Hoopa Valley Tribe elder Verdena Leona Chase Parker was raised speaking Na:tinixwe Mixine:whe’ (Na-teh-nah-hwah Meh-hah-neh-hweh), the language of the Hupa people since time immemorial. Her fluency was a tribute to brave women in her family, including a grandmother who threw an Indian boarding school agent over a gate when they tried to forcibly take Parker’s mother away as a child.
Going to school in Hoopa, Parker was teased and even punished for speaking the language but was determined to hold onto it. Later, as one of the few remaining native speakers, she became focused on protecting Na:tinixwe Mixine:whe’ into the future, recording thousands of hours of audio tapes for the University of California Berkeley’s California Language Archive, sharing in Hupa details about her life, traditional Hupa stories and common phrases.
Closer to home, Parker was also integral in the founding of the language revitalization project Xine:wh-ding (Hah-neh-hweh-ding), a local nonprofit based in the Hoopa Valley that’s dedicated to preserving the language and empowering new generations of speakers to reclaim it, including a Hupa immersion program known as “the nest.”
Parker passed away in March of this year at 90, leaving a wealth of traditional knowledge through her efforts.
“One of her dreams was for Na:tinixwe children to speak the language again just as she had when she was a child. She was able to see this dream come true through her work with her niece Sara Chase Merrick as they made curriculum and developed immersion programming together for Hoopa youth, based on traditional stories and teachings,” her family wrote in a commemoration of her death. “Verdena became a co-founder of the Hupa Language Immersion Nest and founding member of the Xine:wh-ding nonprofit organization, a place in which all her teachings could live and be shared with the next generation of Hupa speakers. The Nest, located near her home village territory of Diysh da:ng a din became part of her legacy to have a place to pass on what she fought so hard to maintain.”
As in many Native communities, a loss in fluency followed in the wake of atrocities suffered by generations of children — some as young as 4 — who were taken from their families in the 1800 and 1900s to attend Indian boarding schools in a concerted government-led effort to strip them of their cultural identities and connections.
In addition to harsh punishments for speaking their native languages, children were not allowed to visit their families, and some were sent hundreds of miles away to distance them from their parents, tribes and lands. Many who survived these boarding schools either lost their fluency or didn’t want to pass on their language to their children out of fear.
Decades ago, the Hoopa Valley Tribe, elders and community members began an effort to nourish a resurgence of Na:tinixwe Mixine:whe’, later leading to classes in the language being offered to local students.
Meaning “a time and place for language,” Xine:wh-ding builds on those foundations, embracing traditional pathways of knowledge passed down for millennia to cultivate a sense of community, instill pride in being Hupa and strengthen cultural bonds to their language among the tribe’s youth, helping to heal the wounds of intergenerational trauma left by the boarding school era.
“There’s this colonial myth that before boarding schools or any kind of schools, there was no education, but there was,” says Merrick, a co-founder and the nonprofit’s director of Research and Development. “It was very intentional and obviously very successful because our people have survived for thousands of years off of this knowledge. And so how do we really make sure that we’re trying to start there instead of just translating things that are happening in mainstream schools?”
Merrick describes how when she was in school, students from kindergarten through eighth grade only received half an hour of language learning per week, while the high school offered Hupa in the form of a “foreign” language class, which hasn’t changed much to this day. After graduating, Merrick says she didn’t have any avenues in college to continue that learning and wanted to implement a form of education in the Hoopa Valley that better sustained the language, which led to her working with and learning from Parker.
“We had gone through the infrastructure and loved the language, but didn’t feel like we were fluent, and so we started to think about, ‘Well, how can we change the infrastructure of what is offered in terms of language so that we can have new fluent speakers in our community?’” Merrick says. “And so I think that that’s really where our organization has come in and really shifted focus in terms of who can learn it the fastest — babies, right? So [we’re] really focusing on them and that transmission early on, and in an immersion setting.”
Xine:wh-ding started out by holding annual camps, which evolved into a summer program for school-age children that recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. The nonprofit now hosts several language-based programs, including an immersion summer school, internships and support for those seeking a Hupa Language Teaching Credential.
The immersion nest started three years ago is the latest addition to the fold, with the goal of reaching the youngest Hupa children. The most recent cohort had 10 students between ages 3 and 5, several of whom were among the inaugural class.
For four days a week, the children are dropped off at the Tish Tang Campground and greeted by their teachers, or “aunties,” in Hupa. They won’t hear a word of English until they are picked up in the afternoon.
According to Merrick, the Xine:wh-ding team spoke with elders and community members and based their curriculum off their stories and philosophy of the land. The nest’s teachings are rooted in the values imparted by ancestral stories, songs and practices, learning how to navigate and reciprocate what the land offers and fostering connection between the body, spirit, land and people.
Math skills are taught by cracking and sorting acorns, and the children learn songs and stories in Hupa, some of which are donated by families that have been passed down through generations. Recordings of first-language speakers like Parker are also used to transfer fluency in Na:tinixwe Mixine:whe’, a branch of the Athabaskan/Na-Dene language family and unique from those of other tribes in the region.
Regular walks by the river help develop fine motor skills and knowledge of local wildlife and plants. Projects are based on what is seasonally available, ranging from learning about frog eggs to processing huckleberries and pine nuts. Jenna Hailey, the nonprofit’s director of operations, describes how the aunties also help students learn the names of animals and the natural world around them through scavenger hunts.
“They love to search for animal poop, they love to search for pawprints, they love to look for little crawdads in the river, and we often would see one,” Hailey says. “So just letting them explore and really get to know the land, and then us knowing that we need to know all the language for that ahead of time.”
An intergenerational exchange of knowledge plays an important role in the program.
