Module 4: Cataclysmic Events and Their Effects

Explain:

Like a number of my classmates blogs I read, a lot in this module was information I have a general understanding of.  The most interesting things I took away dealt with things specific to Alaska.  I feel that this is one area that I have so much to learn about.  It's interesting looking back at my education from the lower 48 - our studies of Alaska were sporadic and spotty at best.  I am enjoying learning about the diversity of landscape, geologic features, and cultures, and at getting a better understanding of how they are interrelated.  It is important for me to be able to reference things that my students are familiar with, rather than taking the easy route and referencing things only I have the background knowledge of.

My excitement lies in finding connections between things my students have backgrounds in and things that I have backgrounds in, and then having that bridge appear that can link the two.  Which brings me to... 

Extend:

Maui and the "Big Catch"

I am going to move out of Alaska for the remainder of this blog to make some connections between past and present learning - and in the process begin constructing that bridge that can connect my knowledge with my students'.  While watching the video of the creation myth of Hawaii I was brought back to my time student teaching in New Zealand.  The Maori, the indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand, share an almost identical creation myth with the Hawaiians (down to the name of the fisherman, Maui, and his fishing up the islands).  While the myths themselves have an interesting role to play in education, I find the spread of them more interesting.

In my history classes I am teaching (both US History and Alaska Studies) I like to look at connections of cultures across geographies.  It is a powerful way to see connections between groups of people.  It provides an opportunity to evaluate migrations and this in turn can be brought up to the present to immigration and looking at how these events shape the world we live in today. 

My bridge is beginning to look fairly strong.  I may be able to walk across it soon.  I am seeing connections between the Polynesian migrations (motivated by a desire to find more food for growing populations) to early Alaska Native groups (who were not Native to Alaska at that time) traveling across the Bering Land Bridge, also in search of food.  Both migrations had certain things in common - of interest from above - oral stories. 

Evaluate: 

Looking back on what I have written, I surprise myself.  I like science and numbers and facts.  I make my neighbors laugh at my obsession with finding out why things work.  I grow increasingly frustrated with local responses to my questions about the reason for the number of fossils of trees and leaves on out beach.  "That's the way it's always been," I have been told by multiple people.  Argghhh.  I will find out the answer to that question.  But I am digressing.

My surprise is that my above discussion focuses on creation myths.  "How on earth is this related?" I was just thinking.  But I then I began to pull together some connections.  

Early cultures, from Polynesian, to Eskimo, to Western European, viewed the world through a series of lenses.  I am positive that in another 2000 years, future Earthlings will be looking back at our understandings (and more likely misunderstandings) of science with similar thoughts about us - "Boy were they off".  But I don't think our previous conceptions were that far off.  

I mean obviously the New Zealand islands, as well as the islands of Hawaii and Tahiti, were not pulled up from underwater by some superstrong fisherman named of Maui.  But they were, and "pulled" may be the wrong verb, brought up through an equally violent and sudden (although sudden on a geologic time scale) series of events.  The creation stories do help explain why things happened - and this desire for explanation is the beginning of our scientific nature.  

I am going to leave this post with a thought about an event that happened in New Zealand in 1931. 

 

I lived on the North Island in a small community called Havelock North near Hawke Bay which opened to the Pacific Ocean.  In 1931, a massive earthquake devastated the Hawke's Bay region.  The large city of Napier was ruined.  What buildings were left standing after the two and a half minutes of shaking subsided were consumed by fire.  Over 250 people lost their lives.  Thousands more were injured.

Post Office Post Earthquake

But what makes this earthquake interesting occurred on a combination of a geographic and a cultural level.  Geographic first.  The earthquake lifted some 40 square kilometers of sea bed up more than 2.7 meters - high enough to bring the sea bed above sea level.  I remember reading first hand accounts of this stunning event.  People recalled seeing boats suddenly stranded hundreds of feet from water, fish flopping around in the mud, surely baffled (if they were capable of such thoughts) as to their current situation.  Today, this land, should you ever fly to Napier, is where your plane will land.  In addition to an airport, are residential homes, farmland, and industrial buildings.

