The Tension of Emergence: Thriving in a world that remakes, not breaks

Untangling Our Minds through Language, Land and Laughter – with X’unei Lance Twitchell

• Jennifer England • Season 4 • Episode 1

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How might a willingness to cross thresholds of understanding help us access wilder and more intimate ways of knowing? 

In this episode Jennifer talks with X’unei Lance Twitchell—Indigenous language teacher, poet and scholar—who shares his deeply personal journey of reclaiming the Tlingit language. From an early longing to connect with his grandfather to challenging the violence of cultural erasure, X’unei invites us into the healing and transformative role language plays in decolonization and community renewal.

In this episode, you'll learn:

  • How the seemingly impossible can become a movement, one word and gesture at a time
  • How learning an Indigenous language changes the way you think, untangling the illusion of separateness
  • Why vulnerability and mistake-making are the foundation of resilient and laughter-infused community building.

Join Jennifer and X'unei for a conversation that invites you to listen through the words—to the generous heartbeat of a community and culture remaking itself.

Links & resources—


Gratitude for this show’s theme song Inside the House, composed by the talented Yukon musician, multi-instrumentalist and sound artist Jordy Walker. Artwork by the imaginative writer, filmmaker and artist Jon Marro.

S4. with X'unei Lance Twitchell

[00:00:00]

Jennifer: Have you ever learned a new language and perhaps you've learned more than one? Well, I'm curious whether you remember those first few weeks when you try to get your mouth around new sounds. When you're tasting unfamiliar words and stringing them together awkwardly, and then you have to overcome your fear to say anything at all.

And in my experience, learning a new language is disorienting. It requires all your senses, not just your hearing to take it in. I have to watch someone's mouth move. I have to watch their tongue. I study the expression on their face. I have to listen for tone and intonation trying to figure out what they're implying.

And this is all the, well, I can't yet speak and I can't really understand. And in [00:01:00] fact. Misunderstanding is the norm. And it seems to me, if I had a hunch, it feels like we're in the middle of learning a new kind of language as a collective.

And this is not entirely unprecedented in times of rupture and change, but it feels like where we're grappling is in not quite understanding one another across different kinds of languages, different gods, different governments, different politics, worldviews, different identities. And in some ways it makes me think that at a collective level, we're in a time of profound mispronunciation, a time where we're tripping over words, where we're not getting it right.

Our concepts, our vocalizations, our [00:02:00] intentions, it is, as I've written elsewhere this year, feels like.

Like a chimera of vulnerability. This learning a new language, how to be with one another when there's so much falling apart. How to be patient and humble, and then steadfast in the face of our own awkwardness. To trust that even when we don't want to, that we'll find our way back to each other.

A few months ago, I went to a beautiful talk on language and loving by the magnetic X'unei Lance Twitchell. He's a Tlingit scholar, professor, writer, and poet, and I was at an event hosted here in my hometown by the Northern Council of Global Cooperation and For the Wild (podcast), and they brought X'unei and his extended family and community.

Together, and it was one of the most uplifting evenings I'd been to in a long time. So I wanted to begin this season with an encouraging [00:03:00] conversation with him about his journey of learning and teaching Tlingit in the Alaskan Yukon region. And if you think that this might have nothing to do with you, I want to gently encourage you to stay with us in story.

Because if you've ever been lost in translation, if you've ever met your awkwardness again and again as you sat outside, what's familiar? This story of patience, determination, and love helps us rethink what's possible even when it looks like everything's been destroyed. I want to invite us to think about language as dream, speak as heart time as a way of human in ourselves through the vulnerability of wanting so much to express and see and feel this world together there.

Lance [00:04:00] Twitchell is a Tlingit scholar, writer, poet, and a professor of Alaska native languages at the University of Alaska Southeast. He holds a PhD in Hawaiian and indigenous language and cultural revitalization from the University of Hilo in a Hawaii and is an accomplished poet and writer.

He won a 2025 Emmy Award for outstanding writing for a preschool animated program for his work on an episode of Molly of Denali. I sat with him on a beautiful morning, feeling inspired, heartbroken. Tender and ultimately believing that we're all creating in a world that remakes itself.

So with that, enjoy this conversation with X'unei.

 . So, okay. I [00:05:00] translation,

I, I'm okay. And you.

I don't know how to answer that and Tlingit it, but I am really, really grateful to be here with you.

X'unei: Yeah, you say let's do the short version.

Jennifer: it's great. It's like a whole other part of my, sound making apparatus in my throat is having a new adventure.

X'unei: We got about 60 some sounds and maybe half of them are not in English, so we're all about consonants and fun sounds.

Jennifer: Yeah. I love it. I would love [00:06:00] to invite you to talk about the story where you began to take learning your language seriously. The language of klingit.

X'unei: Yeah. My name is, I'm, I'm Haida and Ami, and I was very fortunate to know. All of my grandparents, so all four of them. And I was always very close with my mother's father and when I was in college, he got sick and so I came home to help and we couldn't move around a whole lot. He had a stomach thing and so we watched a lot of baseball.

His sister came to visit and she told me her name is Kathy Dennis, and she said, your grandpa is the only one in our family who can speak the Tlingit language. I said, oh, really? Wow. Okay. Maybe he'll teach me. So then we were sitting around the kitchen table and I said, grandpa, you should teach me Tlingit it.

That'd be really fun. So he pointed at the salt shaker and [00:07:00] he said, age. And I tried to say that and he laughed at me. 'cause that's, that was his nature. And so goal number one was to get grandpa to stop laughing at me. Goal number two was to be able to be the one who could talk to him. And so it became something that connected us.

Unfortunately, he died within about a year. And so it, it became this way to keep this connection to him. And then as I started to learn more Tlingit, I came upon this book called Stabilizing Indigenous Languages, which was published in the mid 1990s. And I was just fascinated. By the state of Indigenous languages.

