Christine: Harry, as an American, have you noticed any strong class distinctions in English society since you've been here?
Harry: Strong class distinctions? Yes, they haven't changed at all—that's what—that's what amuses me—in fifteen years or fourteen years—that the stratification is exactly the same as it was when I first came. It's extraordinary that it pervades everything.
Anna: What is class distinction? Because I don't know whether it's what job they do or ...
Harry: It's people's accents. In Pygmalion, you know, it goes back to, as soon as you open your mouth in England you're immediately you know placed.
Anna: Do you mean that there aren't different accents in America?
Harry: Not—of course there are different accents—but they're not as—they're not nearly as clearly defined.
Anna: But I mean, don't—doesn't a certain strata of American society use perhaps more slang than another one? More correct?
Harry: Not the way they do in England. In England they seem to really stick together. I mean I went the other week for the first time in my life to a point-to-point and I couldn't believe what I found. There I was in the middle of Lincolnshire and we went through muddy fields and suddenly we came upon this parking lot with nine thousand Range Rovers in it and everyone going 'Oh, hello darling. How are you?' you know and it was hilarious I mean and they were all you know this meeting of the clan and that certainly doesn't happen in America and all those people spoke the same way.
Barrie: But that—yes, I live in the middle of the country in the south and I must say when I moved there I noticed—I mean of course I'd been aware of class before that but I had no idea that the lines between them were so rigid. I lived on an estate of a very big and successful farm until recently, and so the farm of course was run by the landed gentry who all went hunting and to point-to-point and all the rest of it. I lived next door to the groom who was—who despised them because they did all this and he had to just get the horses ready, um but at the same time he was terribly fond of them and they of him and there was all this sort of paternalistic attitude to the country workers that still goes on. I was staggered and nobody knew where to put me because I was living in a tied cottage that was tied to the farm, um but because I didn't work with any of them they were all uneasy with me. Most peculiar.
Christine: But I think you raise a very good point there Barrie because you're in fact talking about yourself not fitting into either of these two extremes and I'd like to ask Harry again how many classes he can see very clearly defined.
Barrie: In England?
Christine: In England, yes.
Harry: Well, I guess, three off the top of my head. I mean not counting immigrants and foreigners. Yes, I mean there's the middle class is the most snobbish of all it seems to me. You know, they're the most aware of the whole system really because they're upwardly mobile usually you know they hope to be, and they're the ones—I mean the upper class are what I find extraordinary—they seem to be totally uninhibited for the most part. I think it's extraordinary. I mean I'm not passing any moral judgements on them but it still exists ...
John: Because they've got the confidence ...
Anna: ... and the money ...
Barrie: ... confidence and the money ...
John: Well no, I don't think money's much to do with it actually.
Anna: How can you change it? I mean how would you change it?
Harry: I'm not saying it should be changed ...
Anna: No, no, no, no. I don't—I mean people do say that it should be changed. Politicians say that we should have total equality which I don't believe you can ever have in anything.
Harry: Well there should be equality of opportunity. I mean at least it's a nice ideal to have, isn't it?
Public school was hard compared to what I'd had before, day school on the reservation and a year at Sequoyah Government School. I almost flunked eighth grade at the public school, and it was a miracle that I passed. I just didn't know a lot of things, mathematics and stuff. I survived it somehow. I don't know how, but I did. The man who was head of the department of education at the Agency was the only person outside of my family who helped me and encouraged me to get an education. He understood and really helped me with many things I didn't know about. For a long time the white public school for the Big Cypress area would not let Indian children attend. A boy and I were the first Big Cypress Indians to graduate from that school. He is now in the armed forces.
After I graduated from high school, I went to business college, because in high school I didn't take courses that would prepare me for the university. I realized that there was nothing for me to do. I had no training. All I could do was go back to the reservation. I thought maybe I'd go to Haskell Institute, but my mother was in a TB hospital, and I didn't want to go too far away. I did want to go on to school and find some job and work. So the director of education, at the Agency said, maybe he could work something out for me so I could go to school down here.
I thought bookkeeping would be good because I had had that in high school and loved it. So I enrolled in the business college, but my English was so bad that I had an awful time. I had to take three extra months of English courses. But that helped me.
I never did understand why my English was so bad—whether it was my fault or the English I had in high school. I thought I got by in high school; they never told me that my English was so inferior, but it was not good enough for college. It was terrible having to attend special classes.
At college the hardest thing was not loneliness but schoolwork itself. I had a roommate from Brighton, one of the three reservations, so I had someone to talk to. The landlady was awfully suspicious at first. We were Indians, you know. She would go through our apartment; and if we hadn't done the dishes, she washed them. We didn't like that. But then she learned to trust us.
College was so fast for me. Everyone knew so much more. It was as though I had never been to school before. As soon as I got home, I started studying. I read assignments both before and after the lectures. I read them before so I could understand what the professor was saying, and I read them again afterwards because he talked so fast. I was never sure I understood.
In college they dressed differently from high school, and I didn't know anything about that. I learned how to dress. For the first six weeks, though, I never went anywhere. I stayed home and studied. It was hard—real hard. (I can imagine what a real university would be like.) And it was so different. If you didn't turn in your work, that was just your tough luck. No one kept at me the way they did in high school. They didn't say, "OK, I'll give you another week."
