Alaska lawmakers passed a bill last week that adds several Indigenous languages to Alaska’s official list of languages.

A version of the bill, sponsored by Juneau Rep. Andi Story, was approved by the Senate and then OK’d by the House last week. It was originally passed in the House last year. Now it heads to the governor.

Earlier this year, Story, a Democrat, called the changes included in the bill an important step in recognizing all of the 23 distinct Alaska Native languages in the state. 

“This reflects the goal of sustaining and reinvigorating Alaska Native languages, a concept that goes beyond preservation,” she said. 

The languages that the bill adds to the official list are Cup’ig, Middle Tanana, Lower Tanana and Wetał. Middle and Lower Tanana were previously classified as just one language. 

According to a recent report from the council, there are currently no high-proficiency speakers of the Wetał language. It comes from the Portland Canal region of Southeast Alaska and British Columbia.

The bill also expands and renames the Alaska Native Language Preservation and Advisory Council. The council advocates to promote the survival and revitalization of Indigenous languages in the state. It will now be called the Council for Alaska Native Language. 

The bill adds two seats to the council and moves it from the Department of Commerce to the Department of Education and Early Development to better emphasize the council’s focus on education. 

In testimony earlier this year, the chairman of the council, X̱ʼunei Lance Twitchell, said he supports the bill and argued Indigenous languages need to be a bigger priority for the state. Twichell teaches Alaska Native languages at the University of Alaska Southeast. 

“Alaska Native languages are the oldest living resource in Alaska,” he said. “These languages are older than the trees, they’re older than some of the rocks, and none of us are qualified to make the decision that they should not exist anymore.”

He said it’s crucial that these languages are recognized as the valuable and historic resources that they are.  

“Every single Alaska Native language is sacred and irreplaceable,” he said. “It contains concepts that cannot be translated, it contains things that cannot be replaced, and that give a sense of fulfillment and wholeness and health to Alaska Natives and to non-natives in Alaska.”

The bill passed unanimously in the Senate. In the House, only Rep. David Eastman, a Wasilla Republican, voted against it. He argued some of the languages proposed, like Wetał, are not spoken regularly and should not be added to the official list.

A spokesperson for Gov. Mike Dunleavy did not directly respond to questions asking whether the governor plans to sign the bill.

As time runs out for Alaska lawmakers to address a recent court ruling that rattled the state’s correspondence education programs, a proposal has emerged for state officials to track their spending for the first time in a decade.

The Alaska Department of Education and Early Development does not track whether or not correspondence school allotment money is spent constitutionally. That duty falls to districts, said Commissioner Deena Bishop.

“That is not a function of the Department of Education,” she said, adding that there are no regulations or statutory requirements that it do so.

Bishop said there are no reporting requirements, either, so districts do not have to give an account of the spending back to the state. That means the education department does not have a tally of how much state money has gone to materials from private organizations in the last decade.

That could change if lawmakers adopt a proposal aimed at stabilizing the programs in the wake of a Superior Court ruling that threw out two provisions of the law that governs the program. House Bill 400, a proposal from the House Education Committee, would temporarily set guidelines for the programs that allow two key components of the correspondence program, individualized learning plans and allotments of state money for educational materials, to continue.

House Education Committee Co-Chair Rep. Justin Ruffridge, R-Soldotna, said his intent is that it would also establish parameters to conduct audits. “DEED used to perform audits — regularly, actually — of correspondence programs,” he said, and added that the requirement was taken out of statute in 2014.

Superior Court Judge Adolf Zeman ruled that state allotment money could not be used to pay for private school tuition, a growing practice following changes to state law that green-lit spending at private and religious institutions. The ruling raised the question of how much state allotment money went to private school tuition.

Ruffridge’s office could only come up with an anecdotal answer in the absence of state oversight. “We’ve done a lot of phone calls with different programs. They don’t think it’s a large sum. But it’s more than zero. So, more than zero is — needs to be looked at,” he said.

It is now up to the Supreme Court to decide what kind of spending is constitutional for these programs in Alaska. The language in HB 400 is such that the law would be relevant even if a constitutional amendment to allow allotment spending on religious materials, which has been proposed by members of the House, were approved. The legislation would sunset at the beginning of next July.

The Senate has also proposed a solution, Senate Bill 266, which would also preserve allotments and learning plans. It differs from the House proposal in that it proposes additional student testing requirements and allotment spending restrictions.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy and Bishop have indicated they favor the House version. Bishop praised its “simple language” and said she has been in communication with the state’s correspondence program principals to keep them apprised of the potential changes and the department’s position.

The Supreme Court has scheduled a June 25 court date to hear the state’s appeal to the ruling, five days before Zeman’s ruling would take effect. Dunleavy has indicated he may call a special session of the Legislature after the ruling to make clear what is available through correspondence programs.