Cradling the Sockeye: A Conversation on Language, Land, and Legacy with Heather Evoy

Winter 2024-25, FORUM Magazine

HEATHER EVOY'S HOME on Áak’w Kwáan—Juneau—bubbles with energy. Outside, heavy clouds may choke the Mendenhall Valley, and mud puddles may call for woolly socks and Xtratufs, but within Heather's home, an inviting warmth prevails. Her kids, Judah and Silje, charge the place with an energy that stems from a mother who is consciously raising her children to engage with the world around them and to take pride in who they are, and where they come from.

Arrival at Heather's place is always a bit chaotic in the best way. Silje, 8, shows off her 90s-era dance moves. She and Judah fire off jokes like popcorn. At 14, Judah is the young man who arrives at a community gathering and, without prompting, makes the rounds with the elders, bringing them tea and coffee, and making sure they each have a seat.

Amid the cacophony, there's a peaceful security. Seafoam-colored walls display photographs of Heather and her children in regalia: Silje's curly golden brown hair tumbles down the back of her Chilkat robe from beneath a woven cedar hat. Heather shows me the strongman rope that she and a close friend wove from cedar bark—that had been harvested by her late grandmother—to mark Judah's passage toward adulthood when he graduated from junior high.

Heather and her children are Tsimshian, Lingít, and Crow with a mix of European heritage, and Judah and Silje have Mexican-American heritage from their father. Heather grew up in Ketchikan and Metlakatla, where she and her children maintain close ties, even as they embrace their current lives on Áak’w Kwáan, also known as Juneau. I've come to their home for a visit on my way to Ireland, where I'll spend three months writing, connecting with my living relatives and ancestors, and deepening my relationship with Gaelainn, a dialect of the Irish language that my great-grandparents spoke. While I'm here visiting Heather and her family, I'm interested in learning more about their relationship with their ancestral languages, Lingít and Sm'algyax, the Tsimshian language.

I first met Heather when we worked together at a nonprofit based in Juneau. In 2018, I watched Heather testify before the Alaska Legislature on a clean water issue, with three-year-old Silje by her side. Heather introduced herself and Silje and began her testimony in Sm’algya̱x. Testifying before a government body in any language can be intimidating, but I was struck by how Heather's voice rang through that space with strength and clarity.

Two years after Heather's testimony, the pandemic disrupted every aspect of our daily lives, and I cast about, trying to find strength and solace. I looked to my Irish ancestors who endured famine, colonization, criminalization of their language and culture, and finally, emigration from their homeland. Meanwhile, I also found inspiration in Indigenous friends and colleagues in Alaska who were reclaiming their languages. I saw the joy and resilience they drew from their languages, and how language seemed to connect them more deeply to the land, their culture, and their ancestors. In Heather's example, I saw courage, grace, and power embodied in her language. I was struck by the example she set for her children and for everyone who witnessed her testimony. Heather and her family draw their vibrance from the land and water, the traditional foods they harvest and share with the community and their cultures. I wanted to find out how language ties all that together for Heather. And I wanted to know how Silje sees things, as the next generation to carry the languages forward.

Silje is bursting to tell me about her school where much of the day—classes, play, conversation—occurs in Lingít. Silje attends the Tlingit Culture, Literacy, and Language (TCLL) program, a "school-within-a-school" partnership between Sealaska Heritage Institute and Harborview Elementary School where Lingít elders and language speakers work alongside K-8 teachers to provide a place-based cultural and language immersion experience.

Silje explains, "If we're gonna talk, we need to talk Lingít, unless we don't know the word, and then we can say it in English. The kindergarteners and first graders only speak English. But they'll get it someday."

"They want us to be language leaders when we're older because there's only a few elders left that can speak fluent Lingít. They want to make us some of those people, so our language can go on. That's pretty amazing."

It occurs to me that Silje and her peers already are language leaders.

