Transcript: Reverend Dr. Michael James Oleksa, Ph.D.
In three generations, people in Alaskan villages have gone from a supportive society to a sense of isolation
- [Oleska:]
- The older generation was raised in the traditional way, and they’re very well grounded in “who I am,” “who we are,” and these protocols, this way of respectfully relating to the world around them. The middle generation never got that because they were away at boarding school, and the third generation at this point doesn’t have a clue. So you can look at a small village and see the elders, the parents, the parental generation, and the teens and young people really seeing the world in three different ways, behaving in three very different ways, and there’s a kind of breakdown— because the elders were living in a fairly healthy, mutually supportive system, and the young people feel isolated, alone, depressed, and self-destructive, and we’ve seen this happen in three generations. I think that that’s happening everywhere. It’s just that in a small isolated Alaskan village you see it happening up close and personal.