Uncommon program helps children displaced by flooding that devastated Alaska villages

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Rayann Martin sat in a classroom hundreds of miles from her devastated Alaska Native village and held up 10 fingers when the teacher asked the students how old they were.

“Ten – how do you say 10 in Yup’ik?” » » asked the professor.

“Whoa!” » replied the students in unison.

Martin and his family were among hundreds of people flown to Anchorage, the state’s largest city, after the remnants of Typhoon Halong flooded their small coastal villages along the Bering Sea last month, dislodging dozens of homes and causing them to float – most with people inside. The floods destroyed or seriously damaged nearly 700 homes. One person died, two are still missing.

As residents grapple with uprooted lives very different from the traditional lives they left behind, some children are finding some familiarity in a school-based immersion program that focuses on their Yup’ik language and culture — one of two such programs in the state.

“I’m learning more Yup’ik,” said Martin, who added that she uses the language to communicate with her mother, teachers and classmates. “I generally speak more Yup’ik in the villages, but especially more English in the cities.”

More than 100 languages ​​are spoken in the homes of students in the Anchorage School District. Yup’ik, spoken by about 10,000 people in the state, comes in fifth. The district adopted its first language immersion program – Japanese – in 1989, to which it later added Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, German, French and Russian.

After numerous requests from parents, the district obtained a federal grant and added a K-12 Yup’ik immersion program about nine years ago. The students in the first class are now eighth graders. The program is based at College Gate Elementary and Wendler Middle School.

College Gate Elementary principal Darrell Berntsen is an Alaskan native himself – Sugpiaq, from Kodiak Island, south of Anchorage. Her mother was 12 years old in 1964 when the great 9.2 magnitude Alaska earthquake and subsequent tsunami devastated her village of Old Harbor. He remembers her stories of joining other villagers on the hills and watching the rising waters carry the houses towards the sea.

His mother and family were evacuated to a shelter in Anchorage, but returned to Kodiak Island when the old harbor was rebuilt. Berntsen grew up living a subsistence life — “the greatest moment of my life was being able to go duck hunting, deer hunting,” he said — and he understands what evacuees from Kipnuk, Kwigillingok and other damaged villages left behind.

He also has a long-standing interest in preserving Alaska Native culture and languages. His ex-wife’s grandmother, Marie Smith Jones, was the last fluent speaker of Eyak, a native language of south-central Alaska, when she died in 2008. Her uncles had their hands slapped when they spoke their indigenous Alutiiq language at school.

As evacuees arrived in Anchorage days after last month’s flooding, Berntsen greeted them at an arena where the Red Cross had set up a shelter. He invited families to enroll their children in the Yup’ik immersion program. Many parents showed him photos of ducks, geese, moose, seals or other traditional foods they had saved for the winter – stocks that were washed away or spoiled by the flood.

“Listening is a big part of our culture – hearing their stories, letting them know, ‘Hey, I live here in Anchorage, I run one of my schools, the Yup’ik immersion program, you’re welcome at our school,’” Berntsen said. “Let’s do everything we can to make them feel comfortable in the most uncomfortable situation they’ve ever been in.”

Some 170 evacuated children enrolled in the Anchorage school district, including 71 in the Yup’ik immersion program. Once the district’s smallest immersion program, it is now “thriving,” said Brandon Locke, the district’s director of world languages.

At College Gate, students receive half-day instruction in Yup’ik, including Yup’ik literacy and language as well as science and social studies. The other half is in English and includes language and mathematics courses.

Among the new students in the program is Ellyne Aliralria, a 10-year-old girl from Kipnuk. When the waters rose on the weekend of October 11, she and her family were in a house that was floating upstream. The flood waters also washed away her sister’s grave, she said.

Aliralria enjoys the immersion program and learning more phrases, even though the Yup’ik dialect spoken is a little different from what she knows.

“I like doing them all, but some of them are difficult,” the fifth-grader said.

It’s also difficult to adjust to life in a motel room in a town nearly 500 miles from their village on the southwest coast.

“We’re homesick,” she said.

Lilly Loewen, 10, is one of several non-Yup’ik participants in the program. She said her parents wanted her to participate because they “thought it was really cool.”

“It’s really amazing to be able to talk to people in a language other than the one I primarily speak at home,” Loewen said.

Berntsen plans to help new students get acclimated by hosting activities such as gym nights or Olympic-style events, featuring activities that mimic Alaska Native hunting and fishing techniques. One example: seal jumping, in which participants assume a plank position and move across the ground to imitate the way hunters sneak up on seals napping on the ice.

The Yup’ik immersion program helps undo some of the damage Western culture has done to Alaska Native language and traditions, he said. It also helps bridge the gap between two lost generations: In some cases, children’s parents or grandparents never learned Yup’ik, but students can now speak with their great-grandparents, Locke said.

“I took this as a great opportunity for us to give back some of what trauma had taken away from our Indigenous people,” Berntsen said.