"I really like it because I feel like when my kids grow up, they'll get to know what Lingít is. They'll get to know their culture, and they'll get to experience what I experienced. I hope TCLL stays for a long time because it's that school that keeps our language going."

That may be, but it's Silje and her classmates who carry the language forward to future generations.

When I ask Silje what it feels like when she speaks Lingít or Sm'alygax, she doesn't hesitate. "It makes me have a good day." I'm struck by the confidence in her voice. "It makes me feel good in my heart when I speak Sm’algya̱x in Metlakatla or Lingít here."

But it's not always easy.

"You have to work to know your language. And, the kindergarteners—they have to work because their brains need to be full with language, or else they'll be full with something else. Then the language will just be on the side."

I ask Silje for her favorite word in Lingít.

"I really like kʼwátʼ. It means egg. It's fun to say."

~

Silje's favorite word makes me think of the connections between language, food, and homeland. Many of the first words a person learns in a language—whether as a child learning early language skills or someone learning a second language later in life—relate to food. Communication is essential for survival, and language allows us to express our most basic needs: food, comfort, and safety. As our language skills develop, we learn to communicate more deeply; we use language to express our relationships, who and what we love, what we remember, and our connection to the world around us, to our home.

The first word I knew in Irish, even before I started studying the language, was uisce—water, the most basic necessity of life, and the material that makes up most of our bodies. The early words I learned relate to food, place names, and the natural world; these things are inseparable. Egg in Irish is ubh. Práta is one of many words for potato. Sú talún—the word for strawberry—means the juice of the land.

My ancestors are from Cill Airne—anglicized to Killarney—which means the church of the sloes, the fruit of the Blackthorne. Blackthorne hedgerows provide habitat for a diversity of creatures; the blossoms support pollinators, and the fruit—a small, bitter-tasting plum-like fruit—provided a significant source of sustenance for people up through the Medieval period. Today, people mainly use it for flavoring sloe gin, but it remains an important food for wild birds. Blackthorne is a symbol of protection, and for thousands of years in hedgerows, it has served as a natural barbed wire that keeps livestock in place, without stifling wildlife movements the way modern barbed wire can.

I learned the Irish word for salmon—brádan—from folklore. One of the most well-known Irish legends is that of Fionn MacCumhaill, the warrior hero who gained his power by being the first to taste the flesh of the Salmon of Knowledge. In doing so, he gained all the knowledge in the world and became the leader of a band of warriors, Na Fianna. The story speaks to the significance of salmon as a cornerstone of culture, strength, and life—a thread that seems to be common wherever salmon exist around the world.

~

Since 2022, Heather has been teaching culture camps for young people, centering on being in the right relationship with plants and the land through harvesting, plant identification, and using wild-harvested plant materials.

"Like with song and dance, when you're engaging multiple sensory experiences and the language—we've been doing something similar, being on the land and working with plants. Being in a relationship with the natural world in a different way than I think we're most commonly taught in a Western—and predominantly American English—setting. Then we go into a classroom setting and use the plant materials that we talked about. We talk about setting intentions if we're working with these plants as medicines or foods. Because a lot of this is around food sovereignty as well."

She shares a moment from one of the camps she taught last summer.

I was working with salmon, and I had all of this sockeye cut up that had been soaking in brine overnight. I was carrying it out to dry and then smoke, and I had it in this bowl that I inherited from my grandmother. I was holding this fish, and my body just started moving. I started swaying like I was rocking a baby. I had this group of high school girls with me. I told them, my body wants to do this. My brain is telling me to sing a song in my language. And I did. I started singing this Sm’algya̱x lullaby about this little mountain goat, and he goes through his family members. That just felt so right to me. It was such a precious thing to be holding, and I wanted to rock it like a baby. I think it was almost out of worry. You know, my son loves to fish. And I sometimes worry, will there be salmon for him to catch? You hear Silje talk about how she is rooted, and she's got this strong conviction that she's learning this language and that her kids are going to learn this language. I don't have that same sense of continuation with our foods for the next generations, and that deeply worries me.

