Anchorage Daily News

Hers was one of the first voices they'd ever heard speaking Inupiaq on the radio.

That's what Eskimos in Northern Alaska still tell Mildred Sampson about her mother, Ruthie, who began translating Bible verses while still in her teens and spent the rest of her life spreading and teaching the endangered language.

When it came to Inupiaq, Ruthie Tatqavin Sampson was the final word for many. She spent years teaching the teachers. Stumped scholars called her with questions.

When it was time to translate the New Testament to Inupiaq, or write a new dictionary, Ruthie -- an Inupiat who grew up in Selawik -- polished the text.

"She seemed to realize that if we don't do anything, we are going to lose our language," said Marie Greene, president of Nana Regional Corp., which tapped Sampson to help create a version of the Rosetta Stone computer program to teach people Inupiaq.

Friends and family expected Sampson to continue sharing the language for decades to come. She was already working on another version of the computer program, this one focused on a different dialect, when she visited Anchorage last week.

Linda Lee, Sampson's longtime friend and colleague, made the trip too.

On Friday, Sampson stopped by Jo-Ann Fabrics to buy yarn for the Shungnak women's sewing night.

"She claimed to not be a seamstress, but she could fake it very well and pretend to sew and hum along and be in the crowd," Lee joked.

To the dismay of friends and family, Sampson suffered a massive stroke at the store. She passed into a coma and died on Sunday.

She was 54.

Her family in Anchorage gathered Wednesday at a downtown funeral home. Dozens of people lined the lobby, waiting to say goodbye.

For several minutes, the crowd waited silently.

Then, moved by the moment, everyone began to sing -- "Praying for You." They sang the first verse in English, the second in Inupiaq.

It was Ruthie who encouraged people to learn songs in their Native language, Greene said.

She was always teaching. Mildred said her mother would speak Inupiaq to friends when they called on the phone.

"She'd e-mail me in Eskimo," said Ruthie's sister-in-law, Elsie Sampson Vaden,

Sampson taught Inupiaq to college students online and after a short stint working for KOTZ radio in the 1970s, according to a written biography, spent much of her career running the bilingual language program for the Northwest Arctic Borough School District.

"Before she got there, there was hardly any bilingual program ... in the district," said Carolyn Smith, a former co-worker in Kotzebue.

The Friends Church -- Ruthie and her husband, Luke, are pastors -- sent the Sampsons to Shungnak in 2004. Ruthie would translate four Sundays worth of Bible verses and text and send it to the villages around Kotzebue each month, Lee said.

Ruthie's body is headed back home. The family plans to hold a funeral today in Shungnak, followed by Saturday services in Selawik.

Sampson would probably have shied away from the attention. For all her language expertise and respected position in her community, friends say she was more of a listener than a talker.

"She was a woman of few words," Sampson Vaden said. "But what she said was very important."

In a 1998 story about Kotzebue tourism and the revered role of elders in Native culture, Sampson told The New York Times how she viewed death -- others' and her own:

"When your time comes, your time comes," she said. "You can't go over it, beside it or under it. You have to go through it."

Find Kyle Hopkins' political blog online at adn.com/alaskapolitics or call him at 257-4334.

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