 I'm very happy to introduce our guest speaker today, Thomas Thornton. He is from the University of Oxford, from the Environmental Change Institute. So I have to tell you that Tom is not a linguist. He is the Director of the Graduate Program in Environmental Change and Management. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the ACI of the Environmental Change Institute. His training is in Social and Cultural Anthropology. And he has worked very extensively as you will see in areas related with human ecology adaptation. Local and traditional ecological knowledge and I think that what you will hear today would really resonate with all that. And of course with conservation. He is interested in conceptualizations of space and place. And of course this sort of links of political ecology, resource management. And particularly his work has concentrated in the indigenous people of North America and the Silicon Valley North. So it's very timely isn't it? Just when we get into the center to talk about the Silicon Valley North. And the course of this research at Thomas come across language. And it is his explorations and interactions with language that is actually the basis of this talk today. Which is on the oratory of the thing of people from North America. Thank you. Thank you Candide and to the seminar for the invitation to be here. I am from a school of geography so I've got a couple of maps but we're not going to be fixated on maps for the duration of this talk. But one of the maps here, the one on the right, your right is a clink of territory which lies within this map of Alaska in the southeast. It's the tropical part of Alaska if you might say, it's a rainforest environment. And it's the northernmost area of the so-called Northwest Coast culture area. This other map is a map of the state of Alaska divided by regional corporations. And this is actually the institution I'm interested in studying now is Alaska Native Corporations. They are business corporations that were created to settle land claims more than 40 years ago in 1971. And to be a legitimate institution in clink at country you have to justify your existence and you have to justify it on the basis of your relationship to other institutions. And one of the ways you do that is through oratory. So believe it or not even from their corporate officials clink its expect good oratory and their standards are very high. And what I hope to do today is introduce you to some of those standards through one speaker who was a person that I knew very well who died last year. His name, his English name is Clarence Jackson, his clink at name. I knew him by the name Osk Ock which was a clan name from my own adopted clan. He belongs to an eagle clan which is one of two moieties in clink at social structure. And I'm going to give you a little primer on clink at social structure just enough so you linguists can appreciate what we anthropologists get excited about kinship. Who was a very good orator and was also one of the few traditional clink at speakers on the corporate board of directors of this native corporation that I'm interested in. And he became a very kind of pivotal person in helping to legitimize the work of the corporation within shall we say the continuity of clink at culture. And it's a bit of artistry how to do this but you have to do so within the rules of oratory. And I'm not even an expert on oratory and I really would bow to my predecessors and contemporaries in clink at studies but we have wonderful people who've worked on clink at oratory. I don't know how many of you know the work of Richard and Nora Dauenhower but they've written books about clink at oratory. Most of it based on the very traditional kinds of oratory and I have been a student of their work and unfortunately Dick Dauenhower just passed away a few months ago. So let's dedicate this talk to Dick and to Clarence who both helped I think further our understanding of clink at oratory. But I think you could say most of this about oratory in general but maybe not all of it but certainly oratory is a restricted and formal kind of speech. It's occasioned by certain events. At Oxford we have an oration every spring where some distinguished person gets up and says in Latin what the year meant to Oxford. And most of us can't understand him so there's an English translation which can be read but it's important that it be done in Latin or part of it be done in Latin. And it's an important occasion, the spring graduation. It's not something you hear every day. You hear it at Grace, some colleges including mine. It's also relatively conservative in form and content. There are rules of oratory. You can't just say anything. There are ways of beginning, ending, so on. It's heightened. In clinket they sometimes call it high clinket, what's called oratory. And again that means it's a different kind of speech and it may be restricted in terms of what you can say but even the way you say it can be important. So a high speech is usually said in a loud voice. And a lot of oratory is actually given by women in clinket and there's nothing like seeing an old woman and I'm thinking of one in particular who has Parkinson's and barely whispers and then when she's going to make a speech all of a sudden she stands straight up and gives magnanimous gestures to her audience and the voice goes up several decibels. So it's elevated speech designed to elevate you might say. It's also empowering in the sense that it's evocative in the clinket context of spiritual forces that you are literally evoking their presence when you speak in this kind of high clinket. And obviously it's designed to inspire to breathe life into the people you're speaking to or about. And also it has purposes of uniting and strengthening people and to moving people towards a state of transformation, an emotional state of transformation or what have you. And it's also representational and so metaphor can play a very important role in oratory and it does in clinket oratory. And by metaphor I simply mean representing one thing in terms of another. And it's also representational in terms of intersubjectivity. Most clinket oratory tries to represent community and identity in very specific ways. And so all of this can be done in English according to kind of clinket rules. And what's happening in clinket country is you've got a population of about 20,000 people and you have about only about 100 speakers who are fluent in the language. You have quite a few who are passively bilingual. That is to say they understand clinket but don't speak it or speak it haltingly. And then you have a few dedicated people including my co-author on this handout if you've gotten this Ishmael Hope who I would say are the young and up and coming who are learning it as a second language but are becoming fluent. And they're quite interested and hungry you might say for oratory and