So proud of my dad, Richard Atuk, who spent his life working on behalf of our people and now, at 80, he’s taught himself to build an Access database to document the languages of the Northwest Seward Peninsula/Bering Straits region. I sat on a Zoom call while he explained to another octogenarian how he manipulated a font to capture sounds that are not part of Western languages and how it’s going to allow others to document their own dialects. Without this dedication, these languages would surely die with the elders who speak them.
Instead, these people – brilliant, thoughtful, analytical, engineers by nature — separated by 1,000 miles but connected by 10,000 years of culture – are building a language movement to ensure that our languages proliferate into the next decade, if not the next century.
Come join the Kissaq Kingikmiuraguqtuat language summit in Nome this August. Inupiraqtaa!
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