We are pleased to share another great video from WAYK player and filmmaker Sky Hopinka. Sky joined the WAYK team on St. Paul Island for the 2015 Summer Intensive as a returning intern. Even though his focus was on teaching our newest WAYK interns and guiding the local team through hunting language and developing lessons, he still carved out time for several video projects. By the end of the summer, Sky had recorded sessions with fluent speakers, filmed and edited sample video lessons, and offered support to other team members who were working on their own audio/video tasks. Somewhere in there, Sky also created this short video for WAYK that captures the Summer Intensive experience.

Looking back on the summer a few months later, there are a few things that stand out about our time on St. Paul. First, the sheer size of our team made this our largest Summer Intensive to date; 28 (!) people in total participated over the course of the summer, including fluent speakers, local youth, volunteers from across the region, WAYK interns and staff, a university linguist, the tribe’s cultural director, and the local school’s language teacher. Second, a huge variety of activities happened, often simultaneously, every day. We hunted language from speakers, developed lessons from these hunts, documented our findings, learned songs, created immersion games, shared Techniques, practiced teaching, revisited and revised lessons, and facilitated community events.  Lastly, in order to keep track of so many people and activities, we developed and refined a number of organizational tools that helped us immensely.  You’ll see posters, post its, and glimpses of our meetings scattered throughout Sky’s video. There’s no way we would have reached our goals for the summer (developing 50+ new lessons and organizing them into a structured curriculum that everyone could teach) without the help of these tools.

We hope that Sky’s video leaves you with an impression of the joy that everyone experienced while participating in the summer project, the growing confidence of the local teenage learners (both in terms of fluency and leadership), and the beauty of our host community, St. Paul, Alaska.

To read more about the 2015 St. Paul Summer Intensive, click here. For more WAYK videos, be sure to check out our Video Library.  And stay tuned for announcements about our upcoming 2016 Summer Intensive!

Written by Evan Gardner