Lily Wong Fillmore Breaks New Ground in Work with Native Children in Alaska

The state of Alaska has adopted a high school exit exam similar to the one California plans to implement in 2004, but Alaska's timetable is several years ahead of California's. "Kids in Alaska who are now sophomores will take the test for the first time in 2000," said Professor Lily Wong Fillmore, who came up with some surprising findings when she recently studied how the test may impact children in rural, native villages. "Seniors have to pass the test by 2002 or receive a certificate of attendance, rather than a high school diploma." Educators in Alaska are predicting a failure rate as high as 90% in rural villages.

That chance to glimpse what may happen in California's near future was part of what drew Professor Fillmore to accept an invitation from the Lower Yukon School District to examine the impact that these tests will have on native children. "I went to the villages just to study languages but when you do ethnographic research, you often learn more than you set out to," she remarked, describing why her inquiry quickly expanded to deal with the more sweeping question of how the public education system can best serve the native children she met.

Professor Fillmore, a nationally recognized expert on bilingualism and second-language learners, originally planned to focus only on Village English, the creole spoken in many rural, native communities in Alaska, and its effect on the ability of kids to pass the high school exit exam. "Village English developed some generations ago when the federal government and missionaries herded all the native kids into boarding schools," she said. The children were forbidden to speak their mother tongues, and evolved their own dialect of English, a dialect that gradually became the everyday language of native communities in Alaska.

Accompanied by GSE doctoral students Mary Eunice Romero and Sharon Besser, Lily Wong Fillmore set out to interview a small sample of school children from two rural schools along the Lower Yukon River that had predominantly native populations. "We ended up interviewing 70% of the children in one school and 65% in the other, and many adults as well," said Professor Fillmore. Her team compiled the interviews over two visits, and Fillmore has made a total of nine trips to the state since summer 1999. Why did she expand her study? "There is a persistent belief among educators, locally and nationally, that many Alaskan native children are affected by fetal alcohol syndrome," Professor Fillmore said. "There is a myth that these children are incapacitated by things their parents did before they were born or that their parents have been neglectful in rearing them afterwards," she added.

What she found in her interviews was quite the opposite. "The children are crackly bright," she said. "Their parents have taught them a great deal about the physical and social environment they live in. The children know how to subsist in an unforgiving climate."

She told the story of a six-year-old boy who recounted in detail how to survive if lost out on the tundra. "The boy explained that you should never stick moss into your clothing for insulation, since it holds moisture. He went on to tell me how to beat the moisture out of grass and use it to stuff your clothing, since grass doesn't retain water."

An eleven-year-old boy came into an interview smiling from ear to ear. Asked why, he told the research team that he had been out hunting and had recently made his first kill, an important milestone for males in that culture. "I asked him if he'd given the moose to his mother," said Lily Wong Fillmore. "He explained that following tradition he'd given the kill to his grandma to share with the elders who no longer hunt for themselves, a sign that he was ready to participate as an adult member of the community and to accept the responsibility of providing for the community."

Lily Wong Fillmore credits the open response the team received partly to an unusual tack they took as researchers. "Each of us tried to share a little of our world, so it wasn't just our taking something from them," she said. Mary Eunice Romero, a Native American from Cochiti Pueblo in New Mexico, showed the school children her buffalo dance regalia; Sharon Besser talked about her scuba diving hobby, and about environmental damage to coral reefs; and Lily Wong Fillmore celebrated Chinese New Year with the kids. "I think our approach had a lot to do with the willingness of the children and their families to participate," said Professor Fillmore.

Their research led to difficult questions. While Professor Fillmore praised the dedication of the teachers she met, she observed that not enough is being done yet to help the students get access to the type of academic English they need to improve literacy: "Why haven't these kids for the most part gotten turned on to the zillions of things that can be learned from books? Someone needs to see the language the children speak as a stepping stone and not as a handicap," she asserted. "Teachers are going to need training on language teaching to help the children bridge the linguistic gap between the language they speak and the academic English used in texts." She condemned "myths often invented to deal with our inability to handle the real needs of kids." Reflecting on her experience, she said, "Maybe the kids have just been waiting for someone to listen to them, and to teach them."

Three Yup'ik girls

Lily Fillmore showing the Yup'ik girls how the digital camera works

Lily Wong Fillmore on her interviewing techniques:

In interviewing the children in one of the two villages we visited, I looked for familiar artifacts that would be useful for eliciting language from the children. The best one was a warped spear I found in a storeroom in the school. It was a handmade spear of the type used for hunting seals and walruses.

"What do you think of my spear?" I asked in the interviews.

The youngest children thought it was probably O.K., and would quickly change the subject to topics they would rather talk about. "See there was a rabies fox living in a hole by my house, and it bit my dog, and my dog turned into a werewolf!" Or, "Last week, last week we went to Hooper Bay and my father saw a whale. It was a beluga!"

Every child from the second grade on up, however, had much to say about my spear. I was warned not to try hunting with it. Why not? "Because, well, because it wouldn't work," the children would tell me with great seriousness: "It wouldn't go very far; it would not throw true; it would go where I didn't want it to go; it would wobble," and so on. "And why would it do that?" "Well," the children would say to me, "it's bowed, or bent, or not straight."

"How did it get bent?" I would ask them. "It must have gotten wet," one child guessed. "You have to take care of spears. If they get wet, they sometimes dry like that!"

"How could I straighten it?" I asked each child. "What would happen if I just press down on it?" Some children guessed that if I did that, the shaft would break. The older children told me that it wouldn't work, because the spear would still be bent when I took the pressure off. And how would they try to straighten the spear? Most of the children thought I should just try getting another spear, and to take better care of it so it wouldn't get warped. The older boys thought that I might try wetting the shaft first and drying it out with weights on it.

For me, these interviews were especially telling, not only of the children's command of English, but also of their ability to reason, to formulate hypotheses, and to guess at what would happen under various conditions. Their dialect of English is certainly different from standard English, but they were no less competent in expressing complex ideas than are speakers of standard English. They were able to produce hypothetical and conditional sentences, and they were able to express themselves competently and confidently with a stranger who spoke standard English.

Girl swinging