on the cover / By Heidi Walters

In Karuk

A family struggles to bring its ancestral tongue back to life

(Oct. 27, 2011)  Elaina Supahan Albers remembers well what her husband, Phil Albers Jr., said that day eight years ago when she told him she was pregnant with their first child. She was 20 and he was 23. They both worked hotel jobs and attended Southern Oregon University, although Phil was about to graduate. They were at home in their little rental house on Park Street in Ashland, their first home together.

“It wasn’t like, ‘Oh my God, we’re going to be parents!’” she says, laughing. “It was, ‘I have nine months to become fluent!’

Nisha Supahan (right) and Elaina Albers (left) summer 2000 in ceremonial dresses that they made themselves. PHOTO BY TRISHA OAKS PHOTOGRAPHY

GALLERY >

The Albers are both Karuk, but at the time they weren’t fluent in their ancestral language. Elaina — everyone calls her Elly — was proficient. Phil was quickly improving, with help from Elly and her family. But neither had the ease of a native speaker, someone whose first baby babbles had that growling static sound of Karuk: cuuuuhhhr, cuuuhhhhr. They wanted that for their baby.

It was language that brought Elly and Phil together. A mutual mentor at Southern Oregon University introduced them — the girl who knew Karuk, and the boy who desperately wanted to learn it.

Phil had grown up in Yreka with a Karuk father and Choctaw mother. As a kid, he carried around a Karuk phrase book and pestered the old folks for words. When he was 19, he and another tribal member studied together, poring over the technical Karuk language book written by the tribe’s official linguist, Bill Bright, in the 1950s.

Elly grew up in Hoopa and later Orleans. Her father, Terry, is Karuk. Her mother, Sarah, is not. Both of Elly’s parents learned Karuk as young adults, then taught the language in schools and helped start the native language program at Hoopa Valley High. They raised Elly, her twin sister and her brother with as much Karuk tradition and language as possible. They even translated the kids’ Sesame Street books into Karuk.

And the whole family spent a lot of time talking with their Auntie Vi — Violet Super — who lived next door. When Elly and Phil got together, Auntie Vi became a force in their lives, supporting their quest to give their children the fluency they never had. Their kids, they determined, would speak Karuk as their first language.

There would be challenges. The Albers anticipated some of them: their own inadequacies with the language, English surround-sound everywhere they went, few Karuk-speaking peers for their kids to practice with.

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