COLONIZATION: CONTINUED

In Thursday’s post I shared an experience in which a white male told me that American/Western/white culture were superior to Native cultures. American culture brought Western medicine and Western education and Native people should embrace American culture. In short, he was racist and made several racist statements that reminded me of the historical notion of the “uncivilized” or “savage” Natives. 

Alaska Natives, like many many other Indigenous groups worldwide, were considered “uncivilized” or “savages.” To be “civilized” meant to relinquish tribal affiliations and assimilate into mainstream American society. This meant that Indigenous people were to be re-named, "educated," and Christianized, among other things. You can see what Smith meant when she wrote that colonization brought “disorder” to Indigenous peoples’ worlds; how it fragmented our realities.

Some missionaries renamed several families in our region. My family surnames are Knox and Greene. Other common names to this day are “Washington,” “Lincoln,” "Cleveland," (presidential names...?) “Black,” “Brown,” etc. Though we still give Inupiaq names to our children, most of us have English first names.  My grandparents speak Inupiaq as their first language but most of the younger generations are English-only. Why? I’m sure that the fact that my aana was punished in school for speaking Inupiaq played a key role in that. The missionaries must have scared the heck out of our elders because in my family, we were not allowed to Inupiaq dance because the missionaries had deemed it “evil.”

In elementary school in Kotzebue, we had something akin to “Inupiaq week.” An Inupiaq teacher would come and teach us Inupiaq words. We also had Inupiaq dancers who would teach us dances - the teacher would stand in front of the class and show us the movements to various dances. I wanted to join so badly but I remember not participating because I knew that it would displease my aana. I wanted to learn but I didn’t want to go against her wishes. So I sat in the back and watched. 

Our languages, our names, our ways of being, all disordered.