#ahtna

Every excavation creates records. Reports. Datasets. And with the scale of new rescue digs occurring every year, they quickly add up. But what do we do when those datasets are old and not yet digitised? Ignoring them as too hard is not only throwing away hard work by previous archaeologists, but effectively destroying the last remains of a site worthy of remembering.

Using new technology to read and digitise old site records, archaeologists can learn new things about sites dug decades ago, and allows the remaining archaeology to be left safely in the ground.

Dahwdezeldiin' koht'aene kenaege',

ukesdezt'aet.

Yaane' koht'aene yaen',

nekenaege' nadahdelna.

Koht'aene kenaege' k'os nadestaan,

lukae c'ena ti'taan', Tez'aedzi Na',

Sii 'e koht'aene k'e kenaes,

Sii ndahwdel'en,

dandiił'en

s'dayn'tnel'en.

- John Elvis Smelcer

//

The Poet I am beginning to write in our language, but it is difficult. Only the elders speak our words, and they are forgetting. There are not many words anyhow. They are scattered like clouds, like Salmon in Stepping Creek at Tonsina River. I do not speak like an Ahtna elder, but I hear the voice of a spirit, hear it at a distance speaking quietly to me.

(translated from Ahtna to English by the poet.)

[Ahtna, which has four regional dialects, is one of the nineteen indigenous languages of Alaska. It had no written form until only a few decades ago... Today, only about a dozen fluent speakers remain. The mythology of the Ahtna people claims the language was given to them by a raven, and the raven figures in many of the stories and myths the Ahtna people tell... Smelcer, who is a member of the Ahtna tribe, is one of only two known people who have worked on documenting the language in writing, and he has undertaken the incredible task of creating an Ahtna dictionary, traveling for years through Ahtna villages to meet and talk with the elders of communities based in remote places. He also teaches Ahtna on YouTube in a series called 'Ahtna 101'. When he became the executive director of the Ahtna Heritage Foundation, the elders visited him, enthusiastically educating in their language and mythology. 'The end result,' Smelcer says, 'was that I became a living repository of our language.'

The poem.. in some parts documents Smelcer's mountainous task of documenting the Ahtna language.. On one hand, Smelver is committed to doing what he can to capture and sustain cultural memory, but he has to work quickly against the declining memories of the last speakers. He uses an image which brings together his work in documenting the words of the Ahtna with the Ahtna language itself, 'scattered like clouds, / like the Salmon in Stepping Creek / at Tonsina River'... A vocabulary that is pivotal to their consciousness within a living landscape... As the youngest speaker of Ahtna, he is the one to whom the task of documenting the culture and customs of an ancient people has fallen.]

The Anthropological Masterlist is HERE.

The Western United States is a North American region that constitutes the western part of the United States. Alaska and Hawaii are also considered part of the Western United States.

AHTNA ─ “The Ahtna, or Ahtena, people are an Indigenous North American people. They are native to the Copper River in southern Alaska.” ─ Ahtna Information

ALEUT ─ “The Aleuts, or Unangas, are an Inuit people. They are native to the Aleutian Islands between Russia and Alaska.” ─ Aleut Information ─ Aleut Museum ─ Aleut Language

ATHABASKAN ─ “Athabaskan, or Dene, is an Indigenous American linguistic group that share the Athabaskan language family. They are native to Alaska, north Canada, and southwest United States of America.” ─ Athabaskan Languages ─ Athabaskan Language Conference

CAHUILLA ─ “The Cahuilla, or Ivilyuqaletem, people are an Indigenous North American people. They are native to the center of southern California.” ─ Cahuilla Information ─ Cahuilla Language ─ Cahuilla Language

CROW ─ “The Crow, or Absaroka, people are an Indigenous North American people. They are native to central and south Montana.” ─ Crow Information ─ Crow Language

HOPI ─ “The Hopi are an Indigenous North American people. They are native to northeastern Arizona.” ─ Hopi Information ─ Hopi Culture and History ─ Hopi Dictionary

INUIT ─ “The Inuit are an Indigenous North American people. They are native to Greenland, Canada, and Alaska.” ─ Inuit Collections ─ Inuit Religion ─ Inuit Dictionary

KUMEYAAY ─ “The Kumeyaay, or Tipai-Ipai, people are an Indigenous North American people. They are native to southern California.” ─ Kumeyaay Culture ─ Kumeyaay Language ─ Diegueño Dialect

KWAKWAKA’WAKW ─ “The Kwakwaka’wakw, or the Kwakiutl, people are an Indigenous North American people. They are native to Vancouver Island.” ─ Kwakwaka’wakw Mythology ─ Revival of the Kwakwaka’wakw Langauge ─ The Bible in Kwakwaka’wakw