Gradually I started making friends. I guess some of them thought I was different. One boy asked me what part of India I was from. He didn't even know there were Indians in Florida. I said, "I'm an American." Things like that are kind of hard. I couldn't see my family often, but in a way that was helpful because I had to learn to adjust to my new environment. Nobody could help me but myself.
Well, I graduated and went down to the bank. The president of the bank had called the agency and said he would like to employ a qualified Indian girl. So I went down there, and they gave me a test, and I was interviewed. And then they told me to come in the following Monday. That's how I went to work. I finished college May 29, and I went to work June 1. I worked there for three years.
In the fall of 1966, my father and the president of the Tribal Board asked me to come back to Big Cypress to manage a new economic enterprise there. It seemed like a dream come true, because I could not go back to live at Big Cypress without a job there.
But it was not an easy decision. I liked my bank work. You might say I had fallen in love with banking. But all my life I had wanted to do something to help my people, and I could do that only by leaving my bank job in Miami. Being the person I am, I had to go back. I would have felt guilty if I had a chance to help and I didn't.
But I told my daddy that I couldn't give him an answer right away, and I knew he was upset because he had expected me to jump at the chance to come back. He did understand, though, that I had to think about it. He knew when I went to live off the reservation that I had had a pretty hard time, getting used to a job, getting used to people. He knew I had accomplished a lot, and it wasn't easy for me to give it up. But that's how I felt. I had to think. At one time it seemed to me that I could never go back to reservation life.
But then really, through it all, I always wished there was something, even the smallest thing, that I could do for my people. Maybe I'm helping now. But I can see that I may get tired of it in a year, or even less. But right now I'm glad to help build up the store. If it didn't work out, if the store failed, and I thought I hadn't even tried, I would really feel bad.
The basic thing about my feeling is that my brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews can build later on in the future only through the foundation their parents and I build. Maybe Indian parents don't always show their affection; but they have taught us that, even though we have a problem, we are still supposed to help one another. And that is what I am trying to do. Even when we were kids, if we had something and other kids didn't, we must share what we had ...
By the age of nine, girls were expected to take complete care of younger children. I too had to take care of my little brother and sister. I grew up fast. That's just what parents expected. Now teenagers don't want to do that, so they get angry and take off. Head Start and nurseries help the working mothers because older children don't tend the little ones anymore. The old ways are changing, and I hope to help some of the people, particularly girls about my age, change to something good.
There are people on the reservation who don't seem to like me. Maybe they are jealous, but I don't know why. I know they resent me somehow. When I used to come from school or from work back to the reservation, I could tell some people felt like this. I don't think that I have ever, ever, even in the smallest way, tried to prove myself better or more knowing than other people. I have two close friends here, so I don't feel too lonely; but other people my age do not make friends with me. I miss my sister, and I miss my roommate from Miami. My two friends here are good friends. I can tell them anything I want. I can talk to them. That's important, that I can talk to them. That's what I look for in a friend, not their education, but for enjoyment of the same things, and understanding. But there are only two of them. I have not been able to find other friends.
The old people think I know everything because I've been to school. But the old people don't have the kind of experience which allows them to understand our problems. They think that it is easy somehow to come back here. They think there is nothing else. They do not understand that there are things I miss on the outside. They do not understand enough to be friends. They are kind, and they are glad that I am educated, but they do not understand my problems. They do not understand loneliness ...
1. One wonders how, then, these students have arrived at such a false conclusion. One reason, of course, may be that they're science students. Scientific terms generally possess only one, precisely defined, meaning. It is, in fact, exactly this quality that makes these words distinctive in English, or indeed in any other language. Another reason could be the way in which these students were taught English. For example, long vocabulary lists are still an important feature in the foreign language learning programmes of many countries. On one side of the page is the word in English; on the other side a single word in the student's native language.
2. 2. Practically all the students think that every word in English had an exact translational equivalent in their own language. Again this is a gross distortion of the truth. Sometimes a word in the student's native language may not have an equivalent in English at all, which may have to employ a phrase as a translation. Sometimes one word in the student's language may be translated by one of two possible words in English. The difficulty that many students have with the two verbs 'do' and 'make' is an example of this. Often the area of meaning covered by one word in the student's language may be wider or narrower than the area of meaning covered by a corresponding word in English. This sometimes happens with the naming of colours, where most students would expect an exact correspondence between their language and English. The borders between the primary colours of the spectrum are, however, drawn at different places in different languages. Translation, in fact, is a particularly difficult thing to do well. It certainly can't be done by matching single words from one language by single words from another. At first, those computer scientists who attempted to construct an automatic translation machine made this mistake. The machines often produced nonsense.
3. What, then, is the best way to increase one's vocabulary in a foreign language? This can be answered in three words. Firstly, observation: the unknown word should be observed in its context; in other words, the neighbouring words and the grammatical construction should be noted. A good dictionary should be referred to and examples of the usage of the word should be noted. Secondly, imitation: the student should use the new word in appropriate contexts, imitating the examples he has noted. Finally, repetition: he'll need to practise using the word several times before he's confident that he can use it correctly; in other words, repetition is necessary if the new word is to 'stick', and especially if it is to enter the student's active vocabulary.
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