oratorical skills as well. So here's what you might read in the literature on clinket oratory from the Dauenhowers and others. Okay there's this idea that it's elevating, it can inspire, it can unite, it can move but of course the opposite is also true. It's a double-edged sword. You can also hurt people with words and words are strong and can injure. So an orator and clinket is often referred to as like someone carrying a long pole. And if you're just unconsciously swinging around you're going to hit people and knock things over. So you have to be careful how you wield it particularly if you're inside of a house which is where most oration is done. And there are some nice things that people say about people who speak well. This quote here is referencing the fact that when you speak well it's like a cloth being gently spread out on a flat surface. Okay so it feels good and it sort of creates a pathway or a surface or a field on which you might want to tread or lie down or rest, be comforted. Another term that this was the title of Sergei Khan, an anthropologist who works among the clinkets of his dissertation. It's called Wrap Your Fathers, Brothers and Kind Words which is essentially one of the rules of oratory for a potlatch. If you're all familiar with a potlatch I'll say a little bit more about it but this is the very important ritual among Northwest Coast peoples. Particularly commemorating death where all sorts of business is achieved. You end up grieving, you assign a succession to the person who died, a new leader takes his place and so on. Regalia has transferred names, people are adopted, lots of business is transacted at potlatches. But one of the most important things that you do is you speak to the opposites, your father's brothers in a matrilineal society. Your fathers or the people are the opposites and you try to wrap them with kind words. So that's an oratorical expectation. And then this one which is maybe the most important. Khatou ke al-sinch means people gain spiritual strength from good words, from oratory. And myself, I've been interested in ethnogeography and entered it through the linguistic domain of place names. But place names and landmarks can be very important in oratory and often are used to establish what I've called a linking landscape to kind of unite people through a traditional landmark and events that occurred there, which are usually of great importance to the clan that's speaking. Okay, so oratory has obviously changed but it's still considered the most powerful way to mediate between time, space and what you might call the social order. So it's alive and well in many respects. Now here's the part about clinkett social structure. Okay, the main message to get is the complex and getting more complex, not less complex. So I've divided it into six levels in thinking about how the matrilineal system works. Even the person is really a unit of the social structure because the person consists of components, some of which are inherited, you might say. So the person is already a social being from birth. But the main ones are traditionally are these, the house group, which is literally based on the idea of people who are living in a cooperative corporate house and that was their economic unit and their living unit. But even after these houses, which were large clan houses essentially, even after they more or less disappeared from people's dwelling spaces in villages and most people live in modern single family houses, you still belong to the house group. Okay, so everyone belongs to a house group. And house groups all fit under clans and there are about 70 plus matrilineal clans and every clan fits under a moiety. Okay, and so the moieties are basically super clans and moiety is just the French word for half, right? So you've got two sides to the social structure. You've got ravens and you've got eagles and then you've got obviously the nation. But the nation is a very weak part of the social structure. Much stronger is the clan and I would say in the modern context, the village. But as I said, this is the traditional, there is such a thing, social structure. And so already it's complex, but later in another slide you'll see it goes up to 13 levels. Okay, and this creates additional stress on orators to try to link and mediate between all of these levels. Okay, so as I said, the primary ritual I think in which oratory is maintained is the so-called potlatch or in klingit they call it kuik. And the kuik is derived from the klingit verb to invite. And that's what happens is after a prominent person has died, the opposite side takes care of what are called the funerary rites, and then a period of one to two years afterwards the host clan, the clan to which the person who died the deceased belongs, reciprocates through a potlatch. Okay, and so the memorial potlatch ends the period of grieving through a part that's called the cry and then moves into you might say doing business and renewing the lineage. And so the person who has died, someone might replace them as a clan leader, someone may get their name or names through adoption or naming ceremony. And the opposite side will be thanked for their services in the funerary rites for basically propping the clan up when they were really suffering, for bolstering them. And you can imagine the emotion that goes on because you have to affect the transition in this memorial potlatch where you're moving from grief, even after two or three years, into succession and the new order. And oration is a big, big part of this. Okay, and so this is one from, this was supposed to be the last potlatch because they tried all kinds of things. You may know the history of British Columbia in Alaska. Christian missionaries in the state tried to put an end to potlatching because they thought it was heathenistic and creating all sorts of social problems that went against the new order they were trying to create. So in Sitka, they tried to end it in 1904 and I would say not very successfully because this is in 2012 and 14, these rituals are still alive and well. They actually begin about this time of year, usually in fall time in October. And there's usually at least 20 or 30 major ones held each autumn. And at these parties, I would say most of them have on the order of 100 to 500 guests. And a lot of gifts are given away. I would say on the order of five to $10,000 worth of gifts are given away to the guests and often a lot of money. The last one I went to, it was about $25,000 US dollars was given away to the guests. So they're a big economic engine but the main purpose is essentially to lay this person who has died to rest permanently and to begin the succession of the clan in their recovery. Okay, that's not the only time potlatches are held, by the way. They also have them for house raising, for marriage and so on. But the memorial potlatch is the dominant one and the