> Ed, > > You sound like an economist. My former student and my daughter's God > mother Jane Lind is Aleut. She is a world class actress who has performed > all over the world including Peter Brooks "The Birds" and the Serban "Greek > Trilogy" in Athens and in the amphitheater at Epidoris. Theater > Communications Journal called her one of America's treasures. She has > recieved most of the awards in the business. She has spent the last few > years working with and rescuing the indigenous theater and art forms as well > as the music and language in Alaska. There is a great wealth there and it > would be crime to let all of that experience and richness disappear. Like > I said it is a dark age akin to the burning of the library at Alexandria. > (I'll probably catch hell for that comparison.) > > Ray Evans Harrell >
Ray and Selma, I don't mean to sound like an economist and, deep down inside, I do mourn the passing of languages and of culturally different lenses for seeing reality. When I spent a lot of time in the Mackenzie Valley, the Yukon and other northern places during the past four decades, I tried very hard to see the world the way Native people of those places saw it. I couldn't of course, at least not completely. What ever so many young Native people were trying to do at the same time was see the world as I saw it. They had a much easier time of it than I did because things were loaded in my direction and the direction of my society. Their society, at least in its traditional forms, was passing, mine was ascending. Many of them became politicians and bureaucrats able to operate in my world far better than I could ever have hoped to operate in theirs. They are still able to operate in their world, though it is no longer the world in which they work or depend on, so it may be fading for them. That is the upside story. The downside is something else that I've seen many, many times as well. It's young kids, laughing at a grandmother, because she is giving them hell in a native language they no longer understand. Or it's teens, trying to be oh so cool, oh so modern, just like they've seen on TV. Or it's far, far worse than that: sniffing gas, doing drugs, and not really being able to see reality through any kind of lens at all. Things pass. It's sad, and one can only hope that the outcome is not destructive. Often it is. Ed Ed Weick 577 Melbourne Ave. Ottawa, ON, K2A 1W7 Canada Phone (613) 728 4630 Fax (613) 728 9382
