I'm chiding myself for something I wrote yesterday. I talked of feeling badly about the damage 'my people' have caused 'their people', meaning Inuit, over the years. Afterwards, I realized that I had done a fine job of absolving myself from any personal blame. However I did live in Iqaluit for three years, and looking back, I realize that I managed to inflict my own values on people I came in contact with, just as white people who came before me had done. Here is a case in point:
For part of my time there, I was the senior news editor for CBC. I had a newsroom of three, including one Inuk reporter. Each newscast was bilingual: first presented in Inuktitut and then in English (or maybe it was the other way around, I can't remember). At times there were stories that were very uncomfortable for my Inuit staff to deal with. They tried to tell me that in their culture, this wouldn't be a story, or this wouldn't be something that people would want to hear on a newscast. I argued back that while it might be uncomfortable for them, it had to be done, since it wouldn't be right to leave out stories done in English from the Inuktitut newscast. After all, when it came right down to it, news was news no matter what the language, right? And after all, I was the expert in these things, having gone to journalism school, right? My compromise was to allow them to re-arrange the order of the stories, so that the more uncomfortable stuff was buried in the newscast.
Now I shake my head at my ignorance and narrowmindedness. Of course there would have been no problem with having different stories on the Inuktitut version of the news. It makes perfect sense that, depending on what was taking place on any given day, there could have been completely different content in each version. I wonder why I couldn't see that at the time. I wonder if anything has changed in that regard since my time there. It raises the question: in what ways am I still imposing my values on people from cultures different from my own?
2 comments:
That's an interesting observation, Janet. I think of myself as a pretty tolerant and inclusive person, but perhaps we impose ourselves on others in ways we don't realize. Sometimes I think I just get a particular idea in my head and it doesn't occur to me to change it until I latch onto something else.
It's not necessarily always bad, though. When I lived in Germany 13 years ago, my friends kind of teased me about my catch-phrase of the time, "think positive!" But it turns out it did them a lot of good.
We did a lot of work on this topic when I did the 'Worldwork' seminars with Arnie Mindell down in Oregon in the mid-nineties. It was a real eye-opener for me and I came away feeling guilty and a little paranoid about what I was thinking and saying. I don't know if we can change our attitudes overnight but it heightened my awareness and my education is an ongoing process.
I think the concepts have taken this long to trickle down into films and public awareness, and it isn't over by any means. The sort of realization that you've just had is what really means the most because it starts to change our knowledge into behaviour.
Your mentioning it here has re-surfaced it for me.
Lucca
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