America first

Like many others, my daughter's university offers "study abroad" courses and even semesters of study to its students, affording them the opportunity to experience living in a different cultural milieu and interacting with people whose life experiences are quite different from their own. The selection available to the students is quite broad, with over a dozen programs on five different continents.

This is a good thing, for although the America most of us know has an amazingly diverse cultural heritage, Americans are justly ridiculed world-wide for their cultural insularity and ignorance. On one of my parents' post-retirement trips overseas, a guide told a very telling joke that played on this:

Question: What do you call somebody who speaks three languages?
Answer: Trilingual.
Question: What do you call somebody who speaks two languages?
Answer: Bilingual.
Question: What do you call somebody who speaks one language?
Answer: American.

Emblematic of our cultural naivete, we've quite recently had a President who had been born into privilege but was apparently proud of having never left the United States, save for short excursions into Mexico.

Nevertheless, many Americans avidly seek out intercultural knowledge, and programs such as college "study abroad" semesters are popular. A number of companies serve similar interests by non-collegians, and also enjoy real popularity. Rosetta Stone, for instance, offers home-study courses in over forty languages, representing Africa, Europe; the Middle East; East, Southeast and South Asia; and Latin America.

Living on the east coast, I've met many people who have traveled overseas extensively, mostly in Europe, even if they haven't seen much of their own continent. When I ask them why, they usually talk about the importance of seeing other cultures, or lands quite different from their own, or to visit places where the language and the way of life are fundamentally different from our own.

And these efforts to broaden cultural horizons are all laudable.

Yet they're all missing something vital, and very, very American. There is within our own boundaries a cultural diversity unimagined in Europe, of which most of us are utterly ignorant. What we miss is extremely important: it's uniquely indigenous to our own continent, and we must know of it if we are to truly know ourselves. Our land is home to amazing cultures and people who are almost invisible to most of us, but whose history here seems ancient compared to most of the rest of us: these are the peoples who are actually indigenous to our own continent, and still live in a cultural milieu uniquely there own and have languages uniquely their own. Theirs is a cultural and linguist world which differs from the standard "American" more than any one might find in Europe.

I'm thinking most of the Navajo and Hopi peoples of the "Four Corners" region of the American southwest, but only because I am more familiar with their story. Yet theirs are only two of a substantial number of cultures indigenous to our soil which present fantastic differences from the experience of most of us. In both cases, the languages are very much alive - well over half of the Navajo nation, for instance, speaks Diné bizaad, and an even larger proportion of the Hopi people speak Hopi. In both cases, the languages differ from English by a far greater degree than any Indo-European language. Both people have a spiritual heritage which differs in very profound ways from any Judeo-Christian religion (yet also differs significantly from each others). In both nations, many people follow a pattern of life which differs more from what an urbanized American knows than anything a visitor to Europe might experience. And both, as is the case with all other native American cultures, look back to a rich history of which the rest of us are totally ignorant or, worse, suffer from gross misconceptions. Most important, though, is that the rest of us could learn and benefit greatly from knowing.

Yet the vast majority of us not born into a native American nation are utterly ignorant of the lives and culture and history - and wisdom - of these, our neighbors.

In short, an American unfamiliar with the worlds of our country's first peoples would do well to explore the amazing diversity found within our own land. Yes, Europe (and Asia, and Africa) hold a fascination for me, but I would much rather learn more of the people who share this land I call my own.