And so I wrote a paper called Stabilizing Indigenous Languages, and at the University of Minnesota in a upper level English college writing class, I got a C minus, and the person wrote on there. Why doesn't everybody speak English? And they had nothing to say [00:08:00] about my writing, nothing to say about my research.

And so I fought that and that kinda lit a fire to like sort of figure out like why people wouldn't want our languages to exist. And so those two things took off this way to keep my grandpa with me and to figure out how to advocate for indigenous languages.

Jennifer: How old were you when you decided to ask your grandpa to teach you?

X'unei: Yeah, I was 21 years old. I didn't know a single word. In an indigenous language. My father went to a boarding school, so his, his parents had to move from Takatana to Anchorage and his mother got sick and they had. Lots of kids, and I don't think they could afford to keep all of them.

So three of them went into this boarding school, I think in Wasilla, Alaska. And they were horribly, horribly abused. His sister in particular, and well, and his, all of them were, but then when he [00:09:00] tried to stop them from sexually abusing his sister, they just, they. Beat him like just relentlessly. And it really, he, he only explained this to me a couple weeks before he died and like the last conversation we ever had, he said, I'm sorry, I never said I loved you.

I didn't know I was supposed to say that more. Nobody told me when I was growing up. And I went to this school and they, they did these things to my sister and I tried to stop them and they just. Beat me up and then I, I just gave up on everything. So we grew up kind of with a pretty strong rejection of lots of stuff from my father probably to try and protect us from everything.

Jennifer: of course. I can't imagine. And I'm also just really curious around your being in your early twenties and having the curiosity and the patience to be able to start the [00:10:00] process of, of walking into the unknown. Understanding a language that's totally new. And also the known and this beautiful lineage that you're part of.

What was the pull and what did you start to discover in the language that continued to build your determination and your love for it?

X'unei: I started to study with some folks. I met a speaker named Esther Shea. Her name I think is t and she taught me some things, but I, I ended up not being in Ketchikan for very long. It wasn't a great situation for me. So I went home to Skagway when my grandpa died, and I kind of. I didn't know what to do.

'cause I had this idea and it was, to be honest, I was feeling super guilty. 'cause I spent the summer with him in 1996. And then I said, well grandpa, I got like one semester left or one year of college left. So why don't I just stay here and study Tlingit it with [00:11:00] you and then I'll finish after, I'll do it next year.

And he said, no, just go back and finish. And so I went back to finish and I was. Most of the way through the first semester. And I had one semester to go after that and he called me and he said, Hey, you better come home. And I said, well, I just, I'm got this semester, the next semester, then I'm just done.

I'm, and then I can just be there forever. And he died like a couple months after that and I felt really bad 'cause I didn't. Respond. I didn't answer the call, but then like listening to these tapes of beginning Tlingit and the voices of Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Hu Richard Dauenhauer and Fred White, these people just like, and I ended up in Kechika for a little bit and then I ended up going back to the University of Minnesota and I was listening to these tapes.

I had. Bought these blank flashcards and I made a, a flashcard for every single noun that was in the noun dictionary. And I just, I would just walk around and there was, as [00:12:00] far as I knew, there were no Tlingit speakers in Minneapolis and so I had nobody to talk to. And so I would just like listen to these tapes and practice this thing.

And it just became something I became fully invested in. And it helped that I had friends who were Lakota, who were learning Lakota and, and Dakota and had friends who were Anishinaabe, who were learning. Ojibwe. And so those things really helped 'cause we could talk about our language journeys together, even though we're studying completely different languages.

And then I came home the summer of 1999 'cause my grandma was having a hard time and I wanted to help her. And then I heard about this language camp that you could go live at the university where I teach at now, and you could go live in the dorms for two weeks and just take language classes. And so I went and then I started meeting these elders who could talk, and I realized that they were looking for people to talk to.

And then it became my goal to become a person they could talk to, to just have conversations with. [00:13:00] But I realized that I had a long way to go.

Jennifer: Oh, I love that. Becoming someone they could talk to because what did you discover as you became that person They could talk to? What changed it? Like what was that experience like? Because that's a, that's an incredible moment where you can realize, like, I reciprocate.

X'unei: There was a group of us who were in our, in our twenties in the 1990s who, who started to figure it out and, and there weren't a whole lot of us, but maybe there were five or six of us, maybe 10, and we helped each other to figure out how the language was working. Then we had these very patient elders who would listen to us and figure out what we were trying to say.

And the ones who helped us the most, I think were the ones who responded to what we were trying to say instead of always correcting us or always. Switching to English to tell us what we were doing wrong or could do better. But those ones who [00:14:00] invested in, communicating with us, that was where it really started to take off.

And then we went to this immersion in Glacier Bay in 2003, and that was the first time I really tried to just not use English. We had a little a big. What was it? A big oatmeal container and you had to put money in it if you're gonna speak English. And it was interesting 'cause we were kind of out, we were out of town and so it was whatever cash you had.

So if you had a do a $1 bill, you put it in there, but if you keep speaking English, next thing you know, he was like, oh, all I have is a five. All I have is. A $10 thing. And so it really sort of hit that, you know, we had to live without English and to try and do that, I realized I didn't know how to talk. I didn't know how to take something that I looked up and to use it.

And so it became a mission of mine and those who were studying with us to figure out how to do that and to get off of the books and things. And it took me about 10 years after [00:15:00] that before I think I could. Really just say I was full on talking to people, but then this one time I met this elder in Teslin and I was going up there to teach probably in 2014 maybe.

And someone from their community was, was dying. And so as a clan, I. These folks had to go take care of some of their business. They said, we gotta get, talk about the funeral, we gotta talk about the family, we gotta talk about taking care of everybody. So they went into another room, they said, we gotta go take care of our business.