most important for oratory. Again, just to give you a sense of how it works, this is the traditional clan house that I was talking about. And it was in this house where you displayed your what are called attu in Tlingit. These are owned things, sacred possessions that are symbolic of your lineage and its distinctions. And so that would sit here traditionally and then you had a fireplace here and in a ceremonial context, in an everyday context, the sort of noblemen, there was a stratified society. The nobles would live in this area and the commoners closer to the door. But in a ceremonial context, the space becomes divided or stratified according to the moiety. So the guests, if their eagles are on this side and the hosts, the ravens would be on the other side or vice versa depending on who's hosting and who's guesting. But the general purpose of a potlatch, I would say, is summed up by what happens to soak berries in a potlatch. This is to give you a visual. You start with a very little bit of wealth and sentiment and then when people get together and they eat together and they speak orations, that gets whipped up and it multiplies. So you want to multiply good feeling in a potlatch. You want to move from morning to celebration and you want to be able to transfer lots of gifts and have those gifts reproduce in the future as reciprocal gifts. And I was wondered why soak berries, which are really a kind of a bitter tasting berry. Nobody's favorite berry are so important in potlatches, but it's really the symbolism of what they do, which is really what a potlatch is trying to do. It's trying to multiply communion, communitas, good feelings and wealth, positive emotion and so on. And so obviously things have changed, as I said. So these large houses which might accommodate 30, 50 people are now typically built as community houses and not as clan houses. And most clan houses today are much smaller than that, not big enough to support a potlatch with 300 guests. So they will have those typically in a gymnasium or another kind of hall, but they still produce, I'm sorry this isn't coming out well, the same kind of heraldic screens. So this is one that was, so we say, unveiled and dedicated at a recent potlatch. And that would have been the same as the one on the right at the heraldic screen that would have fit in a house. But they still make them the same way. Okay, that's just to give you an idea. And these things are, the regalia that's dedicated tends to be based on the crest or the sacred design that the clan has. And many of those designs refer back to geography. So this, for example, is a landscape, the first one I ever investigated in. It's called Sitko Bay, Alaska. And so these are copper shields that are represented here. You can see it as copper shields. And here, that's a real place called Tinaguni. It's a copper, means copper spring water. This double-headed raven, which is represented here, is another sacred place called Yehikatuku, which means ravens cave. And the salmon, which are here, are representative of a very productive sockeye stream called Gattini, or Red Salmon Creek. So another way to read this is that these are titles or deeds of trust to traditional territories that get passed on. Okay, so backing up a bit then. So the potlatch is to pay off all those services that the other, the opposite side, the other moiety did for you when you were suffering grief when the person died. So that part of the funerary rights is referred to as condolence oratory. And this is very important and it's still carried out in a very traditional way. And so on the handout on this, in this article, you can follow along with this, but I didn't reproduce on the slide the slingit, but you can follow it on the second full page of your handout. Okay, so in this case, we have a very prominent raven person from the raven moiety who's died at age 101, one of the most prominent figures in Southeast Alaska, a man named Walter Soboloff. And Clarence Jackson, who is oratory I'm focusing on, is of the opposite moiety. So he is appearing to essentially comfort Walter Soboloff's clan relatives who are grieving. Okay, so if this works, I'm going to play the whole thing in Klinkett. And it's a very restricted kind of oratory and it revolves around, again, these blankets or regalia. It doesn't have to be a blanket, but in this case, it's a killer whale blanket. So pay attention to how he evokes that image. So just to tell you a little bit about that, it's very classic. I mean, if you'd heard that speech 100 years ago, 200 years ago, by all accounts, it would have been very similar. There's a particular structure where you reference all of the opposites. You say that we're here for you as your outer shell, your opposite side to bolster you, essentially, and to give you comfort. And then you evoke your own regalia, your sacred objects, to comfort, wrap around your shoulders, give you warmth, and also to catch your tears. There's an important dynamic in Klinkett about not letting people's tears hit the ground, which is important, as you'll see in the second speech. And so often it is a blanket that's used, but not always. Sometimes it's feathers that may have to do with another clan's crest like a bird or something like that. And it's all about comforting them. It's very strict. You don't say anything personal. Obviously there's not humor involved. And it's said in a very solemn voice, and Clarence has a wonderful baritone voice. And the other clan is comforted by these words. And often once you've done that, you go behind them and you hold them to show you're standing behind them. Okay, so that's, I would say that's the very classic kind of condolence oratory. Sorry, I'm going to have to tack back to this now. Okay, now I told you that social structure gets more complicated. I don't expect you to memorize this, but if you remember my previous one had, what was it, six layers? And now we're up to 12, but we haven't subtracted any. Okay, so we've added in the 20th century, we've added Alaska Native Brotherhood camps. And these were camps that were essentially a political organization that was sometimes described as the first civil rights organization in America, long before Martin Luther King, we had leaders in Alaska who were fighting for civil rights with success. But they were founded in 1912, and one of the things they did was they built halls in villages to replace clan houses. And so the emphasis went away from the matrilineal clan and on to the community as a tribal entity. But these became venues for hosting potlashes and they still are. But the A and B actually eschewed traditional culture. They kind of were founded by a lot of converts, Presbyterian converts. And so they were very wary of clan-based structures. And one of the ways they weaned people away, you might say, from clan-based structures is through oratory. So the oratory of unity. So