LUISEÑO ─ “The Luiseño, or Payómkawichum, people are an Indigenous North American people. They are native to the coastal area of southern California.” ─ Luiseño Culture ─ Luiseño History ─ Luiseño Language

MIWOK ─ “The Miwok, or Miwuk, people are an Indigenous North American people. They are native to northern California.” ─ Miwok Mythology ─ Miwok History ─ Miwok Dictionary

NAVAJO ─ “The Navajo, or Diné, people are an Indigenous North American people. They are native to the southwestern United States of America.” ─ Navajo Culture ─ Navajo Mythology ─ Navajo Language

O’ODHAM ─ “The O’odham people are an Indigenous North American people. They are native to the Sonoran Desert in Arizona.” ─ O’odham Dictionary

PAIUTE ─ “The Northern Paiute people are an Indigenous North American people. They are native to the Great Basin in the United States of America.” ─ Paiute Culture ─ Paiute Culture ─ Paiute History

PUEBLO ─ “The Pueblo, or Puebloan, people are an Indigenous North American people. They are native to New Mexico and Arizona.” ─ Isleta Pueblo Information

SHOSHONE ─ “The Shoshone, or Shoshoni, people are an Indigenous North American people. They are native to Wyoming, Idaho, and Nevada.” ─ Shoshone Information ─ Shoshoni Language Project

SNOHOMISH ─ “The Snohomish people are an Indigenous North American people. They are native to the Puget Sound area of Washington.” ─ Snohomish Culture and History

TEWA ─ “The Tewa are an Indigenous North American people. They are native to the Rio Grande, New Mexico.” ─ The Ethnogeography of the Tewa Indian

WINTUN ─ “The Wintun people are an Indigenous North American people. They are native to North California.” ─ Wintu Language

Ahtna (Atnakenaege’)

Basic facts

Number of native speakers: 45

Official language: Alaska (United States)

Script: Latin, 32 letters

Grammatical cases: 0

Linguistic typology: polysynthetic, SOV

Language family: Na-Dené, Athabaskan, Northern Athabaskan

Number of dialects: 4 main groups

History

1970s - development of the alphabet

1990 - first dictionary

Writing system and pronunciation

These are the letters that make up the alphabet: a b c c’ d dl dz e g gg h hw i k k’ ł m n ng o p s t t’ tl tl’ ts ts’ u x yh ’.

When vowels are repeated, they represent long sounds.

Grammar

Nouns have three numbers (singular, dual, and plural) and no cases. There are several classifying nominal prefixes.

Possession is indicated by different prefixes depending on the possessor. Modifiers usually go after the noun.

Verbs feature different prefixes to express tense, mood, aspect, and object and subject agreement. These also raise or lower transitivity.

Dialects

There are four main dialects: Lower Ahtna, Central Ahtna, Western Ahtna, and Upper Ahtna.

Chief Stickwan's two daughters holding buckets and carrying burdens on backs with trumplines, Klutina-Copper Center band of Lower Ahtna, 1903

Most American school children learn that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, leading us to join World War II. This week marks the 75th anniversary of Japanese-Americans being subsequently rounded up and interned as suspected enemies of the state. But there's another tragic and untold story of American citizens who were also interned during the war. I'm a member of the Ahtna tribe of Alaska and I've spent the better part of 30 years uncovering and putting together fragments of a story that deserves to be told.

In June 1942, Japan invaded and occupied Kiska and Attu, the westernmost islands of Alaska's Aleutian Chain, an archipelago of 69 islands stretching some 1,200 miles across the North Pacific Ocean toward Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula. From a strategic perspective, Japan wanted to close what they perceived as America's back door to the Far East. For thousands of years, the islands have been inhabited by a resourceful indigenous people called Aleuts. During the Russian-American Period (1733 to 1867), when Alaska was a colonial possession of Russia, Russian fur-seekers decimated Aleut populations through warfare, disease, and slavery.

Shortly after Japan's invasion, American naval personnel arrived with orders to round up and evacuate Aleuts from the Aleutian Chain and the Pribilof Islands to internment camps almost 2,000 miles away near Juneau. Stewardship of the internment camps would fall under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services (USF&WS). Furthermore, orders included the burning of the villages to the ground, including their beloved churches, as part of a "scorched earth" policy. The Army's stated purpose was to protect the Aleuts, who were American citizens, from the dangers of war. But one officer told astonished Aleuts that it was, as he put it, "Because ya'll look like Japs and we wouldn't want to shoot you." That exchange is part of a documentary video called Aleut Evacuation.

The Other WWII American-Internment Atrocity

A subject I have always been fascinated and passionate about is the plight of endangered languages. Not many people know or perhaps understand what that is, but I would love to share it with you, so I created a new weekly topic that explores it, focusing on one language a week. With the help and blessing of The Endangered Languages Project, we would like to bring some awareness to this serious…