The history of Alaska from the Russian period to the present has impacted life so significantly that the cultural identity of the Native peoples now faces extinction. Ironically, education has had the most profound impact on cultural preservation and destruction efforts. The Russian Era marked the beginning of literacy and documentation of the Alaska Native languages. In 1867, Russia sold Alaska to the United States. America was primarily interested in economic gain, not Native culture. Overtly, missionary teachers systematically destroyed Native language and culture as part of a plan to assimilate indigenous peoples from their barbaric ways into mainstream, Christian, American society and culture. Currently, all twenty Alaska Native languages are critically endangered and soon may become extinct.
The Russian period was from 1741-1867. The first Russians that came to Alaska were not under government control, but were fur hunters. They simultaneously endangered both the sea otter and the Aleut people. As a result, The Aleut Native population was reduced from 16,000 to about 1,600. Next, from about 1785-1825, the Russian-American Company under Shelikov at Kodiak established permanent settlements and increased government control. Treatment of the Native people improved from outright slaughter and massacre to mere enslavement and exploitation in the pursuit of more sea otter skins. In 1824, a humane missionary, Ioann Veniaminov, arrived in the Aleutians, bringing with him an interlude of enlightenment and benign Russian influence in the colony. This is the last time that outsiders influence would be advantageous to Alaskan Native cultures and languages.
The Russian Orthodox Church and its educational system brought literature and literacy to Alaska Native cultural history. Veniaminov worked with Aleut chief Ivan Pan’kov to adapt a Slavonic alphabet to Aleut and had translated a catechism. (Previous to this, all Native languages were oral in nature and had no alphabet.) Subsequently, wide-spread literacy developed in other Alaska Native languages and cultures; at first, in relation to the church and church school activity.
In 1887, the Americans came to Alaska seeking riches in the canning and mining industries, and American church missions and schools were established. The first Commissioner of Education for Alaska (1885-1908) was Presbyterian missionary Sheldon Jackson who, unlike Veniaminov, did not believe there was a place for Native languages in education or religion. For the next eighty years in Alaska history, the old assimilation tradition reprimanded and/or discouraged Native children from speaking their ancestral language. Not until the civil rights movements of the 1960’s was there a resurrection of interest in Alaskan Native linguistics and culture.
Those eighty years of negative indoctrination of Native linguistics and culture has resulted in a detrimental sacrifice, with several generations brainwashed into the notion that Native languages are inferior, unfavorable to childrens’ livelihoods and professions. Cultural indoctrination, combined with the ridiculous notion that because teachers typically only have modeled fluency in one language, English, it is harmful to burden one’s brain with more than one language, or perhaps that it is hopeless to speak two languages well, contributes to the decline of Native languages. Because of the unrelieved repression of Native languages, cultural extinctions are now a serious possibility for the coming century. Linguistic anthologists project that by about 2055 all Alaskan Native languages will have vanished unless immediate preservation efforts are made.
Language is considered to be the most crucial part of a culture. Language provides the means by which beliefs, behavior, ideas, customs, etc. are transmitted through society. “The only way a language can survive as a living spoken language is if children learn that language as their first language and transmit it to their own children the way it was transmitted to them” (Krauss, 66). Alaska Native languages have survived to the present day by oral traditions, distributed for innumerable generations by those who have formed, refined, and perfected those customs according to their own culture into a rational heritage of multifaceted beauty, unique to each individual. Native cultural suicide is currently happening; the generation that is now able to speak Native and English, but is speaking English only the children, is directly responsible for recklessly abandoning their heritage.
Since Jackson’s days of Native linguistic and cultural eradication, an additional enemy has surfaced. The battleground has now spread like an infectious disease from the classroom directly into homes. Internet, radio, and televisions are aiding in Alaska Native cultural annihilation. Every day, satellites bring mainstream America into homes via a direct feed. Programmings, unfortunately, are not conceived by or about the Native people themselves. Rural Alaskan television is not locally controlled. Imaginative and determined media personnel must work together to take active control and transform television and radio to the service of preserving Native heritage. There must be a desire for conservation efforts by the Native cultures if any efforts are to be impacting and lasting.
Efforts within schools could also assist in the battle against Native heritage extinction. Aside from being unrealistic, it is unfair to hold the educational institution solely responsible for the preservation of Native languages and cultures. All too frequently, the teachers within the schools are not Native, and thus lack the appropriate perspective. Successful Native language preservation in the schools is only realistic by considering the current linguistic work (and how that manifests into literature) and then on the materials and training available to teachers. To bring about any true and permanent linguistic and cultural revival, parents and the community must continuously work together with the schools.
As the village Secondary Generalist in bush Alaska, I have experienced, first-hand, the affects of the last 143 years of assimilation efforts. I live in Pedro Bay, Alaska, where the only semi-fluent Native speakers of the Dena’ina language are in their sixties or older. Admittedly, the current situation is extremely disheartening. The culture is dying, and with it so will the village. The absence of subsistence activities combined with the inability to obtain any sort of income outside the Village Council paid-positions has forced too many of the local Natives to relocate to a place where they could earn a living. There are only two families left. There are only nine students attending the school, and three of those children belong to the non-native elementary school teacher. After this year, the Dena’ina School will be forced to close indefinitely because there will not be the state-required ten students present to have the funding to keep the doors open.
Inserting a little clarification here, as of right now I know of only 2 elders that speak the Iliamna Dialect of the Dena'ina Athabascan fluently, and both are over 80 years of age. There is a third person who understands, but does not speak, he to is over 80 years of age.
ReplyDeletePedro Bay was settled by a white man, the native culture was left behind in the Old Ilamna Village. Yes, we hunt, we fish, we live off the land, but the social side of our culture has been forgotten. When my parents and grandparents lived in Old Iliamna, the native dances, tea parties, potlatches and, subsistence way of life was practiced more. But . . . that is where the decline of our culture started, because that is where the Dena'ina were punished for speaking the native language. Language is part of culture.