Now 1931 was less than 20 years after Alfred Wegener proposed his theory of continental drift (the precursor to our current theory of tectonic plates).  At the time, much of his theory was still up in the air.  Wegener lacked a mechanism to drive the plates, and much of the evidence to support that the continents were moving had yet to be discovered.  In fact, it wasn't until the 1950s that his theory became widely accepted.  Now imagine you were alive in 1931.  You've never heard of continental drift.  I'm not going to say you will believe a fisherman snagged his hook on the bottom of the sea floor, but...at this particular moment in time you just witnessed the ocean floor jump upwards nearly nine feet!  What will your explanation be?

A post script to this event...   

The rebuilding of Napier and the surrounding towns tell a story as well.  The earthquake took place in 1931 at the height of the Art Deco craze in architectural design.  Many of the buildings are beautiful examples of the fad and Napier's architecture is highly regarded one of the best collections of Art Deco in the world.  I took my students on a field trip in Napier examining the best examples of Art Deco.  What surprised me wasn't how fantastic the buildings were.  It was the integration of the Art Deco I was prepared for and the traditional Maori motifs.  The Maori are the indigenous people of New Zealand, and like indigenous peoples in all the areas of the world that the British colonize, they suffered greatly under British rule.  This was an interesting connection to see, especially in a time period where the mistreatment of Maori people was still widespread.        

Three Colleagues
I visited three new blogs this week.  I am enjoying this.  So many different perspectives and tidbits of information.

First stop: Alaska Knowledge where I picked up an interesting tidbit about the origin of the Tlingit name for Mt. Edgecumbe translated to "blinking mountain" in reference to the last time the volcano erupted - 4000 years ago!  The power of oral histories.

Next stop:  Explore Alaska.  I laughed when I read Tracy's statements about her being fine in the Bush, should the world "go to hell", but her students would go insane due to the loss of their cell phone service. 


Last stop:  Dan's Explore Alaska!  I enjoyed reading about the connections he was making in his class between the tsunami and Indonesia and past and future tsunamis here in Alaska.  

 

Module 3: Anthropological geoscience is a mouthful

Explain:
Teaching has had a profound impact on how I view the world.  At all times when I am in front of my class I am monitoring my sentences - from structure to vocabulary - to ensure that my message is received as I intended.  I fail often.  But the more experience I gain, the better I get.  I notice that this monitoring of language enters into my thinking as I read - whether educational research or quantum physics articles or 2300 year old geometry proofs or, umm, Twilight, only these times the modifications I am making are those that translate the text out of the author's voice, be it professional, jargon- filled  or a sappy teen romance vocabulary, and into one that I am more comfortable with.  The ability to do this has taken years, but its affects are beneficial to my comprehension and retention of the material I read.  It's an interesting thing when you get down to the reason this skill is important to me: it helps me be successful in my day-to-day life.  It gives me background for teaching concepts or provides strategies to try in my classroom or maybe it just simply gives me something to talk about with my friends.  In short, learning through books helps me survive in my environment.

Euclid's Elements

I have no excuse for this

But living in rural Alaska has given me a new perspective on the use of the word "survive."  And it's given me reason to believe that the skills I've spent years acquiring back in Minnesota may not be adequate for what is meant by survival in the tundra.  In rural Alaska, to survival skills are literally that - skills that will allow one to survive (i.e. not die) in an often hostile environment.  Or when the environment is only a little hostile, the ability to make it through a day without ending up waste deep in water a mile from home while walking through the tundra.

As I stated above, it took years to become proficient at being able to translate written language into my memory, it appears it will also take years to become proficient in being able to translate the language I am being provided here in Tununak.  My lessons come in a variety of modalities, but I am coming to recognize most are subtle spoken stories or veiled recommendations.  Take my example from above with me falling into the tundra.  I'd read about the tundra before this experience.  I'd seen movies and pictures, consulted websites and even remembered bits and pieces of information about the tundra from my time in elementary school.  None of this, it seems, was enough to prevent what was to happen.

Falling into the tundra

We had decided to walk from our village to Toksook, another village about six miles away through the tundra.  This would be my first true experience in the tundra.  Asking our guide, lifetime resident of the tundra, if we needed rubber boots we were given a cryptic response: "Well, you don't need boots."  Hours later we had learned a valuable lesson - one that would come in handy many times in the future.  On an immediate level - the answer the our question was yes.  We had missed the hints and as a result were quite wet upon arriving at our destination.  One of our party actually ended up waist deep in a surprise puddle.  But on a larger level, the lesson we learned was that advice was rarely explicitly given.  Hints, subtle hints, were about all we were given.  Whether a cultural characteristic or a misunderstanding about our knowledge of the environment, the results were the same - we were wet. My reading had not prepared me for this.    

