Kenaitze presenters demonstrate 'spruce' method to teach Dena'ina reading and oral skills

At a lunch-and-learn hosted by Representative Elam, Dr. Joel Isaac and Jennifer Williams of the Kenaitze Indian Tribe demonstrated teaching materials and activities aimed at rebuilding Dena'ina language literacy for students and community members.

The presentation focused on a culturally rooted “spruce” method that combines song, segmented listening activities, flash cards and a visual grammar chart to teach pre-literacy, phonemic awareness, phonics and sentence comprehension in Dena'ina.

Dr. Joel Isaac, director of Dena'ina culture and language for the Kenaitze Indian Tribe, opened by explaining the pedagogical challenge: many students do not grow up speaking Dena'ina, so the program emphasizes pre-literacy listening and speaking before introducing text. “One of the things that we do for pre literacy ... is songs,” Isaac said, describing a songbook built to train students to hear and produce the language’s vowel contrasts. Jennifer Williams, manager of the Dena'ina Language Institute, highlighted tools for teachers and learners, saying, “If you learn what sounds correspond with what letters, it doesn't change,” and adding that the tribe provides audio files so learners can hear words at full, half and quarter speed.

Presenters demonstrated a sequence of classroom activities: vowel warm-ups using a four-vowel system that can produce multiple sounds; immersion flash-card games with pictures and no English text; a 20-prefix “spruce” mapping that links morphemes to parts of a spruce tree to teach morphology and sentence building; and short instructional texts that remove pictures as students advance. Volunteers from the room helped build a physical “spruce tree” grammar chart to model how stems, classifiers and suffixes assemble into verb complexes.

The presenters described technical points teachers must notice in Dena'ina instruction: vowels carry dense morphological meaning; certain back velar or uvular consonants (described in the presentation as “back velars” or “uvulars”) lower vowels; and stems and suffixes occupy different zones that affect comprehension. Isaac and Williams showed an alphabet poster, baby board books, pocket dictionaries with IPA charts, and a set of classroom-ready flash cards and instructional texts. Williams said the pocket dictionary includes an IPA vowel chart and that the tribe has uploaded audio and flashcard recordings to a SoundCloud page and a tribe-hosted web resource called “Kenai Keywords.”

Presenters gave several program details from the session: the teaching packet emphasizes four orthographic vowels (which can produce additional sounds); phoneme inventories used in materials include roughly 40–50 sounds across Dena'ina dialects; and a set of baby board books was in transit, described as being on a barge to Alaska. Isaac said the tribe's more recent, organized language project dates to 2016 and credited earlier documentation efforts and elder speakers for enabling the current classroom materials.

Attendees included members of the Kenaitze tribal council (identified in the meeting as Council Chair Bernadine and Council Secretary Ronette), tribal education staff, Representative Elam (host) and Senator Bergman (who stopped in). The presentation closed with an explanation of the cultural grounding of the method: presenters tied the “spruce” concept to a traditional story used to frame vocabulary and grammar instruction and emphasized family- and community-based events such as language-focused family nights.

There were no formal votes or actions taken at the session. Presenters said instructional resources and audio recordings are available online through the Kenaitze Tribe’s web resources and SoundCloud; they remained after the session to answer questions and distribute materials.

Resources and next steps mentioned during the presentation included pocket dictionaries with IPA charts, an audio companion for every phrase in the instructional texts, baby board books (limited supply), the Kenai Keywords audio/text beta, and teacher materials that mark lowered vowels for classroom instruction. Presenters also asked for classroom volunteers and recommended hands-on activities (magnetized morpheme cards, flash cards and a physical spruce grammar chart) for different student ages.

The demonstration emphasized that Dena'ina instruction requires different sequencing than English reading instruction: prioritize oral and listening skills (songs and immersion) before moving to text, explicitly mark lowered vowels during learning phases, and remove picture supports as students demonstrate comprehension. Presenters described the approach as a dual-goal effort that aims to restore Dena'ina fluency while strengthening English reading and grammar skills as a byproduct of the method.

After the formal presentation, presenters answered audience questions about dialect variation and phoneme counts and reiterated that instructional audio is posted online and that some printed materials are still en route. Dr. Isaac said the language effort is part of a multi-decade effort rooted in earlier elder-linguist partnerships and framed the classroom work as part of cultural restoration and intergenerational healing.

Supporters and attendees were invited to take limited baby board books and to access the tribe’s audio and instructional materials online. Presenters remained on site briefly after the session for individual questions and distribution of materials.