Deepak Subramony -

Near one of the northernmost reaches of the contiguous North American landmass - roughly 1300 miles from the North Pole and 500 miles north of the closest paved road — sits Barrow, Alaska, a settlement of around 4,000 hardy souls along the Arctic Ocean. The majority of Barrow’s population is Iñupiaq Eskimo, a group that settled the region around 5,000 years ago and, over the millennia, perfected the art of eking out a sustainable living from the inhospitable arctic terrain and climate. The traditional Iñupiaq lifestyle was that of a subsistence hunter-gatherer. They used whales, seals, caribou, ptarmigan, tundra plants, driftwood, sod, and other such locally harvestable resources to provide everything needed in order to produce food, clothing, and shelter. (Boeri, 1983; Blackman, 1989; Chance, 1990).

This economic and ecological self-sufficiency began to change with the arrival of the first Western explorers and missionaries in the area during the 19th century — a change that was hastened by the arrival of U.S. military installations and the concomitant introduction of a cash economy around World War II. However, the event that was to change the lives of the Iñupiat most dramatically and permanently was the discovery in 1967 of the largest petroleum deposit ever encountered in North America at Prudhoe Bay. This made available millions of revenue dollars that were deployed to introduce to the region the energy intensive, technology-dependent lifestyle prevalent in the rest of the United States (Worl & Smythe, 1986; Chance, 1990).

A crucial part of this lifestyle change involved the establishment of a constellation of modern, technology-rich K-12 schools across the North Slope Borough (NSB), including three — an elementary, middle, and high school — in Barrow itself. As part of my doctoral dissertation (Subramony, 2005) I conducted an ethnographic case study of the sociocultural impact of this Western-style, technocentric educational model on the Iñupiat students attending these schools. In this article I provide a brief overview of the issues surrounding the cultural, social, economic, and ecological sustainability of such an educational model in the Alaskan arctic.

Cultural and Social Sustainability

As C. A. Bowers — the noted cultural anthropologist of educational technology — explains, the power of computer-based technologies is immensely attractive to Native American groups, especially as they become more integrated into aspects of economic life and competency in their use becomes increasingly essential to employment opportunities (Bowers, Vasquez, & Roaf, 2000). The NSB — with its petrodollarfuelled economy — has become so technologydependent that, as a local government official proudly explained to me, even driving a garbage truck in Barrow requires computer literacy since their entire trash collection system is computerized. In Subramony (2007a) and Subramony (2007b), I explain how the Iñupiat youth I observed in Barrow displayed remarkable interest and ability with numerous computer applications.

However, stakeholder accounts reveal how the younger Iñupiat were now forced to straddle two worlds — they are being schooled with the latest Western technological and curricular offerings by their teachers, and yet they are expected by their community to retain interest in the traditional socioeconomic activities that define their native culture; they are caught, literally, between whale hunting and online shopping, between skin-sewing and instant messaging. As the school district’s chief of multicultural education admitted, “the pressures upon our young today are so great, they have to succeed in school, and school isn’t necessarily an environment where who they are has been recognized, acknowledged and honored! And then you have a home (and) community environment where traditions remain strong…” A local parent lamented to me how these days the Iñupiat children “are so into all this technology stuff that they don’t want to leave their home … whoever wants to take them subsistence hunting, they say no, the (computer) is more important than your subsistence lifestyle.” Or as an Iñupiat teenager I spoke with conceded, shopping on eBay was nicer than butchering a caribou, which, as she explained, was “a lot harder. It takes hours and it smells bad and it’s gross!”

Meanwhile, as a community leader in Barrow described, “the kids are going to school, they are getting exposed to computers and technology … and when they go back home they don’t have that there, their elders and parents don’t have that exposure to that kind of technology, it is creating a distance between the kids and their elders. Grandma and grandpa’s time to talk to you has been taken over by Game Boys and computers. The parents and grandparents are being removed from the child’s world.” Some of the younger Iñupiat I interviewed seemed to agree that their elders were no longer an important source of knowledge as they were back when traditional ways of knowing prevailed. “Our grandparents don’t really know about the Internet or computers, they didn’t have computers back then. They grew up hunting, no school, and all that kind of stuff…” one of my high school student respondents declared, laughing.

In Subramony (2006) I describe a wide range of initiatives undertaken by the school district’s bilingual and multicultural education staff to make the local schools more responsive to the cultural and geographical characteristics of the region. Many of these see in computerbased technologies a means of revitalizing the Iñupiaq language and preserving the traditional knowledge essential to Iñupiaq identity. Bowers, et al. (2000) recognize how educators of Native children in North America continue to justify technology integration on grounds that echo the arguments being used in the dominant culture. Thus, native knowledge that is in danger of being lost as elders pass on “appears” protected from extinction if encoded on a CD-ROM.

I also gathered from my conversations with some Iñupiat that to them it looked very much like Western technologies were actively trying to replace Iñupiat traditions with alternative ways of living — an issue that Bowers discusses extensively (Bowers, 2000; Bowers, et al., 2000). As a local middle school teacher put it, “now we have the world telling us that information and, not only just information but superior information comes from technology, from sciences, from computers, you know, this kind of stuff [pointing around her classroom].” One of the community elders I interviewed spoke about this issue with passion: “The role that (Western technology-based education) plays in this culture is very negative, because it’s goal (is) to eliminate this culture in order to be the superior culture in the world. What it does is to remove traditional forms to knowledge in order to make room for itself. That’s how you destroy cultures.”

Another elder I spoke with observed bitterly, “We have a very unhappy society. You see people never sobering up, you see children hooked on to television and video-games and the Internet … they’re hiding something, they’re trying to substitute something. They are substituting a lost way of life, a teaching mechanism, a self-regulating mechanism, you know, as a society, a culture, we were self-contained, we didn’t need anybody in the world, to feed ourselves and take care of ourselves. That’s what (Western education and technology have done) to our culture. The technology is responsible for this because the people here see a smarter culture than theirs that has taken their land away, their way of life…”