A celebrated and familiar face visited Skagway to discuss the pronunciation of local places. Participants came from Juneau, Canada and Deiyáa, otherwise known as Dyea, to hear Lance Twitchell speak. The Lingít professor says there is a new translation for the word “Skagway.”

 

Lance Twitchell, a founding member of the Skagway Traditional Council, returned to Skagway, the place of his birth, to discuss place names. Twitchell is working to restore traditional Lingít names throughout Southeast.

“My name is X̱’unei Lance Twitchell. It’s an honor to speak to you today. I’m not the only one here. My grandfather, Si Dennis Sr., is with me. He was my first Lingít language teacher.”

Twitchell says his grandmother, Dorothy Dennis, also accompanies him. 

He describes how his grandmother first came into contact with his grandfather’s family in Skagway.

“There’s a little theater here, probably in the 1930s,” Twitchell says. “She came here to work in a tuberculosis sanatorium. She’s a Haida woman. And she went to go see a show. And she sat in a good seat. 

And these Native people came by her and said, ‘Hey, you can’t sit there. We Natives gotta sit in the back. Only the white people get to sit in the front.’ 

And she said, ‘Well, I sit where I want.’ And pretty soon, whoever was running the joint came up and said, ‘Hey, you can’t sit here. You gotta sit in the back. And she’s like, ‘Why?’ 

‘That’s just how it is. You gotta sit in the back or you gotta leave.’ 

She said, ‘Well, the money I gave you, you give it back to me and double it. And I’ll leave. But if you’re not gonna do that, just leave me alone and get out of my face.’ 

Now, I don’t think he had seen a ferocious woman like that. He didn’t know what to do. And he left. These two old people came walking by her and she said, ‘Don’t go in the back. Come sit by me.’ And they said, ‘We have to sit on the bench.

 ‘No we don’t. Come sit by me.’ And those two people turn out to be her husband’s parents.”

Now a professor at the University of Alaska Southeast, Twitchell started formally studying Lingít in 1996. He estimates there were 5,000 speakers. Today, there are seven fluent speakers. He says the language erasure was deliberate and catastrophic.

“We just lost one of our speakers a couple of weeks ago,” Twitchell says. “And it’s like a, it’s like a giant library burns down – rare books that aren’t in print anywhere else.”

The decline of the Lingít language began with Native residential schools, where children were separated from their communities and punished for practicing Indigenous culture and language. Twitchell shares the experience of Irene Cadiente, from Angoon, who attended the Pius X Mission School in Skagway. 

“She said every time she spoke, they would hit the back of their hands as children.”

Twitchell says one way to revitalize the language and recognize the generations before the gold rush is to properly pronounce existing Indigenous names. 

Twitchell acknowledges the transition might be difficult for some residents.

“There are white people people who have lived here 80 years, and we’re going to try and get them to say Shg̱agwei instead of Skagway, and Deiyáa, instead of Dyea,” he says. “And Náxk’w instead of either Nahku or Long Bay. This is gonna take some effort and some reprogramming. So we have to be kind, loving, and help people along the way. I know some people are going to be mad. Some of the things they’ll say is like, ‘Why do you want to change the name?’ I’m like, ‘Well, it’s actually just y’all have been mispronouncing it for like 100 years. We’re just finally like, okay, we’ve been very polite. And we’ve also been dealing with an awful lot of racism. But the way you say this, is this.’”

There are 62 possible sounds in Lingít and 27 of those sounds are not found in English. Twitchell describes Lingít as a language that loves classification. For example, the way to say ‘play fetch with a dog’ depends if the item being thrown is a stick, a coiled rope or a ball. Twitchell thinks complication is fun. He finds a lot of fun in the Lingít language.

Twitchell made a correction in the workshop that will surprise residents and tour guides. After 20 years of research and discussion by Lingít speakers, the translation of Skagway has changed. 

“There were many interpretations,” Twitchell says. “Windy place. Home of the North Wind, Windy Valley, wind off the mountain, sound of a woman peeing on a rock. I don’t know where that one came from.”

The new interpretation makes no mention of the fierce wind, or urinating on rocks. It translates to “heartwood place” in reference to the center or the strongest part of a tree.

“It has to do with the type of driftwood that comes ashore here,” Twitchell says. “It has a really solid core. It’s a hardcore place.”

This hardcore place is moving forward with a plan to have Lingít street signs above the English sign at every intersection in town. The project was first proposed by resident and author Jeff Brady about two years ago and is now a collaboration between many local organizations – the Margaret Frans Brady Fund, the Municipality of Skagway and Skagway Traditional Council. They plan to coincide the installation of the signs with upcoming street upgrades.

Skagway Traditional Council Chair Jaime Bricker is eager for the educational opportunity the signs will offer residents and tourists.

“To our knowledge, if this happens, and hopefully, we can do it fast enough, we would be the first community in Alaska to have every public street within our town site to have a Lingít name, which is really exciting,” Bricker says. “Especially considering Skagway’ history, tough history. You know, with colonization and assimilation, to have so much of Lingít culture removed from this community at such an early time in its modern existence. To have that come back and to be reflected in every street in Skagway, it’s just, it’s really exciting.”

On the Skagway Traditional Council webpage, skagwaytraditional.org, users can find traditional place names, and their spellings and pronunciations provided by Lance Twitchell. On skagway.com, Skagway’s Visitor Center page, trail maps now feature council-approved traditional names.