“We Talk to You Because We Love You”: Learning from Elders at Culture Camp

• Published in: Anthropology and Humanism
• Main Author: Fienup‐Riordan, Ann
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley 2001
• Subjects: Yup'ik; Alaska
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ahu.2001.26.2.173; https://api.wiley.com/onlinelibrary/tdm/v1/articles/10.1525%2Fahu.2001.26.2.173; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1525/ahu.2001.26.2.173; https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1525/ahu.2001.26.2.173

This article explores the activities of the Calista Elders Council (CEC) an example of “culturalism,” that is, the process of self‐conscious, deliberate use of identity, culture, and heritage in the struggle for recognition of a distinctive Yup'ik way of life. Culture camp in southwestern Alaska provides a modern means for the traditional end of training young people to be good listeners and, in their turn, become speakers truth. The emphasis on talk remains, reflecting an indigenous view of how young people should learn and elders should teach. Grandparents, even more than parents, were an important source of moral instruction in the past. Contemporary village children spend much less time in the presence of elders. Through CEC activities, some elders seek to reclaim that space and make their voices heard. Elders at camp presented instruction in group settings, based on their own personal experience: “I tell what I know.” They made no claims to completeness or to imparting the one true faith. Their sense of their own culture was neither essentialist nor bounded, and the emphasis was not on presenting a unified, homogeneous, systematic view, as in some instances of cultural revival and renewal. During evening sessions elders engaged in serious moral discourse. They talked about not only what young people needed to know but how they were expected to learn it. Like the grandmother we honor here, they were teaching nothing less than how to learn.