Opinion
A4
Saturday, April 23, 2022
OUR VIEW
Vote, our
democracy
needs it
A
s the next election draws closer it is
important to remember the best way to
participate in our democracy is to vote.
While we’ve spent some space and ink already
on this issue, it is crucial we remind voters there is
an election coming up and it is important to vote.
Oregon’s made voting pretty easy. The ballot
is delivered to your mailbox. The voter fi lls it out,
puts it back into the mailbox and the job is done.
Still, off -year elections, such as the one coming
up in May, typically do not draw the kind of voter
numbers seen during a presidential election.
Yet off -year — and any — elections remain
important.
There is a lot wrong with our system of gov-
ernment right now. From the White House all
the way down to the lowest rung of the democ-
racy ladder, we have a lot of items that need to
be fi xed.
That’s why it is so important that when you
receive that ballot in the mail you take a good,
hard look at the candidates. If you are unaware
of who they are or what they stand for, do your
research.
Independent research is probably the most
potent weapon against the fake news and outright
lies sponsored by those who are not invested in
democracy.
Yes, research — fi nding out about the stance
of a particular candidate — takes work. It means
slicing out a section of time to discover whether a
candidate is a person worthy of your vote but it is
essential to making an informed choice.
Informed choices are not exactly legion nowa-
days, as dogmatic battle lines are drawn between
political parties. So that means the more you
know, the more you can research, the better deci-
sion you can make.
Our democracy depends upon the involve-
ment of the voter. This upcoming election is as
important as any other. So, when you get your
ballot, don’t disregard it. Take the time. Get
involved in democracy.
CONTACT YOUR REPRESENTATIVES
U.S. PRESIDENT
GOVERNOR
Joe Biden
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20500
Comments: 202-456-1111
Kate Brown
160 State Capitol
900 Court St.
Salem, OR 97301-4047
503-378-4582
U.S. SENATORS
STATE
REPRESENTATIVES
Ron Wyden
221 Dirksen Senate Offi ce Bldg.
Washington, DC 20510
202-224-5244
La Grande offi ce: 541-962-7691
Bobby Levy, District 58
900 Court St. NE, H-376
Salem, OR 97301
503-986-1458
Rep.BobbyLevy@state.or.us
Jeff Merkley
313 Hart Senate Offi ce Building
Washington, DC 20510
202-224-3753
Pendleton offi ce: 541-278-1129
Greg Smith, District 57
900 Court St. NE, H-482
Salem, OR 97301
503-986-1457
Rep.GregSmith@state.or.us
U.S.
REPRESENTATIVE
STATE SENATOR
Cliff Bentz
2185 Rayburn House Offi ce Building
Washington, DC 20515
202-225-6730
Medford offi ce: 541-776-4646
Bill Hansell, District 29
900 Court St. NE, S-415
Salem, OR 97301
503-986-1729
Sen.BillHansell@state.or.us
We see world through lens of language
RICH
WANDSCHNEIDER
MAIN STREET
B
ir lisan, bir adam …
In Turkish, that begins the
saying, “one language, one
person, two languages, two people,”
meaning that we are literally dif-
ferent human beings when we fl u-
ently use another language.
I am thinking about this because
I am going back to Turkey for only
the second time in 52 years. I’m
brushing up on the language, words
and phrases coming to mind after
long absences. “Fark etmez,” I auto-
matically answer when someone
asks whether I want coff ee or tea —
“Makes no diff erence.”
And when a friend comes down
with COVID, I say “gecmis olsun”
— “may it pass quickly” — like I
would have 50 years ago. We don’t
have anything that handy in English.
That’s the fun of it, but there
is a serious side to language and
its relation to knowledge and cul-
ture. Author Wade Davis says in his
2009 book, “The Wayfi nders: Why
Ancient Wisdom Matters in the
Modern World,” that of the 7,000
languages then spoken in the world,
half of them were not being carried
down to the next generation.
Every two weeks, he said, an
elder was dying and taking the last
syllables of a language with her/
him. He likened this loss to the loss
of biological diversity. As we lose
languages, we lose ways of seeing
the world, ways of relating to other
people. We lose part of the store of
human knowledge.
I’m reminded that Alvin Josephy
said over 50 years ago that the
Americas had been inhabited by
humans for more than 20,000 years,
perhaps as many as 40,000. And
he wrote that the population might
have been as many as 90 million
when Columbus hit the shore.
He based his thinking on lan-
guages. Linguists told him how
long it took for a language to break
off and become unique, and the
explorers and missionaries and set-
tlers with language curiosity doc-
umented approximately 2,500
languages spoken on the two conti-
nents in 1492. Linguists have mea-
sured and followed the dispersion of
peoples across the continents with
language from then until now.
In Alvin’s time, archeolo-
gists were spouting the Bering
Land Bridge theory, postulating a
crossing from Asia about 12,000
years ago. And many anthropol-
ogists said that the population,
from the Arctic to the tip of South
America, could not have been more
than 10 million, that there were
maybe a million inhabitants in what
is now the United States.
They were wrong. Too many lan-
guages; too many peoples. There
is now good documentation that as
much as 90% of tribal populations
were killed in early years of con-
tact by European diseases to which
they had no immunities. We have
new fi ndings on the Salmon River
of 16,000-year-old settlements, and
footprints in sand in the South-
west that date to 23,000 years ago.
Coastal migration from Asia is
now the theory. And modern DNA
research shows migration patterns
that follow the ways of language
Josephy wrote about in “The Indian
Heritage of America” — in 1968.
Language is the lens through
which we see the world. My mother
saw her world in Norwegian fi rst,
and then, embarrassed that his
daughter didn’t know English,
Grandpa Hagen said that they’d
speak English at home. Mom hung
onto the language enough so that
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Rich Wandschneider is the director of the
Josephy Library of Western History and Culture.
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she could talk secrets with her
Minnesota friends in front of me
growing up. I didn’t learn it.
I spent a summer working on a
farm with Mexican laborers who’d
come to California for the higher
wages — 90 cents an hour. I had
two years of high school Spanish
and that summer of Tex-Mex
Spanish. What a pity that I let it go.
The fi rst colonists, from the
British Isles, understood the con-
fl uence of language and culture.
They saw Anglo-America as the
arrow of civilization, led the new
government with borrowings from
England, engulfed immigrant pop-
ulations with school and church
English and sought to totally
incorporate and assimilate Amer-
ican Indians by taking children
from parents and putting them in
boarding schools, outlawing their
languages.
The wheel has turned, and Amer-
ican Indians are openly speaking
old languages and reviving ones
at the edge of extinction — about
250 individual languages, among
them Nez Perce and Umatilla. I
wish I knew enough to understand
their complex family relationships
— I only know that brothers, sis-
ters, cousins, aunts and uncles have
no direct translations and broader
meanings than anything in Amer-
ican English.
And, thanks to an old Turkish
roommate who has prodded me reg-
ularly on the phone for 50 years, and
to a wonderful trip back in 2004, my
four years of living in that language
in that country is coming back. Not
totally of course, but enough to say
please and thank you, to know what
to call elders and children, to say
“Hos bulduk” — “I fi nd my coming
back good” — when I arrive.
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