It’s an exploration of how that culture has transformed over the years, into what it means to be Dena’ina in the 21st century. Along with the to-be-expected old pictures, ancient artifacts and re-created models of how things used to be, are hands-on iPad learning stations, audio recordings and film clips of how things still are today. In that sense, the exhibit is as alive and contemporary as the Dena’ina themselves.

“(What) we tried to convey is not only to educate people that we were here, but that we’re still here. So we had Dena’ina artifacts going all the way back to Captain Cook in 1778 and his voyage all the way up to we have photographs that were literally taken in the summer of 2013 right before we opened the exhibit, so we’re showing that it’s still a living culture,” said Aaron Leggett, one of the co-curators of the exhibit for the Anchorage Museum, and a Dena’ina himself, from Eklutna. “We’ve had an intense amount of change, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is still Dena’ina Ełnena — our Dena’ina homeland — and that we’re still here as a people and that we still fight to maintain some of our traditions and culture, even if we don’t always necessarily recognize it. It’s still building up that sense of pride.”

And what better way to demonstrate that currentness than with live performances, fresh food, laughter, visiting — people coming together to celebrate tradition as it’s experienced today? That was the idea behind the Dena’ina Heyi, a winter celebration, held Friday by the Kenaitze Indian Tribe amidst the exhibit at the visitors center.

“We knew that we had to acknowledge the fact that this traveling exhibit was here and it’s been a long time since we just celebrated with our family and our friends and our community,” said Alexandra “Sasha” Lindgren, director of tribal government affairs for the Kenaitze Indian Tribe. “And we wanted to acknowledge all the hard work that the Anchorage Museum did, get the community to come in and look at this exhibit and share some of our stories and songs. … Anything that says, ‘We’re still here,’ resonates with our tribe, our families.”

Open arms — Arming future stewards with knowledge of the past

Photo by Jenny Neyman, Redoubt Reporter. Dr. Alan Boraas, anthropology professor at Kenai Peninsula College, discusses a Dena’ina house pit excavation with Dave Guilfoyle, an archaeologist with Applied Archaeology Australia, and assistant Genevieve Carey, near the Kenai Armory recently.

By Jenny Neyman

Redoubt Reporter

Sparkling bubbles of laughter wafted across the tree-sprinkled knob, borne on a breeze that ruffled the frail fall foliage and momentarily disrupted its gentle autumnal recoil back into the dirt. The revelers were too far away to make out what was being shrieked and said, but the universal language of kids at play translated as clearly as the warm glow from the low-angle afternoon sun.

The creek in the ravine below swelled rich with the seasonal substance of spawning salmon. Above, people walked from a house site in the trees to a string of food storage pits lining the edge of the bluff, pausing to take in the views over Kenai to the east and Cook Inlet to the south, the landscape stained with September hues.

In this scene the time frame could have been the better part of 1,000 years ago, the people being Dena’ina villagers who lived in a collection of houses stretched out along the meandering creek. The spot was likely chosen for its access to timber for firewood and house logs, abundance of fish and game animals for food, and the well-drained soil that freezes in winter and softens for digging in the summer, allowing salmon to be stored in cache pits in the ground that would sustain the villagers all winter long.

But, in fact, it was 2014, and the people on the hillside off South Forest Lane in Kenai last month were anthropologists, investigating the remnants of those who inhabited that spot close to a millennium ago. On that sunny, mild fall day, with the sounds of kids playing in Kenai Municipal Park nearby, it was easy to picture the once-upon-a-time life of the Dena’ina villagers as calm and content.

“Working in this place I’m thinking about when people were living here. We hear kids when we’re working out here, and you imagine kids were probably running around playing (back then), too,” said Dave Guilfoyle, an archaeologist with Applied Archaeology Australia, who conducted a cultural resource survey at the site over the summer.

“This time of year they were fishing down at that creek. And somebody was working on the pits, getting ready for winter, and looking out at this amazing view across the gorge,” said Dr. Alan Boraas, anthropology professor at Kenai Peninsula College, who visited the site to consult with Guilfoyle.

Fast-forward hundreds of years, though, and the scene wouldn’t have been as tranquil. The sounds of kids laughing and breezes ruffling the trees would be drowned out by construction noises, of South Forest Lane and the subdivision beyond it to the west, of the Kenai Spur Highway to the north and, in 1973, the Kenai Armory building a stone’s throw away.

On the armory property activity has been distinctly not serene over the years — troop drills, training exercises and even tank maneuvers on the cleared field, the building bustling with people and vehicles, both military and civilian as the armory building has been used for community events and as an emergency shelter location. All without realizing that, hidden in the grass, were the remnants of a Dena’ina village.

“The first thing is to protect these areas from the Army itself, because they do training out here still,” Guilfoyle said. “The focus really for this stage is a management plan for the property, and then more research and more archaeology will be part of that plan.”

Health center is well of care, renewal — Wellness facility represents sea change for Kenaitze Tribe

Photos by Patrice Kohl, for the Redoubt Reporter. A “Łuq’a Nagh Ghilghuzht” sculpture by Joel Isaak depicts traditional Dena’ina life at fish camp outside the Kenaitze Indian Tribe’s new Dena’ina Wellness Center in Old Town Kenai.

Clarification: It was incorrectly reported that the Dena’ina Wellness Center is currently seeing all veterans and is considering expanding medical services to the public. Currently, only Alaska Native and American Indian veterans receive VA services through the Dena’ina Wellness Center. As a community mental health center, behavioral health services are open to the public. Other services are available to Indian Health Service beneficiaries.

