I am Danny YellowFeather Manning, I have been working with the Weye-ebis project with Donna Clark and the Susanville Indian Rancheria language team since November 2014. My teacher is Wilhelmina Ives, one of the last Maidu speakers, and she has been having classes every Friday at the Greenville Rancheria. In early 2015, I had a… Read more »

When you’re language hunting, or even teaching, it helps to document those sessions in any way you can. With the ubiquity of smartphones it’s easier than ever to video record a language hunt, bucket brigade, TQ: Walk, or whatever you’re working on. Here are a few tips and tricks that may help you get started… Read more »

This summer, WAYK (Where Are Your Keys) creator Evan Gardner, Susanna Ciotti, WAYK veteran Sky Hopinka and two language-loving interns, Casey and Robyn, battled unpredictable airline schedules and dreary weather patterns to facilitate the Unangam Tunuu Summer Language Intensive on the tiny remote island of St. Paul, AK situated far in the Bering Sea. This island… Read more »

You may have noticed that Where Are Your Keys is now on Instagram!  We’ve been posting photos from workshops throughout the spring, including great Set Ups for teaching language that we’ve seen.  We’re also posting current shots from our Unangam Tunuu Summer Intensive on St. Paul Island.  Follow us @playwayk, and check out all of the… Read more »

The hardest part of hunting Chinuk is easily the most rewarding at the same time – much like the three mile “marathon” going on next week that Sky has convinced me is worth doing for the t-shirt, if nothing else. Coming into the WAYK team already having spent a couple of years learning ASL has… Read more »

“The only time you are speaking wrong is when you are not speaking at all.” These are the words on a sign up in the Civic Center which is the home-base of the Unangam Tunuu Summer Language Intensive on St. Paul Island. Although I completely agree with this sentiment sometimes it’s harder to live out… Read more »

The WAYK team returned to the Alaska Native Heritage Center in late April for a week-long workshop. The ANHC has hosted WAYK on several occasions over the past four years, and this time the workshop was for speakers and learners of Yup’ik and Inupiaq as they embark on a three-year language project funded by the… Read more »

  Working with Evan, David Edwards, and April Charlo at the first WAYK summer program was a great experience. I learned a lot about language revitalization as well as community revitalization. Working with the seven high school students was great also, seeing language work from a different perspective. So when I had the chance to… Read more »

Welcome to the new home page for Where Are Your Keys! Over the past four years, we’ve discovered that our blog has grown to be more versatile and practical than our static home page. And so, after many hours of dedicated volunteer efforts by Susanna Ciotti, Caylie Gnyra, David Edwards, and Sky Hopinka to make… Read more »

When we signed up to be interns with WAYK we really had no idea what we were actually getting ourselves into…in a good way. It’s next to impossible to explain in a two hour interview or one hour teleconference what you do for 18ish hours a day, 7 days a week, while living in a… Read more »

When the WAYK team was last in Tanana, in late October 2014, the Yukon River was just about to freeze solid. During our return trip this spring, in mid-April, the entire village was waiting for the ice to break up. Both life and language revolve around the river in Tanana! During our fall visit, the… Read more »

I’m starting my third year at the University of  Virginia this fall, where I major in linguistics, which is how I ended up applying to work on this summer intensive. Other than languages, I spend a lot of time on the college radio station and buying/cooking/eating/thinking about food. I’m from North Carolina so I’ve already… Read more »

I am originally from Calgary, Alberta, but have been in Kelowna, BC for the past 6 years completing two degrees. I very recently (as in the week before I left for Alaska) defended my Master’s thesis in linguistic anthropology and am currently enjoying my newfound freedom as a non-student for the first time ever. My… Read more »

So many languages, so little time! The WAYK team returned to Fairbanks this spring for two weeks of training with speakers and learners of four Athabaskan languages: Hän, Gwich’in, Deg Xinag, and Denaakk’e. Prior to this visit, in the fall of 2014, the Doyon Foundation organized a series of introductory WAYK workshops in the Fairbanks… Read more »

Our search for summer interns for our St. Paul summer project began in early February, when we opened applications for three WAYK interns sponsored by the Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association. We had an amazing response, and found it very difficult to choose only three interns from all of the highly qualified applicants. After many hours… Read more »

The WAYK team spent a week at the beginning of April in Susanville, California. The language program at Susanville Rancheria, led by Donna Clark, has been hard at work developing a new curriculum for Tosajdom (Mountain Maidu), and brought WAYK in to support their brand new teaching team. The first and last days of the… Read more »

  I began learning my Native language, Lingít, about three years ago. At some point I came to the idea that I would like to eventually teach the language. However, I imagined doing so in a very distant future after many years of dedicated study of the language and time with fluent Lingít elders, when… Read more »

This summer, we are excited to offer three WAYK internship positions that will be sponsored by our host community of St. Paul Island, Alaska through APIA and ACSPI. Participating in a WAYK summer project is one of the best ways to be fully immersed not only in another language but also in the WAYK method… Read more »

It can be hard to imagine what a language revitalization summer looks like, but working to strengthen a language is a full-time job. As with any program centered around language learning, it’s essential that we have daily contact with the language in an immersion environment. However, it’s equally important to have adequate time to relax,… Read more »

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