Our first semester at the university in Fairbanks, Bill and I enrolled in Iñupiaq Eskimo Language class. Most of the students were Iñupiaq, but there were a couple of non-Native students besides us. As it happened, just before the academic year began, the guy who had taught the Iñupiaq language classes out of the Alaska Native Language Center (ANLC) left and they needed to find a new native speaker. They hired someone, but everything was not finalized before the year began, so we started out with the linguist in ANLC who was fluent in all dialects of Iñupiaq. A few weeks in, the new teacher arrived and they taught the class together for the rest of the year. It was a rocky start, but after a bit, everything went really well and it turned out to be a great class. I love words and written language especially, so studying languages is like doing puzzles for me in some ways. I get excited when I can see the logic of how things go together and how dialect differences show up, and I can become quite fascinated by some small aspect of language use. I was one of the few people I knew during my time in academia who really enjoyed the linguistic subfield that was part of my anthropological education. So I had really been looking forward to starting the Iñupiaq class.
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| alsaka native language map |
I did get frustrated at first, because it seemed like we were not progressing—I grew tired of saying my name and where I was from over and over again, class after class. One day, however, things got more interesting. We were have a day where the teacher was informally doing commands—telling us to stand up, walk to the board, and write our names. When she got to me, I did what she was telling me to do, feeling a bit annoyed to be honest, and stood at the board with the chalk in my hand. ‘Kiña atqiñ?’ she asked. I wrote ‘Shari’ on the board in reply. ‘Do you have an Eskimo name?’ she wanted to know. I shook my head and said I didn’t. ‘Do you want one?’ she asked. I said I did. She was quiet for a minute or two and I started to fidget. ‘I’m going to name you after my sister. Kuukpiaq. She died,’ she replied. I stopped fidgeting and stood there, stunned. The class had gotten very, very quiet. I’d read enough by then to know about the tradition of the atiq (namesake) and what it used to mean. Traditionally, it was a way to extend kinship ties. People would name a child after a deceased relative of someone else and that would create the same kinship tie between the child and the relative. I wasn’t sure what to make of this development, or what it meant in this case, but the fact that all the Native students in the class were so quiet seemed significant to me. Not knowing what to say at that point besides ‘thank you,’ I said that. ‘Do you want to know how to spell it?’ she asked. I nodded, she told me, and I wrote it down. Then I went back to my desk and sat down, writing it in my notebook. When it was Bill’s turn, he went up and was also asked if he had an Eskimo name, said he didn’t, and was given one, but for his name, the teacher asked the class to provide one. Someone who had lived in a village suggested Sayuu, which was the name of someone she knew there. He wrote his name then came back to sit down.
At the end of class, the teacher came over to me and asked, ‘Do you want to visit me?’ And we did. We went to the apartments she shared with her husband and grandson many times. They came to our home many times. She and I were in and out of one another’s offices. She made me traditional clothing, including the parka I posted about a while ago. They borrowed our truck for months when they needed reliable transportation during winter. They stored their stuff at our house when they went back to their village in the summers. She used to call me Sis Kuukpiaq. During the Christmas break that first year, when we were visiting, she told Bill she was naming him after her brother.
Things did get complicated after a while and even painful at times, but we continued to be friends and remained in contact off and on after she left the university and we left Alaska. Most recently, we would communicate via Facebook, but she was rarely on there because she didn’t have regular access to wifi (or email). When I decided to leave Facebook and delete my account, she had been absent for a long time, so I sent her a private message, but I don’t know whether or not she would have gotten it after my account was gone. Maybe one day, we’ll connect again.
Note: All of the Iñupiaq names are real words, but not real names. Kuukpiaq means coffee and sayuu means tea.
