GREG SODEN
Opinions Writer

It is difficult to maintain a way of life that isn’t, in some way, attached to the ways of the industrialized Western world.

One way is valued and one way is not. Our schools are set up according to the values of valued Western cultures and ways of knowing. Most of our schools teach us that any knowledge that isn’t written down or recordable in some way is inferior in status and importance.

Even at a progressive university, we still sit in desks and write things while we talk about how there are other styles of education used around the world. We use this method and talk about the others because, in many instances, we teach how we’ve been taught. 

If a family or a community wants to live off the land and reject the Western world, then there is little hope of ever entering it because the knowledge that is possessed by non-Westernized people (self-sustainability, seasonal transient survival, hunting, growing one’s own food, knowledge and spiritual connection to land under foot) is not what is valued in today’s capitalistic society. People don’t matter; it is money that matters.  

When we learn about regions of land around the world, we are learning in the words of the (usually) white scholars who travelled to a place, wrote things down from their perspective, in their language, and took it back to the West to share.

I have no doubt about these scholars’ passion for the places and things they study, but their words, no matter how careful they are, will not accurately capture the knowledge of the land that an indigenous population holds. Living on a piece of land for thousands of years creates a bond with the land that is unmatched because they have been on this land, farmed that land and know every little nuance of nature in the surrounding biome. These nuances cannot be captured and translated into English or German or French because equivalent words simply do not exist. 

Languages around the world are dying because of Western culture and its infiltration. The languages of many populations around the world are going extinct just like our polar bears. I recently read a comparison of this language extinction to “watching someone set fire to half the world’s libraries.” Think about the loss if only one library burns. One per cent of the human race speaks 50 to 60 per cent of all languages spoken by humans. These cultures are the ones constantly being assimilated, marginalized, “civilized” and subsequently destroyed.  

If these cultures are destroyed, how will we learn all that there is to learn about the land these populations inhabit? We will, undoubtedly, send our scientists there, they will learn what they believe to be relevant and then it will be written and published. Knowledge is not easily translated from an indigenous language to one of the 10 dominant languages, so why should we bother? We won’t get the translation right anyway, so let’s teach these people English or French or Spanish and then they can tell us what they know about their ancestral homeland. 

Too bad it will all be lost in translation and we’ll never get it right.