Читать книгу Racing Toward Recovery. The Extraordinary Story of Alaska Musher Mike Williams Sr. онлайн

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Really, from the time we first started school, the United States government, through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, worked to wipe out our culture. At home we spoke Yupiaq, but when I entered elementary school in the BIA school I started learning to speak in English. It was not a bad thing to learn English, but they would not allow us to speak our native language at all. When we were not in the classroom, though, we spoke Yupiaq with our friends. We just kept speaking it when no one was around to tell us not to do it.

The goal was to make us into good little American boys. They had an assimilation process and that’s what they stuck to doing. We had to learn about Dick and Jane and that nuclear family even if our lives were completely different from the lives that Dick and Jane led. They were always clean—they didn’t get dirty from working outside—and they had a nice car. We didn’t have cars in Akiak. The teachers presented this to us as the ideal, the way we should be and the way we should aspire to be.