A Comparison: The Athabascans versus the Amish

            Comparing the year in isolation of the Athabascan girls to the rumspringa of the Amish is difficult, because one is an ethnic group and one is a religious sect. Small similarities are present if one looks closely. Unless they are acting English, Amish girls keep their hair covered just as the Athabascans girls wear their hoods. Amish girls are pulled from formal education systems after eighth grade, but some choose to continue during their rumspringas. Teachers are moving to get their female Athabascan students to remain in school during their year of seclusion, where the girls would have been kept from the public eye before. And lastly, both groups of girls do a considerable amount of physical labor during their liminal stages between childhood and adulthood. For Athabascan girls, they are taught to sew and to bead, spending an enormous amount of their time in doing so. The Amish girls attend to all of their chores, their families, their communities, and their religious teachings.

            There are quite a few differences between the two groups though. One being age: an Athabascan girl goes into her period of quarantine with the occurrence of her first menstruation, putting her coming of age in her early teens. An Amish rumspringa begins at age 16. Another difference is that Athabascan girls are kept apart from people during their ritual, more ritualistically now than in the past, whereas young Amish girls are encouraged to get out and meet people in hopes of finding a man in which they wish to marry, and to experience “worldly activities”.

An Amish girl’s rumspringa is more about experiencing the world and giving into its temptations before conforming to their Amish principles of no technology, drugs, drinking, or the like, as opposed to an Athabascan girl’s year of seclusion in which she learns about womanhood and how to take care of a family, something young Amish girls learn simply by growing up and helping their mothers with younger siblings. Rumspringas show us that the Amish are willing to let their children make the choice between the outside world and getting baptized into the Amish church. They believe that, if they have raised their children correctly, their teenagers will make the most out of their couple years of freedom before settling down with a good, sturdy, Amish man. In conclusion, the rumspringas of the Amish and the year of seclusion of the Athabascan girls hardly have anything in common with one another, other than preparing the girls to settle down into the lives of tradition that their parents have weaned them into.