Updated September 04, 2024 at 14:59 PM ET
Yup’ik is the most commonly spoken Native language in Alaska, but Nikki Corbett couldn’t find any Yup’ik books to teach her kids the language. She wanted to fix that.
Corbett grew up in the majority Alaska Native community of Bethel where she says Yup’ik was part of her everyday life. She attended an immersion program in grade school and spoke Yup’ik at home with her mom. But when she moved to Soldotna – where the demographic is primarily white – she found herself speaking less Yup’ik and wasn’t as steeped in the culture.
“Obviously, being immersed in that, you understand more and can speak more,” Corbett says. “But being away from it – the community that I live in, it’s not a language that’s normally spoken.”
Corbett says she was fortunate to grow up with her Yup’ik culture in the forefront, but that’s not the case for every Alaska Native. The subjugation of Native Americans and hostility toward Native language and culture has a lot to do with it, Corbett says.
“The younger generations, like my generation, in some of those areas, they don’t know the language because their parents were punished for speaking Yup’ik,” Corbett says. “And so I think that they were afraid to teach their children because they didn’t want their children to be punished for speaking our language.”
There are immersion schools in Alaska that have Yup’ik learning materials, like alphabet books and early education primers, but Corbett says it’s nearly impossible to find those books outside the classroom.
“If you go in the store and you see the kids section, and you look at the educational material, and you’ll see French or German or Spanish,” Corbett says. “Wherever those things are, we want to be able to create something similar in the Yup’ik language.”
O’Connor, an artist based in Nome, Alaska, says she didn’t learn much about her own Iñupiaq culture until after high school.
“There’s not a lot available out there,” says O’Connor. “The literature, the books that are out there – related to any Alaska Native culture – most of them are written by non-Native people.”
So, Corbett and O’Connor, who had met at the Iditarod Sled Dog Race, teamed up and applied for a fellowship to make a Yup’ik alphabet coloring book. Such a thing would be unprecedented, they thought.
The coloring book that Corbett and O’Connor created, published over the summer, includes the letters of the alphabet with illustrations specific to Yup’ik culture.
“The letters of the Yup’ik language, they relate to something in our culture,” says Corbett. “You won’t see a coloring book that has fry bread in it … And so it’s images from a part of who we are as Alaska Natives.”
Corbett said that, as of September, they have between 700 and 1,000 bulk order requests for the coloring book, including an Alaska school district.
“Our culture is so strong and our people are resilient – and just to be able to, you know – it’s just a coloring book, but for us, it’s just so much more,” Corbett says.
Corbett and O’Connor hope to release their next coloring book in the Iñupiaq language.
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