William L. Iggiagruk Hensley - Fifty Miles from Tomorrow: A Memoir of Alaska and the Real People

Iupiaq Writing and Pronunciation
by Lawrence Kaplan

The standard writing system in current use for Alaskan Iupiaq was designed in 1947 by Roy Ahmaogak, a North Slope Iupiaq man, who worked with the linguist Eugene Nida of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. They adapted the English alphabet to Iupiaq and added several symbols. With subsequent revisions, the Iupiaq alphabet has twenty-four letters and combinations: a, ch, g, , h, i, k, l, , , , m, n, , , p, q, r, s, sr, t, u, v, y. Many of these letters represent the same sound as their English equivalents.

The vowels are pronounced as in Spanish or Italian, a like the first a in English papa, i as in pita, and u as in lunar. Double vowels (aa, ii, uu) are pronounced long, so they are held longer than single vowels. Diphthongs are combinations of two different vowels and are also long. The pronunciations given here are valid for most Kotzebue Iupiaq: ai and ia both sound like the ay in pay, au and ua both sound like owe, ui sounds like u plus i, or the vowels in gooey, and iu sounds the same as the Iupiaq ii or the vowels in the English see. Double consonants are held longer than single ones, so mm is a long sound, as in the Italian mamma.

Consonant sounds differ from those in English. Here are some Iupiaq examples:

Examples of Iupiaq words containing sounds found also in English are Iuk (person), which sounds like [n-yuke], anun (man), which sounds like [ng-oon], and savik (knife), which sounds like [sh-vik], with an accent mark indicating a stressed or accented syllable. Many sounds have no English equivalent, and so cannot be respelled in this way: qayaq (kayak) sounds just like the English word, but with the q or back k sound. Nii (to eat) sounds like [neeree] but with a French or German back r, symbolized by

Prologue

On Saturday, December 18, 1971, everything changed. It was warmer than usual in Anchorage at that time of year; it was a bit above freezing. But as always during the long winter months in the Far North, the hours of daylight were excruciatingly short. The sun did not rise until just after nine oclock in the morning, and it set well before three in the afternoon, hours before the start of the big event. As the sky darkened, people began streaming toward the center of Alaska Methodist University, now known as Alaska Pacific University. There were Iupiat and Yupiat, Aleut and Athapascan, Tlingit and Haida, students and elders, tribal and village leaders, politicians, businessmen, and ordinary citizens. They had come to watch history in the making.

At last the long, tempestuous process of turning Alaska into a real state was about to be completed. The grand poohbahs of Big Oil were poised to start tapping the 10 billion barrels of petroleum discovered three years earlier at Prudhoe Bay. Big Labor could hardly wait for the construction jobs that would be required to build the $8 billion, c-long pipeline needed to funnel the black gold to market. And the environmentalists had their sights on the 150 million acres that were promised as protected wilderness areas, parks, and fish and wildlife sanctuaries.

But I think it is fair to say that no group was more anxious that day than Alaskas Native peoples. There were tensions in that room. After all, a centuries-long saga of warfare, treachery, apartheid, betrayal, and hopelessness was coming to an official end. For more than a hundred years, Native Alaskans had waited for clarification of their rights to ancient homelands. And finally, after considerable disagreement, a settlement was about to be announced. The United States Congress had agreed to set aside 44 million acres and earmark nearly $1 billion for Alaskas Natives.

The hundreds assembled stood motionless as the evenings business began. A familiar voice echoed through the room, piped in from Washington, D.C. I want you to be among the first to know that I have just signed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, said President Richard Milhous Nixon. The new law, he declared, was a milestone in Alaskas history and in the way our government deals with Native and Indian peoples.

I was there. For five years I had battled to secure our traditional lands. As an unknown graduate student, I had helped to organize Alaska Natives, explaining to all who would listen that we were in urgent danger of losing the lands that had sustained our forefathers for thousands of years. I had run for state office and won, then painstakingly learned the ways of politics. More than a hundred times I had traveled across the continent between my home state and Washington, D.C., where Congress would decide the fate of Native claims. And I had faced the wrath of officials and business interests who wanted to crush those claims.