SC/SS 115, like culture, slips away at term end with a whimper, not a bang. The course fades into the end of the term. After the April fifth invasive species walk the seventh focused on the intersection of climate change, carbon sequestration, and the role of trees in that carbon sequestration. Trees are not a simple one size fits all magic solution to the problem of carbon build up in the atmosphere.
Spring break then intervened in the calendar, ending the term in the minds of some of the students. On the back side of the late in term spring break attendance dropped. On April 19 I shared a few plant legends and stories from Kosrae and Pohnpei. On the 21st the students were to share a plant story or legend from their own culture. Of 15 students only six attended class and only three had a story to share. Which is the reality of a generation increasingly raised on and babysat by technology.
While some of the children in this Lukop, Madolehnihmw sand pile have an English speaking parent, what concerned me was that the children of local parents were communicating in unaccented American English.
These are children being raised on YouTube videos and online children's games.
Not tech, but he knows what this ought to be
Holding tech as early as a year old, for these children L1 is English and the stories they see and hear are those they see in videos, not the stories once told by elders as evening entertainment. The collapse in the story culture is real and happening even faster than climate change. Gone in a single generation.
Of the stories shared, one was probably from online sources, one was a more modern sakau market ribald myth - more a punch line than a legend, and one was a reference to Ficus prolixa being reputed to be a home to spirits. Of the three presentations, only one was a legend and that is one likely found online. In essence, no student is walking around with a library of traditional stories and legends in their head. This generation knows more about the origin stories of Marvel superheroes than the origin stories of the plants that kept their ancestors alive.
The holiday structure at the end of the term left only a single day for psychoactive plants. This term, as last term, I opted not to attempt a field trip to a nahs for a sakau ceremony. The college continues to operate under coronavirus condition four. With only a single class I made the decision to cover only betel nut, showing the class
Chew, a documentary on oral cancer in the Marianas. I followed this with a lecture on not using psychoactive plants in ways that they were not traditionally used. I riffed off of Berry Oloday's question, "Why in this generation are we getting ill?" Because this generation is including tobacco in their chew, and that is not a traditional mix. Ethnobotany is the teacher: tobacco is a sacred plant for the native Americans and belongs to their culture and custom. Tobacco consumption was primarily reserved to special ceremonies and consumed by male high titles. Not a daily commodity consumed by just anyone. Supercharging the carcinogenic effect is that here cigarette tobacco is used. Tobacco does not tend to stay lit, so compounds are added to cigarettes to improve their ability to remain lit. Compounds that burn off when a cigarette is smoked, but not when a cigarette is placed in one's mouth as part of a chew.
The result is early onset oral cancers, cancers that are unheard of historically in Micronesia. I have too many former students who have had or are battling oral cancer. A cancer that is devastating because even if one survives the cancer, it inevitably affects one's sense of identity as it disfigures one for life. What is a selfie if not a statement of self identity? Other cancers are more hidden. Scars elsewhere are not so visible. But your face is the one thing that is hard to hide. You wear that for the rest of your life.
This term I opted not to cover Piper methysticum. Having a white guy from Chicago stand in a concrete classroom and explain a sacred plant to the indigenous people who respect that plant on the island on which the plant is sacred feels disrespectful in the extreme. Just plain wrong. A good way to get struck dead by Luhk Nansapwe. Or at the very least wind up with soumwahuen eni.
The term will wrap with test four online, a field review, and a final whimper: pouring rain would cause the final examination to be cancelled and students would end the term with whatever grade they had at that point.
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