The Aleuts, residing on several islands
of the Aleutian Chain, the Pribilof Islands, and the Alaskan Peninsula, have
possessed a written language since 1825, when the Russian missionary Ivan
Veniaminov selected appropriate characters of the Cyrillic alphabet to represent
Aleut speech sounds, recorded the main body of Aleut vocabulary, and formulated
grammatical rules. The Czarist Russian conquest of the proud, independent sea
hunters was so devastatingly thorough that tribal traditions, even tribal
memories, were almost obliterated. The slaughter of the majority of an adult
generation was sufficient to destroy the continuity of tribal knowledge, which
was dependent upon oral transmission. As a consequence, the Aleuts developed a
fanatical devotion to their language as their only cultural heritage.
The Russian occupation placed a heavy linguistic burden on the Aleuts. Not
only were they compelled to learn Russian to converse with their overseers and
governors, but they had to learn Old Slavonic to take an active part in church
services as well as to master the skill of reading and writing their own tongue.
In 1867, when the United States purchased Alaska, the Aleuts were unable to
break sharply with their immediate past and substitute English for any one of
their three languages.
To communicants of the Russian Orthodox
Church a knowledge of Slavonic remained vital, as did Russian, the language in
which one conversed with the clergy. The Aleuts came to regard English education
as a device to wean them from their religious faith. The introduction of
compulsory English schooling caused a minor renascence of Russian culture as the
Aleut parents sought to counteract the influence of the schoolroom. The harsh
life of the Russian colonial rule began to appear more happy and beautiful in
retrospect.
Regulations forbidding instruction in any language
other than English increased its unpopularity. The superficial alphabetical
resemblance of Russian and Aleut linked the two tongues so closely that every
restriction against teaching Russian was interpreted as an attempt to eradicate
the Aleut tongue. From the wording of many regulations, it appears the American
administrators often had not the slightest idea that the Aleuts were
clandestinely reading and writing their own tongue or even had a written
language of their own. To too many officials, anything in Cyrillic letters was
Russian and something to be stamped out. Bitterness bred by abuses and the
exploitations the Aleuts suffered from predatory American traders and
adventurers kept alive the Aleut resentment against the language spoken by
Americans.
Gradually, despite the failure to emancipate the
Aleuts from a sterile past by relating the Aleut and English languages more
closely, the passage of years has assuaged the bitter misunderstandings and
caused an orientation away from Russian toward English as their second language,
but Aleut continues to be the language that molds their thought and
expression. |
