The Basque Country--Language, Culture and Politics: A View from the Inside

In this presentation before the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council, Roslyn M. Frank, professor emeritus of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa, shares her experiences in the Basque Country (Euskal Herria) where for the past forty years she has carried out fieldwork and related investigations. The talk begins with a brief overview of how the Basque Country is seen from the outside, for example, by visitors as well as how she herself originally saw it when she first went there and before she learned Euskara, the Basque language. It is a perspective that often casts the Basque people, their language, culture and political beliefs—as if they represented the ultimate “outsiders” vis-à-vis the rest of Europe. From that starting point, her decades long journey, one that revealed a radically different perspective of the Basques and their relationship to Europe, will be discussed. Her investigations, facilitated by having learned Euskara, led to a truly remarkable discovery, namely, that the Basques used to believe they descended from bears, an indigenous belief system that appears to have been shared by other Europeans. In short, this revised perspective provides a lens through which an indigenous ecocentric worldview with significant time-depth starts to come into focus. The talk also provides an overview of the strategies that the Basque people have had to use to preserve their language and culture, both under the Franco regime and later. The current situation in Euskal Herria is also treated with special attention being paid to the trial of eight young Basques, the “Altsasu Eight”, which is currently taking place in a Madrid court.