Advancing Native place names in Alaska

2015

Indigenous place names are of undisputed value to understanding culture history (Kari 2010). In Alaska place names have been used to inform our understanding of archaeology , climate, migration, etc. Place names also provide insights into indigenous conceptualization and usage of the landscape, and there is great potential for place names to inform may other fields. Unfortunately, knowledge of place names is quickly disappearing as the shift away from Native languages accelerates. Documentation of Native place names collected over the past two centuries, and especially the last 30 years, is extremely fragile and almost as endangered as the languages themselves.

Language, Memory, and Landscape, 2013

"The two major Alaskan language families, Inuit-Yupik (Eskimo) and Dene (Athabascan), share a border which extends in an arc nearly 2000 km long from Cook Inlet in the Gulf of Alaska, paralleling the coast of Alaska all the way to the Canadian border. Both families extend further into Canada; Inuit-Yupik extends all the way to the east coast of Greenland. Along this shared border many thousands of places have been named, and these names—and the place-naming strategies which underlie them—provide insight into indigenous conceptualizations of the landscape. Inuit- Yupik place-naming is grounded in human affordance; names are assigned based on people’s relationship to the land. In contrast, Dene place-naming is highly deterministic, based on a generative geographic directional system. There are of course plenty of exceptions which prove these rules, but broadly speaking these generalizations hold across the two language families. Here I suggest that this difference in place-naming strategies can be explained in part in terms of differences in the demonstrative systems of the two language families. Both Inuit-Yupik and Dene languages have elaborate systems of words expressing spatial relations, allowing a much finer distinction than is possible with the proximal ‘this’ and distal ‘that’ in English. However, the function of the demonstrative system differs greatly in the two language families. In Inuit-Yupik languages the demonstrative system functions primarily on the local level and have limited application to the larger landscape domain. In Dene languages the demonstrative systems are fundamental to the conceptualization of landscape, playing a key role in place naming strategies."

2009

Compared to many places in the world where indigenous people struggle to have their voices heard, Inuit in the Canadian Arctic are in an enviable position. Nunavut occupies 1⁄5 th of Canada’s land mass, a vast majority of its population (85%) is Inuit, and 70% consider Inuktitut their first language. In harsh, treeless land considered by many to be mostly devoid of human presence, Inuit have a rich history of land use and occupancy that is reflected in thousands of place names that have yet to appear on Canadian maps. The Inuit Heritage Trust (IHT), a Nunavut land claim organization, is working to elevate Inuit toponymy to official status. Inuit involved in land claims outside of Nunavut, as well as other aboriginal groups in Canada’s north are submitting new names and name changes by the hundreds to provincial and territorial authorities often in concert with land claims negotiations. In addition to existing as an expression of cultural and territorial sovereignty, place names cons...

This paper will summarize and advance upon the work that has been done, recognizing the prehistoric depth of the Na-Dene languages in Alaska. It is published as a white paper to allow subsequent updates as more data is added. It is intended to be responsive to any peerreviews sent to the author as well. The paper presents the Alaska Traditional Dene place name

Landscape in Language, ed. by D.M. Mark, A.G. Turk, N. Burenhult and D. Stea, 225-37, 2011

This paper further explores the non-universality of landscape terms by focusing on one particular landscape, the Yukon Intermontane Plateau of western Alaska. This region serves as the boundary between two great language families of North America, Athabaskan and Eskimo, and thus offers a unique laboratory in which to examine the extent to which cultural factors in two genetically unrelated languages influence the categorization of a single, fixed landscape. Drawing on published lexical sources, unpublished place name documentation, and firsthand interviews with Native speakers, the results presented here demonstrate that, while Athabaskan and Eskimo speakers may occupy the same landscape, their respective languages conceptualize that landscape in different ways.

ARCTIC, 2003

The combined use of a GPS receiver and mapping software proved to be a straightforward, flexible, and inexpensive way of mapping and displaying (in digital or paper format) 400 place names and 37 trails used by Inuit of Igloolik, in the Eastern Canadian Arctic. The geographic coordinates of some of the places named had been collected in a previous toponymy project. Experienced hunters suggested the names of additional places, and these coordinates were added on location, using a GPS receiver. The database of place names thus created is now available to the community at the Igloolik Research Centre. The trails (most of them traditional, well-traveled routes used in Igloolik for generations) were mainly mapped while traveling, using the track function of a portable GPS unit. Other trails were drawn by experienced hunters, either on paper maps or electronically using Fugawi mapping software. The methods employed in this project are easy to use, making them helpful to local communities involved in toponymy and other mapping projects. The geographic data obtained with this method can be exported easily into text files for use with GIS software if further manipulation and analysis of the data are required.

Indigenous …, 2009

In: Developments in the Theory and Practice of Cybercartography. D.R.F. Taylor and T.P. Lauriault, T.P. (eds)., 2014

This chapter describes place names research over 20+ years with Gwich’in Elders living in the Northwest Territories resulting in: 1) an interactive online Gwich’in Place Names Atlas showcasing 900 named places and the oral history behind them (atlas.gwichin.ca), 2) a series of place name maps (atlas.gwichin.ca), and 3) the official recognition of almost 500 Gwich’in place names by the Governments of the NWT and Yukon to date. The online interactive atlas was created in partnership with the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre, Carleton University. The Gwich'in Place Name maps were created in partnership with MDT Communications. The Gwich'in are among a handful of Indigenous peoples in Canada who have produced such comprehensive maps and interactive online atlas for their traditional lands.

2019

This article analyzes related lexical and grammatical structures in Central Alaskan Yup'ik (CAY) in terms of the theory of nominalization (Shibatani 2018, this volume) focusing on the relationships between noun formation and grammatical structures paralleling so-called relative clauses in other languages. We first examine the characteristics of nominalizations lexicalized as nouns, showing that various types of nominalizers are employed in the formation of nouns, and then observe that essentially the same formal structure is utilized in relative-clause counterparts in CAY, with the use of some of the nominalizers seen in lexicalized forms (Jacobson 1995). We demonstrate that the differences between derived nouns and relative-clause counterparts are attributable to the different instantiations of the single process of nominalization-lexical nominalization and grammatical nominalization.

The Whapmagoostui Crees form a small-scale society that has used the same land for many generations. In this paper 1 I will examine the results of a project carried out in the 1990s to compile information concerning historical and cultural knowledge relating to places within the Whapmagoostui Cree traditional territories. The project involved both a detailed place-names survey and the collection of additional information in the form of stories, myths and land-use data concerning particular named places. 2 Toponymy was seen as a useful starting point for understanding Cree perceptions of the environment and of key points within that environment, and for obtaining a broad coverage of places of potential cultural and historic interest, based on the assumption that most such places would be named (cf. Hanks & Winters 1986:274).