Keeping Alive the Haida Tongue

When a neighbour asked Doreen Mearns of Skidegate for help figuring out how to paint the Haida translation for "Peace on Earth" on his window this Christmas season, she knew exactly where to turn.

Mearns speaks the language, but some phrases don't immediately slip off the tongue. The answer was found by flipping through a glossary containing over 9,000 Skidegate Haida words with English translations, which has emerged over the last seven years thanks to the Skidegate Haida Immersion Program (SHIP).

Mearns is one of 20 elders registered in a program with the goal of preserving the language. In addition to spending days archiving the knowledge of fluent speakers, she and others teach the language to community members on Monday and Thursday nights.

Those who are registered at SHIP can think of only 30 people in Skidegate who speak Haida and then only 15 of them are fluent. Of these 15, the youngest is 56 years old and the oldest is over 90. The average age of Skidegate Haida speakers is 78, says instructor Diane Brown and it is these kinds of statistics that bring a real urgency to their work.

Elders run the show

Every morning the elders gather around a large table in the longhouse which used to house the band office and is now home to SHIP. With a view of the sea, they record words and phrases on paper and on CD.

The traditional post and beam construction of the building is complemented by the impressive modern technology used to complete the task. Microphones in front of each participant capture the voices of some of the only speakers of the Skidegate Haida language in the world. And like a true ship, a large control panel, manned by Brown and her collegue Kevin Borsario, a high school teacher who was seconded to the program when it began seven years ago, seems to steer the proceedings.

But that which looks modern does not always hold the most power as Borsario points out, it is the elders themselves who are in control. Everything from the general structure of the day, to the linguistic method for writing this otherwise oral language, has been designed by them, he says.

Each day at SHIP starts with a prayer in Haida and then five new words a day are added to the glossary. Once each word is written and spoken, the participants then have the chance to make a sentence using the new words which is also recorded.

"Every word is precious," says Brown.

No mink coat? 'Oh dear'

Some sentences are funny, like when syang (mink) and haajasdii (oh dear) were recorded in a plaintive, "Oh dear, I don't have a mink coat." Others tell a mini-story, like how a cedar oven mitt was used to take things out of a fire, proving these exercises are more than a linguistics, but part of documenting a culture.

Throughout the proceedings elders discuss the spellings and pronunciations of each word making changes if necessary. Every village had its own dialect, says Borsario, so it is important to note the differences. Occasionally someone points out a more specific meaning for words than was first noted on the board.

Hlkayxuuda, for example, means shady, but according to GitKun, the word is specific to the canopy of an old forest. He says it takes the third generation of trees to produce this particular quality of light.

GitKun's English name is John Williams, but those who dare to use such monikers in the Haida immersion program must cough up a hefty 25 cent fine.

GitKun is a valuable resource. Now 82 years old, he grew up on the islands, but served as a United Church minister in Kitimat for 12 years and before that he was the vice-president of the Queen Charlotte branch of the Native Brotherhood of B.C.

Two years ago, he replaced his uncle as the hereditary chief of Tanu. GitKun is acutely aware of the vulnerable state of the Haida language. One of his sentences, using the featured vocabulary, told of a time when he was sick in Vancouver and his grandfather visited him in a dream.

"I knew I was going to live when my grandfather left me without inviting me to go with him," he says.

'What can we call ourselves?'

Niis Wes, Ernie Wilson, sits beside GitKun at the long table. At 91, he is a valuable resource as well. Born in Skidegate, he says he has done everything in his life — trapping, trolling, logging, along with working and captaining on a seine boat. He likes to pass on bits of information when he can.

He also spent five years in residential school in Chilliwack, where they tried, as he says, to kill their language.

"And they darn near succeeded too."

Wrapping an uninitiated tongue around the sounds of the language is challenging and even though Niis Wes is near deaf due to his 30 years on a noisy logging boat, he is patient at correcting pronunciation. If one doesn't pronounce the word right, it will mean something else, he warns.

This expertise on the nuances of the language at is why archiving what he knows and what he sounds like is so important to people at SHIP.

"If we lose the language, what can we call ourselves?" says Niis Wes.

Both these men worry the younger generation doesn't feel the same urgency about preserving the Haida language.

"School children say they don't need [the language]," says GitKun, who adds youth spend too much time with television. He also fears their initiation into drugs and alcohol.

Language outlawed

Although Skidegate Band Council education administrator Gail Russ acknowledges the language and culture programs offered at the daycare, elementary school and high school levels are not going to make students fluent, she says it is helping them learn phrases, words, stories and songs.

"It is imperative to offer the language to a younger generation," she says. There are classes offered for Haida and non-Haida students through day care and kindergarten through Grade 11.

In the Grade 8 class at Queen Charlotte Secondary the students are beginning to get a sense of why it is important for them to take Haida. "To keep the culture alive," says 13 year-old Victor Edgars. But most of the students admit they don't speak Haida at home. "Why?" teacher Debbie Burton asks and the children explain their parents don't speak the language either because, in the past, they were told not to.

As far back as the mid-1800s laws and government policy were focused on assimilating native cultures by outlawing practices such as the potlatch and forcing children to stop speaking their languages at residential schools.

When Burton presses the children about why their parents were discouraged from speaking their language, one young man says, "Because they didn't understand us."

Extinct tongues

Worldwide there are 6,500 languages and experts fear that half of them may be extinct within 50 years. Canada has 50 to 73 aboriginal languages representing 11 language families. British Columbia is rich with more than half of these languages representing eight distinct language families.

When a language is lost, so too is the local knowledge, ways of thinking and specialized skills that go along with it.

No aboriginal languages are protected by legislation, but in 2002, the Canadian government committed $160 million over 10 years to the preservation of Aboriginal languages and culture.

Ensuring some of that money trickles down to the tiny SHIP program is just one of the challenges the program faces. Brown, who at 56 thinks she may be the youngest fluent speaker of Skidegate Haida, knows she is up against huge hurdles, but she has seen a lot of progress.

"There is more Haida being spoken than seven years ago," she says, adding that everyone in the program can and often is called upon to tell stories or to begin and end a gathering with a prayer.

Legacy on CDs Hundreds of CDs have been recorded at SHIP including stories on things like fishing, food gathering, weaving and more. There are lessons that cover topics like hunger, thirst, feelings, animals and plants. There are conversational CDs, the alphabet and basic grammar is recorded, more than 700 place names are documented along with a map and there is even a CD of baby talk phrases for young parents. All of these are available for sale through the program.

Many years from now, says Brown, great-grandchildren will be able to pick a CD and listen to their great-grandmother's way of speaking. But she hopes more people will take advantage of the program now.

"The opportunity to learn the language from fluent speakers is not going to be there forever," she says.

Heather Ramsay lives in Queen Charlotte City. This article also appeared the Queen Charlotte Islands Observer.