'In', 'for', or 'with'?

[Mia Kalish]

I agree with Daniel, but in a different way. 

My friend Yolanda and I are both 1st generation Docs-to-be. Both of us come
from environments that would be called "marginalized". Yolanda's family was
very, very poor growing up. Mine was less poor, tending to middle and upper
middle class over time. The difficulty with mine is that alcoholism was the
central social guideline. 

When I left my home town and home state to get a job, and happened to
discover that I loved computer languages, I had opportunities that my family
could not 'imagine'. They tried to relate what I did to something physical
that they understood, like plumbing, or carpentry, even accounting, but to
no avail. My mother, who was very cruel anyway, was fond of saying, after 20
years of my trying, also to no avail, to explain, "You are my daughter and I
have no idea what you do for a living". She was Very Proud that she could
make me feel like an "outsider" in my own family. So my experiences and
increasing education moved me slowly along an invisible line that I only now
recognize. I could feel the sense of "being left out," of "not belonging,"
because little that I said made any sense to them. What was my world was
clearly not theirs, and there was no way that I could share my
understandings and experiences. 

My friend Yolanda is experiencing the same thing in the process of getting
her doctorate. Her family is generally very nice, not torn apart by
alcoholism or drug addiction and the miseries that stem from them. But as
she learns things, she finds that she is unable to share them with her
family. Not only are her ideas out of synch with the ways people in her
family think, but her family - like mine in many ways - is unwilling to make
the effort to learn new things to talk with her. She has become an
"outsider" in her own family. 

We have talked about this at length, first in the sheer surprise and comfort
of finding that the other had or was sharing the same insider/outsider
experiences vis a vis "Family" and "Education". But this is a common
experience: A tribal Elder once said to me, "When they come back from
school, we throw them out of the tribe, because they don't think the way we
do, they think differently". 

So maybe people who get schooling beyond the 6th or 7th grade are not
"smarter," but they have different ways of thinking and talking about
things. They have different experiences that they include in that process.
And they have different goals. Yolanda talks about how in her family,
getting a job as a sales clerk in a department store was a crowning
achievement. Today, Yolanda is a college instructor, a task way different
both in required knowledge and remuneration, than the family pinnacle. 

We often talk about how this group and that group needs to get more
education. But we do not often talk about the costs of that education. We do
not talk about the costs to family and tribal relationships. We don't even
talk about how it feels. 

People who come from families where others have gotten degrees have (I am
assuming) a climate where further education is encouraged and valued. There
are people in the family who share similar experiences, and the family has
already been changed because of the influence of the education. So getting a
degree does not force a serious Either/Or choice. 

How many people on this list, I wonder, had to choose between Family and
Education, Tribe and Education, perhaps even cultural and social Self and
education. How many people found that their ways of talking post-Education
distinguished them uncomfortably from their pre-Education milieu. 

They say, You can never go home again. At least for me and for Yolanda, this
is true. 

And perhaps the discussion is appropriate for Martin Luther King day. 

Mia  

-----Original Message-----
From: Indigenous Languages and Technology [mailto:ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU]
On Behalf Of Cunliffe D J (Comp)
Sent: Monday, January 16, 2006 3:37 AM
To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
Subject: Re: [ILAT] 'In', 'for', or 'with'?

Hi All,

I think there is something in this conversation that strikes to the
heart of what we (or most of us I guess) are trying to achieve.

Annie Ross wrote about the artificiality of borders between people and
that "...academic life likes to teach us academics that we
are somehow different (smarter, more this or that), but we are not.  if
we
all knew that, there would be fewer problems. ... there is no 'insider'
ther is no 'outsider'.  that is the big secret."

While I am entirely happy to accept that academics aren't smarter etc,
(guess who spent 45 minutes walking around Bristol Airport car park in
the rain in the dark on Sunday night because he hadn't thought to make a
note of where he parked the car!) I really think that there are some
important issues around the insider / outsider boundary. If we fail to
recognise and manage these issues then at best our efforts will have no
effect, and at worse will cause damage.

As an Englishman living and working in Wales and as a non-Welsh speaker
(practically) working with the Welsh language, I recognise that I am
'outside' along several dimensions. Whilst I am happy to accept the
label "incomer", hopefully I have managed to avoid being branded as an
outright colonist. 

No matter how long I live in Wales, or how good my Welsh becomes (I
wish!) I cannot ever foresee a time in which I would actually BE Welsh -
either in my own mind or the minds of others. 

To my mind the best I can do is to recognise this and to try to identify
appropriate ways of managing it. 

Being a simple computer person, my preference is for simple practical
guidelines like those contained in (part of) Decolonizing Methodologies
rather than high brow discussions of the need to re-radicalise the
post-colonial agenda within the post-modern neo-liberal context (hmmm...
can't help feeling that I ought to have included feminism in there
somewhere...)
 
Be seeing you,

Daniel.