This Week in Native American News (10/16/2020): Recovering, fighting, and educating
October 16, 2020
How Alaskan Yup’ik People Are Reviving the Culture Lost to the 1919 Flu
Yup'ik dancers at a dance festival at Toksook Bay in 1996. JAMES BARKER
IT WASN’T SO LONG AGO that Yup’ik culture, in Alaska’s subarctic Bristol Bay, revolved around dance. There were dances of greeting, dance festivals, dances that went all along the river and into communities. These days, many, if not all, of these dances have been lost to cultural memory. “We don’t do that anymore,” says Arnaq Esther Ilutsik, the director for Yup’ik Studies for the Southwest Region Schools in Dillingham, Alaska. “It’s no longer practiced, because of the big flu epidemic.”
“The big flu really devastated a lot of different cultural traditions and practices,” she says.
Vera Spein at her fish camp near the Yup’ik village of Kwethluk, hanging subsistence-caught king salmon to dry. photographed around 2004, this process goes back thousands of years. COPYRIGHT 2020 CLARK JAMES MISHLER
“They used to have a really strong kinship system. I grew up in a traditional home, but we didn’t really have any relatives around to reinforce different ideas and values.” When speaking to her father, a reindeer herder, she would be expected to pass questions on through her mother, even if he was sitting right there—a practice that’s long since been abandoned. “My parents, especially my mother, would always excuse me for my accent, because I didn’t know that proper way, the etiquette, the way to honor different parts of the family.”
Now, as a teacher of Yup’ik Studies, Ilutsik works to educate Native youth about traditional Yup’ik ways and language, in addition to instructing new Alaskan teachers on the region’s culture and history. “I’ve had no training in language preservation or how to build a program or that kind of thing, so it’s all new to me,” she says. High school students in the area can learn Yup’ik to replace foreign language credits, in addition to taking subsistence classes to learn about traditional foodways.
But it’s a challenge, especially when it comes to getting distracted teenagers to engage with their cultural heritage. Ilutsik has tried to look beyond teaching numbers and colors, and to the sharing and maintaining of the storytelling that has long been a critical part of Yup’ik culture. Here, the accounts relayed by elders are especially useful, as they paint a vivid picture of what once was. “We’re trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together,” she says.
Read the Full Story and History Here
To Combat COVID, A College Embraces Navajo Principle of Kinship
(Fort Lewis College/YouTube )
Fort Lewis College senior Ally Gee watched as COVID-19 devastated the Navajo Nation and took the lives of two loved ones.
The overwhelming impact the coronavirus is having on her life prompted her to share with her school in Durango the Diné, or Navajo, concept of K’é, meaning kinship. The philosophy, which Gee said is sacred to the Navajo Nation, is guiding the southwest Colorado college’s response to staying safe during the pandemic.
The school crafted a campaign around the concept that employed social media to promote togetherness and a YouTube video of Gee speaking to students. She cast the best practices in pandemic prevention — wearing masks, keeping a safe social distance, and thinking through their actions to keep others safe — as behaving responsibly to the community.
Read the Full Story Here
Xbox marks the spot: New game helps put Southeast Alaska arts and culture on the map
Game makers work with artists, nonprofit to portray local souteastern Alaskan culture.
The request was so unusual that Jeff Skaflestad was nearly certain it was a misunderstanding.
Would Skaflestad, a Hoonah-based, Norwegian-Tlingit artist, be interested in creating artwork to be used in a video game?
“When they first asked me the question, I had to make sure they knew I don’t do Western-style art,” Skaflestad said in a phone interview. “I didn’t understand how formline art could appear in video games. I thought, in the first moment, ‘I think they got the wrong guy here.’”
However, incorporating art and culture not often seen in video games into the narrative adventure game “Tell Me Why” is exactly why Skaflestad; his partner, Lisa Andersson; Hoonah-based artist Gordon Greenwald; and Huna Heritage Foundation Executive Director Amelia Wilson among others were tapped to contribute to and consult on the project.
“Tell Me Why” is an episodic video game published by Xbox Game Studios and developed by the Paris-based Dontnod Entertainment. It is set in the fictional Southeast Alaska village Delos Crossing. And while the setting isn’t real, Tlingit culture and art factors heavily into the game as it unspools the tangled memories of long-separated siblings across multiple chapters.
Read the Full Story Here
Monday was Indigenous Peoples Day, but we don’t have to limit it to one day each year:
How to Honor Indigenous Peoples with Your Kids, Today and Every Day
In an attempt to honor and recognize Indigenous people as the first inhabitants of the United States, Indigenous Peoples’ Day is being celebrated in many cities throughout the country. While advocating for the observation of Indigenous Peoples’ Day is a step forward, the inaccurate and whitewashed history that is taught in most schools contributes to the erasure of over 500 Native nations. We can do better by centering Indigenous voices and stories all year, even with our littlest learners.
This Indigenous Peoples’ Day, commit to teaching children to make deep connections to the land and present-day Native nations, along with amplifying and learning about Indigenous heroes, artists, writers and musicians all year long.
Read the Full Story and Helpful Ideas Here
History Corner:
Hundreds of Native American Treaties Digitized for the First Time
For many Native American tribes, historical treaties are a fraught reminder of promises made—and broken—by the United States government over centuries of colonial expansion and exploitation. The documents are also of paramount importance today, as tribes and activists point to them as binding agreements in legal battles for land and resources.
Thanks to a newly completed digitization effort by the U.S. National Archives and the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture (MIAC) in Santa Fe, researchers and the public now have unprecedented access to hundreds of these critical agreements.
Alaska’s new ‘I Voted’ stickers celebrate women and highlight Native languages
The Alaska Division of Elections has introduced 13 new “I Voted” stickers for the 2020 election meant to show the “diversity, strength and power of Alaskan women.”
The artwork is by Barbara Lavallee, known for her watercolor paintings that depict diversity and life in Alaska. The stickers show a series of women in Native communities across the state; there’s also one representing urban areas.
The Division of Elections sought to highlight women’s long journey for the right to vote and to celebrate the courage of women past and women today, Director Gail Fenumiai said in an emailed statement Monday. This year is the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which gave women the right to vote.
Bill Addresses Cultural Genocide Caused by Indian Boarding Schools
For about 100 years, the U.S. government supported a system of boarding schools where more than 100,000 American Indian and Alaska Native children were stripped of their culture, their languages, and their religions and forced to assimilate to white customs.
The United States has never fully accounted for the harms caused by the schools, the lawmakers said. Their bill, which has attracted a bipartisan list of cosponsors, would form a "Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policy" to compile records and oral accounts of what happened in at 367 Indian boarding schools across 30 states. Those schools educated children as young as five years old and sometimes forced them into labor in white communities far from their homes, advocacy groups say, but many records of their practices have been lost or destroyed.
It’s hard to fit all the news in a little space.
To read all of this week's news, visit the LIM Magazine.
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