And they left me with this wonderful elder and she said what brings you to our town? And I said, well, I'm. I'm gonna teach the language here. And she said, oh, do you, do you speak it? And I said, yeah, I could speak the language. And she just started talking to me and you know, and those were moments you had to be ready for because when they start talking, you have to switch over.

And, and we did. We just had this. 20 minute conversation and they came outta the room and the other folks that were there [00:16:00] and they had taken care of their business. And I said, okay, well we're gonna take off. And this elder that I had been talking to, she said, I haven't talked like that since my dad died.

Jennifer: Mm.

X'unei: And I was just so, I was so sad for the lonesomeness that I could hear in her voice, but I was so comforted that I was able to. Be there and be that conversation to so that she could see. And that same elder maybe a year later, we got together in the community of Whitehorse and there was a bunch of us there from different communities from especially Teslin and Carcross Cross.

And all the elders went to go sit at a table. And my wife and I, we decided when we had kids that. One of us would speak to them only in Tlingit it, so we'd try this one parent, one language, and my middle daughter, her name is or, or Ava, she just walked over to the elders table. And so the elders kind of all sat down and there [00:17:00] wasn't a sign that said Elders only, but they just kind of.

Table and she just walked over there and sat with them and she was probably five or six years old and they were just talking, Tlingit it to her and she was just laughing and talking with them. And I just watched it and just watched the joy of these 80-year-old people who finally have a child that they can talk to.

Jennifer: It brings tears to my eyes, both those stories. I just, the, and, and thinking about the guilt that you felt with your grandpa. You know, not being able to come back and have as much time with him, and yet whatever the gift was and that spark of determination and curiosity and devotion in your heart to relearn, Tlingit it.

And then this gift where people are having this, I take it, we take it. So I take it for granted as an English speaker because there's, you know, when I, when I heard your talk in Whitehorse just a couple of [00:18:00] months ago. I realized like there's nothing, there's nothing similar to this fight for indigenous languages where there's no Duolingo, there's no huge country you can go to.

There's no school system that is, you know, you can't go to the grocery store and speak. And so this determination of yours. Is just so heartening because, and I think you've talked about this, like if it's impossible, like I'm gonna go right in. There's this grit that you have where almost the bigger the challenge, the more you're in

is that, uh. 

X'unei: sometimes it's the challenge, but sometimes, like, especially when I'm talking to new learners, sometimes I'll share some stories that were shared with me. So I, I went to this language conference in Hawaii, it's the International Conference on language documentation and conservation, and it was [00:19:00] great.

And I was talking about this linguist named Michael Kraus, who really inspired me. 'cause I'd read a lot of his work about what was going on with indigenous languages. I was talking to someone and I brought his name up and I'm like, oh, Mike, he's right there. You wanna go say hi? And I was like, what? And so I went to go say hi to him and we had a great conversation and he said, well, let me tell you what I think you should do.

I think you should go to these elders who were abused for speaking their language and get them to tell you what happened. In detail in your language, get and record it because you're gonna lose them and no one will believe you. The inhumanity that they experience, no one will believe you. 'cause people don't like to talk about it or think about it. And so not long after that, this one elder told me what she went through. There's a little school that's here in our community. It's a totally different thing now. But then she told me and. I asked her if I could record it and Tlingit it. She said, I'll think about it. And then she called me. She said, okay, [00:20:00] I'll do it.

And so I went to record her and I'll never forget it. There's a, a couple things about it. One is she started her recording by saying something like, ke.

Then she talked for about 25 minutes, and then she got done and she's told me she was done and I was putting my gear away and she said, what was the first thing I said? And I looked at her and I thought I don't think I fully understood it. There was, there was like something cheesh, something like possible or not in something.

And then she told me, and then I went to several people who were studying Tlingit at a very high level. And I said, okay, this is what a elder said to me. What do you think it means? And none of them could figure it out. So one, like grammatically, it was very complicated, but what it translates to is it's impossible for you to feel how much we suffered when people didn't want our [00:21:00] language.

And then she told me she had to start this story like that. So then she calls me a few days later and she said, you know what? I didn't even get to the thing that happened when I, when you recorded me. And I said, oh, I know it's hard. It's okay, we could try it again. And so we tried it again and she got it.

So it took her two tries to tell this story. So at the time, my daughter, my oldest daughter was probably five years old. And so she's telling me a story about, and this elder is, I think she was 90 or 92 years old, and she said when she was about five years old, she was getting ready for her first day of school.

Her older sister said, you cannot speak Tlingit at that school. You'll get in big trouble. And so she just went to school. This is the 1920s. Most kids were speaking Tlingit at that time. She saw kids she knew and she was speaking to them in Tlingit. I mean, go tell a 5-year-old not to speak the language they know all day.

It's just not gonna work.

Jennifer: Yeah.

X'unei: So she's speaking [00:22:00] Tlingit, and the teacher calls her up in front of the class. She said she was a big lady, and the teacher grabs her by her hair, lifts her off the ground, shakes her violently, and then drops her on the ground and says that she'll hit her right in the face. So she speaks that language again.

And this is day one. Day one of going to school. So she goes and gets her stuff off her desk. She's scared, she's hurt, she's embarrassed, and she just walks home crying and her hair is pulled all over. And she goes in the door and her parents ask what happened? And then she watches her parents get into this physical altercation 'cause her father is gonna go kill that teacher for hurting his child.

And the mother was gonna stop him 'cause he would just go to jail forever. And. She sort of shared that story and she shared so much stuff with me. One, one day I was driving her home and she said they tried everything. They tried to beat me. They tried to humiliate me. They tried to scare me, but they couldn't get my language out of me, and I was able to tell her, and it.[00:23:00]

I said thank you for, for having fortitude, and for going through that. So a lot of the stuff that I do, it's not so much like trying to meet a challenge. It's trying to match everything that has been done to us with an energy to bring everything back to us.

