Sharing Iñupiaq one word at a time

Gail Smithhisler may have been camera shy when she was younger, but now she doesn’t mind getting in front of her phone to record short videos with Iñupiaq vocabulary lessons for her followers.

“I want other people to be able to learn,” Smithhisler said. “I try to share as much of what I know with others.” And sharing, she noted, is an important Iñupiaq value.

She has been maintaining social media accounts on Facebook and TikTok over the last few years that promote an “Iñupiaq Word of the Day.” She greets her followers with an Uvlaalluataq and then repeats a word or phrase, with the spelling as well as the phonetic spelling written in the video’s text. Recent examples include “Alainaitpaqtuqtutin!” which means “You make everyone happy!” in the Qawiaraġmiut Dialect and “Qiksiksrautiqaqtutin,” which translates to “You are respectful” in the North Slope Dialect. She said she will often pick a word based on how she’s feeling, or sometimes she just wants to spread a positive message.

“I feel like a lot of people really enjoy when I make words that are very positive,” Smithhisler said.

Smithhisler is still working on her own fluency. She was raised in Oregon but after her father passed away, her mother wanted to be closer to her family in Alaska. Smithhisler moved to Nome as an 11-year-old and got to participate in her family’s traditional subsistence lifestyle—hunting in the springtime and camping, fishing and berry picking in the summer. With those activities came more Iñupiaq words and phrases. “I’m really thankful that my mom raised me up here, because I could learn how to subsist and kind of understand part of her language,” she said.

Because several of her family members grew up speaking Iñupiaq and then were forced to learn English in school, Smithhisler said they sometimes “got stuck” between the two languages. She said she would help her mom and grandparents at their doctor appointments.

“I learned how to take down whatever was said to them in English into simpler terms that they could understand, and that made it easier for me to start learning Iñupiaq,” Smithhisler said.

In high school she started to spend time with some King Island Elders who helped teach her basic words.

“They always told me if I want to work on the accent what I should do is mimic some of the animal noises that our Indigenous animals make like ravens and walrus and caribou,” she said.

Then a few years ago she took a class at UAF Northwest Campus with Josie Bourdon. “After that, I was like, ‘I cannot get enough! This is so much fun! I understand! I need to know more!’”

She started seeking more classes, including a conversational Iñupiaq class with Meghan Sigvanna Topkok. She praised Bourdon and Topkok for their support of students: “They’re phenomenal at finding resources and helping others feed their hunger to learn.”

As she was learning, Smithhisler started posting her own vocabulary videos to her personal Facebook page. Then her friend in Utqiagvik invited her to become an administrator of the “Iñupiaq Word of the Day” page which already had hundreds of followers. Now the page has more than 7,000 followers and Smithhisler has started using TikTok to create her videos because the platform makes editing and adding text relatively easy. She said she gets more interaction on TikTok, and on both platforms, she’s reached audiences outside of Alaska. People from Greenland and Canada will often point out Iñupiaq words and phrases that are similar in their language and share their own translations.

As for the next steps in her own Iñupiaq education, Smithhisler said she is taking as many classes as UAF will let her. She said she might start taking online classes taught out of other UAF campuses, though a challenge is that these classes are sometimes taught in other dialects, like the North Slope Dialect.

Smithhisler said she also would love more people to participate in sharing on “Iñupiaq Word of the Day,” but not everyone is comfortable taking videos of themselves. For now, she doesn’t mind being the face of the effort.

“I really want people to just be exposed to Iñupiaq the way that I was, because that’s what sparked my curiosity,” she said.