MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Yupik is the most spoken native language in Alaska.
NIKKI CORBETT: (Speaking Yupik).
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
That’s Nikki Corbett introducing herself in Yupik. Corbett is a mom and small business owner in Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula. She searched in stores online but couldn’t find any books to teach her kids Yupik, so she made her own.
MARTIN: And there seems to be a market for it. Of the about 21,000 Alaskans who identify as Yupik, nearly half speak the language.
FADEL: Now, growing up, Corbett herself was immersed in Yupik culture. But that’s not the case for every Alaska Native. The subjugation of Native Americans and hostility toward Native language and culture has a lot to do with it.
CORBETT: The younger generations, like my generation, you know, in some of those areas, they don’t know the language because their parents were punished for speaking Yupik.
MARTIN: Now there are immersion schools in Alaska that have materials in Yupik. But Corbett says you can’t find those kinds of books beyond those classrooms.
CORBETT: You know, if you go in the store and you see the kids’ section and you look at the educational material, you’ll see French or German or Spanish. You know, wherever those things are, we want to be able to create something similar.
FADEL: So Corbett tapped her friend, an illustrator, to help make a Yupik alphabet coloring book.
KATIE O’CONNOR: My name is Katie O’Connor. I’m an Inupiaq artist.
MARTIN: Growing up in Nome, Alaska, O’Connor didn’t learn much about her Inupiaq culture until after high school.
O’CONNOR: There’s not a lot available out there. And then also, when you start digging into it, the literature, the books that are out there related to any Alaska Native culture, most of them are written by non-Native people. Most of them are written by people who aren’t from Alaska, and some are written by people who’ve never even been to our region.
FADEL: O’Connor and Corbett won a fellowship to make their book. It’s 27 pages, each featuring a letter of the Yupik alphabet and illustrations celebrating Yupik culture and heritage. Here’s Corbett again.
CORBETT: The letters of the Yupik language, they relate to something in our culture. Like, you won’t see a coloring book that has fry bread in it. And so we’ve got a double letter in our language. It’s a double S – (speaking Yupik), which is fry bread. And so it’s images from a part of who we are as Alaska Natives.
MARTIN: Corbett says they have about a thousand bulk order requests for the coloring book, including an Alaska school district.
CORBETT: Our culture is so strong and our people are resilient. You know, it’s just a coloring book, but for us, it’s just so much more.
FADEL: Corbett and O’Connor hope to release their next coloring book in the Inupiaq language.
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Publish date : 2024-09-02 18:40:00
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