Jon
Ross is drawn to the scenery, the soil and the spirit as he steps
lightly through Kalifornsky Village.
Up here, where the sounds of the road
are overtaken by the sound of Unhghenesditnu, the farthest over
river, Ross reflects. Behind him are a few graves and further beyond
are depressions in the ground where his forbearers once lived
cache pits, house pits.
It is his favorite spot a connection
with the past, a reminder of the lifestyle and while so much Dena'ina
heritage left this site after colonization, the language once fluently
spoken here thrives inside Ross.
The sentiment is perhaps best captured
in one of his favorite sayings shts'itsatna ha nacheyakda'ina
da'a be\ qude\.
"That means that my ancestors and forbearers
are still walking with me," said the 40-year-old who lives a few
miles south on the bluff in Kasilof.
Each day as he hones his mind and tongue
he takes another stride in that journey. With every read translation,
audio recording or elder conversation, Ross gains on his goal to
be a fluent Dena'ina speaker. Only a handful of Natives fluent in
Dena'inaq' about 25, he estimated remain. Most are
over the age of 60 and scattered across Southcentral Alaska, he
said.
"I think most everybody who is living
today has somehow bought off on the idea that it is going away as
a spoken language," Ross said. "What I'm saying is, 'No, it is not
going to go away, it is going to come back because we want it to
come back, I want it to come back.'"
That's the chorus Dena'ina qenaga
shech'nutdalen: the Dena'ina language is coming back to me
to a song he wrote called Shech'nutdalen. He opened his laptop and
started his music player where many other stories, songs and speakers
are catalogued.
"I want to learn, I want to listen, I
want to think, I want to speak Dena'inaq'," Ross sings accompanied
by guitar in Dena'inaq'. "Looks like I'm going to read, looks like
I'm going to write, looks like I'm going to sing, looks like I'm
going to dance."
The void
Ross grew up in British Columbia, Kenai
and Kodiak, but returned to Kenai each summer during his youth.
Oh his father's side he is Scottish; on his mother's Dena'ina, Russian
and Sugpiaq.
He didn't grow up with the language, but
his curiosity was piqued early.
In Kodiak, he ordered "Ethnography of
the Tanaina" and later his mother gave him another book Peter
Kalifornsky's "A Dena'ina Legacy."
"The whole thing was written in Dena'ina
on the left side and on the right side was English," Ross said.
"It just blew me away I never really heard it, I never really
thought about the language and here is this huge book with all of
our stories, our history all written in our language, our dialect."
After college, Ross started working for
the Southcentral Foundation and as part of the job helped host groups
of Maori, indigenous people from New Zealand.
The Maori were interested in learning
about what Alaska Natives were doing with health care. Ross soon
noticed the Maori were strong in their culture, language and traditions
and he became impressed and inspired during the many trips they
made up North.
"One of the last times that I hosted them,
they basically let me know that if you don't go to their country
and learn from them and have this reciprocal relationship, then
it doesn't look good for them," he said. "I was very pleased to
hear that because I immediately put together a team that went over
to New Zealand to learn from them what they've done with education."
As the Maori stood proud and sang loud,
Ross knew he wanted to do the same with Dena'inaq'. Those feelings
were amplified on another trip when Ross saw a Maori man in tears
during a language conference.
"This guy, he couldn't speak his language,
and just the weight of that and the shame and the whatever
the guy was just crying because he had lost it and everyone in his
whole tribe had lost it," Ross said. "Here he is in this meeting
with all these other people and they can speak their language, but
he can't speak his."
In total, Ross went to New Zealand three
times throughout the 2000s, but coming back he had a nagging feeling.
"It was like there was this void, cultural
void, language void," he said. "I see the culture and the language
as a treasure and I wanted to do something to turn the situation
around."
Ross started spending a lot of time with
Dena'ina elders, applied for a position on the Kenaitze Indian Tribe
Council and took a position as the Alaska Native Heritage Center's
president and CEO where he worked for about eight years.
Since, he has helped to partner organizations
to compile and distribute language resources in addition to helping
maintain a Dena'ina language program. After leaving the Native Heritage
Center, he started two of his own businesses Tsiltan Management
Group and Language Insights, the latter being a company he would
like to produce language materials to help other villages.
"When you can speak the language by definition
you are getting the Dena'ina world view," he said. "You are getting
the history, the stories and it makes you feel like a complete human
being."
'A journey'
Dena'inaq' is one of the hardest languages
in the world to learn and speak, Ross said.