the same oratory, but for a different purpose. And they said, now we have to stop being divided by clan and we have to come together as both village communities and as regional entities, as Alaska Native Brothers. And in fact, they didn't even limit it by ethnicity, clinkett ethnicity, by Alaska Native ethnicity. You can join the Alaska Native Brotherhood or Sisterhood if you want. And in fact even women can join the Alaska Native Brotherhood. It's happened. After that, so that's in 1912, the bigger changes are the IRA Tribal Governments, Indian Reorganization Act, that's in the 30s. But in 1993 they all become so-called federally recognized tribes and become essentially sovereign governments recognized by the United States. And then in 1971 you have the development of village and regional corporations. So every village now has an A and B, it has an IRA Tribal Government, and it has a village corporation if it's a Native community. So those are three new socio-political structures put on top of the existing ones. And then you have these regional corporations of which see Alaska as one. So as I said, that makes things more complicated. And when you get to funerary rights, it means that you have many more, what I would call, following Michel Calant hybrid forums, where you've got a kind of cultural service going on with very traditional clinkett oratory, and then you have a more sort of Christian or ecumenical memorial service that may involve other oratory, and then you have separate ceremonies that may be put on by various churches and so on. But the dynamics of it are still very similar. So I want to jump now to, I'm not going to do this condolence oratory, but for the second individual that died that I'm talking about another prominent individual named Herman Kitka, Clarence was the same clan as him. So in the condolence oratory, it would not be appropriate for him to speak. It would have been Raven speaking. So here's an example of one thing that was said that's very similar, referencing a blanket. This blanket called the Gunakha Hu. Gunakha is a sacred landmark to one of the Raven clans. And she explains what the blanket means in Huna. There's a cliff where the bird's nest, when a loud noise is made, they fly away. When they come back, it's like a white blanket covering the cliff. May these things comfort you. The sort of white feathers is a kind of reference there. So that's the kind of comfort that was spoken. And then you get a response, in this case Clarence was responding on behalf of the eagle side, one of the people who responded. And he says, thank you, your words are helping our hearts. But he also paid tribute to the person by saying, losing this person was like having a mountain that slid away. And he equated it to what had happened in the past in his own area when there was an earthquake and this mountain slid away. And he says, that's the way I'm feeling now with the loss of this person. So he's very much on the grieving side. And I was going to say more about the ritual oratory of this, but as I said it gets quite complex and you have multiple services. But the cultural service still takes place along the same lines as the first one I showed you. But then others may take up different themes. Okay, but now I want to jump to the memorial potlent. So this is two to three years later when the clan essentially pays back the other side. And as I said they may bring out new regalia. This is a killer whale screen that was brought out. There'll be lots of gifts that are given away. Right here you've got lots of fruit and food gifts, a lot of canned and dried fish, blankets, and that sort of thing, and also money. And they're honoring in this case a Kaguantan man, Herman Kitka, who is the same moiety but a different clan than Clarence. Okay, so I'm going to play a part of this. And so the dynamic here is you have this period at the beginning of the potlatch, which is called the cry. And at the end of the cry, that's the end of the comforting by the opposite side. Okay, and then the hosts proceed to thank them. And they start by doing it in a kind of solemn way saying, this is what you've done for us. You've helped us stand up again, et cetera, et cetera. And then they affect the transition and it becomes more of a happy time. So Clarence is on the opposite side this time speaking for the eagles to thank the ravens for having bolstered them during this cry. Can you hear it? They saw two canoes coming. Behind them they said, they might be two war canoes. And when they were getting closer, they said, we better get out of the way. They are kind of cool. I don't know how to speak to you. Sorry, I realize I'm not going to be able to play this whole thing, so I'm going to actually skip ahead, but I can't do it on that screen. So I have to, sorry, I have to do it this way. Apologies. So I have to remember where to put it here. Okay, sorry, I'm going to have to fill out a little of this because we're running it shorter on time than I thought. So he's telling the story about this war party, right? That the people see it's an uncle and his two nephews. And the war party passes them. They stop on an island, the war party passes them. Then they come back. And the sons stage essentially a fight on the beach against this war party. And both, sorry, their nephews of the uncle, both nephews are killed by the war party. And then they leave again. And during this time, the uncle is in the woods, so he hides in the woods to witness what's going on. But he's not seen by the war party. And he buries his nephews. And he cries because there's nobody there essentially to perform that right that the opposite moiety usually performs to take care of the body and to give you comforting words. So he cries as he buries them. And then the war party has gone away, but they turn back because somebody says, wasn't there one more person there maybe? And so they come back to get the uncle. And when further north... They take him prisoner, hostage, you might say. And maybe after a day or two they turned around and they started back to the beach working at very obvious nephews. He asks, I need your show. There was an old person, so they knew he couldn't get away. So they took him ashore. And he started running away from them on the beach. They quickly surrounded him. He ran on that sandy beach. And they took him aboard the boat. They say, oh, it's cheap. Would you imagine that you would all ruin us? They never answered. And they don't even think you could run away from us. They asked the question the first time. He said, I'm glad you asked. You see, when you came around that corner, instead of the sun rising, tears fall over the shining lightning. See all my tears when I cried. You would push my tears off. And so I ran around in one of my tears. People come here. And when I come here, my tears are gone. Raven. And pretty soon, long ago, they