CJ Day
Staff Writer
The first thing Pamela Innes tells people is that her new assignment is not a vacation.
“This is going to be a lot of work,” she said. “I’m going to be talking to people every day, at all hours of the day.”
Innes, professor in Linguistic Anthropology and Native American and Indigenous Studies, leaves on Saturday for Iceland, where she will spend three years studying integration techniques among rural communities there. She plans to interview those living in these rural communities to better understand how immigrants eventually become naturalized.
“We’re asking what people have to do to become members of these tight-knit social groups,” Innes said. “We want to come to realizations about what guides integration.”
The question of integration has been on Innes’ mind for a while, though her career did not start there. Innes’s research background is in native languages; specifically, she helps to teach Native American languages to native students, in the hope that an influx of native speakers can save these languages from extinction.
During her work, she found what she describes as “obstacles that were too great to overcome” – students, even native ones, could not connect with the language in a meaningful way, because they did not have much cultural context. Innes started looking for ways to solve this problem, hoping for a silver bullet solution.
“I started looking for commonalities, and I wanted to see if there were examples in the world,” she said. “I figured that I wasn’t the first one to have this problem.”
Innes’ research eventually led her to Iceland, whose distinctive culture and long history of immigration made it ideal for her to find answers. Unfortunately, she did not find the simple solution she was looking for, but she had the opportunity to network with other academics there, and eventually they came up with the idea for this study.
She hopes the data she collects from this study should be useful for other rural areas. In her view, Iceland is similar enough to rural Wyoming that the research she collects could have policy impacts here. Both economies are largely focused around agriculture and tourism, and Innes argues Iceland’s fisheries bear a passing resemblance to Wyoming’s mines.
“They’re both extractive resources; you’re going out somewhere remote to collect something with a limited supply,” said Innes.
The similarities are not just economic. Innes said she feels that while their cultures are wildly different at a superficial level, like holidays and languages, there are some commonalities.
“People have a real pride of place,” said Innes. “In the same way that people in Wyoming are really proud of their small towns, people in Iceland are too.”
When new people move in, they do not have the same reputation that a fourth-generation native would. That is just as true in Torrington as it is in Siglufjörður, Innes said. Much of rural integration, then, is finding out how people eventually become accepted into these communities.
Rural Wyoming towns and remote Icelandic villages are also facing the same massive problem – rural flight. In both, people are leaving small towns to take their chances in the big city, and with older folks dying, towns in rural areas cannot make up the difference.
Already, Iceland is one of the most heavily urbanized countries in the world, with 94% of its population living in urban areas, according to recent demographic data published by the University of Iceland. Wyoming faces a similar problem, with many of its younger residents leaving for bigger cities after college.
In this way, immigration becomes a crucial part of a town’s survival.
“Now, instead of immigrants being some other, they assist with maintaining society, keeping enough people in the town for the schools to stay open, for the hospitals to keep giving treatment,” said Innes.
Innes will spend the next three years in Iceland, spending that time in six isolated rural communities. She plans to gather over two terabytes of data between audio and video recordings and other forms of media.
Though some might be jealous that her career is sending her to Iceland for the next three years, Innes said she is confident the trip will be all work. She said she is excited to leave for Iceland, though, and grateful to have the opportunity to do her job in such an exotic place.
