I have had a whole crowd of foppish liberal wine and cheese faux aristocrats who fight tooth and nail not to budget money for Celtic Arts courses at our school, and we have produced national level artists from the ranks of our students. Not willing to give in, our band funded the courses by playing 60 public engagements per year,earning 30 thousand dollars to fund instruction, creating fame and good will for our school throughout New England. Still the wine and cheese liberals would not relent, because the Celtic Arts are "uncivilized" when compared to the likes of Beethoven and Handel.Yet the public clamors for what we do, and the liberals are left rotting on their aristocratic vines, as they fail to produce student artists of national stature, who can't even gain entry into our leading University music programs.
Prejudice against Celtic culture is very real to me. I battle it every week. How many names in your community phone book are Scottish or Irish? If you have many, why are there not fiddle,harp, and piping concerts like those of Cape Breton. Why have those people lost their culture? Simple, because they were stigmatized for having it, stigmatized for speaking Gaelic. Yet they have no Gaelic or Celtic studies in our Universities, while we have Afro American studies, women's studies. There are more Swahili courses in the USA than Gaelic.
I get to see what happens when our band parades down the streets of New England. We are the recipients of a surge of gratitude and often tears in the eyes of those of Celtic descent. I wonder what the reason for that might be?
When I laugh around the dozens of kilt jokes, drunk jokes, I am not laughing at the jokes any more, but I am laughing at the fools who tell them from a false sense of superiority and ignorance.And I laugh way harder than any such joke warrants. It sometimes makes them think.
Several of us on this board have spent several years studying all we could of the Sa'ami.
Talk about a minority, one tribe ~ the Skolt ~ are down to 500 people in Finland and less than 5,000 in Russia. The total in Europe is probably 100,000 counting all the tribes.
The Irish are not an endangered species, nor are the Scots, nor the Welsh, nor the Cornish, nor the Bretons, nor the Galicians.
Blam and I have a tribe with 500 people. Just last month the last person who could speak the language of a related tribe passed on ~ that tribe is no more.
Rejoice that you have sufficient members to know your tribes still exist.
Blam would probably like to know that a fellow we know whose done a lot of family genealogical work on folks from Otsego NY also has all the ills that affect the rest of us ~ I may have found several hundred more!
Beer and Buffalo Wings, please!