The crowded quarters of the Alaska Native Language Archive at UAF have the feel of a library, a place of quiet discovery. It is here that the archive’s occupants carefully organize the documentation of Alaska’s many languages. The cluttered walls of these rooms, a few floors above UAF’s Rural Student Services, house the results of years of data collection and work by Native speakers. Its quiet occupants scuttle around, pulling a map here, a paper there. Amidst the stacks of notes and maps, director Gary Holton has just completed a massive undertaking — one that involves hundreds of stakeholders from across the state. Holton, in cooperation with researchers at UAA’s Institute of Social and Economic Research, updated the Alaska Native language map.

To understand the map update, one must also understand the history of the map — a history that winds from the days of the Russian American company’s presence in the area that would later be the state of Alaska, through the civil rights movement and the fight for inclusion of Native languages in Alaska’s schools, by a young scholar with a pen and paper visiting the tuberculosis wards of Anchorage’s Native hospitals, to today’s GIS technology and the modern day demand to have information available anywhere, at the touch of our fingers. One must also understand the intricate web of Alaska Native cultures across this great state, and how people live, travel and communicate with one another.

The Map
The Alaska Native Language Map, at least the one that comes to mind for most familiar with the state, is, according to Holton, an iconic symbol of indigenous Alaskan landscape. The map can be found hanging in most schools, on countless walls across the UAF campus, and in the halls of Alaska’s legislative buildings. Classes have been built around the map, students have studied and memorized the map, policy decisions have been made based on its boundaries.

The map has been existence in some form or other for several hundred years. According to Michael Krauss, author of the 1974 map that most Alaskans are familiar with today, the first version of the map was created by the Russians.

“The Russians took an intelligent view of things,” says Krauss. “They were interested in who was in the area because they considered it part of Russia. So they identified the people who were here by their languages.”

A few others contributed to versions of the map throughout the years before Krauss began the work that would eventually result in the 1974 version of the map.

What distinguished Krauss’ 1974 version, and perhaps led to its iconic status, was Krauss’ use of linguistic criteria and methodology to differentiate between the languages. Krauss had a more sophisticated understanding of isoglosses, or the boundaries between places that differ in a particular linguistic feature, than previous map authors.

Despite what some critics have argued, the lines of Krauss’ map were not placed there arbitrarily, nor were they lines that could be drawn and simply updated with a quick survey. The lines were based on careful analysis of how particular people pronounced particular words in particular places — reflective of the continuum that language really is.

To make things even more complicated, because most Alaska Native languages do not have a written record, documenting how particular words are pronounced and when those pronunciations move or change can be challenging. Prior to Krauss’ map, most languages didn’t even have a name for themselves, so asking someone if they spoke a particular language was impossible. Defining where unique language features were changing was, to say the least, challenging.

“Lots of lines were confirmed at the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage in 1962,” says Krauss. “People were hospitalized with TB and I spent the summer at the hospital.”

Krauss took his notebook and pencil to the hospital and interviewed people. He tuned in to the particulars of individual pronunciations in relation to places. At the time there were no best procedures, and Krauss had no training. But his gift of the subtleties of language paid off, as is reflected in the 30-plus year lifetime of the map.

“Language is a continuum,” says Krauss, “and the map was really a compromise between linguistic and social reality.”

An icon for the 21st century
The importance of Krauss’ version of the map really hit home the first time a meeting regarding the map was called. In January 2008, Gary Holton, along with researchers from University of Alaska Anchorage’s Institute of Social and Economic Research, hosted a symposium at the bilingual conference in Anchorage. As part of the symposium, they invited people to comment on the map. Two hundred people showed up.

“This really had become Alaska’s map,” says Holton. “People now feel a sense of ownership, so you have to be careful when you go and start changing things.”

But there were things to be changed. For instance, on the old map, there were terms that some people felt were derogatory. The word Ingalik, for instance, which on the old map referred to the Athabascan language Deg Xinag is derived from the Yup’ik word for “one with lice.”

Many people also felt strongly that denotation on the old map of how many speakers remained for a certain language should be removed. Additionally, Holton and his colleagues included the Native name for every place on the map, with the English name underneath.

Perhaps the biggest challenge though lay in how to describe where languages occurred in a place where official names for places are often still undocumented. There are over 200 place names on the map, and yet there is no database of Alaska Native place names to base that information on. With this many place names that needed to be reviewed with speakers from 20 languages, Holton had his work cut out for him.

The task of compiling names began with decades of research by Alaska Native Language Center linguists James Kari, Steven Jacobson, Lawrence Kaplan, Jeff Leer and others. Multiple meetings were held, primarily in Anchorage and Fairbanks. Also, many speakers were consulted when visiting ISER and ANLC. But much of the work involved phone calls and emails to language experts across the state, both individuals and organizations, including the Alaska Native Heritage Center; Sealaska Heritage Institute; Inupiaq History, Language, and Culture Commission; the Alutiiq Museum and many others. Holton coordinated all of this with primary collaborators Jim Kerr and Colin West of ISER, as well as graphic artist Clemencia Merrill.

In addition to the updates in changes to the languages, the map was also digitized with GIS information. Now users can access the map online and structure the information they want from the map in the way they desire.

“A paper map is useful as a wall decoration but is no longer the go-to source for geographic information in today’s digital world. Agency officials and managers seek digital data that can be readily combined with data from other sources to understand current problems in the state,” says Holton. “Making language boundaries and place name data available digitally via the Alaska State Geospatial Data Clearinghouse will help to increase awareness of Native languages in the state. For example, planners will be able to easily visualize which languages and Native places would be flooded by the proposed Susitna hydro project.”

Now that the project is drawing to a close, the lighter side of its immensity can be seen. On a quiet afternoon in the archives Yup’ik professor Walkie Charles strolls in and chides Holton “I just heard some folks want to change the name of Mountain Village to Asaucaryaq.” The two chuckle, knowing that the name for Mountain Village has at least five different pronunciations, only one of which could be included on the map.