Jennifer: Hmm. I feel two things as you share that I feel just the deep sadness, you know, that comes when you hear a story like that. And I feel the resistance of that elder, an incredible resilience that she had in. The face of that violence and the systemic erasure that the attempts and all these really calculated ways [00:24:00] was intentional.

And so I feel this resistance, and I also feel this incredible love. So for you, how is this resistance and resilience and love for language helped you in this this momentum around decolonization. How has that changed over the last 25 years that you've been, 25 years plus that you've been studying the language?

X'unei: I've, well, I've had, I've been blessed. I, I get to meet these folks in Hawaii who are of kind of the architects of this massive language movement over there, and. Not only just meeting them at some of these conferences, but going through a, a PhD program over there at Ani and you really get to know the folks who, who built this thing.

And you get to ask them like, how'd you do it? Didn't, didn't it feel like you couldn't, you know, and as they reflect on the things that they did, and it's kind of [00:25:00] neat 'cause you could look at that and you could say, that could be us in 30 years, but it's gonna take this tremendous.

Shift 'cause like to bring a language back from having like 10 or fewer speakers, or 20 or less than a hundred to sort of saying, okay, there's gonna come a day where we've got 5,000 speakers, you know, or in Hawaiian, I don't think they can count them anymore. It's way more than 10,000. But in order to do that, you have to really, you know, dream the impossible dream and, and.

Figure out how to do the thing, which means sort of taking steps and not really knowing where it's gonna go, but trusting that it's the way to go because. The, the United States and Canada, they can guarantee one thing and that's language death. They can absolutely guarantee that, and without even thinking about it, because I'm not sure what the Canadian experience is, but outside of schools that are really run by native teachers and native people, people don't [00:26:00] talk about the boarding school experience or the residential school experience.

People don't talk about language suppression to the levels that people are putting chemicals into kids' mouths and. Having them hold their tongue out for hours at a time. And all these horror stories that we've, we've heard, like coming back to this speaker, her name was sh Margeson one time. She also said we were tortured.

We were tortured as children, and most people like if this happened to some other population, it would be all over. People would. No, there would be these days of remembrance and all these other things, but for indigenous peoples, that ends up being pretty invisible. But that means our fight is usually to bring visibility to things and to bring our languages out and to use them and to push back against some of these, there's these waves to, of like outright in your face, racism that sort of dip down.

And then they come back up and they're, they're on the rise in the United States with the current leadership and all the stuff they're doing, and they're. Sort of white supremacy, [00:27:00] cruise control apparatus. And so as we sort of look at going against those types of things, for most indigenous peoples, like when it comes down to it, we've been dealing with racism since 1492.

And so like, it's nothing new, but it's certainly exhausting. And so I've also really had wonderful opportunities to connect to people who are. Just amazing thinkers when it comes to decolonization especially Pacific Islanders. I draw a lot of inspiration from Linda Smith and Graham Smith from Aotearoa from New Zealand as she calls herself, my decolonial auntie, and. And sometimes when I go talk to, she's just got, she and Graham, they just got straight talk and they just, oh yeah, you just, you just run 'em over. That's what you do to just really get inspired by people who have done this because you have these, I. Similar colonizers in different lands, and so you [00:28:00] have similar techniques of completely trying to erase people and then coming back from that erasure and thinking about like indigenous empowerment from a perspective of kindness and love and our cultural values, so you don't have to fight hate and anger with hate and anger, what you do.

As you sort of push back against it and make it sound as ridiculous as it is, and then show people how inviting and welcoming you can be and that you can do things with love.

Jennifer: Yeah, I feel at this particular cultural moment with the new administration of the United States, this is being recorded. We're in early 2025 still. This is the question, you know, people are asking, you know, what to do in every different corner. And, I think you, you use this beautiful image of a root system. I think it's Austin Hammond. You quoted at one point in a talk you gave that, you know, indigenous language is like the root system of a tree on a high steep [00:29:00] mountain keeping the tree rooted.

X'unei: Yeah, we got a couple of. Really neat metaphors. There was a speaker named Usin Clarence Jackson, who used to tell this story about this gigantic tidal wave at this place called which on the, it's on the maps says Lituya Bay. And there was a underground landslide, which caused this gigantic tidal wave, which went pretty much over an entire mountain.

And people witnessed it. People saw it including, French traders who were there and there's a story that comes back from that, which was the, the tidal wave ripped all the trees off of this mountain except for this one single tree. That begins to scream out.

Can you hear me? Can you hear me? And this patch of trees on the other side of the lake begin to yell out. We hear your voice and it gives that tree strength and it starts to drop these pine cones and it starts to rebuild the forest. And so [00:30:00] we take from that story and then there's another elder, Donna W.

Austin Hammond, who used to say to people especially. If you, we still have snow on the mountains here,

not on the ground. He says, you look up on the top of that mountain and think about how deep that snow is, think about how cold it is, and you might think to yourself, how, how do those trees survive?

There's just a little bit of soil up there, lots of rock. And he says the way they survive is the roots underneath are intertwined. Just like the hands of the people, the way that we hold each other through our culture. So we use a lot of those types of imagery to. To keep us going. 'cause learning an indigenous language, like it feels like a shot in the dark sometimes.

It's this, the sound system, the, grammar is incredibly complex and there's, there's so much to figure out and you've gotta get your brain to decolonize to a point where you can think in the language and feel like everything will be okay. [00:31:00] 'cause I think two of the most dangerous things from colonization and one of these.

I borrow from a Maori speaker named Moana Jackson, who said like, one of the most dangerous things of colonization is it gets us to stop believing in ourselves. So we have to like sit there and maybe in the back of our mind we're waiting for some sort of solution to come or some sort of opportunity to arise, or some funding system or some law to pass.

Jennifer: A hero to swoop in.

