This is anecdotal - but I have lived many years in the village and I notice a trend. Many Native youth are ill-equipped by their education to obtain employment, unable to fit in the "outside world", and lacking in subsistence and traditional knowledge due to spending their formative years in school rather than on the tundra and sea. Often, kids have neither the tools nor the skillet to live comfortably in either lifestyle, and creates a sense of displacement. Perhaps this is a telling indictment of the colonialist mindset our schools in rural Alaska have, they do not value the teaching of a traditional lifestyle, and seek to adjust students to "reality" so they can "make it in society" and not "waste their life in the village", I have heard this exact phrasing countless times before, having worked and lived in several villages for around half of my life. This inabillity of many youth to fit in in either the outside world or their traditional life leads to a conflicted identity, they are not accepted nor integrated in either lifestyle, and as a result, lack workskills and subsistance skills. Again, not all youth, but this is a common issue. This dichotomy between the outside, and the village, this internal struggle and sense of cultural and familial trauma leads to alcoholism and depression, issues that already naturally exist in many other northern environments, perhaps due to the effects of SAD. Schools can be better, they can incorporate Traditional Ecological Knowledge into their material without a need for compromising on the quality of their standard curriculum. Both systems can complement each other, and their is neither a need to push students to leave the community, often end up stranded without a support structure, nor say the village is the only place you should end up. Both options can be presented, with opportunities like trade school, the national guard, and native colleges, rather than a vague plan to move to Anchorage and study at UAA, just to be introduced to drugs and alcohol on a scale that is not found in the village, perpetuating the cycle of addiction when they may not be emotionally ready to handle these unknown stimulus and temptations.
Dylan, Thank you for sharing these observations from your experience in villages. The conflicted identity you describe is a significant tension and one that relates to many of the binaries and dichotomies we have been tracing in our readings, but here it is presented as a cause of confusion and a trauma at the level of lived experience. Indeed we are learning that such distinctions between tradition and "progress", between village and city, between politics and poetics, physically maims our existence as individual subjects and it paralyzes our thinking about time and change just as surely as it alienates us from our speech itself.
ReplyDeleteThe move to decolonize education in recent years has strengthened and it is vital to implement its lessons into education practice today. How might Napoleon's proposal contribute to a vision of decolonizing education in Alaska?
I really appreciate that perspective and I definitely agree that being at a crossroads between these two environments is a likely stressor for Alaska Natives. That is definitely an issue that is increasing in the 21st century and combined with the observed issues that Napoleon identifies is even more cause for concern.
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