The People of the Eye: Deaf Ethnicity and Ancestry (31 page)

12 D. C. Poole, A New Vineyard (Edgartown, Mass.: Dukes County Historical Society, 1976).

13 Nelson, New Gloucester Book. I. Parsons, "An Account of New Gloucester," Collections of the Maine Historical Society 2 (1847): 151-164.

14 Chi square = 9.3, p <.001.

15 Women in History Project. "Nancy Rowe Curtis Papers." William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

16 J. C. Stinchfield, History of the Town of Leeds in Androscoggin County Maine From Its Settlement June 10, 1780 (Bowie Md., Heritage Books, 1996).

17 The father's petition gives a count of four Deaf children at the Asylum: "petition of William B. Curtis of Leeds [wife Olive] 'it has pleased the Righteous Disposer of all events to withhold from four of my dear children the capacity of hearing and of speech.' Executive Council, 1825: Resolve for the assistance of the Deaf and Dumb." However, each of the sons claimed on entry to the Asylum to have two brothers and two sisters (thus five Deaf siblings), and each of the daughters claimed three brothers and two sisters. In the Fay entry for Olive Curtis, #677, she is said to have had one sibling of unknown hearing status. E. A. Fay, Marriages of the Deaf in America (Washington, D.C.: Volta Bureau, 1898).

18 Anon. [T. Brown marries Sophia Sumner nee Curtis]. National Deaf-Mute Gazette 1 (1) (1867): 16.

19 Stinchfield, Leeds; O.M. Wheaton. [Curtis family records], Maine State Archives.

20 J. Rowe, Letter addressed to Mr. George Curtis, East Leeds, January 24,1842; S. E. Rowe, Letter addressed to "Dear brother and sister," written from New Gloucester, Maine, December 2, 1851. From Sarah E. [illegible; probably Hutchins].

21 K. Lockridge, "Land, Population, and the Evolution of New England Society: 1630-1790." Past and Present 39 (1968): 62-80.

22 J. Rowe, Letter addressed to George and Nancy Curtis from "Aunt Judith Rowe" [father Zebulon Rowe's sister], New Gloucester, Maine, May 14, 1846. The letters were obtained from Women History Project, "Nancy Rowe Curtis Papers."

23 Maine Deaf Mute Mission, Samuel Rowe; O. Berg, A Missionary Chronicle: Being a History of the Ministry to the Deaf in the Episcopal Church (1850-1980) (Hollywood, Md.: St. Mary's Press, 1984).

24 S. Rowe, Letter addressed to Ebenezer W. Curtis from Samuel Rowe in Keene, N.H., February, 1849.

25 H. Lane, The Mask of Benevolence: Disabling the Deaf Community. (New York: Knopf, 1992). H. Lane, "Mask of Irrelevance: A Reply to the Annals Review of "The Mask of Benevolence: Disabling the Deaf Community," American Annals of the Deaf 138 (1993): 316-319.

26 S. Rowe, Letter addressed to George Curtis from Samuel Rowe in Lawrence, Mass., May 16,1849.

27 N. Rowe, Letter apparently addressed to Rev. S. H. Shepley, New Gloucester, Maine, April 16, 1846. Written in Leeds.

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SUMMARY

We observed, at the start of our investigation of Deaf ancestry in Maine (Part III), that Deaf people who married chose other Deaf people for spouses much of the time, with the result that many Deaf households were enmeshed in a Deaf kinship network. We reasoned, based on the lives of Deaf families like the Browns of Henniker, New Hampshire, that marriage with a person of one's own kind in an environment of otherness creates a heightened consciousness of shared identity and destiny. We suggested that Deaf ethnicity is an upward projection of family, of language, and of cultural rules and values. Now we can go further and propose that an intermediate stage between Deaf family and Deaf ethnicity is intermarriage across Deaf families, forming larger Deaf clans. We have thus had the opportunity to observe some features of the founding of an ethnic group, specifically the formation of clans and kinship networks, features that in the case of many other ethnic groups have been obscured by the passage of time.

Members of kinship networks need not know one another and that is true for the kinship network diagrammed in Fig. 18. The more degrees of separation the less likely the acquaintance.' Not all of the Deaf people in this kinship network were contemporaries and some of the descendants of these linkages may not have been aware of their ancestry.