X'unei: Yeah. And like. Superman don't come Batman, Spider-Man. They don't come to help out, you know, little native people in their communities. But we, we help ourselves. And I think the other thing that it does is it plants a seed that if it wasn't colonization, it would be, I. Chaotic hell on earth. And this is the, the job of anthropology and history, how they would talk about like, oh, they were just warring people all the [00:32:00] time and they were just, it was just chaos and there was no systems where there were totally systems and there was not war all the time.

There was so much interchange and trade and intermarriage. But those seeds end up sort of planted. And so when you start to learn an indigenous language and you start to speak it, I do think that colonized part of your brain feels like this is bad. You are doing something wrong. It's going to ruin everything you're failing and it just starts to flood your, your consciousness with all these thoughts.

But what that is, it's the dying grasp of colonization. And that doesn't mean that English shouldn't be here and non-indigenous people shouldn't be here, but it means nobody should be completely destroying languages and ways of life. And as we sort of sunset that idea, like truly sunset, that idea, we have to come to a new reality.

And that new reality is wonderful. It's multilingual, it's it's inclusive. People can be welcomed and people can [00:33:00] live somewhere and speak the language of that place.

Jennifer: I just got chills as I listen to you talk, which I got chills the first time I heard you talk. But this idea of decolonizing the mind. Is is an actual living. It's not an abstraction. It's not a DEI inclusion checklist

tell me about this worldview shift as you became fluent in Tlingit it. And I know maybe that's even hard to do in English because it is the language of the colonizer, but I'm so curious of like, how did it make you think differently and feel differently and relate differently? And you're, you're a father of three beautiful kids who are bilingual.

So I'm so curious about that too. So whoever you wanna take that, but what is, what is this world that you have talked yourself into?[00:34:00]

X'unei: Yeah, well, first of all, we, we try not to use the F word in the work that we do, so we try not to say fluent. Instead, we say like, you are a speaker and you have fluency, and your fluency can continue

to Get higher. 

Jennifer: Yeah. I think you used the beautiful metaphor of like, kling, it's like an ocean and you know, you have a glass of water and you, you look at the ocean and you realize how much there is to learn. So thank you for

X'unei: Yeah, there's these two beautiful sisters sat and, and they're just such an inspiration to me to see these. Folks who they could be my mother at that, that age. And to see the hard work and determination as they learn the language and teach it and document it at the same time. And it was one of them that said that we were at Glacier Bay and she held up this glass of water and, and it was full.

And she says, I feel like this is me and this is what I know about Tlingit. And I was like, oh, that's so beautiful. That's so great. And then she pointed out to the ocean right behind her, like, and that's Tlingit. And [00:35:00] she started crying and we all start crying, you know, because. It's such a lifelong journey. So last night we have a class called Tlingit Oral Literature where we just listen to recorded stories.

And for some of them we're really fortunate to have it written down and translated to, but we just, every night we do that, I just sit there and think, how are we gonna do, like, how are we gonna do that? How are we gonna match that? We're just little babies and we got these, you know, incredible, incredible geniuses.

But I think. We are lighting the path for future generations, so a lot of the work that we do makes it easier for the people who come behind us, which is really, really beautiful to like clear this trail that. We haven't been allowed to walk on for a long time. And, and to have your language banished, like Canada had banished indigenous languages.

The United States had banished indigenous languages, and you never hear that. Like there's no, there's no real [00:36:00] acknowledgement of that. There's a creeping sort of, oh yeah, yeah. That was kind of bad,

you know, So as my fluency started to increase, it was really interesting 'cause one of the things I noticed, these elders who we just love each other. Er, er, and these ones that I got really close with. And sometimes I would stand up to talk and I would struggle. I was like, I didn't know how to say the thing. And I would get to this point and I would like pause and they could see me.

And they would say what I was trying to say, like they knew what I was gonna say and they would finish my sentences for me. And that's when I realized like. How collective and collaborative this work is. And then I started realizing like if I was getting mad or if I was trying to deal with something, I like to speak, ling it first so that I can say I want to think about it and ling it and say it and ling it, and then I'll translate it.

And then once we had kids and I would just look at this little baby and I would think, well, if I'm only gonna speak Tlingit to you, [00:37:00] what do I do? How do I do it? Like we went. 60 plus years without raising any children in our language. And so to just sit there with the baby and just say, what if I didn't speak English to you?

And there are several moments where I thought, is this even working? And she wasn't even one years old. And I said, and she sat down and took her socks off and I was like, whoa, I didn't, I don't know. I don't even know. And so,

Jennifer: Yeah,

X'unei: and she would. She would start translating for her mother and she would translate for other people.

And then all three of them were just beautiful speakers and understanders of our language. And I remember my daughter was probably, my oldest was maybe seven or eight years old, and we were living in this little beautiful little neighborhood in Sitka. And she was playing with some friends. None of them were Tlingit.

None of them spoke Tlingit. And I noticed she was getting a little nervous when I speak [00:38:00] Tlingit in front of other people, not just every now and then. So she's playing with her friends and I went over there and I said. And she said, okay. And her friend says to me, what language are you speaking? So I looked at my daughter and I said, I said, tell 'em what language it is. And she turned to them and she shrugged and she said. Human language. And then I was like, that is a victory. And so just to see like she didn't have a separation of, of that kind of stuff.

And just to see the, the confidence and the abilities of a bilingual child and just to say, everybody needs to have this, everybody needs to have this in their home. Everybody needs to see this and see the, the power and the healing ability. Larry Kimura is. I call him the grandfather of the Hawaiian language Movement, but we said we should call you the godfather of the Hawaiian language.

He's, he's just amazing. And he came over here to visit us and he said, let your children be the [00:39:00] yeast if, if the language movement flows through them, people will see that child talking and they'll forget about all this pain. They'll forget about all this shame, and they'll just say, I wanna talk to that.

Baby, I wanna talk to that kid. And what it does is it helps the whole thing rise and it was. I've seen it firsthand in Hawaii is it's, it's difficult. You're asking people to do a lot of stuff. Some of them have a whole lifetime of guilt and shame and terror and you're trying to get them, you know, I remember I was in this one community Atlin and I saw, I think the only person who spoke Tlingit at there and he said, Hey, are you here to do some language stuff?

