Will Monroe, who made a short cameo appearance in Anchorage for the 2018 Summer Intensive wrote about his summer experience in July 2018.  Aang, everyone! Will Monroe here, and I’m back in Alaska working with Where Are Your Keys for the second time. In 2013, WAYK introduced me to the Kodiak Alutiiq community. Since then, I have started… Read more »

Time for some “new” videos! Back in 2015, Sky Hopinka made a terrific series of videos for Where Are Your Keys. This series was designed to be both an overview of the method and an entry point for anyone who was newly interested and wanted to learn more about WAYK.  We’ve been slow in publishing these videos,… Read more »

Here’s Robbie Penman’s update from the spring of 2018, several months after his summer with WAYK on St. Paul Island, Alaska. Thanks for the update, Robbie! In April, me and Caoife left Melipüllü, a.k.a. Puerto Montt (I’d been there for about three months, helping the local language revitalization team) for Argentina. We took a bit… Read more »

Here’s Mary Leighton’s update from the winter of 2017, six months after her summer with WAYK on St. Paul Island, Alaska. Thanks for the update, Mary! The summer internship seems like a foggy dream from a long time ago – those long northern latitude days, the otherworldly flora and fauna, and the literal fog of… Read more »

Here’s Robbie Penman’s update from the fall of 2017, a few months after his summer with WAYK on St. Paul Island, Alaska. Thanks for the update, Robbie! *Jerky is one of the few Quechua words in English At the end of August 2017, I came back to the Ununited Kingdom (note to Susanna: that’s deliberate!)… Read more »

My favorite part of the WAYK Summer Language Intensive on St. Paul Island has been getting to witness an amazing team of young people who are taking language revitalization into their own hands. I feel very lucky to have been able to learn from the Unangam Tunuu language team and to witness their many years… Read more »

My favorite thing from the 2017 Summer Language Intensive on St. Paul Island was becoming more comfortable learning and teaching language in immersion, by which I mean staying in the target language and avoiding English. In the past, I tended to divide language learning and language use. There is an essay by Greg Thomson, “Leave… Read more »

I would like to give a shout out to the Unangam Tunuu Speaking Listening Teaching Team (UTSLT) on St. Paul Island. 2017 was WAYK’s third year partnering with the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island, and I was brought here to be patient and supportive student for the UTSLT members. As a fellow Unangax̂, and… Read more »

When I sat down to write my blog reflecting on the summer of 2016, I knew it would be a difficult blog to write. I have never been someone who had just one favorite thing—my favorite color depended on my mood and my favorite books could probably be a library in and of themselves. So,… Read more »

One way to describe a summer with WAYK is that it provides the on-the-ground work experience that should be part of any training in language revitalization and documentation. In this blog I’ll describe it in these terms, mainly by contrasting it with the only other “official” training I’ve had, a masters degree at SOAS in… Read more »

With any intensive experience, there will be moments that really appeal to you and others that probably appeal to you less so. As a reflection of my time here this summer, and hopefully as some insight to interns that hope to apply for the WAYK Summer Intensive in the future, I hoped to share some… Read more »

I joined WAYK for the 2017 Summer Language Intensive on St. Paul Island, Alaska, because I wanted to learn more about the techniques involved and to learn more about approaches to Indigenous language revitalization. Visiting a remote island in the Bering Sea and its flora and fauna was a wonderful perk, too. After the summer… Read more »

When you work with Where Are Your Keys, a common question you encounter is “What do you actually do?” It’s a great question and I love to talk about my WAYK experience, but it is still also a tricky question to answer. The reason is that, in a lot of ways, to understand what we… Read more »

We’ve put together a list of some of the most common questions we get about WAYK internships and Summer Language Intensive projects. We hope that anyone who’s interested in applying for an internship with WAYK can find the answer to some of their burning questions below. If you have a question that’s not answered, please… Read more »

This summer, we are once again fortunate to offer WAYK internship opportunities during the 2019 Summer Language Intensive. The internship positions are sponsored by our host community, Tsleil-Waututh Nation, in North Vancouver, BC. Participating in a WAYK summer project is one of the best ways to be fully immersed in the work of language revitalization,… Read more »

It can be hard to imagine what a language revitalization summer looks like, but working to keep a language vital is a full-time endeavor. Here’s an updated look at what to expect from the WAYK Summer Intensive schedule in 2019. As with any program centered around language learning, it’s essential that we have daily contact with… Read more »

What you can expect as a summer participant: You will learn how to use WAYK. One of the main purposes of the WAYK Summer Intensive is to provide comprehensive training in WAYK skills, something that is difficult to demonstrate or even explain in a week-long workshop or a few language lessons. A good way to think about the… Read more »

WAYK is very excited to announce—after months (and years!) of planning with the host community—that our 2019 Summer Intensive will take place in North Vancouver, British Columbia! This will be WAYK’s 9th summer project with a partner community. In 2019, we will continue our partnership with Tsleil-Waututh Nation (TWN). Due to the location and history… Read more »

In my last blog, I wrote about the obstacles to maintaining an immersion bubble. In this blog, I ask how the immersion bubble, as a kind of “language policy”, can further the interests of an Indigenous language community. There are two related benefits to immersion bubbles, as I see it. One benefit is that they… Read more »

The idea of creating an “immersion bubble” is probably nothing new in language learning. Nor is it new within the field of language revitalization in the 20th and 21st centuries; creating immersion bubbles has been a goal of many revitalization movements at least since the kōhanga reo pre-school immersion initiatives in Aotearoa (New Zealand) in the… Read more »