Hundreds of residents of Alaska Native villages were airlifted to Anchorage after the remnants of Typhoon Halong inundated their coastal communities along the Bering Sea last month, destroying or heavily damaging nearly 700 homes. One person died and two remain missing. Among those displaced are children who have found a measure of familiarity in a school-based Yup'ik language and culture immersion programme.
Rayann Martin, one of the pupils, said she is learning more Yup'ik and using it to communicate with her mother, teachers and classmates. 'I usually speak more Yup'ik in villages, but mostly more English in cities,' she said.
The Anchorage School District adopted its first language immersion programme in 1989, with Japanese, and later added Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, German, French and Russian. The K-12 Yup'ik immersion programme, based at College Gate Elementary and Wendler Middle School, was added about nine years ago after requests from parents, and its first cohort is now in eighth grade.
College Gate Elementary principal Darrell Berntsen, an Alaska Native from Kodiak Island, understands the evacuees' losses. His mother was 12 in 1964 when the magnitude-9.2 Great Alaska Earthquake and tsunami devastated her village of Old Harbor. He has long been interested in preserving Alaska Native culture and languages; his ex-wife's grandmother was the last fluent speaker of Eyak.
Berntsen greeted evacuees at a Red Cross shelter and invited families to enrol their children in the Yup'ik programme. Around 170 evacuated children have joined the district, with 71 entering the immersion programme, which Brandon Locke, the district's world language director, described as 'booming'.
Among the new students is Ellyne Aliralria, a 10-year-old from Kipnuk, whose home floated upriver during the flood and whose sister's grave was washed away. She likes the programme, though the Yup'ik dialect differs slightly from her own.