I was like, yeah, you should come hang out with us. It'll be so fun. And he said, that man's right behind me is gonna hit me right in the ear again if I do it. Then he talked about how whenever he'd speak clit, his teachers would, would cut their hands and smash 'em on their, under their right, onto their ear.

They call it boxing the ear or some horrible thing like that. [00:40:00] And just thinking about the violence that adults executed onto children. And these are teachers, these are religious leaders. These are people who are supposed to be. Kind of the, the ones we trust the most because we leave our kids with them.

And these were the ones who were doing this kind of stuff. And so over here, when we look at the work that we do, we rely on our own people. We rely on our own initiatives, but we look at educational structures and we look at religions and we say, well, what are you gonna do? Because y'all, y'all had a hand in this, and if you burn the house down, you better be there.

Building the house back up. And so, but it's wonderful to see. There's a Presbyterian group here that does a lot of reconciliation work, and they're, they're coming. They're listening. They've made public apologies. They said we were a part of this and we are so sorry it was so wrong. And it's so beautiful to hear that because those are the ones who were saying we were, we were primitive and savage [00:41:00] and they didn't even know anything about our language.

And they would say it was of no use. And so. To hear those things coming the other way, and then they would back it up. They'd say, here's $2 million, here's this, here's that. And to see that they're gonna be right there with us when we build these houses back that they all burn down. Like that's, that's a wonderful thing.

Some people wanna talk about, it's not my responsibility. I didn't do that. But we all inherit the world that we live in and some of us, we have ancestors who did wonderful things, and we have ancestors who did horrible things. 

Jennifer: Yeah. 

X'unei: That means we gotta do a lot of good things. I.

Jennifer: I wanna circle back. I, I love, I love that your daughter said, you know, human language and like, did this shrug and so I. Would you describe that human language that decolonizing in as you learned more and more Tlingit it? How did it change the way that you saw the world, the way that you thought, the way that you perceived?[00:42:00]

X'unei: I would find these older people that I could talk to and I would just talk to them. And I would say, you know, part of the work that I was doing, it always had this sense of urgency, you know, and sometimes I would. Tell people kind of jokingly, but it's also kind of sad when, when all your friends are in their nineties, you better hurry up.

You know? 

And so, 

and as I tell the students, I say, okay, this is what you have to be ready for is you're gonna learn this language and you're gonna be able to speak to these people who've been waiting their whole lives to have new people to talk to, and they're gonna share stuff with you that no one else in the world is gonna even understand, and it's gonna form this special bond.

Then you're going to lose them. Because you know this whole, as I've done this for almost 30 years, I've also been witness to the loss of almost every single speaker we had. And so we're down to probably six master level birth speakers. And when those six [00:43:00] are gone, we're gonna have this huge gap as we try to climb this mountain to replace them.

And so part of me think, thinks about that kind of stuff, but then. Just the humor in the language is different there. There's so much fun stuff in the language. There's so much laughter and there's so much interconnection with things. And we could say some phrases like

there's a living spirit inside of everything, and that's why we give respect to all things. And this is a challenge for. The world that some people wanna live in. They want this world to just go so fast and to just go so relentlessly that why would you stop to talk to a tree before you cut it down or to talk to a plant before you harvest it or talk to the animals before you go out and, and go hunting among them.

And so, but for us, like we cannot shift. That perspective, we can't say buy [00:44:00] into this colonial and capitalistic idea that there's limited time and limited money and everything's gotta go, and you gotta stack it up for your own self as fast as you can. Whereas like our measures of wealth were to give everything away.

How much could you give to the people? How much could you provide? And so. In order to, like for example, we were trying to find the words for decolonization. We just struggled. Struggled. Like, like what? Like, and we, and we were out coming, coming up with kind of some unkind concept. But then I watched this recording of a speaker that I had recorded, and at the end he said.

They had been taken to the river that untangles a person's mind. And we, that's the name of a river. It's, it's just called ka. And so we said that's it, because this verb which would be a ka, would mean if you saw some [00:45:00] footprints and you followed them or tracked an animal, or if you undid the. The stitches on your sewing, you ripped them back.

Or if you undid your weaving or if you took a thing of like tangled up yarn and you untangled it, that's all the same verb for us. And so it was so fun to see you like we're trying to. Follow these footprints of the ancient ones. And so this other thing is like kind of pushing back against modernity a bit because the concept of modernity is every generation is greater than the ones before it.

Like we're always, and everyone's on this rising trajectory 

and 

Jennifer: success. Yes. Success and accumulation and one over 

X'unei: yeah. And ev. Every culture in the world could be measured against this one, right? Like, which is usually the, the white culture of, you know, the North America. And to say, oh yeah, well we're here and they're there. So they're this far behind us. And so it's, it's a measurement [00:46:00] stick for superiority a lot of times.

But it also just disregards like the greatness of your ancestors. And so for what we usually just say is. We're, we're just gonna imitate them because for our ancient people, we, we understand so little. Like if we go back to 500 years ago, like how did people live? And we, we know roughly, but just like, what was that day-to-day life like?

How did they talk to each other? What did they do? How did they interact with the things around them? And so a lot of our goal is to try and continue to rediscover those things through the language and. There was a elder named Randall, Randall Telic, who came to one of our classes one time, and he just stopped us and he said, maybe you guys are losing a lot of your elders right now, and maybe you're getting real sad, but I gotta tell you something.

And that's when they die. Their wisdom doesn't go with them. It goes back into the land and you go out on that land and you [00:47:00] speak your language and it comes to you in your dreams. And so for some of us to have this faith that it's gonna come, because I think the other thing is you learn an indigenous language, it's just different.

