Iñupiaq on the silver screen

I’m a bit slow posting about this, but apparently a new Drew Barrymore film, Everybody Loves Whales, is going to be filmed in Alaska (news story here). What a shocker –  movie set in Alaska that’s actually filmed in Alaska! For my fellow Alaskans, this is a familiar story: it’s about attempts to rescue some whales that got stuck in sea ice near Point Barrow in 1988. I don’t know if it was as widely broadcast in the Lower 48 or not, but for us it was a gripping news story. Will they rescue the whales? How will they even go about it?

Of course, the part I find particularly interesting is that the casting director is searching for Iñupiaq-speaking actors to be in the movie. They’re holding auditions in places like Anchorage, Kotzebue, Nome, Barrow, and Fairbank.

Schildt said they’re “keenly interested” in casting an Inupiaq man between 50 and 65 years old who speaks Inupiaq, and an Inupiaq boy between 10 and 13. “(The boy) doesn’t need to speak his language, but those are two key roles that we’re looking for,” she said.

I love that they’re not just planning to have someone who looks vaguely Native play the part and fake the language thing. (One typical Hollywood way to do this, of course, is just to have a thick accent when speaking English. Thick accent = I’m actually speaking “foreign” right now!) Wonder if the Iñupiat actors will be anyone I know?

Language loss and climate change in Shishmaref

**blowing dust off blog**

It’s been a while, but this article on CNN reminded me to post here. It’s on the effect of climate change on an Inupiat village named Shishmaref in northern Alaskan. Shishmaref, like several coastal villages in Alaska, is rapidly falling into the sea due to increased water levels, melting sea ice, and erosion. I think what makes the article good is that it’s not so one-sided as most similar articles. It explores many aspects of the village’s impending slide into the ocean, including the effects on the Inupiaq dialect spoken there. There are also some short audio clips of Shelton Kokeok speaking the Shishmaref dialect. The article’s take on language loss isn’t perfect, of course, because it assumes the language loss is entirely due to climate change, but it’s the first time I’ve seen an article on climate change address language issues. If anyone knows of others, please drop a line.

Yup’ik election follow-up

As a follow-up to my post about voting in Alaska Native languages, here’s an article about how the elections went with the state-mandated translation support. (Yes, it’s now over a month out of date, but my blogging activities have been on the back burner. Maybe even on a burner in an outbuilding in a neighboring town.)

Anyway, the gist of it is that while the efforts were well-intended, they weren’t without problems, at least for Yup’ik (the article doesn’t mention anything about voting materials in other Alaskan languages). Mistranslations and translations that ignored rather important dialectal differences meant voters weren’t always sure what they were voting for. An example given in the article is this:

The state’s translation for the predator control initiative used the word “takukaq.” In one Yup’ik dialect, that means “brown bear” but in a coastal dialect, it means “seal,” the lawyers said.

“As a result, voters on the coast (a predominately Yup’ik-speaking area) read a ballot that indicated seals would be shot because they had been consuming too many moose calves and were depleting the population — a nonsensical prospect,” lawyers wrote in a motion filed in U.S. District Court last week.

In spite of the problems, I applaud the state for trying to meet voters’ needs in indigenous languages. After the court decision, they were on somewhat of a constrained timeline to get materials out in time for elections. I also hope improvements can be made. Still, it’s not like there aren’t wording mistakes or ambiguous verbiage on ballots in other languages, so it’s not too surprising that it happens in Yup’ik, too.

More baffling are readers’ comments on the article, many of which demand that Yup’ik speakers just “learn English already” or go back to their own country. Sigh… apparently they missed the part about Yup’ik being an Alaska Native language, or the quote from the Native American Rights Fund.

Linguistics Halloween costume

My blog stats tell me someone found my blog while searching for “linguistics halloween costume.” Now I’m dying of curiosity – who was looking for a linguistics Halloween costume, and did they find anything? Or did they come up with something of their own, such as:

• the Floating Tone
• the Masked Morpheme
• Dr. Linguistics
• Captain R-less

On a related note, yesterday a student who couldn’t remember my name called me Miss Linguistics. Sounds like a good superhero/Halloween costume idea to me.

Quyaanna, Tatqaviñ

Iñupiaq revitalization lost one of its best teachers on Friday when one of the most dedicated Iñupiaq teachers and translators, Ruth Tatqaviñ Sampson, passed away unexpectedly. My sincerest condolences go out to her family.

I only met Tatqaviñ last year, when I took a distance ed conversational Iñupiaq course from her, but she was truly an amazing teacher. Always there for her students with kind, patient feedback and a gentle humor. She also had a gift for accommodating multiple dialects in her class.

Ruthie was not only a teacher but a tireless translator, author, and editor. Many of the existing Iñupiaq books for children were written or edited by her, and she was instrumental in getting Iñupiaq Rosetta Stone software produced. One of her edited texts available online is Maniiḷaq, a collection of elders’ recollections of Maniiḷaq, the Iñupiaq prophet. The list just goes on and on.

Piḷḷuataqtutin, Tatqaviñ, you did a good job. You certainly left big shoes to fill, but I know your students and colleagues will keep up the good work.