Description

There are 20 Native languages spoken in Alaska. Of these, 17 count fewer than 100 speakers—and of these, 13 have fewer than 10. Alaska Native language activists and educators are confronting a crisis of language loss and are seeking to create new language teachers and new speakers as quickly as they can. 
The University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Alaska Native Language Center was established in 1972 to  document and preserve Indigenous languages in Alaska. It has built an impressive archive and makes language resources available to tribal communities across the state. ANLC also offers courses in three Alaskan languages Yup’ik, Inupiaq, and Gwich’in.  
The Center, though, recognizes that much more is needed if more of these endangered languages are to be saved. It has proposed to hire additional adjunct faculty to teach semester-long courses in two more languages—Siberian Yup’ik and Denakke. Siberian Yup’ik has never been taught in the US.  
The Center will also hire additional faculty in Yup’ik and Inupiaq so that those programs are not dependent only on a single faculty member. And it will convert an adjunct position in Gwich’in to a more stable “tripartite-track” position that the University has pledged to continue to fund after the expiration of grant funding. 
These investments, the ANLC team hopes, will attract more students to the Center’s offerings, which will in turn generate new funding for the program and help to justify additional investment by the University and state.  
The project will be overseen by Walkie Charles, the director of the Center. It was brought to our attention and has been shepherded by Professor Charlene Stern, a Luce Indigenous Knowledge Fellow who also serves as Vice-Chancellor for Rural Community and Native Education at the University. With X̱ʼ unei Twitchell, another Luce Fellow and a professor at University of Alaska Southeast, and other system teachers, Professor Stern has been working to deepen support for the Center and to grow it into the statewide resource it ought to be.