“I asked her, ‘Grandma, when other people come by, why do you stop doing anything that’s Lingít?’” Ketah said, thinking back 40 years. “She said, ‘Because we were trained to do that.’”
“And I was telling her that it’s hard learning the language at this point in my life, and one thing that makes it even harder is that I have to pay for it,” Ketah said, describing what he wrote. “White people took the language from us and now they’re charging us to get it back.”
Students currently taking non-credit classes in Lingít, Xaat Kíl or Smʼalgya̱x – traditional languages of Southeast Alaska – are no longer required to pay any tuition or fees. Taking down the barrier of cost is working. UAS language professors say enrollment has gone up for both non-credit classes and for-credit classes. UAS still charges tuition and fees for for-credit classes. When Twitchell first joined UAS in 2011, enrollment was in the 30s or 40s. They were happy when it reached 70. “And I remember when we got up to 100,” he said.
“To have your classes be in such high demand that we’re struggling to keep up, it’s an exciting problem,” she said. “I do think long term, we need to hire more people to be able to teach these classes if the demand continues to be this high.”“It might be being a little bit hyperbolic, but it’s like everybody wants to learn, whereas back in my youth, it just wasn’t something that people were excited about,” Ketah said.
Ketah said his grandmother’s family is originally from Sʼeek Heení, Warm Chuck Inlet on Heceta Island on the northwestern side of Prince of Wales Island, before they moved to Klawock. The kids were taught to inform on each other. Even a kid who had not broken the rules but failed to turn in another kid who had would get punished.
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