Through the joint venture award, Indian Health Service funding supports operation and maintenance for a minimum of 20 years. The state of Alaska Department of Commerce, Community, and Economic Development Division of Community and Regional Affairs provided $20 million to the project.

 

By Jenny Neyman

Redoubt Reporter

For the Kenaitze Indian Tribe, a new building in Old Town Kenai is an indication that the tide has turned.

A gradual erosion of culture, connection and community has reversed, and what was washed away, grain by grain, as if by the lapping pull of receding waves, is rushing back in, not only replacing what’s been lost, but reaching a new high-water mark.

That mark is a substantial one, both in its 52,000-square-foot physical form — the Dena’ina Wellness Center in Kenai — and in what it represents for the tribe.

“The Dena’ina word for it is ‘naqantughedul.’ For the tribe it means the tide is going out and it’s turning and going back in,” said Jaylene Peterson-Nyren, executive director. “It means the culture, the people, the land and just the lifestyle has been going away for many, many years, and it has taken a turn with this facility. It’s coming back.”

The building isn’t just a health clinic, nor was the motivation to construct it simply some tipping of an equation of funding and client base and service needs. It grew from a need to come together — to reconnect, strengthen and grow — and to improve health beyond just the physical.

The lobby of the new, 52,000-square-foot Dena’Ina Wellness Center is meant to be an area for gathering and socializing, more than just a medical clinic reception lobby.

“We wanted to design not just a health clinic, but we wanted to look at wellness from a holistic perspective, and that means not just that you’d have your checkups and you check out well. It means social and economic wellness, it means educational wellness — knowledge. It encompasses relationships across the board with customers who come in to seek services and for staff who are all working together on behalf of our customers,” Peterson-Nyren said.

Fittingly, then, the facility consolidates the tribe’s three health services programs under one roof — medical, dental and behavioral — as well as expands new services to address the wellness of a person as a whole, not just whether they’re running a fever.

“We try to focus on prevention and intervention. We want to encourage people to return. That’s one of the reasons we built the Gathering Space (building entrance room) is we want people to want to be here,” she said.

Along with being a center for holistic wellness, the brand-new facility, with construction starting in August 2012 and the grand opening ceremony June 12, is also a hub of social connection — an area of wellness which the tribe believes also needs care.

It’s designed to facilitate both — new equipment and the latest technology to aid the delivery of quality medical services, and a welcoming, calming, comfortable design to encourage people to come and enjoy the facility. The entry leads into the Gathering Space, with a large, open, airy design and windows stretching floor to the second-story ceiling above. A stage area anchors the wall facing the doors, while a reception desk, curved as if beckoning a visitor further into the building, stands to the right of the stage. To the left of the entrance is a wide staircase giving the feel of floating upward as it parallels the windows looking out over Old Town toward the mouth of the Kenai River and Cook Inlet. Upstairs are balcony railings to allow a bird’s-eye view of the stage and circular Oculus feature below, which will have a commissioned art piece suspended above it.

The whole space can be configured for large gatherings, such as the grand opening of the facility, which was packed to standing room only. Over 1,000 people came through the facility during the two days of tours, presentations and festivities, Peterson-Nyren said.

“I think the response has been tremendous,” she said. “It was amazing to feel that community support, just everyone showed up.”

Food pits for thought — KPC students excavate caches where new dorm would go

By Jenny Neyman

Photos by Jenny Neyman, Redoubt Reporter. Kenai Peninsula College anthropology students watch professor Alan Boraas measure the profile of an excavation pit dug to investigate a Dena’ina food cache, dating to probably around 1,200 A.D., on Nov. 20 at the Kenai River Campus. The pits were discovered in the area planned for a dorm.

Redoubt Reporter

Anthropology students at Kenai Peninsula College’s Kenai River Campus got a lesson Nov. 19 and 20 in how history can become a current event.

Nearly a millennia ago, long before traffic snaked along College Loop Road’s curvy route to the public-access fishing holes and expanding KPC campus along the bank of the Kenai River, the area was used for some of the same reasons it’s used for today.

People pulled salmon from the Kenai River at its tributary Slikok Creek, to freeze and eat all winter long. They learned about ecology and biology, culture and sociology, science and engineering. But they didn’t need fancy fishing platforms or college facilities to do it. For them, fishing, teaching and learning were all a daily part of routine life.

Hundreds upon hundreds of years before College Loop Road, KPC, the state’s university system or even Western inhabitation of what would become the state of Alaska existed, the area’s Athabascan Native population, the Dena’ina, found the area that’s now home to the flourishing Kenai River Campus to be a fertile place to make their home.

A Dena’ina village of about 75 people thrived on the banks of Slikok Creek, where inhabitants had easy access to the bountiful salmon runs in the Kenai River. They spread out for hundreds of yards around their five houses, constructing more than 100 food cache pits in the ground to store the summer’s harvest of fish for food during the winter months.

This winter, KPC is looking at expanding, as well. With the passage of Proposition B in the November election, approving bond funding for various University of Alaska capital projects, plans are progressing to construct a student dormitory at the Kenai River Campus. The building is slated to be located across College Loop Road from the campus, on a lot that’s currently vacant except for a gravel pit and access road.

About 800 years ago, the spot wasn’t vacant, and the college has decided to examine how it was utilized in the past before proceeding with plans for the future.

On Nov. 19 and 20, KPC anthropology professor Alan Boraas led volunteer student crews in an archeological dig to excavate and document food cache pits left by the Slikok Creek Dena’ina villagers. Two of the pits are right where the footprint of the new dorm building is expected to go.

“The state Office of History and Archeology recommended that work be done on this, essentially to gather the information so the dormitory could go forward,” Boraas said.