Like some people talk about when they learn Spanish or when they learn French or Norwegian or Russian, and that's great. Good Korean like go for it. But it's. Sometimes a different thing than indi an indigenous people learning a language that was kept from them deliberately. And that someone, again, entire nations, like the most powerful nations that ever existed, tried so hard to completely destroy these languages, like this cultural linguistic genocide that was nearly successful.

And then as we go and we say, okay, say this word. Sometimes like there's a flood of emotions because you have all these barriers. And so for us, what we're trying to do is collectively say that barrier's not real. Like if you just take that step, it's gonna go. But then to try and [00:48:00] get people to just continue to go for it.

And for the learner, the thing that I also realized is it's up to the learner to make the time and make the space in your life. And usually I'd say, okay, if you're here on day one of. Beginning Tlingit it language class. If you don't speak the language, you absolutely can, but you cannot live the same life.

You're the one who has to change your life. And what I'm asking you to do is make room for your ancestors, make room for future generations and make room for those who are learning with you.

Jennifer: I have this image coming to my mind. It's like tectonic plates of this deep. Geological structure of our planet. And this idea that I've been working with in my own writing and thinking is, you know, the world doesn't break. It remakes. And when I heard you speak and talk about languages, you know this idea of trying to save the [00:49:00] world so it replicates and gets us to a hyper modernistic.

Way of being seems to be the order of the day. You know, in our professional lives, academia, and the way we are raising our kids and families. There's this sort of race of urgency to, as you say, with modernity to constantly one up each other. I mean, that's happening right now in terms of this sort of expansionist rhetoric coming from the United States with Greenland and Canada and so forth.

And so. As I hear you speak, what struck me is like the, the work that you're doing is remaking, it's remaking, and in some ways it was never broken. It was, it was taken away, as you said. But there is, when you talk about this beautiful image of okay, you, even if you don't speak out on the land and your ancestors will come to you in your dreams.

There is a continuity that is naturally there. At the same [00:50:00] time, you're evolving the language, you know, as you're talking about, like having to find new words to describe things. And so there's this beautiful polarity between preservation and evolution, and it feels to me like a radical remaking that in some ways, and I don't know if this resonates with you, but like you don't have to save anything because it's already there.

X'unei: Yeah, we were giving testimony to a bill that would make Alaska native languages the co official languages of Alaska, which, hey, the Yukon could do that. 


X'unei: And so as. As we were doing this, my, we had one elder, her name was Ka, Selena Everson. She went to. A boarding school in Sitka, Alaska and me.

And so her perspective was from someone who speaks a language, always has, and lived through the language suppression era and giving her perspective as an elder. And then I was there giving my perspective from more just [00:51:00] like doing the right thing, accounting for social wrongs making a path, not not being racist.

And so those were sort of my talking points and. One moment we were up there testifying to the legislature of Alaska and she was sitting next to me and she talked in the microphone and she said, how? And I thought, that's it. The language saved us. And I was working with my auntie Nora Dauer, who was so much fun.

She was so, so funny, especially if you knew her really well. And I said, which is our language saved me. She goes, me too. I was crazy. She, but just this idea that yeah, like when we talk about the longevity of indigenous languages, like we could talk to you about the mammoth and we got a name for it.

'cause we were here when it was here. We were speaking this language when it was here. Saber tooth [00:52:00] tiger, saber tooth, salmon, like all this other stuff. And we have held on for. Well over 10,000 years. And so who are you guys to think you should come and like just wreck that and replace it with something that's brand new?

But also sort of like moving away from these dichotomies that it has to be English or indigenous or French or indigenous and say no, like everything could live, everything could have a place. Yeah, I remember as in Skagway and we're at this meeting with the National Park Service and someone had planted this flower called like a white clover, and they said, this is an invasive species and so we gotta go in and dig it out down at 

the root. 

Jennifer: yes. 

X'unei: It comes and it takes all the good soil, it makes it really hard for the native plant. So we're gonna dig out this invasive species and we're gonna make it better for the native plants. So I raised my hand and they said, yeah. And I said, you know, as the only native person in this room, I'm just loving this conversation.

I just wanna say that.

Jennifer: Yeah. 

X'unei: and there was just a lot of nervous [00:53:00] laughter.

But 

Jennifer: that's great.

X'unei: when we talk about decolonization, that that's not what we're talking about. What we're talking about is saying there's this. Concept that came with colonization, that it has to be us and only us, and we have to kill everything else that's here and like it does not have to be that.

But in order to move away from that, you have to openly address those intentions and openly. Analyze all the institutions and systems and say, are there any remnants of that? Does it still expect it to be these English only or French only environments? Because if that's the case, then we need to change that.

And it's not gonna hurt English, it's not gonna hurt French. You're not gonna have to go back to England to reset and recalibrate. Like everything will be fine. But there's this sort of idea that if it's not this, then English will somehow suffer. And, and I, I've caught. Little sort of hints of that as well, and so I try to try to tell the colonizer and the descendants of the colonizers you'll be fine.

Like you'll be okay. No [00:54:00] one's gonna put you in the concentration

camp. 

Jennifer: exactly, as we come to the close of our conversation, I'm just so enjoying. Your perspectives and just this incredible life force that I feel from the collective reemergence of the communities across Alaska and the Yukon with the revitalization of Tlingit.

But it feels like it's a metaphor, but it's not a metaphor. I just wanted to ask you the question, what is the new language that we need to speak together at this time where there's such terror in a way, you know, there's terror around real material effects of almost a resurgence of the white Christian dominance and, old ways of perceiving.

And I, and I don't wanna make that a monolith because that's unfair, but there is this. Tamping down of any kind of diversity, especially in the United States. And you can see [00:55:00] little components of where it starts to sneak up in Canada. But this process of like going to the river, that beautiful image of going to the river to untangle the mind, what are we being invited to now, une and what is the the new language that we must learn to speak together?

