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The Arctic As
A Homeland
Family Life |
First day back to school. 
Even mother and baby on horseback. |
Though families of parents and children
generally live in separate houses or tents, they also depend on
a wide range of relatives and even other people whom they call relative.
They share and help each other as part of daily life. |
| Earlier, children always learned adult
tasks through watching their fathers hunt or their mothers preparing
meat and skins. Now some of them live in towns and must learn town
skills. But for those who live in the tundra and forest, there is
a problem. In order to learn to survive in the modern world as well,
they must go to school. |
| But the schools are often in villages
and towns, far away from where their parents live. So the children
must live away from their parents much of the time in boarding schools.
There they learn subjects which have little to do with their life
at home and they lose touch with the world of their parents. They
are also often taught in English, Russian or Danish and so lose
the ability to speak their own languageAmong the Eveny, for example,
children leave the village to join the herds only for the summer
holidays, and so they never learn how to herd reindeer through the
winter months. |
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