Preserving A Language
by Andrew Peterson


0VER THE COURSE of her life, Tlingit writer and linguist Nora Marks Dauenhauer has witnessed a complex evolution of her culture.

 "When I started at school," she says, "I had no idea even what my name was in English. I only knew what people called me by--my Tlingit name."

 Up until the age of 8, Dauenhauer's life in the rainy climate of Southeastern Alaska was surrounded almost exclusively by things Tlingit. When her father wasn't out seining for salmon, the family lived aboard his fishing boat. During the winter, they'd all go out trapping for mink, otter, marten and wolf.

 "Everyone spoke Tlingit," Dauenhauer says of that period in her life. "The entire family and everyone in the villages we went to spoke Tlingit. Even in Juneau, the native people spoke nothing but Tlingit."

 Over the years, Dauenhauer says, she has come to appreciate increasingly the beauty and value of this heritage. In addition to writing her own poetry, she has become deeply engaged in the enormous task of maintaining and preserving the traditions of Tlingit culture.

 In collaboration with her husband, Dauenhauer has published two volumes of translations from Tlingit. The first, Our Ancestors, is a collection of stories told by Tlingit elders. The second, To Heal Our Wounds (which won the 1991 American Book Award), is composed of Tlingit funeral oratory.

To a remarkable degree, these books capture in print the beauty and complexity of the Tlingit oral tradition. "The one thing that we tried to preserve in the stories and the oratory," Dauenhauer says, "was the world view--how we as Tlingits look at stories. We wanted to do that, instead of seeing it like it is in popular publications, where it's cleaned up to look like any other western story."

 And so, the texts in these books reproduce both the context for the telling of the stories and speeches, and also the feel of the Tlingit language itself. Lines break off in different places than we would expect them to in English, and the rhythms of speech are different. As readers, we're forced to hear the English language in a new way.

 Dauenhauer says that her interest in working with the Tlingit oral tradition began after she'd raised her children and gone back to attend college.

 "I think it was when I started to work on my father's speeches from the ceremonies," she says. "Before that, I heard them all the time. But I never quite took it seriously. We--Tlingits--we talk to each other when we lose someone. We give speeches to the person who's grieving, to take the edge off the grief. The speeches are about how we cope with death. It's very different from a church sermon. There's a whole culmination of many things in the speeches--the genealogy, the art work, the songs.

 "In past documentation of speeches," she adds, "the genealogy of the people being talked to, and your inter-relationship to them, is altogether gone. It's documented in a way so that it doesn't look like Tlingit anymore."

 These days, Dauenhauer readily acknowledges, her culture is at a turning point. "There's a big threat to our languag,;" she says. "There are about 16,000 of us, and there are about a thousand who speak the language." To help enable nonspeakers to learn Tlingit, Dauenhauer and her husband have written several textbooks on the language, which are currently being used in schools around southeastern Alaska.

 But she's realistic about the possible survival of Tlingit in daily use. "It remains to be seen," she says. "I hate to be negative about it, but when I go out, even I speak English now. English is the money language." Still, such changes don't threaten Dauenhauer's feelings about the integrity of her culture. "Our language has been stigmatized," she says, "by people who were trying to Christianize us. They were trying to acculturate us into the white way of living. That's impossible, don't you think? Even if we lived like whites, we're a different kind of people."