October 8, 2010

Roots

Written by: Ruth Tong, Intake Specialist, Child & Family Services

I grew up thinking I was full Iñupiaq. I knew my maternal grandmother spoke Unaliq, a dialect of Yup’ik from the village of Elim, to the west of Koyuk, where I was born. My father told me he was Malemuit, part of an Iñupiat contingent from the Kotzebue area who had migrated to the southern Seward Peninsula. I always heard my mother speak fluent Unaliq with her first cousin, Elsie Nelson Ball, who was half Norwegian and half “Eskimo.” I later learned Elsie grew up with her grandparents in Elim. My mother would switch to speaking Iñupiaq with my father. She spent five months in the Kotzebue hospital when I was a baby, so she picked up the Kotzebue or “up north” Iñupiaq dialect as well.

About 2007, my cousin, Iris Magnell, a niece of Elsie Ball, completed a very thorough and impressive family tree of our great-grandparents forward. My older sister also told me our maternal grandmother was Yup’ik from the St. Michael area. From Iris’ family tree, I learned that our great-grandmother, Aukbayuk, was Iñupiaq from the Kotzebue area, and she married Otton, who was Yup’ik.

So, recently I figured I am 3/8 Yup’ik and 5/8 Iñupiaq – still mostly Iñupiaq, but not at all full!

In regard to languages, I remember listening to a documentary made in northern Canada when I was in my early 20s, and I could understand most of the Inuit. And, one year, some Greenlanders came to Anchorage to speak to us in their language, and I understood them too. That was such a revelation to me.

In 2004, I traveled to Kodiak and looked at one of their tourist booklets. On one page, they listed 16 Aleut words, and 11 of them were familiar to me from my Iñupiaq and Yup’ik background. Later still, I looked up an internet site of the Aliotors, indigenous people from the Siberian side close to the Aleutian Islands. One of their publications was called “Wankuta Maani,” which in Yup’ik means “we here.” Because of my Yup’ik/Iñupiaq background, I also understand some of the Siberian Yup’ik spoken on St. Lawrence Island and their relatives in Siberia.

It’s all been a very exciting journey in understanding myself, my forebears, and the larger world of the Northern peoples.

My mother used to say, “I’m not just bi-lingual, I’m multi-lingual!” On a lighter note, I once played internet Scrabble with a lady from the United Kingdom. When we chatted, I asked if she spoke other languages besides English; she said no. I told her I knew a little Iñupiaq, Yup’ik, and a few Aleut words, and that I also mastered the English language. When I beat her in the Scrabble game, I told her to tell people she was beaten by an Eskimo.