Story out of Barrow, Alaska:
About 90 minutes into “The Revenant,” as a friendly Pawnee builds a shelter for a trapper left for dead by his companions, a woman’s voice can be heard speaking a Native American language. There’s a lot of Pawnee spoken in the film about the Old West. But these lines are not in Plains Indian Pawnee dialect. They’re in the Inupiaq language of Arctic Alaska, spoken by Doreen Nutaaq Simmonds of Barrow.
Simmonds was watching the Oscar-winning film in Fairbanks with her son and a friend when she unexpectedly encountered her 15 seconds of fame. As the scene unfolded, the friend, who also speaks Inupiaq, suddenly whispered, “Hey! I can understand that!”
“I was so engrossed in what the Indian was doing, that I hadn’t paid attention,” Simmonds said. “But then I started listening more closely. My son said, ‘That’s you, Mom.’ That’s when my ears opened.”
The audio is of Simmonds reciting a poem by a Canadian Inuit featured in the recording of John Luther Adams’ “Earth and the Great Weather.” Cont.
Story from - Alaska Dispatch News
Image from - Day Donaldson - Flickr
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