Transcript: Reverend Dr. Michael James Oleksa, Ph.D.
[Oleska:]
And another thing the teacher would say, “You must not speak your indigenous language here in this school, on school property during school time.” She says this in perfectly clear English. Of course, the kids don’t understand a word of it. And after an hour or two the five and six-year-olds in the front row are getting fidgety, and Evan says to Nicolai [in Native language], “What’s she saying? I can’t understand her”—violating school rule number two. Those boys usually get slapped across the mouth. None of the other children have ever seen another child being physically abused. Everyone gets quiet for the next nine years. I asked my wife what it was like to go to such a school. When did you begin to understand anything? She says, “About fourth grade.” You sat through three years of schooling without understanding basically anything that was going on? She said, “No, but we used to play school.” Used to play school? What happened? “Yeah, at recess.” You went outside and slapped each other around for 15 minutes. She said, “No, no, we sat on the ground in rows, and the play teacher stood in front of the others and went, [nonsense words], and we’d raise our hands and pretend to speak English as well and answer in the same way [nonsense words]. That was school.” I told that story among Tlingit people a few years ago, and an elderly Tlingit woman said to me “You remind me, Father Michael, we used to play school, too.” “How?” “The same way. We sat in rows on the ground, but we didn’t go [nonsense words].” “What did you do?” She said, “Well, we were Tlingit, we said la-la-la-la lalala.”
[Lindberg:]
So that’s what English sounds like?
[Oleksa:]
That’s the way English sounded to a Tlingit kid. Well, what I’m saying, though, is that the entire community, not just the children, became rather confused and frustrated in the first generation or so of schooling. Who are these people? What are they doing to our kids? And, of course, when the child came home and said “My teacher slapped me,” the Yup’ik mother would say, “Well, then don’t go back there anymore. You don’t have to go.” The parents were just as much in the dark— who these people were and what the point of all of this was.