The kinship network schematized in Fig. 18 is larger than it appears in the diagram. Hearing spouses in mixed marriages can certainly link Deaf families, although we did not include them in Fig. 18. For example, Sophia Curtis's marriage to Thomas BrownD would have brought the Brown and Swett families into the network shown in Fig. 18. Finally, links were created between Deaf families by the marriages of two hearing people but these are also not shown. Including such bonds among the families would increase the size and complexity of the kinship mapping.

At the same time in early America that Deaf people sought out one another and intermarried, so too did members of the dominant ethnicity, Anglo-Saxons. The two ethnicities were developing side by side but with several important differences. First, the marriage options of the Deaf ethnic minority were much more restricted. Second, Deaf partners in marriage were more often related to one another. Third, early Deaf Americans were creating Deaf ethnicity, shaping its language, culture, and values, while the descendants of the Puritans and other immigrants from England imported their ethnicity, as it were, from the Old World, although it would be shaped by conditions in the New. All three factors contributed mightily to Deaf solidarity: marriage between Deaf people, marriage between relatives, and de novo creation of Deaf ethnicity.

Abetted by institutions such as the American Asylum, the New England Gallaudet Association and the Deaf-Mute Mission, the Deaf of southern New Hampshire and Maine came to see themselves as a class apart from the hearing world, a group with its own distinctive language, culture, and physical makeup. The members of this ethnic group took pleasure in their shared identity. As Deaf inhabitants of Martha's Vineyard increasingly attended the American Asylum, married Deaf in much greater numbers, and joined Deaf institutions, their ethnic consciousness would have increased as well. The movement to replace signed languages, formally inaugurated in the Congress of Milan, had stifled that consciousness but could not extinguish it. Finally, that consciousness blazed anew as a result of the American Civil Rights Movement and continues to grow today with the flourishing of Deaf activism, Deaf arts and Deaf Studies. Deaf people are entering the professions in large numbers, especially professions that serve Deaf people. This expanding Deaf middle class reflects the growth of Deaf enrollments in college programs, many of which are Deaf culture affirming.

Developments in the larger society present both challenges and opportunities for all ethnic groups. Although there are forces that promote Deaf separatism, most Deaf people have hearing parents; moreover, hearing society both restricts and facilitates what Deaf people can achieve, so the Deaf-World, it seems to us, seeks engagement and a degree of bilingualism. We mentioned earlier that the Deaf clubs have been dwindling while other venues for Deaf association have developed. Perhaps vlogs on the internet, email, texting, pagers, and videotelephony reduce the need to some extent for physical presence. Most American Deaf children today are in local schools, depriving many of their ethnic heritage and of all the Deaf-World has to offer. Increasing numbers of students receive cochlear implant surgery. Many such children require a command of ASL in order to communicate with their teacher or interpreter and to converse with other Deaf people, but programs of implant surgery often discourage the use of ASL-thus the historic struggle between minority and majority language continues.

We have presented evidence and reasoning with regard to language, culture, and boundary maintenance that encourages a reconceptualization of Deaf ASL signers as an ethnic group. In response to those scholars who insist that ethnicity also requires shared ancestry, either real or mythical, we replied that a majority of the members of the Deaf-World inherited their ethnicity, which they owe to a small number of shared ancestors.

We have made a start at identifying those ancestors for the island of Martha's Vineyard and the illustrative case of Maine. Tracing those ancestors back to their American progenitors and beyond revealed that nearly forty clan progenitors in the Vineyard and Maine had ancestors in the county of Kent in England? Kent apparently had Deaf people and a sign language, quite early on. That sign language likely was brought to the Vineyard by settlers and likely played a role in the shaping of ASL. This remains to be shown definitively by further research.

In some Deaf families, every generation has had Deaf members and the ethnic physical difference is always expressed. In other cases, the trait is carried forward unexpressed, and then appears or reappears overtly. This dual pattern of ethnic transmission may be peculiar to Deaf ethnicity but there can be no doubt that Deaf heritage-language and culture, including strategies for boundary maintenance and the reliance on vision-are transmitted from generation to generation both through families and through social institutions. The People of the Eye thus contributes to two fields-ethnohistory and comparative ethnography-applied to Deaf Studies.

