Anchorage, Alaska — Sitting in a classroom hundreds of miles from her devastated Alaskan native village, Ryan Martin held up 10 fingers when the teacher asked the students their ages.
“Ten – how do you say 10 in Yup’ik?” The teacher asked.
“Say it!” The students answered in unison.
Martin and her family were among hundreds of people airlifted to Anchorage, the state’s largest city, after the remnants of Typhoon Halong inundated their small coastal villages along the Bering Sea last month, dislodging dozens of homes and floating them away. Many with people inside. The floods destroyed or damaged nearly 700 homes. One person died, and two are still missing.
As the population Struggling with the lives of uprooted people Quite different from the traditional programs they left behind, some children find a measure of familiarity in the school’s immersion program that focuses on their Yup’ik language and culture — one of two such programs in the state.
“I’m learning more Yup’ik,” Martin said, adding that she uses the language to communicate with her mother, teachers and classmates. “I usually speak more Yupik in the villages, but mostly more English in the cities.”
There are more than 100 languages spoken in the homes of Anchorage School District students. Yup’ik, spoken by about 10,000 people in the state, is the fifth most common language. The district adopted its first language immersion program — Japanese — in 1989, and later added Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, German, French and Russian.
After many requests from parents, the district secured a federal grant and added the Yup’ik K-12 immersion program about nine years ago. The students in the first grade are now eighth graders. The program is based at College Gate Elementary School and Wendler Middle School.
College Gate Elementary School’s principal, Darrell Berntsen, is himself an Alaska Native – Sugpiak, from Kodiak Island, south of Anchorage. His mother was 12 years old in 1964 when the great 9.2 magnitude Alaska earthquake and subsequent tsunami destroyed her village in Old Harbor. He remembers her stories of joining other villagers on higher ground and watching as water washed homes into the sea.
His mother and her family were evacuated to a shelter in Anchorage, but returned to Kodiak Island when the Old Port was rebuilt. Berntsen grew up living a subsistence life — “The greatest time of my life was when I could go out duck hunting, go out deer hunting,” he said — and he understands what evacuees from Kipnok, Kwejelenjok and other affected villages left behind.
He has also long been interested in preserving Alaska Native culture and languages. His ex-wife’s grandmother, Mary Smith Jones, was the last to fluently speak Eyak, an indigenous language of south-central Alaska, when she died in 2008. His uncles were slapped on the hands when they spoke the indigenous Aleut language at school.
As evacuees arrived in Anchorage in the days after last month’s floods, Berntsen greeted them at a plaza where the Red Cross had set up a shelter for them. He called on families to enroll their children in the Yup’ik immersion program. Many parents showed him pictures of ducks, geese, moose, seal or other traditional foods they had preserved for the winter — stocks that had been washed away by floods or had spoiled.
“Listening is a big part of our culture — hearing their stories, letting them know that: ‘Hey, I live here in Anchorage, I run one of my schools, the Yup’ik Immersion Program, and welcome to you guys to our school,’” Berntsen said. “We do everything we can to make them feel comfortable in the most uncomfortable situation they’ve ever been in.”
About 170 evacuee children are enrolled in the Anchorage School District — 71 of them in the UPIC immersion program. It was once the smallest immersion program in the district, but is now “thriving,” said Brandon Locke, the district’s director of world languages.
At College Gate, pupils receive half-day Yup’ik language instruction, including literacy and language as well as science and social studies. The other half is in English, which includes language arts and math lessons.
Among the new students in the program is 10-year-old Ellen Aliralria from Kipnock. During the wave of floodwaters on the weekend of October 11, she and her family were in a house floating above the river. She added that the rising waters also washed away her sister’s grave.
Aliralria loves the immersion program and learning more phrases, although the Yup’ik dialect spoken is a bit different from the dialect she knows.
“I like to do them all, but some of them are hard,” the fifth-grader said.
It is also difficult to adjust to living in a hotel room in a city about 500 miles (800 km) from their village on the southwest coast.
“We’re homesick,” she said.
Lily Lewin, 10, is one of several non-UPEX people on the show. She said her parents wanted her to participate because they “thought it was really cool.”
“It’s really amazing to be able to talk to people in a language other than the one I mostly speak at home,” Lewin said.
Berntsen plans to help the new students acclimatize by holding activities such as gym nights or… Olympic style eventsfeaturing activities that mimic Alaska Native hunting and fishing techniques. One example: Seal Jump, in which participants assume a plank position and move on the ground to simulate how hunters sneak up on seals sleeping on the ice.
He said the Yup’ik immersion program helps undo some of the damage Western culture has done to Alaska’s Native language and traditions. It also bridges the gap between two lost generations: In some cases, children’s parents or grandparents never learned Yup’ik, but students can now speak with their great-grandparents, Locke said.
“I took this as a great opportunity for us to give back some of what trauma took from our indigenous people,” Berntsen said.