Extend: 
Watching the Richard Glenn video I connected with the scientists that he took out on the ice.  They had spent their professional careers acquiring skills and knowledge necessary to survive in their environment, and yet when they are in the environment of their knowledge, they are next to helpless.  This ties in with last weeks examination of traditional vs Western science - where Western science is strongly tied with learning from books and experiments -removing the subject from its natural environment.  Traditional Native science is about experiencing the subject in its natural environment and making decisions based on that.

Evaluate:
Moving forward with these ideas I am trying beginning to see strengths in both views.  Geography influences the way we learn and it influences what we know about the environment we live in.  Richard Glenn lives in a unique situation and I enjoy the metaphor of shining two flashlights down the same path.  It alludes to more being known about a topic when it is looked at through multiple lenses.   

Newtok with the river to the east

I feel that it is very important to have people like Glenn living in the villages.  It seems hardly a week goes by when a science or environmentally related topic doesn't bring about some level of discussion in our community.  Last year I spent time with my class looking at an article in the New York Times about another village, Newtok, in our district.  Newtok is in danger of being washed into the river that runs alongside it as warming trends in the past decade have led to less permafrost enabling increased erosion along the banks of the river.  They are referred to in the article as being among the first climate refugees in the United States.  Inevitably, Newtok will need to be moved to the other side of the river - at significant financial costs borne by an organization not yet named.  Residents of Newtok blame the government for this problem - it was after all, the government that decided that Newtok (which was traditionally a seasonal fish camp) would become a permanent civilization.

And then just this past week a debate flared up about the building of a new runway in Tununak.  Our current airstrip is too small for larger planes to land and lined up in a direction that allows for too many crosswind days.  Plans for the new runway are underway with construction planned to start in 2012.  The problem is that the location for the runway, as well as the source of the material being used to build the runway will likely have serious environmental consequences on the river - a major source of food for people in the village.

I wonder what it would be like if more of the people involved in making these decisions had an education in both forms of science.  I wonder how geography has influenced peoples' educations and views ecological situations.  Are there better solutions out there?

 Three Classmates' Blogs: 
I just got finished visiting Cheryl's Explore Palmer blog.  There is an intriguing photograph there of her father-in-law standing waste deep in a crack cause by the 1964 earthquake.  Pretty neat stuff.

Kevin's blog threw an interesting twist into his blog by incorporating his business related knowledge and looking at how the economic resources of an area affect the types of industry that are present in that area.

My third blog I visited this week was the Dan Adair Blog site.  I enjoyed reading Dan's ruminations on how supermarkets can skew our views of food production and how that these new views might be a hindrance to seeing the many cycles that exist in ecology.

Anyone who's made it this far should know that I have wikipedia to thank for a lot of my sources.  I also have wikipedia to thank for this.  It is hard to get out of a black hole, but I did it.

Module 2: Science! What is it good for?

Explain:  Science:  What is it good for?
Science, the word, as well as the discipline brings up a series of images to my mind.  Men in white lab coats briskly walking through a sterile looking laboratory; beakers and test tubes filled with colored liquids, slowly bubbling through tubes to other beakers and test tubes; machines whirring, computer monitors beeping, data sheets spewing from printers...  I'm sure most people get a similar vision in their head when they think about science as well.  Now, doing a similar exercise when I think of traditional native knowledge I get a completely different set of images - nets for blackfish, women crouched over collecting salmon berries, strips of salmon hung to dry...