stopped the story. The ears never left this ground. They never left this ground. And today, the walk down here started smoothing the ground. There's cheese. Okay. So the computer seems to have locked up now. There's tacking back and forth. It doesn't like it. Let me see if I can figure out what's going on here. Oh, it seems to have crashed. I don't even see it here. Okay, let's try that. Oh, it doesn't like that. Gosh, I'm sorry. It's not letting me come back. No, it's not responding. Microsoft. Okay, but you see in the... Ah, okay, maybe it'll work again. Let's get rid of that. Let's try to get this back. So we can start from there. Oops. All right, dare say. So, yeah, well, I think that speech speaks for itself. There's a little bit of clink it in there, but it's mainly just to say the things the way he heard them. But otherwise, the story works quite well in English, as it's told. And again, the tears are very important, because in this case, the opposite side was not there to catch the tears or to comfort him. So the tears froze on the ground and were left unattended. And it's up to the man to fool his captors and go back and stamp those tears into the ground and then that makes them, in a way, more lasting. They can't sit there exposed. It's too devastating to see them. Okay, so now I want to move to a couple of examples of more modern oratory. And hopefully this won't take too long, and I can sort of cut them down, because they're a little less formal than other kinds of oratory. They're more freewheeling. But what makes this interesting, I think, is it's the same individual. That's Clarence Jackson. You've seen him on a very somber side doing very traditional tasks within both the condolence rights and the potlatch now. He's engaging as a corporate leader in a kind of a different setting, where there's still an expectation for oratory, but the rules are slightly different. So a little bit of context. You see Alaska Corporation is, as I said, it's a modern business corporation. It was a Fortune 1000 company in its heyday, made most of its money from cutting down trees, because even though the clinkets were maritime people and built their own wealth on fishing, they were given no water rights or fishing rights, but they were given land as a resource base. And so what they were advised by their consultants was to start a timber company, cut your most valuable timber, and sell it in the 1980s to Japan, which was paying a high price for it at that time. And that's what they did. They made money, and when they made money, they began to think more about the cultural aspects of what they were up to. And one of the things they did was they started a heritage foundation. And there's now a kind of mythology around how the heritage foundation was started that goes back to an oratorical statement by George Jackson, but another elder named George Davis. And they held a conference of elders, and a lot of, you might say, traditional knowledge and oration was brought out. And at the end of the conference, this gentleman spoke, and he said, in klingit, it's just the translation here, we don't want what you did here to only echo in the air how our grandfathers used to do things. Yes, you have unwrapped it for us. That is why we will open again this container of wisdom left in our care. And then they, in effect, charged see Alaska with taking care of this, these precious things, narratives, regalia, and that sort of thing. And they created this nonprofit heritage institute the corporation did as a nonprofit to carry out this work. And so they've been doing that. And one of the things they've done is they've created new rituals. So the potlatch is very traditional ritual. It's very clan-based. And the corporation was very careful not to tread on that territory. But at the same time, to have legitimacy as a cultural institution, they felt they wanted to create new rituals. And so they created this biennial ritual called celebration to essentially showcase traditions and customs of various Southeast communities. And that's song and dance primarily, but also arts and crafts. And it's grown exponentially, really, since its origins. And today you might see 55-plus different dance groups. Sometimes they even invite one from Hawaii or New Zealand. Maybe 2,000 dancers and about 6,000 people attending. So it's a major cultural event that happens every two years in June. But they're very careful to say that it's a new tradition. And they don't want certain things that happen in memorial potlatches to happen in this new ritual. Because in part, it's more light-hearted. It's not so serious. It's not that it's not serious, but it's not occasioned by death and commemoration, which are very serious events. And so it calls for a different kind of oratory, essentially. And interestingly, I've been studying corporations and one of the amazing things that's happened since I've been studying them, which since about 2008, is that people like Clarence Jackson, who essentially, when they became boards of directors in these corporations, felt the need to sort of put on the coat and tie and look the part of a board of directors by the early 2000s are putting that stuff away and putting back on their traditional regalia. So this is a portrait of Clarence in the 80s, I think, or early 90s. And then this is him in the 2000s as the corporate photograph. And it became just as important to be essentially a clink-it person in clink-it dress as it did to appear like a credible corporate board member. And some clink-its see this as a kind of adolescence and growing up. When they went through infancy and adolescence as a corporation, they flirted with all kinds of things. They got into plastics, they got into wood, they got into casinos, all kinds of enterprises. But at a certain point, they realized, look, if we're going to be a corporation, what we have to think about is what we want to sustain. And this began a very serious values clarification exercise on what it is that they want to sustain as a corporation. What are their values? And it led to essentially a reconceptualization of the corporation as the house, which was the original. Northwest Coast Clan Corporation, the communal house. And they envisioned the corporate mission in terms of a house with four posts, these four central house posts, and each one of those being a value. And C. Alaska actually represents clink-its, hiders, and simchians. So this version is the clink-it version, but they have it in all three languages. And what are the values? Well, sustainability, of course, is in the middle. But the pillars that they want to sustain are ha-ani, which means our land. Ha-flatsin, which means our strength, or well-being, or health. Ha-shagun, which is our heritage, but it also can mean destiny, our fate. And then wuch-yak is something like balance or reciprocity. And it's kind of an abbreviation. So this