TLINGIT

In a science classroom at Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé, students are holding carving knives. Teacher Henry Hopkins walks up and down the rows of desks, showing them how to shape the hunks of yellow cedar in their hands.

“The students were working on traditional Tlingit halibut hooks, which sounds like it’s primarily a Tlingit carving project, but it’s actually a science project,” said Hopkins.

  A rare wooden rattle attributed to a famous Tlingit artist sold at an art auction in California last month. The 230-year-old piece came from a private collector and sold for a half-million dollars.

When Sealaska Heritage Institute Native arts curator Steve Brown first laid eyes on the shaman’s rattle, he was amazed by the piece’s excellent condition.

“Nobody had ever seen this before,” Brown said. “It had just kind of come out of the woodwork.”

Our Guest today on Morning Line was Ronald Spatz, editor of the Alaska Quarterly Review.  He shared that Shaawatke’é’s Birth, a short film produced for Alaska Quarterly Review's 35th anniversary celebration, is now available on YouTube. 

"Shaawatke'é's Birth is the film version, in Tlingit and English, of a poem published Alaska Quarterly Review by Emily Wall and X'unei Lance Twitchell. "Shaawatke’é’s Birth" is about the birth of a Tlingit child as well as an origin story. It is ultimately a story about how important language is to sustaining a culture and cultural identity."

Knowing Tlingit makes possible a life of understanding the ways of our elders

By Johanna Eurich

Most of Alaska’s twenty Native languages are going extinct. However, a Native languages assistant professor at the University of Alaska Southeast is bucking that tide. Lance X’uneit Twitchell worked hard to learn Tlingit, a language used by his family for thousands of years. Tlingit people have a rich and complex high civilization along the Pacific coast in Southeast Alaska famous for its totem poles, clan system, regalia, rich poetry and formal rhetoric.