Culture change

ProfessorPodles has an article about a book by an Anglo who grew up on the Navajo reservation. Go and read it.

A lot of it sounds accurate: The bullying is common and brutal because AmerIndians don't use physical punishment for bad children. Instead they "tease" them. The child is not supposed to show anger, so it comes out with rage incidents.

So when the police chief's son, abused by an alcoholic father (who later killed himself) and an alcoholic mother (who died in a car accident) later turned on his classmates (even though he was by then home schooled) and shot them in Red Lake, I was not surprised.

And the Chippewa were fishermen, not warriors, but never mind.

It sounds brutal in the book, maybe because he was an "outsider" who confronted different ways of reacting (i.e. an "ain't it awful" book, which nowadays is called realism. It is not, of course.).

So what do you do when you work with a dysfunctional culture? Or a culture that functions in the old days but when confronted with the modern world morphs into a severely dysfunctional culture?

Here is what I wrote as a comment:

Sounds about right, and the irony is that the Navajos are more in touch with their traditions than other tribes (i.e. language–we doctors often need a translator; the death taboos, clothing, way of life).

The “hazing” is because many Indian tribes don’t use physical punishment to correct their children: They “tease” children to control behavior.

But Navajos were never warriors, but sheep-herders, so I think the “repression” of masculinity doesn’t fit them like it would the Blackfoot or Apache or Sioux.

The problem is not limited to Indians, or whites: it is culture shock when one meets a “superior” technological culture. How do you cope/adjust without losing your soul: a struggle that goes back at least to the time of the Macabees or the Roman conquests of Gaul, and is behind today’s jihadi suicide bomber….

Multiculturalism suggests not to encourage change allowing people to live their ancestral life (for example,South African apartheid), others merely insist the child change to the dominant culture (Han Chinese in Tibet, Amerindian boarding schools).

I was told to read Tony Hillerman to understand Navajo culture. The film “Smoke Signals” and the Australian film “Once was warriors” also were recommended to understand tribal culture in transition.