Baranof Elementary School in Sitka has a new name. The Sitka School Board voted unanimously on Thursday (3-6-24) to make the change, culminating a lengthy discussion on a different-yet-related topic: The need to make cultural education a more immersive experience in Sitka for everyone.
Nine years after the issue was first brought before the Sitka School Board, the time to change the name of Baranof Elementary came at just after 10 p.m.
“It has been moved and seconded to select Xóots Elementary School as the new name for Baranof Elementary School,” said school board president Tristan Guevin putting the question on the table, where it was adopted unanimously with little discussion from either the board, or the ten or so members of the public who waited out the long meeting at the Sheetka Kwaan Naa Kahidi – Sitka’s tribal community house.
Applause…
Xóots, by the way, means “brown bear,” and the raspy “h” sound at the beginning of the word is represented with an “X.”
The person who spearheaded the committee meetings and community surveys that led to the name change was former board president Blossom Teal-Olsen. Teal-Olsen left the school board ten months ago, but stayed engaged with this project, because she may have been the only person who could bring the name change about. Alaska Native, yet not Lingít, Teal-Olsen steered past the cultural conflict that led to the defeat of a previous name change two years ago.
She complimented everyone who helped, and their bravery for moving forward, when it may have been easier to stop.
“It hasn’t been an easy road,” said Teal-Olsen, “and I think there was a point where you’re thinking maybe we should table it and keep it on the table.”
The soft landing for the school name change was in part because of the lengthy discussion that preceded it. Every year, the Sitka School District reviews an Impact Report from the Cultural Department, plus holds a public hearing on its federally-funded cultural education program (Title VI Indian Education Act and Impact Aid hearing), called SNEP, or the Sitka Native Education Program.
SNEP is widely recognized as having been critical to incorporating traditional culture into Sitka’s school curricula, but there was a distinct change in tone at this year’s hearing, that the district – the community – was not going far enough. Lingít cultural education still feels like an adjunct to conventional, western education. And the language itself remains in decline.
Roby Littlefield has taught Lingit in Sitka since 1985. She quoted a paper from Dr. Lance Twitchell arguing that the Lingít language needs to become more central to the experience of living in Sitka. More normal.
“Normalizing means that the language is seen and it’s heard by everybody,” said Littlefield, “so that seeing and hearing the language is commonplace. One of the things that tends to happen with indigenous languages, after generations of language suppression is that the language becomes foreign in its own place. And even to its own people. The result is a distorted sense of what was normal, so that it seems normal to expect to hear only English everywhere.”
Littlefield was seconded by David Kanosh, a Sitka resident and one of thirty fluent speakers of Lingít in Southeast Alaska. Kanosh was educated in the Sitka school system, learned French, Japanese, Spanish, and studied the classics. He would not replace any of this – but supplement it.
“What I say is that we should incorporate more of our language, our culture, into the system,” said Kanosh. “Just as my life was enriched by the works of William Shakespeare, by the epic sagas of the Scandinavians, the ancient Greeks and Romans their myths – they enriched my life. Now learn of us. We are still here.”
Kanosh was not necessarily arguing for a radical change. A frequent traveler to Hawaii, he remembers visiting that state when there were only a couple of hundred Native speakers remaining. Hawaii has made the effort to normalize language, and Kanosh said it was evident on his last trip.
“I went to the airport and over the intercom in the airport you could hear announcements being made into Hawaiian language,” said Kanosh, “and the tourist industry has said that they get more people that come there because they feel like they’re leaving and visiting a foreign country without having to get a passport, thus enriching their economy. Why can we not normalize the Lingít language here as well? Give us that chance and we’ll show you what we as a people can do.”
The kind of immersion suggested by Kanosh and Littlefield is not untested. Pauline Duncan, a retired first grade teacher at the elementary school formerly known as Baranof, had a popular dual-education program in her classroom incorporating lessons in both Lingit and English. She told the board about one of her students, a boy named Ben.
“One day he came to school and he said to me, ‘Mrs. Duncan, do you know that I am Lingít now?’ And I said, ‘No, when did that happen?’ He said,’ I don’t know. It just happened. And I told my mom last night, “Mom, come here, I just turned Lingít.” And she said, ‘Oh, that’s nice!’ This is just to show you that at that level, how a teacher can make an impact on a student.”
The school board took no official action on the hearing, but the discussion certainly cleared the path for renaming Baranof Elementary. Board member Phil Burdick said that Sitka was poised to embrace a richer and more immersive cultural experience. “What’s stopping us,” he asked, “from incorporating all of the knowledge that we have together?”
Disclosure: Roby Littlefield hold a seat on the KCAW Board of Directors.