Silje adds, "I want my kids to taste the crunchiness and goodness of herring eggs."

~

I asked Heather if she felt like her language and culture connected her to past and future generations. She responds, "I don't think of any of this as 'cultural,' but it is…these are all cultural values that I'm fortunate enough to have as a part of me…fortunate enough to be in positions that help me to reconnect and re-remember these things. I feel fortunate to be with young people and to teach these things to the future generation."

That's the thing about culture as a concept. If people are allowed to exist and to thrive in all our diversity, we don't have to think about defining culture—culture is simply day-to-day living in relationship with each other and with place. It's pressure like colonization that suppresses diversity and forces us to define language, food, song, and dance as cultural resources, and that require their preservation. Heather emphasizes, "When it comes to language, I like to think of it as remembering, not revitalization. Because it's there within us. It's not dead."

~

Heather tells me about time and seasonality in Sm’algya̱x, how everything about the Tsimshian way of life is tied to the way things come into harvest, and to being. The months of the year are named for the corresponding harvest times: July is the time to harvest sockeye; November is the time to dig clams. She expresses her concerns about how her language and culture might change with the changing climate.

"Our word for October—Ha'lila̱x sig̱aboox— symbolizes the time to dig for cockles. If that can't happen safely anymore, what does that mean?"

While that shift in seasonality doesn't necessarily sever a connection, Heather explains that the meaning of the word may not be as deep or as immediate but, recognizing how "Being an Indigenous scientist and knowing what my ancestors have known, and knowing what I and other people around me have observed, things are changing." She suggests that we may find keys to adapting to change by looking at the knowledge that's embedded in oral histories and Indigenous languages.

She reminds me that when we are speaking about resiliency, what we’re trying to do is heal. She explains that, “We're trying to shift things… I think people need more tools to connect with the land around them, and to heal. Both the land and the language, to me, have been extremely healing. I look at my kids, and I see them as direct proof and evidence of that healing."

I think about my own experience connecting with my Irish ancestors, and the journey I've chosen to learn their language and connect with our homeland. The Irish language was criminalized under the British penal laws, as were many forms of cultural expression and material empowerment. Still, the language survived colonization, famine, civil war, and the global dominance of English. My great-grandparents brought the Irish language when they immigrated to the United States. Although only one of their children, my great-uncle Jigs, carried the language on, my brother and I have picked up the thread, as we learn Irish and deepen our relationships with our roots. As we find our healing in the language, I like to think we might be healing our ancestors, too. I like to think we are playing a small part in carrying our ancestral language forward for future generations.

Although Irish, Lingít, and Sm’algya̱x have bucked the odds to survive the pressures of colonization, I can't ignore that as a non-Indigenous person in North America, I am part of that colonizing pressure, even as my ancestors escaped the colonization that made life so difficult on their homelands. My great-grandparents faced hardships before and after they emigrated, but I benefit from privileges as a settler on Indigenous lands, from the Abenaki lands I grew up on to the Jilkáat and Lkóot Lingít lands where I live now. It is a privilege and an honor to connect with my Irish ancestors through language and culture, and I'm also deeply privileged and honored to make my home on Jilkáat Aani. I cannot ignore that my doing so impacts the Lingít whose lands I inhabit. I can draw parallels between my ancestral language and culture and the Indigenous languages and cultures where I live now, but it's important to acknowledge the limitations of those parallels.

In Alaska, all of our cultures are deeply tied to the land, the water, and the ways that they nourish us. Language, the landscape, and the foods we harvest are all living things that require nurture and respect if they are to exist in the future. Silje and her classmates are carrying language forward for future generations. It's up to all of us to ensure that Judah has salmon to harvest and that Silje's children get to taste the crunchy goodness of herring eggs. ■

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