Outsiders Are Not Not Saving A Language By Learning It.

Outsiders are not not saving a language by learning it.

While I’m personally grateful services like Tribalingual exist, creating some academic access to Indigenous languages, particularly for Indigenous diaspora (if they can afford it), I’m extremely dubious of the notion that a outsiders learning an Indigenous language is somehow “saving” it. There was a testimonial from some white American girl learning Ainu itak, and she spoke of it as if she were collecting some rare Pokemon card before it went out of print or something, framing it in typical dying Native rhetoric. What is she going to do with Ainu itak, except as some obscure lingual trophy?

If you want to save a language, save the people.

Language means nothing without history and culture breathing life into it, and in turn we are disconnected from our history and ancestors without it. Support Indigenous quality of life, ACCESS to quality education, quality health services (mental and physical), land and subsistence rights, CLEAN DRINKING WATER, advocate against police brutality and state violence, DEMAND ACTION FOR MISSING AND MURDERED INDIGENOUS WOMEN.

Damn, if you really want to “save the language” pay for an Indigenous person’s classes for them to reconnect to their mother tongues. I’m not saying outsiders shouldn’t learn languages they’re invited to learn, but don’t pretend like you learning conversational Ainu itak is saving it from extinction.

More Posts from Copperfingertips and Others

copperfingertips

6 years ago

The Insect Apocalypse Is Here

What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth?

~ the pondering muse🌙

Where have all the bugs gone? That’s what this post tries to answer and if you’re like me and hadn’t really noticed the lack of bugs recently, you’ll understand why this is such a big deal after reading the article. However, before we dive into this article, I want to share with you what I’ve noticed.

I’ve lived in Missouri for almost 19 years now, about a decade ago I remember windshields so full of bug splats that you couldn’t see out of it while driving down the highway and cringing at the *thump* of especially large bugs when they hit. I remember a season where when I rode my bike around town I couldn’t not hit a grasshopper because there were more than I could count all over the roads and fields. Last summer however? I remember pulling a single butterfly from the grill of my dad’s truck. That’s it… There were no more bugs. …

Here’s how plentiful our world used to be. We tend to think that the environmental conditions that we are born into are normal, but it is anything but normal.

“In “The Once and Future World,” the journalist J.B. MacKinnon cites records from recent centuries that hint at what has only just been lost: “In the North Atlantic, a school of cod stalls a tall ship in midocean; off Sydney, Australia, a ship’s captain sails from noon until sunset through pods of sperm whales as far as the eye can see. … Pacific pioneers complain to the authorities that splashing salmon threaten to swamp their canoes.” There were reports of lions in the south of France, walruses at the mouth of the Thames, flocks of birds that took three days to fly overhead, as many as 100 blue whales in the Southern Ocean for every one that’s there now. “These are not sights from some ancient age of fire and ice,” MacKinnon writes. “We are talking about things seen by human eyes, recalled in human memory.”“

So, when you read the above article, please understand how dire these circumstances are for us and our planet. Ok, so what are the highlights of the article?

“A 2013 paper in Nature, which modeled both natural and computer-generated food webs, suggested that a loss of even 30 percent of a species’ abundance can be so destabilizing that other species start going fully, numerically extinct — in fact, 80 percent of the time it was a secondarily affected creature that was the first to disappear.”

- Drastic drops in insect populations have been recorded globally.

- World’s largest king penguin colony shrank by 88%.

- Blue-fin Tuna populations have shrunk 97%.

- 60% decrease in total wild land animal populations.

- 96% of the planet’s biomass now is humans and livestock. Wild animals represent less than 4%. …

- 10-60% less arthropod biomass in Puerto Rico.

- 50-80% drops in partridges from France due to the lack of insects they eat.

- 50% of all farmland birds in Europe are gone.

- Birds which rely on insects may be starving to death due to their collapse.

These are some drastic decreases and we tend to forget that all species are connected. When we loose one species, we can loose all the species that rely on it. We need to recognize what is happening around us with our environment and our planet. We need to know, that what we are seeing today, isn’t normal.

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copperfingertips

6 years ago