In the long hours of waiting for the state of Alaska to recognize Alaska Native languages as equals to English, the group of advocates for the bill laughed as hard as we ever had. It is a coping mechanism. It’s medicine. When I was retelling some of the jokes that we were telling then, which were already more funny in Tlingit than they were in English, the jokes fell flat. There is something about standing there, feeling powerless and knowing your bill could be killed off at any time, that leads you to search for reasons to laugh. Earlier in the day, some of our elders who stood with us in protest said they hated that they had to beg for recognition, but they also said several times that they would do anything to make life better for future generations and to help ease the pain of current generations.

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When the bill was first read all I could hear was my heart pounding in my head. Those of us who stayed there to support it stood up, and many of us instantly began to feel the tears coming. We thought of all those who were there throughout the day and could not stay the whole time. We thought about our elders who were living long enough to see this amazing change. We thought about hours upon hours of advocacy, planning, writing and speaking that kept us from our families, work and sleep.


There is not a better moment than when the vote came through. When this idea was being discussed months ago, I never imagined that it would have passed through the Legislature by a total count of 56-2. Alaska now stands as the only other state in America to recognize Alaska Native languages, standing next to Hawaii as leaders in the language revitalization movement. We know all the hard work we still have to do, but now there is another thing that we know: We can win. We can succeed, and this is not just a Native problem. This is not a thing that small crowds of people talk about and work themselves to death trying to solve. The day is coming when we are not revitalizing Alaska Native languages any more, but we are instead just living them and keeping them safe.

We will never be in a state of dying languages like we are now again. The call has collectively gone out, across our state, to make all of our languages protected, sacred, official. This is a wonderful day, and I had to tell my students something Kingheestí David Katzeek taught me: Tlél ghidaleet -- don’t quit. I said it to my class over and over and over. I know that there are so many things that can make us give up. Standing so close to the edge, sometimes it is easy to just jump.


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