If you’re constantly being hurt, offended, or angered, you should honestly evaluate your inflamed ego. – Author Brant Hansen
We don’t typically travel to our 49th state to make a social point, but I couldn’t pass this story up. Not only does it fully fold into our regular offense-taking-at-every-turn subcultural theme, but it’s flippin’ hilarious, too. So, let’s start at the beginning because that’s always the best place to start.
After a rare September typhoon moved through the Bering Strait wreaking havoc along the Alaskan coastline, the fine folks at FEMA sought to reach out to the myriad of Native Alaskan coastal villagers in their own languages. That meant hiring a California consulting firm to translate the aid application forms into the appropriate tongues.
Simple, right? It generally would be, but we all know that nothing is ever “simple” when a federal government agency gets involved.
Instead of doing the translation job the right way, the consulting firm referenced a 2011 edition of “Yupik Eskimo Texts from the 1940s,” a compendium of field notes collected by Russian Ekaterina Rubstova, who interviewed the indigenous inhabitants on the Russian side of the Strait about their daily lives and culture.
“What could possibly go wrong with that,” you ask? Well, let me tell you!
Some of the Alaskan native residents opened that paperwork only to find the instructions written in Inuktitut, a language spoken thousands of miles away in northern Canada. Worse yet, some of the phrases written in Yup’ik and Inupiaq turned out to not be nearly as helpful as FEMA had hoped.
“Tomorrow he will go hunting very early, and will bring nothing,” read one, while another declared, “Your husband is a polar bear, skinny!” After I finally got up off the floor and stopped laughing long enough to think about it, I realized that one of two things must’ve happened.
The first is that those indigenous Chukotka Peninsula people put one over on the white Russian lady by misapplying their language in an hilarious inside joke that, like an unexploded munition, went off 80 years later. Talk about a magical sense of comedic timing!
While I certainly hope that’s the case, the more likely explanation is that FEMA took the lowest bid on the contract without bothering to as much as Google the company’s references. And now that they were in completely in over their heads, the consultant merely plucked various words and phrases from that Russian text and inserted them into the FEMA forms with a random precision.
Either way, it’s the Caucasians who come off looking like band of blithering idiots and I’m sure a vast number of indigenous coastal Alaskans are laughing their asses off about this absurd incompetence as we speak.
Of course, the bi-lingual irony here is that most of those fine folks speak their language as well as English, which leads to the second irony of FEMA trying to accommodate a minority group, but falling flat on their faces in doing so.
It reminds me of the supposed ASL sign language interpreter who somehow managed to crash a Governor Pritzker press conference and proceeded to make it up as he went along.
So, as you might imagine, FEMA apologized, the consulting firm was fired, they had to return their fee, and I’m sure the specific consultant was swiftly terminated. And that should’ve been the end of it, but no! Somebody somewhere has to take offense at something silly because their day wouldn’t be complete until they felt like they were being roundly persecuted.
And sure enough, like clockwork, Tara Sweeney, an Inupiaq who served as an assistant secretary of Indian Affairs under the Trump administration, said this was just another painful reminder of a time when white folks tried to prevent native Alaskan children from speaking their languages:
When my mother was beaten for speaking her language in school, like so many hundreds, thousands of Alaska Natives, to then have the federal government distributing literature representing that it is an Alaska Native language, I can’t even describe the emotion behind that sort of symbolism.
Then Sweeney called for a congressional oversight hearing to uncover how long and widespread the practice has been used throughout then government.
Really? We need a hearing for that? C’mon! The U.S. Government has been making it up as they go along since the day I was born, and while the execution was far from prefect, doesn’t FEMA get some credit for their ham-handed attempt to honor the Native Alaskan culture?
Look! Colonial times sucked, particularly for the folks who were colonized, and that tragic effort to assimilate native tribes without any regard for their land or heritage is nothing to be proud of. But I’d like to think that my Caucasian counterparts have improved in that regard – perhaps some days more than others.
The point being that not every act is inherently nefarious. This translation debacle is just another case of abject stupidity which is terrifyingly par for the post-COVID era course. It’s either the result of some Native Russians with a great sense of humor, or a lazy consulting nitwit who’s questionable IQ led him to believe he could get away with referencing an 80-year-old Russian manual.
It’s certainly not an assault on any Native American culture. All I can say is, in the words of the great Walt Kelly, “We have met the enemy and he is us!”
