Alaskan Haida Stories of Language Growth and Regeneration

Xaadas 'láa isis, áatl'an ahl díi guudangáay 'láagang.
K' áys hín uu díi kya'áang.
Ga Yáalaas xúuts gúust uu díi k'wáalaagang.
Díi Táas 'Láanaay
Gasa'áan-st uu hl íijang.

(Haida Introduction)

Good people. I'm happy to be here.
My Haida name is K'aes.
I'm Haida Raven, Brown Bear.
Taslaanas [clan]
from Kasaan, Alaska.

Today we have only about ten or so remaining once fluent Alaskan Haida speakers, and they are all seventy-five years or older. Given that our overall population is small (about 1,500 or so) and dispersed, with only about 400 still living in the two remaining Alaskan villages—Hydaburg and Kasaan—recovering the language is no easy task. No one has learned it as a first language for at least forty to fifty years, and English has been the predominate language used since about the 1930s. If it is true, as some linguists suggest, that the only way a language survives "is if children learn their language as a first language and then pass that on to their own children in the way it was transmitted to them," then most would agree that the Haida language is "on the brink," so to speak. Still, there is reason for hope.¹

Perhaps an example from my own family is useful: my mother, Julie Coburn, who just turned eighty-three this summer—and is one of the few remaining speakers—shares with me that she always understood Haida when she was growing up but did not speak it fluently until she made a concentrated effort to relearn it as she approached her fortieth birthday. She was born and raised in Kasaan, Alaska, until she left in the early 1940s to attend high school at the Sheldon Jackson Presbyterian mission boarding school in Sitka. Another Kasaan Haida elder, Harriet McAllister, remembers being "rapped on the knuckles" for speaking Haida in school (Gá saá aan Xadaas Gusuu), but punishment for speaking her language was not my mother's experience. Instead, she tells me that her parents, my náan and chan (grandmother and grandfather), spoke to their children in Haida and asked that they answer in English because they recognized the value of the new language for their children's future. Now, my mother is grateful to have been able to participate in Haida language revitalization projects that took place in the late 1970s and early 1980s because it helped her recover her dormant Haida language. Because of her experience, she is one of our few remaining speakers, and she is now teaching the language in the Kasaan school as part of a new exciting language restoration project we have been fortunate to embark upon (discussed in more detail below). Quite an accomplishment, I would say, for a woman of eighty-three, whose energy and enthusiasm are contagious. Her story offers hope—something to hold close to our hearts as we face the challenges ahead.

As my mother's story suggests, English language fluency as a tool for Indigenous survival is common to Native peoples, as is the desire to see our languages flourish again. For Alaskan Haidas this has also been true; Alaskan Haidas recognized how the steady onslaught of immigrants moving into Alaska beginning in the early 1900s led to rapid cultural and economic change for all Natives. In southern and southeast Alaska, change came quickly after precious metals like copper and gold were discovered, commercial fishing was introduced, and salmon salteries and canneries were established. Native traditional subsistence hunting, fishing, and gathering activities began to be supplemented by a cash economy. During this era, there was both strong pressure to assimilate and the recognition of the need to adapt to changing conditions.

As a survival tool, English language use came to dominate daily life, and the Haida language moved toward a steady...