is what they came up with. And lots of corporations have very nice mission statements, but this one is conceptualized in a very interesting way. And what they've said about doing since 2012, was it? Yeah, that they rolled this out at a shareholder meeting, is they've been trying to embed this basically into their businesses and their planning. And it has created a kind of different set of priorities. And one of them is their investing in culture. So they've got 20 million plus tied up in a new cultural center to sort of correct what they built in the late 1970s, which is this iron and glass box that could be the corporate headquarters for any corporation. And the new cultural center, they're building very much along a clink at architectural model. So anyway, that's a bit of background to this, but at the same time, they're trying to essentially suggest these values as part of the celebration. So they're at the celebration, which is a celebration instead of dance, arts, and crafts, there is an expectation of oration at the beginning. And there was a time in the 1990s when they used to sort of bring governors in and senators, and it was a very sort of political introduction. And some clinkets who were not happy with the values of the corporation and the way some people were getting wealthy and some people weren't, actually began to rebel against the corporation in the context of celebration. And so they got more intentional, you might say, about their oratory. And so here's Clarence again, as a board member. Let's see if this works. Oh, it's going to open up. Do we have internet? Okay, sorry. It's speaking about strength. How's that seem? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, this is the same as the condolence speech. He's calling out the clowns, sometimes called a genealogical catalogue. He's calling out the clowns, saying, where are you? And they're responding. Yeah. Yeah. This guy's a board member who's whispering, don't forget this clan. Okay, so Adi means children, so here's a real difference. So he's allowed to use humor in this setting, whereas in the other oratorical setting it would be a real sin if you left people out and you'd have to apologize, but here he can kind of make light of the fact that there's so many people in the audience. It's not a ritual setting, so he doesn't know which clans are out there, so he just says all you other Adis, which means all you other children of some things. I'm not going to bother trying to name you all. Okay, so I'm going to skip ahead and just play one excerpt from this where he talks about strength, but I've now forgotten where it starts. I know you're not tired judging by Irene Pradovich dancing this morning. I asked my grandfather, now Kisan, how come the older people were so strong? He didn't answer me for two days. Maybe I was nine years old. What made them so strong? And one day we had a harbour date. We had a nice breakfast, and he said to me, how? He said, you asked a question, grandson. I said, how come they were so strong long ago? He said they were strong because they sat in the ocean when the ocean was smoking in the winter. They were strong because they swam in the morning to strengthen themselves. And the reason I asked that question, when they were taking our killer whale drone down from the interior, an uncle of ours, Jimmy George, said that the young people were directed to carry a killer whale drone on land. They didn't want it to get wet. And so a bunch of young men volunteered this great big box drum, and I didn't know what a box drum was until much later in my life. But they were carrying it through the woods and over the hills. And they were singing this song. Ha de ya, ha de ya, ha de ya, ha de ya. Nobody knows how to sing, except me I guess. Anyway, the ones in the canoe answered, ha de ya, ha de ya, ha de ya, ha de ya. They were singing to encourage the ones in the woods, take it over there, and the ones in the woods were singing, bring it over here. Somebody would run ahead and clear the path, and he said, here's the path. And sometimes the old man said, one man would run with the drum, a great big box he would run and sprint through the woods. And then other times three or four of them would carry it. And what gave them that strength is the reason why I asked. I know you're not tired, so I'm going to keep telling the story. And so my great grandfather said, they swam, including him. And they never, I noticed later when I thought about it, they hardly got sick. Where everything that comes along, it seems like I catch it. I told my brother, Henrich Kadek, it's a good thing you're not a lady, you'd be pregnant all the time because you'll catch everything. He was in the hospital constantly for brother of ours, he's still running around. Anyway, he said, there's a story about a young boy. Okay, I'm going to skip the other story, because I don't think we have time. Let me see if I can go back to this, it's doing it again. And I think we don't have enough time, I think to do the last one. So I'll wrap up now. But the last one I was going to show you is a tree cutting ceremony. And again, it's Clarence Jackson. But this time it's another new ritual initiated by the C. Alaska Corporation when they go and cut their first tree of the season in the spring when the snow clears. They now perform a ceremony and they give the first tree to a local carver to make a pole. And the carver gets to choose which tree they cut first and then they donate the pole. But it's a bit like this past piece of oratory, if you want to call that oratory, I would, where there's a formal invocation at the beginning but then it becomes much more of a free form where he engages in personal reflection about why it's important that C. Alaska is involved in the timber business, the benefits that it provides, how those benefits get translated into people's careers, particularly with as concerns scholarship benefits, and also how trees are conceptualized as people. And so he speaks to the trees briefly to essentially ask for their gifts. But again, it's a new ritual in the sense that there were always ceremonies when you cut a tree to make a canoe or for a house post but never for a timber corporation about to start its season. And the other speakers, none of the other speakers spoke clinkett so it was really up to Clarence to make the connection. So I don't think we have time for that. So I will just wrap up by summing up the three kinds of speeches and looking at some of the elements. I think in all of the oratory, reference to clinkett values is central. And so whether you're talking about the most traditional conservative form of condolence oratory or the very modern C. Alaska rituals, referencing values and referencing heritage is very, very important. People expect that. If that element wasn't there, it probably wouldn't be clinkett oratory. And so all of them do that