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

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If children spoke Yupiaq in school they were punished. Their mouths would be washed out with soap, or they would be hit for speaking their Native language. The teachers were instructed to assimilate the students with other American children. My mother told us stories about that. They were telling us that our way of life was not a good one and their way of life was better and we had to adapt.

Then Sheldon Jackson came around to establish missions and churches. He came to Alaska in 1877 and during his career it was said that he traveled more than a million miles and established more than one hundred missions and churches. Many of them were in Alaska and most of them were in the western part of the United States. He had it in his mind that he was going to save these lost Eskimo and Indian souls. His thinking was that these Yup'ik people are lost and our way of life is better. The feeling was that everyone had to learn English and that’s that.

They taught English. It was made clear to us that it was important and useful to learn English, though in my mind it didn’t have to be force-fed in such a harsh way. One missionary was a man named John Kilbuck, a Delaware Indian. He lived in Akiak and died here and he is the one who told people the importance of learning English. He said it was important to learn as much as we could about the ways of the white man because of what he had seen in the Lower 48. John Kilbuck had studied the history of Indians losing their lands, of being put on tribal reservations and before that the killing of women and children by the government. He was a witness to the Delaware Indians’ loss of their land. He emphasized the story of the settlers and the farmers moving west and taking the land everywhere. He was trying to prepare us for the day that settlers were going to come to Alaska and take the land, to take the resources and put us in a box.