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Evans Smith Presentation
The presentation opened with an Alaskan Native
version of the song “My Country, Tis of Thee.” 1
Annette Evans Smith: The most powerful part
of that song is the last sentence for me; it is “we
would like you to let us be.” 2 There are two
things I want to talk about in my presentation,
and those two things are language and math. I
want to talk about them because of what they
are doing and what they have done to Alaska
Native people and how we can use language
to empower ourselves and continue our culture.
The first thing is math. I just want to address it
quickly. I am a hybrid of a hybrid. I am 1/8
Alutiiq, 1/4 Yup’ik, 1/4 Athabascan, 1/8 Russian,
1/16 Welsh, 1/16 English, and 1/8 Irish. How
many of you know your blood quantum to that
degree? When you are Alaska Native, you
know. When you are a Native American, you
know. Because blood quantum and math can
be used to restrict you, to define you, and to
basically leave you out of culture and who you
are. Because, for us, blood quantum was a way
to measure whether or not, early, early on, the
federal government had any reason to provide
some sort of service, whether health care, social
service or whatever. So if you didn’t meet the
federal standard of blood quantum, then you
didn’t deserve or require services, so it was exclusionary
early on. Tribes have then also adopted
this blood quantum status, so each tribe in
America sets its blood quantum as to whether
or not a person is recognized and a part of that
tribe. And a lot of people don’t know and a
lot of people don’t understand that, unless you
are Native, unless you know, you are 1/8, 1/4,
1/4, 1/16, 1/16, 1/8, and 1/4. It all has to add up
to 100% in the end. So that’s the math piece.
Now I want to get into the language. I introduced
myself earlier a little bit in my language.
One of my great sadnesses is that I am not
fluent. I speak only baby Yup’ik, only words
that my grandmother would say to me, words
that make sense within a family structure for
me to hear. My grandmother called me Picari
in Yup’ik, and on my Athabascan side, my
grandmother called me—she gave me her
name—Nehonelo, and that meant “one to
travel and go everywhere.” She gave me her
name and that is what she called me. I only
speak baby Yup’ik because there are a lot of
different things that have happened in Alaska,
as our history has progressed, that have dictated
why our languages are in the situation they
are in, which is that some of them are dying.
I feel the need to present a little Alaska 101.
How many in the room have been to Alaska?
How many are familiar with the different cultures
in Alaska or how diverse they are? I see a few
hands, and that’s one of the reasons I think
we need to go into this a little bit. There are
21 different languages in Alaska [Evans Smith
shows a map of Alaska broken into language
groups by color.] Every color is a different
culture group, so we have in the North, Inupiaq,
and St. Lawrence Island Yup’ik; in the yellow
region, Yup’ik and Cup’ik; in the purple, Aleut
and Alutiiq; in the green, Eyak, Tlingit, Haida,
and Tsimshian; in the red, Athabascan. Even
within these languages, there are dialects, and
that is why I say 21 and not 11. So there are
11 culture groups, 21 different languages. To
give you some perspective, our state is 530,000
square miles, so if Alaska cut itself in half, Texas
would be the third largest state. So we are an
enormous state, and the majority of our state
is not connected to the road system. So you
fly. You rely on an airplane to get around.
Flying is an integral part of your life because
it is the only way you can get anywhere.
Why I show you this map and why I want to talk
about language is partly because everyone is
familiar with the term Eskimo, right? That word
means nothing to us—it means absolutely nothing.
It was a name given to describe many of
us. If you are Athabascan and someone asks
you if you are Eskimo, them are fightin’ words,
very seriously. The cultures that they consider
Eskimo cultures are Alutiiq, Cup’ik, and Inupiaq.
And in all of our languages, like Yup’ik, for
example, basically that is literally translated, “the
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