I think in very, very similar kinds of ways. But beyond that there are potentially significant differences. All of them engage in some kind of genealogical catalogue, that's what the Downhowers call it, and what I would call a geography of respect. So in the last oration, which I didn't show, Clarence, who's not from the area where they're cutting, takes a few minutes to say how his relatives used to come down to Klawak and how his aunts are buried there and so on and how they always like to come down to Klawak. And he mentions all the relatives and how they're connected to the people who were there. But it's not incumbent that he speak to a moiety or an opposite clan because that context doesn't exist. So the only context is really the Kwan or the village itself. And actually this is a source of tension in the corporation because the corporation owns land in many different communities, but it doesn't have to ask permission to cut trees there because it's private property, essentially. And most people who live in the villages are corporations, but not all of them. That's a bit complex to explain. But so that's an issue of how you engage in a geography of respect as a corporate official. It's a bit tricky. Ancestral invocation is very important in the potlatch. It's more commemorative in the corporation kind of oratory. Metaphor, very important, maybe optional in the others. Forming a linking landscape is also, I would say, optional, but good oration, even at the corporation level, does that well. Clingit language is obviously very, very important in the condolence rights. This is a very restricted kind of speech. And you have to name your blanket as if it was a person that's actually acting with the ancestral spirits behind it. And it's much easier to invoke that in Clingit than it is in English because even the term blanket just sort of connotes a material thing. In the corporation, ritual speaking Clingit is important maybe at the beginning and at the end, but most of your shareholders are not Clingit speakers. And so it's almost inappropriate if you spoke only Clingit in front of that celebration audience. He has to either have it translated or introduce just phrases. Reciprocation is obviously very important in the traditional context but limited in the corporate context. Personal, you notice in the context of the condolence oratory, there's no reference to I. You would never sort of insert a personal anecdote in there. You're there to perform a very particular bolstering function and you do it on behalf of your entire clan. Even in the response, it's limited, but he has licensed there to tell a story and he did, but it's obviously not a story about him but about his ancestors. And then in the ritual, it's almost requisite. So when he tells the story about learning about the strength of the ancestors, why were the old people so strong? It's a very personal kind of story. This is how I learned about Futsin in my days growing up. And then humor is very, very important in modern oratory. I think, particularly in the corporate setting, it's almost requisite that you don't take yourself too seriously. Obviously in death, things are very serious, but in secular life in the corporation, it's almost demeaning to be too serious. People will mock you. So by engaging in humor, by saying all you other uddies out there, you're actually endearing yourself to the audience. So I would say it's an expectation. And people who don't use humor and are too serious usually don't get as high marks for their oration. All right. And then I'll finally end by, this was shortly after Clarence's death, you see, sorry, he's cut off. He looks whole in my screen, but this is an editorial from a newspaper by a young, younger, clinkett person who's learning the language and learning to speak. And he's really emphasizing that it's important to be strong because he heard this speech by Clarence Jackson. And he says, we really need to apply this and we need to apply it by speaking our own language. And he suggests that what it takes to bring us together as a culture is actually embedded in our language and embedded in our grammar. Using this example here of how people say, I'm going to make myself united with you all, which is one of the phrases that's very commonly used in oratory. So as I said, I think there's a lot of motivation among young people, all people to hear this kind of oration, but also among young clinkett learners. And it's a very difficult language to learn because of its sound system and its grammar. There's a real desire to learn how to speak high clinkett so that you can evoke and move people in these kinds of ways. So I'm not worried about clinkett oratory. There may be less of it that's totally in clinkett, but I think the basic principles are alive and well. So I'll stop there, some concluding thoughts, but I'll let you read them because I think I'm over time. Thank you for listening. Thank you very much. We have time for questions or comments? Tell us more about the role of the corporations in language. Yeah, it was at that ritual, sorry, at that gathering of the elders conference in 1980 or 80, 1980, that's when they really became involved in language revitalization and documentation efforts. And part of it was that a lot of people made speeches at that conference in clinkett, and some of what they said is we're afraid all of this is going to be lost and we want you to take care of it. So language documentation and revitalization became, I would say, a major focus for C. Alaska Heritage Institute. They had two full-time people involved in it. Richard Dauenhower was one and his wife, who was a clinkett woman, who's a fluent speaker, Nora Dauenhower, was the other. And they produced, as I said, a set of classics in clinkett oratory. It was mostly the traditional narratives, not so much modern speech like what I'm showing you. And those are some of the best books on oratory. And Richard was a real gift in the sense that he studied, you know, Russian, German, Finnish, and he studied narratives and Homeric myths and metaphor and so on. And he said, clinkett has all of these elements and does it just as well or better. And so there's no reason to not appreciate this stuff to the highest level. And there was something that really used to annoy him is when traditional clinkett stories got reduced to children's narratives. So, you know, they would show up in an elementary school curriculum, but not be taken seriously by adults. That is just adult learners, not adult clinkets. And that used to really annoy him because usually you had to strip the stories down of their, of all of their contextual details, including things like place and references to relatives and all of that. And he thought that was really doing violence to the narratives and perpetuating this sort of primitivist idea about indigenous mentality, basically. But yet when