Athabaskan Personal Histories of Climate Change in Alaska and Canada

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As part of the International Polar Year, the cultural history that is tied up in personal narratives, particularly as bound up in threatened languages, will be recorded in a project headed by Dr. Sharon Hargus, University of Washington. The international effects of climate change in the polar regions, as seen through a Native and personal lens, will be elicited and made available to a wide audience. The documentation concerns three northern Athabaskan languages, Tsek'ene and Witsuwit'en (both spoken in British Columbia, Canada) and Deg Xinag (spoken in Alaska). Certain topics in comparative Athabaskan grammar, relevant to patterns of prehistoric population movements, will also be investigated. Intonation will be investigated in each of the three languages, to examine its interactions with lexical tone. Tsek'ene is a tone language, where Witsuwit'en and Deg Xinag are not. Various other grammatical categories will be explored for instructive differences across the three langauages. The Native perspective on polar climate change is likely to be most fully represented in the native language. This project provides a rare opportunity to collect first-hand accounts of climate change over the past 80 years in sections of Canada and Alaska. The language data will help assign the languages to the proper subgrouping of Athabaskan languages, indicative of their rather different grammatical and lexical structures within the Athabaskan family. The comparison of the three languages should provide a window into what Athabaskan languages have in common and when (and possibly where) their ancestors may have diverged. To help with the documentary effort, some time in each community will be devoted to literacy training so that local speakers and/or learners may be able to help with some aspect of text transcription or translation. Thus, one side result of the project may be greater mobilization of local resources for language documentation.