"Basically, if you think the language
is too hard and you are not going to be able to learn it
you are not going to be able to learn it," he said. "It is about
changing your mind about whether you can do it or not."
Its structure is complex and very different
from other languages, he said.
"It is affectionately referred to as the
train wreck," he said.
The language has a verb stem, which is
usually two or three letters at the end of word. The verb stem is
preceded by up to 56 prefixes, he said. A Dena'ina verb will also
contain a lot more information than an English one.
Ross, at times, struggles to put into
words exactly how the language works. In Dena'inaq' one speaks the
energetic sound vibrations of something, not just words that describe,
he said. That is why being able to hear the sound vibrations and
being able to speak them becomes so important, he said.
Stacks and stacks of books sit on Ross'
kitchen table filled with words, verbs, nouns and rules for Dena'inaq',
but Ross tries to stay away from the hyper-scholastic side of learning
the language.
"I have tried to take more of an organic
approach, just listening and trying to understand," he said.
Even though Ross has made progress, he
said he still has a long way to go to becoming fluent. And he doesn't
like to boast about how far along he has come he contends
he will always be learning more.
"It is a journey," he said. "Unless you
have an extreme commitment and dedication, it is just not going
to happen."
If Ross does become fluent, he would be
the first Native that calls Kenai home to do so since Kalifornsky,
he said. There are other fluent speakers on the Kenai Peninsula,
he said, but they are not originally from the area. He would also
be one of the first in many years, he said, to not grow up with
the language but still become fluent.
Preferably, Ross said he would have liked
to have been immersed in the language as a child. Fluent speakers
have all of the language's complex rules ready in their heads, but
teaching and learning without immersion is difficult for those of
all ages, he said.
"It is kind of hard to do that when you
don't have a lot of people you can talk to and spend time with,"
he said. "It is one of our challenges, but at the same time we have
so many written materials, so many audio materials that we can compensate
for that."
Ross is currently learning from Helen
Dick, a Lime Village elder, and is learning a different dialect
than the one spoken in the Kenai area, the inland dialect. Since
the Dena'ina language covers a large area across Southcentral Alaska,
some dialects have more speakers than others, he said.
The differences between the dialects aren't
great, but the differences formed through the different tribes'
isolation from one another, he said. Ross said he is not a staunch
advocate of the Kenai dialect, unlike others, and has no problem
learning a different dialect.
"We may have preserved all of the dialectical
differences, but my hope is to (become) more unified with our language,"
he said. "Of course we don't have the resources of living native
speakers and so we have to do that if we want it to survive."
Ross contends modern society could learn
a lot from the Dena'ina, who had one of the most sustainable lifestyles,
he said. Learning the language not only reconnects the speaker to
the history and life, it also shares the Dena'ina world view, he
said.
"It is a connection with the earth and
everything around you and respect, it is a relationship," he said.
"Everything has a spirit, the trees, the rocks. That is not a typical
world view of our modern society."
'What you intend'
When asked how others react when they
learn he is trying to become fluent in his native language, Ross
paused and thought. Learning a language, he said, is simply not
valued as highly in Alaska or the Lower 48 as it is in other places
in the world.
That's frustrating, he said.
During the colonization process, Alaska
Natives were seen as less human than others, Ross said and those
psychological impacts were passed down through each generation.
"We were oppressed," he said. "The policy
of the government was to get rid of the language and basically do
whatever you need to do to make sure that they have control of the
land and the resources and if there is anything standing in the
way, do things to mitigate that."
Ross said he would love to see the public
school system teach Dena'inaq' as much or more than any other languages
taught, but locals need to believe it can happen. He hopes his optimism
will spur others to follow.
"You go to any of the schools in Anchorage
or Kenai and you can learn Japanese, they've got Russian immersion
programs, German, Spanish, but nothing local or Native languages,"
he said.
Elders share their support for Ross' goal
and are happy to share what they know. And Ross believes the language
will come back strong eventually, but collectively Natives have
not agreed, so to speak, that the language can, and is, coming back
to them.
"I think people think it is too hard,"
he said. "They think, 'Well, we don't have speakers, we don't have
language programs.' So there is this kind of resignation that it'll
go away, but we have it written. I think that if you can imagine
it, it can happen."
There is a Dena'ina saying for that, too.
And it is also one of Ross' favorites nen ch'at yeninzen
yaqech' t'htuni\.
"That means what you want, what you intend,
what you think about; that's the way it's going to be," he said.
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