  

balakov/flikr

Fish camp

These images are so different, so unbelievably at odds with each other that it's no surprise to hear statements like the the one made by a Toksook Bay high school student quoted in Ann Fienup-Riordan's book Yuungnaqpiallerput.  The young man, Jeffery Curtis, is speaking publicly about how he is happy to be given the opportunity to study science and to learn what the white people could teach at the University of Alaska because his ancestors had no science.  If I were to take a guess at when this statement was made I would say maybe 1940.  I'd be wrong - by sixty-three years.  The actual date - 2003.  Fienup-Riordan goes on to make this example more painful - the boy's  own family was full of individuals brimming with knowledge of the world around them and his grandfather was a master kayak builder.  This student has failed to recognize that what his ancestors have been doing, for thousands of years, is no different from what the white science professors he is longing to learn from have been doing for thousands of years - systematically solving problems around them.  Just without the white lab coats.  That's what it's good for.  That's its purpose - to solve problems in a systematic way.  And it's hard to believe that any culture still alive has made it this far without science.

Extend:  Where are these ideas originating from?
I wonder where thoughts like these come from.  It bothers me that I hold thoughts like these in my head.  I take a certain amount of consolation in the fact that when I actually think about my preconceptions that I recognize the fallacies, but it's still not ideal.  And it's potentially damaging to ones image of themselves and their culture if they don't recognize the fallacies.  I think of that student in Toksook Bay.  This hits close to home - literally.  Toksook it a mere seven miles from me.  It's just around the bay.  And if students there can think this, my students in Tununak can think this.  So where are these thoughts coming from?

I don't want to spend a lot of time on this topic right now, but the question reminded me of a conversation I was engaged in during a different class on US history.  We had read a book by Colin Calloway called New Worlds For All.  The following quote stuck out: "Columbus changed forever the history of the planet.  But he did so by connecting two worlds of equal maturity, not by "discovering" a new one.  Convinced that Europe was synonymous with civilization, colonizing Europeans failed to see anything of value in Indian civilizations" (Page 10).  Can it be that this is the legacy of the earliest Europeans to visit rural Alaska?  That these visitors failed to see the full picture - that they failed to see any value at all? 

I have begun an ongoing conversation with my students about how perspective allows someone to see something (or not see something) that another cannot (or can) see.  I think this conversation is an important one to have.  Failure to see something of another culture can make one seem naive, ignorant, or insensitive.  What happens when one fails to see something in their own culture?


Evaluate:  How important is science
I worry about a world without science.  I get some funny looks from my friends sometimes when I express this fear, but I truly am afraid.  Science has been around since the birth of humanity.  It has been present in every culture since then.  What we need to understand is that science may not look the same everywhere, it may not sound the same everywhere, but it does do the same thing everywhere - it solves problems.  If we fail to see science in cultures that look different than our own, we risk losing the contributions to science from that culture.  With the number of problems threatening humanity today, it would be a tragic end if we failed to see a solution because we didn't recognize or respect the source.  


Three classmates' blogs
In my exploration of classmates' blogs I stumbled across a few to comment on.

My first stop was Dave Sather's.  Dave shared an interesting story of a conversation that he had with a student about the upcoming winter, and it reminded my of a similar conversation I had this fall with a student of my own regarding the upcoming winter.  Long story short - it's going to be a snowy one.

My second stop was to AliciaWeaver's blog.  Alicia discussed the power of learning in a teacher's life to help connect with his or her students.  I have similar sentiments and spent most of last year figuring that out.  Okay, I am still figuring that out.

My final stop was Martha Gould-Lehe's blog.  It was interesting to read a blog from the perspective of someone who is an Alaska Native.  I surprise myself how stuck I get looking at the world from my own glasses (new young teaching white guy from the lower-48) and it's good to read things from another perspective. 

Blog Number One - The Stage Setter

Picking a favorite place is a difficult task for me.  I grew up in a suburb twenty miles south of Minneapolis.  I have a favorite place in Minneapolis - Lake Calhoun.  Then I moved to California for a year after high school to snowboard.  The chairlift on a powder day - another favorite spot.  After California I went to college in Duluth on the southern tip of Lake Superior.  All the way out on Park Point Beach was my favorite place there.  I student taught in New Zealand.  The top of Te Mata peak, ten minutes from my house there was my favorite place in New Zealand.  Now I'm in Tununak, Alaska.  This time, down along the beach just outside my door, searching for fossils, waiting for the sunset.  There can't be one favorite place.  It's just nice to be able to be happy and excited about the world you are living in at the time.  I look forward to finding more favorite places in this world.

Fossils of leaves where there are no trees.

Tununak.  Sunset.

Oh, and sometimes it's windy.  Really windy in Tununak.