SFU Linguistics

SHI TO HOST LECTURE ON CONNECTING LANGUAGE LEARNERS: Haida educator to speak about translating a 100-year-old Haida story

Sealaska Heritage Institute (SHI) will host a lecture about what a professor learned when she and her students spent a semester translating a century-old anthropological study on the Haida people.

The lecturer, Dr. Jasḵwaan Bedard, is an assistant professor in the Indigenous Languages Program at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia.

Through her lecture, “Connecting Haida Language Learners Across Borders Through Story,” Dr. Bedard will detail the discoveries she and her students made while transcribing a 1901 document titled "How the Kaigani Migrated to Alaska."

During the fall semester, Dr. Bedard, who is Haida and specializes in X̱aad Kíl (Northern Alaskan Haida,) taught a course called X̱aad Kíl Gyáahlaangdang — Advanced Haida Language Storytelling. The course was offered to students learning X̱aad Kíl and focused on a story called "How the Kaigani Migrated to Alaska,” which was first recorded in 1901 by the American ethnologist John R. Swanton.

To read more, visit https://sealaskaheritage.org/shi-to-host-lecture-on-connecting-language-learners/. To watch the lecture live on SHI's YouTube channel, go to https://www.youtube.com/c/sealaskaheritageinstitute.