A new way for kids to practice Iñupiaq: A spelling bee
Last month, three students from the Bering Strait School District got on stage at Alaska Pacific University in Anchorage to participate in the second annual statewide Iñupiaq spelling bee for beginners.
The winning point came down to a capitalization—of the word Kuuvak, which means Yukon River in English with its first letter capitalized. In lower case, kuuvak means big river. Kopeck Kaitlyn Alston, a fifth grader from Brevig Mission, made that distinction and placed first.
Kaitlyn’s mother is Brevig Mission School teacher Angie Alston. With elders in the community, including some of her daughter’s relatives, she helped establish Iñupiaq language classes as an elective for the high schoolers a few years ago.
A Yup’ik spelling bee had been created 11 years ago, and when Alston learned that the organizers also wanted to start an Iñupiaq spelling bee, she began to coach students at her school who wanted to participate. “It just seemed like such a natural extension of the work we were doing,” she said. “And it hits younger grades. The classes that we do in the high school are just for grades 9 to 12.”
Open to participants in grades 3 to 8, the Yup’ik and Iñupiaq bees are slightly different from a typical spelling bee, in that students earn points for each word spelled correctly, instead of being eliminated as soon as they make a mistake.
“It’s built around promoting and celebrating our language,” said Suzzuk Mary Huntington, the coordinator of cultural programs of the Bering Strait School District, who helped organize the Iñupiaq spelling bee.
The founder of the events, Freda Dan, said there were a good number of registrants enrolled to receive weekly Iñupiaq spelling bee emails with practice materials, but Brevig and Golovin were the only schools to qualify for the statewide competition this year by completing the schooland district-level spelling bees.
“It has always been a challenge to get enough spellers to pull through (at least two schools) for the Yup’ik spelling bee,” Dan said in an email to The Nome Nugget. “Yup’ik has a fairly strong base of speakers. It is a greater challenge to pull the Iñupiaq spelling bee through for several reasons.” Among those reasons are a lack of coaches, great differences between dialects and alphabet differences.
There are about 3,000 speakers of Iñupiaq, mostly over age 40, among an estimated population of 13,500 Iñupiaq in the state, according to the Alaska Native Language Center at UAF. Central Alaskan Yup’ik is the most widely spoken Native language in the state, with about 10,000 speakers in a population of 21,000. This year the Yup’ik spelling bee had 13 participants.
“It is hoped that they can gain some degree of literacy and can pursue more knowledge through this avenue,” Dan said. However, the coaches are advised that the spelling bees are not a language program, as the students focus on spelling, pronunciation and definition of individual words.
While there are lots of opportunities for learning Iñupiaq vocabulary, teaching fluency is more difficult, said Huntington. Many teachers learned Iñupiaq as a second language and are missing some of the basic pieces to be fully fluent themselves, she said.
“All of our schools have some language instruction,” Huntington said. “And we have been really working for a couple years getting training for Native language teachers on teaching methods that are effective for creating speakers.” She added that there are increasing numbers of grassroots efforts to encourage speaking, but the majority that she is aware of are for adults. Often these efforts take the shape of informal, semi-structured conversation groups.
For the last two years, Nome Public Schools has had an immersion program, first with a kindergarten class and now with both kindergarten and first grade. Annie Conger had just retired from 29 years of teaching last year when she saw that the school was hiring for a new immersion instructor. “Nobody was filing that position and I got worried about [the immersion program] going away,” said Conger, whose first language is Iñupiaq. So, she decided to apply. She teaches Western-style lessons in subjects like math and science, all in Iñupiaq. She also teaches her students about Iñupiaq culture and what they would learn in a home environment, such as what type of resources are hunted, fished and gathered each month.
So far that type of program doesn’t exist for younger children in the Bering Strait School District.
“We would need to have a speaker who would be willing to come in and spend all day long in the classroom,” Alston said in the case of Brevig. “And I don’t know if we have anybody right now who’s available to do something like that. We have speakers but they’re busy raising their families and taking care of their lives at home.”
Huntington said she sometimes wonders if she and other educators aren’t moving fast enough to promote language acquisition, but she also thinks if they were faster it wouldn’t work. “It’s really hard to be a novice in anything,” she said. “It’s emotionally draining work.”
She said she gives her students permission to have an English accent as they start learning, because people tend to shut down if they become self-conscious hearing themselves not saying words right.
“You can’t be perfect on the very first try,” Huntington said. “We give that kind of grace to others but not to ourselves. I really want people to actually feel worthy of giving it a try and not to worry about how much they don’t know. Once you get a chance to do it and try it, you’ll have lots of fun. Just seeing what it looks like eliminates the intimidation.”
That was the case for this year’s winner, Kaitlyn Alston. When asked if she felt nervous on stage, she told The Nugget no—because she had been there last year, for the first Iñupiaq bee. Aullaġniaqtuŋa is her favorite word, she said, because it’s long. It translates in English to “I am going to leave.”
“I think the more activities that happen in Iñupiaq, the better,” her mother, Angie Alston, said. “The spelling bee, the immersion schools, anytime kids and people and elders are using language together—I think that’s a good thing. And we are just grateful for the opportunity to participate in the Iñupiaq spelling bee because it gives us a chance to read and hear and speak words. We’re happy and grateful to do that.”