you really looked at how they use metaphor, and hopefully you got a sense of that from the oration, it's really pretty amazing stuff, what they do. Yeah, it's starting to. So now they do have, it's good that you brought that up. I've never been able to witness one of these. I don't have any footage, but as part of the language classes now, they have a clinkett oratory contest every year and it's judged by elders. And so people can enter and they have to write or really memorize the speech because one thing you never see Clarence doing is reading the speech. That's bad, bad to do, bad to do in an oral culture. You have to face your own. So they have to learn it and speak it. And they're marked on how, obviously how well they speak clinkett, but also how they present the oratory. So that's going, I don't think it's getting increasingly popular, but it's still limited audience for those events and probably limited participation. But it's something that's, I would say, growing. Yeah, I haven't witnessed one of the student events. No, I was there at, well, I wasn't, the first oration, I wasn't present at that, but it was a public event. The second one, the individual who he was honoring, Herman Kitka Sr., was adopted me. So I was there, I was standing behind Clarence and recorded it, but I had no idea what was coming. And part of what moved me to write about oratory, me who is not someone who writes normally about oratory, is how that particular speech moved me, because it was beautiful. And he just stood up and spoke it. There were about 300 people there. I knew it was going to be good. I had a feeling it was going to be good. So I turned on my phone. This is not proper linguistic technique and asked Clarence later if I could transcribe it, because it didn't seem appropriate to interrupt him at the time. But that's probably the only recording of that particular speech. And the other reason why I recorded it is because he, in visiting, these potlatches go on for 24 hours. So you get a chance to talk to people. But one of the things I was learning from him was that his cancer was advancing. And he didn't feel like he was going to live that long, which really surprised me, because he seems quite vital. But within two or three months he's passed away from that memorial. So it's really a personal motivation for that. And seeing how he really moved the audience, including myself, who was part of this and knew the individual quite well, who he was honoring by responding to them. I think I understand from your presentation that in terms of what we're doing here with language documentation and language revitalization, so what you have witnessed in this context is a style that has, that is being maintained, but passed from one language to another. So it is this oratory, which is a style or a genre. But maybe not in its entirety, because we would lose the actual condolences and the potlatch. Yeah, I think within the potlatch, I mean my prediction would be it's going to stay quite conservative. But the oratory and other settings, and there are lots of other settings, whether it's because there are these new institutions, there's Alaska Native Brotherhood, there's the tribes and there's the corporations, and they all sponsor meetings and cultural events. And if you want to be legitimized as a leader, you really do have to learn to speak. And I think if you want to learn to speak, you'd be well served by following some of these rules that I've outlined, but you have to be careful. As I said, you don't want to be too solemn, for example, if you're a corporation leader, because you may offend people. And on the other hand, you can't be joking if you're in a potlatch setting, or you can at certain points, but not at others, but you really have to be careful. So you do have to know the rules of engagement, if not the language, I think, with the audience. I think it's actually a really interesting issue that Native tribes in the States are grappling. The Navajo, for example, they recently had a huge powerful because the president of the elected president of the Navajo nation doesn't speak Navajo. So he could rate politically in English, but without it in Navajo language, there was a huge debate about whether this was acceptable or not. It's interesting that the Tlingit had kind of worked through this in some way, whereas other groups are really confronting that. Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure they've worked through it because now that Clarence has passed away, I don't know if you have another board member who is a fluent speaker. And by the end of his career, he's doing all of the cultural relations. They spent half his life going to other people's funerals and representing the corporation. I think he was becoming that, but I think he was always well suited. I mean, the other thing he, again, I kind of wish I could have played the last one, but I blew it with all of my technical problems. But one of the things he says in his last oration at the tree ceremony is that we have to honor our grandparents and the things I taught us. And that's a very Tlingit thing to say, but in his case, one of the reasons why he's a fluent speaker is he was raised by his grandparents. And they made sure that he spoke Tlingit. So he had this ability of basically, he seemed like he was a generation older than he was because his Tlingit was that good and he knew how to speak high Tlingit. And that's what people would say. Other people from cake used to say, wow, he was lucky. He was raised by his grandparents. But I know what you mean in the Navajo. There's a movie called Miss Navajo. Have you ever seen that? But one of the things you have to do to be Miss Navajo is you've got to speak Navajo. And I think a lot of the candidates are not in a very good position on that score. So they have to undergo this drastic learning of Navajo and they follow a series of these young women trying to become Miss Navajo. And the language lessons are painful because it's a lot like Clingit's non-Denae language. The phonology and the grammar are both challenging. But it's an incentive, just like these oratory contests, I think, can be an incentive. But I think the natural incentive is that people want to lead and they see language as legitimizing leadership positions. It's not that you have to have it, but if you don't, if you do have it, you've got an advantage. Should I say thank you to Tom in your name? Of course, as usual, we'll adjourn to the beautiful institute of education. It is open, but we did quite a bit of the other week. What did that one think of that? Yeah, I guess we kind of don't have to go there. Yeah, that's quite sad. Is it nicer upstairs? I don't know. It's nice to have six and one, half a dozen of the other. Yeah, it's quite sad. That's probably, yeah, it's a bit more comfortable I think. Upstairs? Okay, let's do that. Thank you very much.