“The timing was really important … there was this moment where we have these babies that are being born, and we have auntie[s], and so if we can connect those two, then there’s a continuum of language, speaking and living language, and so we did that,” Director of Outreach and Community Partnerships Erika Tracy says. “It’s also just created these very amazing children who are so sure of themselves, and confident, and proud … we get to see them with each other every day, and they love each other and build each other up, and then outside of that, too, it continues.”
Merrick says she has also learned from the traditional cultural values and how the students embody them. To her, the children are as much teachers as they are students.
“We [teachers] also didn’t go to immersion school as kids either, and so there’s a lot of unlearning or relearning that we have to do as well, so oftentimes we’re learning things alongside the kids,” Merrick says.
The education from the nest also extends into the students’ families.
Merrick says the fluency of the parents varies, but all of them are second-language learners of Hupa. The team knew they were going to need family support for their students to continue learning the language outside of class, and they found many Hupa families were willing to take a leap of faith with them in their new program.
“Turns out it’s a lot of families that want this and feel good about it. So that was a really great … affirmation of that it’s not just us as these parents of young children that want this for our children,” Merrick says.
The Xine:wh-ding team hosts monthly dinners speaking in Hupa, sends resources home for families to support their children’s education and invites them into the classroom to see what their children are learning. As their fluency grows, the families and members of the team, including Tracy, are also becoming more comfortable speaking Hupa.
“We know that a lot of our families are pushing themselves, too, and maybe that’s not an area that they were comfortable with or maybe didn’t have access to a lot of language growing up as children either, but are really pushing past that with their young ones,” Tracy says. “We’ve really found that, too, with all of our families. Because the little ones are learning, they’re letting some of their guards down or some of those insecurities go.”
Merrick says she has noticed the difficulty some parents are experiencing with teaching their children Hupa as they enter the public school system and experience social pressure to speak English to fit in. Increasing the number of Hupa speakers throughout the community, she says, will help normalize the language and foster connections with others.
“They have friends that speak Hupa, they have aunties that speak Hupa, there’s all these spaces and places and people where they can speak Hupa, and it’s a normal thing much more than it would be if we were just isolated in our homes,” Merrick says.
Hailey was one of the few team members who chose not to take Hupa classes in high school, saying she feared she wasn’t “Hupa enough,” but later learned to embrace her identity and immerse herself in the language. She is excited for future generations to live without that anxiety and reluctance to openly take pride in their identity, no matter what the world throws at them.
“None of these babies will have that because they’re being raised like, ‘You’re Hupa, even if you’re light-skinned, even if these outside people might be telling you things,’” Hailey says. “They’ll be so strong and confident in being Hupa people and knowing the language already.”
Melissa Sanchez, Xine:wh-ding’s cultural coordinator, recalls speaking in Hupa with her 3-year-old nephew, who was previously enrolled in Xine:wh-ding’s baby groups before joining the nest. They were at a ceremony and he responded back in English, sparking amazement and admiration from the older men around him.
“All the guys were like, ‘What? Look at him! He can understand what she’s saying. Oh, I just love that. That is so cool. Man, I wish I could speak Hupa like that,’” Sanchez says. “It reminded me not everyone who is Hupa is exposed to the language that way, so when they see the baby respond and understand what I was saying, it was just really, really cool. And I was like, ‘Yep, this is why we’re doing it, so more people can experience that joy he had.’”
Tracy, whose 4-year-old son is a student in the nest, says she watched him easily make friends at ceremonies wherever they travel because of skills he’s learned in the program.
“It’s just this extra sense of self-assurance that they just kind of have inherently, and I think it’s really tied to this connection that they have to the language and our culture and the land, that … they’re just so well-grounded and rooted, and just continue to grow up. It’s really fun to watch them grow,” Tracy says. “Some of them we’ve had since they were 18-ish months, and now our oldest [student] is 5, so it’s exciting to see them grow, even just developmentally.”
Xine:wh-ding also has an internship program, bringing in local youth and advanced students from the high school’s Hupa classes to work with children in the nest while honing their own language skills along the way, with some returning to volunteer after college.
“The kids love them immediately. They’re cooler than us, they’re fun, they’re young and they have enough of a language base that they can come in and know things, but they also haven’t done a lot of immersion, so it’s good learning for them and really helping them develop their skills,” Hailey says.
As more families become involved in the programs, Tracy says the network of people who can share a connection through Na:tinixwe Mixine:whe’ keeps growing.
“We can be running errands in Costco in Eureka and run into somebody, and then we just start speaking Hupa in Costco, and they’re so excited and so happy to see each other and love each other,” Tracy says. “[We can] be at the softball field because the older siblings are playing softball, and these guys are playing on the playground in Fortuna, speaking the language. I think that’s been a really huge impact for them and for the families, too. It’s just really become this extended family, which is beautiful and I’m very, very thankful for.”
For Merrick, one moment that has stuck with her was when a group of nest students traveled to sing in Hupa for Parker’s 90th birthday shortly before she passed away. In a tribute page for Parker on the Xine:wh-ding website, her husband relayed that she knew she was leaving the language in good hands.
“You have this dream and it’s this far off thing and then it happens. It’s these everyday things that are so amazing and you’re like, ‘Wow, they really just said that or they really just identified this or they really just did that,’” Merrick says. “But then there are these milestones, too, and so I think, for me, a milestone was just really being able to show we did it.”
Griffin Mancuso is a California Local News Fellow placed with North Coast Journal, Inc. Reach him at (707) 442-1400, or griffin@northcoastjournal.com. The California Local News Fellowship is a state-funded initiative to support and strengthen local news reporting. Learn more about it at fellowships.journalism.berkeley.edu/cafellows.
This article appears in Xine:wh-ding.