Tlingit Immersion Camps
Koolyéik Roby Littefied is a renowned teacher of Lingít who has created a week-long immersive language-learning environment at the Dog Point fish camp in Sitka, where students can experience the profound continuity between language, culture and landscape that constitute the Lingít way of life. Students, Sealaska Heritage "Language Pathway" scholars, and elders will come together in this wonderful setting to film a series of instructional videos in which the will demonstrate the languageʼs deep relationship to food-gathering and to the they rhythm of indigenous life.
Yanshuká Lingít Language Immersion Camp is a proven language revitalization project grounded in Koolyéik Roby Littlefieldʼs learning and teaching of the language with the help and expertise of fluent Elders. She brings over 30 years of experience coordinating these traditional culture and language programs.
The vision of this immersion camp is to serve an intergenerational group of language learners for one week at the Dog Point Native allotment land near Sitka. Learners will be immersed in the authentic and historical setting living daily traditional activities. We will learn to communicate with each other while practicing and living Haa Ḵusteeyí, Our Way of Life. Participants' traditional subsistence activities in the language will be documented on video. The videos will be used to create Lingít classroom materials and online resources and will be shared among Lingit language learners and teachers through our website.
Yanshuká Lingít Language Immersion Camp is a proven language revitalization project grounded in Koolyéik Roby Littlefieldʼs learning and teaching of the language with the help and expertise of fluent Elders. She brings over 30 years of experience coordinating these traditional culture and language programs.
The vision of this immersion camp is to serve an intergenerational group of language learners for one week at the Dog Point Native allotment land near Sitka. Learners will be immersed in the authentic and historical setting living daily traditional activities. We will learn to communicate with each other while practicing and living Haa Ḵusteeyí, Our Way of Life. Participants' traditional subsistence activities in the language will be documented on video. The videos will be used to create Lingít classroom materials and online resources and will be shared among Lingit language learners and teachers through our website.
Place-based Language Activities:
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Our Language Approach:
Immersion is founded upon immersive language learning where participants must communicate in the language while engaging in the daily tasks of fish camp. Whether fishing, preparing traditional meals, harvesting plants or singing songs, participants live the language through hands-on experiences and guidance from fluent speakers and elders. The daily repetition of structured language scripts by elders and language scholars prepared and practiced in advance of the camp will give participants multiple opportunities to hear, speak and apply the language to traditional ways of life.
Yanshuká immersion program will help provide traditionally educated Lingít language speakers and teachers with a lifelong memory of walking in their ancestorsʼ shoes and living their ancestors' way of life while creating Lingít language resources for future generations. These life lessons and language skills will be documented with video and shared digitally for public use. Each video will be 5-10 minutes long, very specific to subject (e.g. canoeing, fire pit cooking, morning greetings, speaking to bears, etc.)
Documenting Our Work for the Future:
- The films will feature participants speaking Lingít and introducing important vocabulary and conversations around traditional activities while smoking fish, skinning deer, telling stories, etc. This will bring together the language and its context in both practical and philosophical ways.
