Language Destruction

Back in 1996, when I’d left Barrow, on my way out; I popped in on Barrow’s Inupiaq Language Immersion Program. Up to that time my understanding was that all was well, and that the kids were doing well. Imagine therefore my surprise, when I was told by the Inupiat director that this was not the case, not at all. You see the Alaskan Eskimo kids were having to stop their vital study at some early age; this so that they could mainstream (Learn that huge lump of largely unneeded information.) The school to be common with most all schools in the USA had no requirement for their language, whatsoever. So it was plain enough. Because of this wanton disregard, the likes of all native languages were doomed. Buried further, of course, by TV and all the rest. For sure then, unique Inupiat culture would soon vanish. And what was school doing?

I sort out one of the kids, Jim, a young fellow who from time to time helped me out. I found him. He was isolated from the rest of the school, struggling to do an utterly pointless (to him, to us all) math test; it was from California. Jim hadn’t been able to answer even a single question. So the school was the problem. Inadvertent perhaps, since the modern era, school was acting - and as planned - as a cultural destruction engine. From out of these currents that I wrote this work, a tool for cultural defence. It was but a short hop from here, to see that what applied to the hopelessly pinned-down native cultures, also applied to all the rest, such as the one million ‘refuser’ kids of Japan, indeed everywhere. So that was it. How it all gelled in my mind. The message of the Raven, if you will.