i gu.aa yáx̱ xʼwán! | have strength and courage!
When someone is having a hard time in Lingít Ḵusteeyí, it is a good time to lift them up. When someone is going to go through something difficult, we encourage them with words. This is one of our most powerful phrases, and is meant to say something like, “be of brave heart” and is a way to show love and support while giving strength.
This 1" button pin is designed by X'unei Lance Twitchell and assembled by our team in-house as a part of our Lingít button pin collection. The collection is made with the intention of promoting the use of Lingít yoo x̱ʼatángi (Lingít language) and to share some concepts that exist within our language. Many of these phrases are ones that we love to use within a community of language users, learners, and teachers that are committed to changing the way things are going with Indigenous languages and place.
Lingít language is alive and in regular use on our community, and those who are on our lands as visitors or residents are invited and encouraged to use our language and end practices of genocide and exclusion. Also, we have fun and challenge ourselves to understand a complex and rich language that has been here since mammoths were walking around.
Also fun: The word for button, like on a blanket or shirt has several forms (ḵaayaka.óotʼi; ḵaayuka.óotʼi; yooka.óotʼ; yaka.óotʼ). All of these derive from the following compound noun ḵaa yaka.óotʼ which I Ḵaanáḵ Ruth Demmert translated as “human made octopus sucker.” Since these buttons have a needle/pin affixed to them, we are calling them át yawdig̱íji yooka.óotʼ (the human-made button that pierces).
Lance Twitchell, PhD, is of Tlingit, Haida, Yupʼik, and Sami heritage with the Tlingit names X̱ʼunei and Du Aaní Kawdinook, and the Haida name Ḵʼeijáakw. X̱ʼunei is an Associate Professor of Alaska Native Languages at the University of Alaska Southeast and is a multimedia artist who works in Northwest Coast Design, poetry, screenwriting, audio, film, and photography. His studies are in creating safe language acquisition spaces and achieving revitalization through counter-hegemonic transformation, which means a rejection of external definitions and fragmentation and a promotion of the thought world of the ancestors of language movements.
small: 1"
large: 1.5"
