Sunday, September 12, 2010
Are you kidding me?!
I CAN NOT believe that survivors of the Great Death would turn over the educations of their children to the missionaries. I mean really?! Yeah sure, you can beat my kids and put soap in their mouths if they speak in yup'ik. And they were threatened to serve in hell if the danced or followed old ways. They taught them to be ashamed of the old ways and that they were evil. What is this going to solve?! What an outrage! These people died! They should be celebrated, not frowned upon.
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Hey, I've mentioned this in some other comments haha but don't forget, these older generation Natives that went through the Great Death, for them it was as if the spirits had abandoned them. Napoleon mentions that to them ,it was as if what they had always believed in was wrong. The Great Death was a crushing blow when they could not cure their own of an illness(remember some illnesses where thought of as illness of the spirit, and was supposed to be fixed by the medicine men). Would you pass on a culture you were no longer sure you could believe in? And to top that seemingly abandonment of the spirits they had the missionaries also telling them they were wrong and were devil worshipers. Combined with the traumitizing death of their people it must have been hard to try and believe in the spirits and yuuyaraq. Now I am not saying its all the fault of the Natives traumitization, but think of how much that would have affected them.
ReplyDeleteWhat confuses me is why they allowed this? Was it that their population was so small that they were easily overtaken by Christians? Or were they just too tired after the Great Death to try and fight anymore?
ReplyDeleteTo some degree is it probably a combination of both factors, but it seems like the great death really caused them to loss faith in what they believed. Which then caused them to feel directionless, and turn to other leaders and a new religion. One that they hoped would serve their children better then the way they percieved their's to have served them.
ReplyDeleteI think that these people entrusted their children's education with the missionaries because they were "too weak" after the Great Death and the devastation that event caused. If the Yup'ik people despised Christianity so much, why didn't they use their own faith to give them strength and teach their own children the "Yup'ik" way?
ReplyDeleteI agree with wilkinson I think they were too weak from what had happened in their past to argue against it. I think the missionaries were promising to do good even though it turned to something bad. I think they didn't use their own faith because it wasn't "working." During the Great Death and Famine they were using their beliefs, like shamans worshipping, but it didn't work. Maybe in their minds these new white people had all the answers.
ReplyDeleteyea, but where in the heck did he say that the Yup'ik despised Christianity? Give me a page number. and read my previous post. and read rachaels post. We throw out a couple of ideas of why we think the yup'ik let the missionaries lead the way.
ReplyDeleteAlthough it doesn't directly say that I think it can be assumed they didn't like them after what the Christians were doing to their children. This isn't in the book but I took an Alaskan Natives class and their was an elderly woman that came in to talk about this time. She told us a story of how she first came to school she didnt know very much English. The christian missionaries were running the school, since she couldn't ask to go to the bathroom in English they wouldn't let her go. Needless to say she couldn't hold it, the psychological effects on a kindergarten or first grader for something like this to happen, I think would generate a lot of hate towards he christians
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