Iñupiaq was the first and is still the only agglutinative language I have encountered. Living as a minority among the Iñupiat and learning a bit of the language, I acquired my first intimation of the link between language and culture. It is difficult to find adequate metaphors for the intuited relations -- language does not determine culture, but to know a language is to sense a horizon of possibility, which is the culture. To encounter a culture that is not one's own and then to learn the language is to feel its contours for the first time.
There is no better introduction to one's own culture than an extended stay in another one. Iñupiaq was not a written language until recently, so my brief immersion in the Iñupiaq culture afforded a glimpse into a world without literacy. I thereby learned something about the pervasive backdrop to my own life. Most significant, I learned that life without literacy could be rich in ways that the literacy-based culture I was familiar with obscured.
When I entered a program in Cross-Cultural Education at the University of Alaska, literacy studies was emerging as a disciplinary field. It was a field that deeply interested me and continues to do so, although my attention has shifted from rural Alaska and cultural difference to urban environments and issues of social class, social change, inter-institutional collaboration, and strategies for intervention into complex "eco-social" (Lemke) systems.