The Tension in Cultural Sharing

I was reading this article from Seed Magazine, and I think it elegantly frames one of the downsides of our increasingly global lives: that in trade for our interconnectedness, we're rapidly losing the diversity of ideas, languages, stories, histories, and biologies that exist on our planet. It mentions the death of Marie Smith Jones, the "last fluent speaker of the Eyak language," and I was reminded of my time talking to Nora Marks Dauenhauer, a Tlingit storyteller who belongs to a culture not far from Smith Jones's in geography, but vastly different nonetheless.

The Tlingits are more numerous than the Eyak ever were, and the Tlingit culture is currently being actively preserved by scholars and members of the Tlingit people. However, even within "the Tlingit people" is a multitude of subcultures, each with their own stories, philosophies, and practices.

Eyak is now only preserved in books; nobody speaks it, argues in it, or asks anyone to pass the salt. What we do have of it was preserved mostly from the mind of one individual. Imagine if all we knew of English language and Western culture was what I could come up from my head. I'd hardly consider the resulting textbook to be encyclopedic.

So where does that leave us? Had I not traveled to Alaska, I would not have met Dauenhauer and heard her stories. I wouldn't know Tlingit from Colonel Klink. But does that selfsame traveling and sharing slowly smooth out what's unique about our culture, or, more accurately, does it gradually wear away at Tlingit in favor of the megaculture of America?