X'unei: Well, I think so in the United States we live with the reality of banned words now. So diversity, equity, and inclusion are banned even though, like legally on what grounds? Because like one guy wrote it on a piece of paper and so it's, so it's moving in this very weird direction, but it's also. It's sadly predictable that racism and colonization, they just hold each other's hands so much and so often, and as people talk about this return to greatness or these going back to these old ways of doing things, usually the unspoken part of that is when there was white male supremacy and that [00:56:00] that's what they're sort of pushing for.

But I think when we look at this. Colonization required complete dehumanization. So one, you had to dehumanize the ones who you were trying to eradicate, like indigenous peoples. You've taken their land, you're suppressing their language, you're doing horrible things to their children, and the only way you could consciously do this thing is by.

Convincing yourself collectively that they're less than human, even though some people might not actually openly say that, but I think they used to, like if you look at the, they used to say savage and primitive and all. They used to more openly say, including teachers. There's an elder who came to talk to me and she said her school teacher used to pull aside and say, you guys think you're just as good as us, but you never will be.

You're second class citizens and you always will be. So like this, this myth of the white supremacy where it's really, you are just the best at being so inhumane and cruel like that. That's not a superiority. Like that's like just the [00:57:00] biggest bully. That's all.

But it, it it also requires a dehumanization of the colonizer in their descendants to say like, it's actually inhumane to do these types of things. And so in order to do this, you have to sort of push from your brain the very concept of love and kindness and, and being a. A caring person.

And so if you look at the acts of decolonization that a lot of folks are asking for and that are sort of saying it's way past time for, it's a re humanization of the collective, . And, and I think some people are so terrified of that, but the reason to be scared or to be angry about it is this whole myth of just how finite everything is. And that is. There's not enough time and there's not enough money and there's not enough space. But the reality is that there absolutely is, and it's gonna take two or three generations to create this new [00:58:00] collective, but there could be this collective where we see each other as humans before we see each other as whatever sort of ethnicity or perceived race or, or.

Disability or gender or we could go human to human eye to eye, language to language and build off of that and get to know each other rather than sort of, we already decided 'cause we're in these little groups who don't have to think. We just sort of be a, a singular mind. And so as we move back towards diversity.

Is going to be when there's beauty. I don't think you have beauty when you're attacking diversity and moving for homogeny. That's where you have dictatorships and, and fascism and these other things, which are horrible. Like there's never been a good outcome of fascism, but we still keep reaching for it and we still see our neighbors and the people that we live next to reaching for it because they're being told that this is the thing.

This is what will bring you success and comfort. It's actually a huge, huge [00:59:00] lie. And so for me, I go back to our Raven Stories and stuff. I was like, oh, we've been tricked by Raven before. So we, we know a lie when we hear it, but we just need the collective to come and to say there's an alternative reality, but it's gonna take intention and effort and we could all get there together.

Jennifer: I think, that is the most encouraging words to end our conversation on, and I just have this image of your daughter going up to the elder's table. It feels like that's what you're inviting us to do. It's like walk over to the table, and embracing the incorrectness, mispronouncing words, taking a risk to mispronounce even one another.

It feels like that's, that's what we have to become more comfortable with in order to. Live in beauty, which doesn't mean perfection. It means being willing to get it wrong so that we have the kind of [01:00:00] intimacy that you have shared with us in all these stories.

X'unei: Wonderful. Yeah. We'll go from this point where it all seemed impossible to where we were sitting around sipping coffee and saying, remember when we thought we couldn't do that? And look at us now,

Jennifer: Thank you so much, X'unei. 

Yeah, this was a wonderful conversation ish.

X'unei: It's great spending time with you. Thank you.

Jennifer: So here is the essence of what I'm taking from this conversation. Language whether it's our mother tongue or the language of music or love. Is how we stay interwoven with one another. And even when our languages or our homes, our communities are destroyed through language, there can be a resilient rebound of what can never be taken. And I love how X'unei shares a story.

Even if you don't know the language, you [01:01:00] can. Feel it in your dreams. You can go out onto the land and it will come back to you. We all need the intimacy of our stories to be told in the language that lives in our bones. And even though some things inside us may never be fully translated, only felt, it's through the listening that we can make a sense of the imprint.

The imprint of intimacy, of childhood, of grief, of violence and X'unei reminds us that even when something is guaranteed to die, a language, a people, a way of life. It's the creative arts that rehumanize us, that restores a longer view of time and offers us access to words and worlds we've always known, and perhaps most importantly, through [01:02:00] rupture.

There can be a reemergence of language that delights, that makes us laugh, that reminds us that even through unspeakable harm, we are interconnected. That there is a living spirit inside everything. And this is what invokes for me, a deeper tectonic force, a world that's remaking itself. To learn more about X'unei's work, you'll find links and resources in the show notes. You can also listen to some of his talks on YouTube. They are engaging and delightful, filled with stories of ravens and elders, the land, and that beautiful image returning to the river to untangle your mind.

So if you know someone who'd depreciate this conversation, someone who's lost in translation, who's making their way back to a language that speaks of their own truth, please share this episode. We're weaving a [01:03:00] wholehearted web based on kinship, not kingship, at the speed of one heart opening conversation at a time.

And to stay in touch with me, Jennifer, and receive practices and unique offerings to support your creative emergence as you lead and live. Come sign up for my newsletter s biweekly on Substack.

And before we close, I wanna remind you that after each deeper dive I offer a practice episode. These are brief, just five minutes, and they're designed to help you deepen an idea that you've heard today into the field of your own life. And my hope is at the end of the season, you have a bundle of practices to experiment with and enliven you and you can save them, share your favorites, and return to them again and again as the seasons change. So this is our audio art sanctuary for intimate practice as we're learning to hold our own [01:04:00] and the collectives contradictions. As we make our way together.

So that's all for now, my friend. Keep your eye out for the next episode. And I'm Jennifer England. Thanks so much for listening.