In today’s modern society, it is so difficult to maintain a way of life that isn’t, in some way, attached to the ways of the industrialized western world. One way is valued and one way is not. Our schools are set up in the way of valued western cultures and ways of knowing. Our “schools tend to teach us that any knowledge you can’t write down or externally record in some way is ‘low status knowledge’” (P. 293).
If a family or a community wish to live off the land and reject the western world, then there is little hope of ever entering it because the knowledge that is possessed by these people (self-sustainability, hunting, growing one’s own food, knowledge of land under foot) is not what is valued in today’s economic capitalistic society.
When we learn about regions of land around the world, we are learning in the words of the (usually) white scholars who traveled to a place, wrote things down from their perspective, in their language, and took it back to the western world to share. I have no doubt about these scholars passion for the places and things that they study, but their words will not accurately capture the knowledge of the land that an indigenous population would hold. Living on a piece of land of thousands of years creates a bond with the land that is unmatched because they were on this land, grew up on that piece of land, farmed that land, and know every little nuance of nature in the surrounding biome. These nuances cannot be captured and translated into English or German or French.
If I think of the place that I grew up, I feel as if I know barely anything at all, despite spending 18 years living on the same piece of land. I know that our “lot” was 1/6 of an acre, that it was divided into a parcel of ownership (a concept regarded as absurd by indigenous peoples), and that it backed up to a man-made storm water run-off. There was a remnant of the wooded land that used to inhabit the area that began after the storm water run-off. The wooded land was probably 400 meters across to the houses on the other side, which were clear as day in the winter months when there weren’t any leaves. Having this wooded land behind our house,however small, was considered a major luxury! Other than these trivial observations, I recall pretty much nothing of any deeper connection to the land I grew up on. I know nothing because I never thought to ask. Even if I did want to ask, who would I go to? The Rawles Development Corporation, the company who tore out the trees and put in the streets and houses?
Languages around the world are dying. The speech of indigenous populations around the world are going extinct just like our polar bears. Rasmussen compares this language extinction to “watching someone set fire to half the world’s libraries” (p. 286). One percent of the human race speaks 50-60% of all languages spoken by humans. These populations are the one’s constantly being assimilated, marginalized, “civilized,” and subsequently destroyed.
If these cultures are destroyed, then how will we learn all that there is to learn about the land that these populations inhabit? We will send our scientists there, they will learn what they believe to be relevant, and then it will be written and published. Knowledge is not easily translated from an indigenous language to one of the ten dominant languages, so why should we bother? We won’t get the translation right anyway, so let’s teach these poor bastards English or French or Spanish and THEN they can tell us what they know about their ancestral homeland.
Too bad it will all be lost in translation.
Citation
Rassmussen, D., & Akulukjuk, T. (2009). “My father was told to talk to the environment first before anything else;” Arctic environmental education in the language of the land. In M. McKenzie, P. Hart, H. Bai, & B. Jickling (Eds.), Fields of green: Restorying culture, environment, and education (pp. 285-298). Creskill, NJ: Hampton.