REFLECTIONS

The consequences of an ethnic conceptualization of the Deaf-World go well beyond academic studies; the quality of Deaf lives (and the lives of those who relate to them) is in large part determined by how Deaf people are conceptualized. Are ASL signers simply hearing people manquees, most of them beset by a genetic mutation passed on through intermarriage, or are they members of an ethnic group whose common descent, language, and culture can be traced across generations? The conceptualization of any ethnic group is a powerful force in self-acceptance and acceptance by others, and a lens through which relations are perceived and managed between majority and minority. Recognizing Deaf American ethnicity, what obligations does that impose on the majority in its dealings with the Deaf? Contemporary ethical standards with regard to the treatment of ethnic minorities are captured in part in the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities.3 The treaty calls on governments to protect and foster the existence and identity of linguistic minorities; it affirms the right of such minorities to enjoy their culture and use their language; it asks that governments take measures to ensure that persons belonging to minorities have adequate opportunities to learn the minority language. Most fundamentally, members of the Deaf-World ethnic group have a right "to participate in decisions on the national level affecting their minority."4

None of these provisions has been honored broadly in the experience of ethnic Deaf Americans. The failure to conceptualize sign language speakers as an ethnic group is, we believe, an important reason for the failure to apply to them the ethical standards that concern ethnic groups. Here follow some examples of the potential rewards of adopting an ethnic perspective on Deaf ethnicity. However, the accuracy of viewing ASL signers as an ethnic group is independent of the gains and losses associated with embracing that identity.

Recognized Authorities

Changing the conceptualization of ASL signers opens the way to apply the accumulated wisdom of the Deaf-World to Deaf children and adults. There would be many more service providers from the minority: Deaf teachers, foster parents, information officers, social workers, advocates. Non-Deaf service providers would be expected to know the language, history, and culture of the Deaf-World .5

Legal Status

Most members of the Deaf-World would no longer claim disability benefits or services under the present legislation for disabled people. The services to which the Deaf ethnic group has a right in order to obtain equal treatment under the law would be provided by other legislation and bureaucracies. Civil rights laws and rulings applied to ethnic groups protect their rights in arenas such as education, employment and language use. There is a body of law in the United States that predicates language rights on ethnicity. As minorities come to occupy a larger part of the population, the need to accommodate ethnic groups and especially their languages will become increasingly apparent. Interpreters are not normally a right of handicapped persons; rather they are a right of ethnic groups based on the principle of equal access.

Cochlear Implants

Changing the conceptualization changes the nature of interventions. In 1990, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved surgical implantation in children of a cochlear prosthesis, a device that converts sound waves into electrical currents that are delivered to a wire implanted in the child's inner ear. Deaf organizations worldwide have deplored the surgery,6 contending that Deaf babies are healthy babies with no need of surgery; that the surgery has medical and psychosocial risks and highly variable results; that children are too young to give consent and their parents are often uninformed about the Deaf-World; and that it is in principle injurious to the Deaf-World.?

The program of childhood cochlear implantation in America and elsewhere has as a primary goal to enable Deaf children to acquire the majority spoken language. In their efforts to achieve this goal, surgeons, audiologists, and special educators commonly instruct parents not to use sign language with their children nor allow others to do so. This practice violates the child's right to language and the ethnic group's right to flourish.8 If the goal of replacing ASL with English could be achieved on a wide scale, the consequence, however unintended, would be ethnocide, the systematic extinction of an ethnic minority's freedom to pursue its way of life. An implant scientist quoted in the Atlantic Monthly claimed that ethnocide will indeed be the likely consequence of programs of cochlear implantation: "The cochlear prosthesis on which I have worked for years with many other scientists, engineers and clinicians, will lead inevitably to the extinction of the alternative culture of the Deaf, probably within a decade."9 The author likens Deaf culture to Yiddish culture and concludes, "Both are unsustainable." Is it self-indulgent nostalgia to want to protect Deaf culture and Yiddish culture? Ethnic diversity enriches life; it is a fundamental good. When ethnic diversity is sustained, so is society's adaptive poten- tial.10 Moreover, most of us recoil at the idea of undermining an ethnic group because it is morally wrong, because it has led to crimes against humanity, and because we want our own ethnicity protected from powerful others. If our society generally has failed to recoil at the prospect of Deaf ethnocide, it is because most fail to recognize Deaf ethnicity.