Dumping the past?

I spend a lot of time worrying about the fate of language documentation squirreled away in caches, sheds, attics, and yes, even in that proverbial shoebox under the bed. It's not that I'm obsessed with the past -- quite the opposite -- I like to think of myself as a very forward-looking person, an early adopter of new technologies and such. But I have come to appreciate the insights of early language documentation.

In some cases even a single word can yield enormous insight, such as when Mikhail Gvozdëv happened to record (in 1732!) a Naukan Yupik name for the Wales (on the tip of the Seward Peninsula) from a kayaker off the shore of King Island. That one little bit of language documentation provides a clue that Inupiaq speakers may not yet have reached King Island 300 years ago. But the more prosaic examples of documentation are equally important. I think of all those recordings made by speakers, now long deceased, who hoped to pass on their knowledge of culture and language. Just last week Kenneth Frank brought in six 3-inch reels of Gwich'in language and music to be digitized at the Alaska Native Language Archive. They had been found stashed out in a shed. Thankfully they are free of mold and still playable. But how many more such recordings have been lost? Whose legacy is at risk of being thrown out when someone cleans out the shed or the cache?

Naively I thought this problem was limited to the realm of Native languages. After all, language is intangible, and its artifacts are not so obviously valuable to the casual observer. Surely this would never happen with physical artifacts. Or so I thought until I heard this story on KYUK radio. Apparently a bunch of masks, regalia, and other items ended up in the Chevak dump after the local school cleaned out one of its old buildings. The school superintendent claims that he tried to notify people of the collection, to no avail. As the controversy grows and people argue about where to assign blame, it seems to me that the real problem is lack of infrastructure and training in the museum and archiving field. We have beautiful museums in Alaska, but these institutions don't always manage to connect to the people on the front lines of the language and culture preservation effort. People don't what to do with artifacts, and they don't know where to turn for help.

Photo: KYUK.org

 Of course we can't put a museum specialist and archivist in every village in Alaska. But schools and libraries -- institutions with a strong presence across the state -- could receive some training in the basics of curation, as well as some information about where to turn for help. I am reminded here of the new Dena'inaq' Huch'ulyeshi exhibit which recently opened at the Anchorage Museum. One of my favorite objects in that exhibit is an arrow quiver with fine quill-work (see image). It dates to 1866 and was housed in a Finnish high school.

Photo: Anchorage Museum

I don't know the whole story of how this Dena'ina item ended up in a Finnish high school, but I'm sure glad that the school didn't decide to throw it out. Odd that a Finnish high school was able to hang on to Alaskan artifacts, while a high school in Chevak couldn't even manage to find a place to house some local objects. Fortunately, many of the Chevak objects were recovered, along with some print documents with stories by Chevak elders. Unfortunately, many more things were destroyed, especially documents.

Wouldn't it be great if, instead of just assigning blame for the Chevak dumping, we could instead figure out away to provide more training and education in curation. Surely we owe that much to the elders.