Light at the Edge of the World (19 page)

Blind to the genius of the Inuit, the early European arrivals imposed their own order. Along with traders who brought diseases that killed nine of ten Inuit, came missionaries whose primary goal was to destroy the power and authority of the shaman, the cultural pivot, the symbolic heart of the Inuit relationship to the universe. The priests forbade the use even of traditional names, songs and the language itself.

By the early twentieth century, the seduction of modern trade goods had begun to draw people away from the land. As they concentrated in communities, often around missions and trading posts, new problems arose. A distemper outbreak led Canadian authorities to rationalize the wholesale slaughter of sled dogs, in whose place the Royal Canadian Mounted Police introduced snowmobiles, with the first one arriving on Baffin Island in 1962 . In the settlements, health conditions deteriorated. A tuberculosis outbreak in the 1950s, and the desperate attempts by medical
authorities to curtail its spread, resulted in 20 per cent of the entire Inuit population being forcibly removed to sanitaria in Montreal, Winnipeg and other southern cities.

In two decades of destruction, beginning in the late 1940s, the Inuit drifted toward dependency. As the Cold War escalated, the Canadian government, compelled to bolster its claims to the Arctic, actively promoted settlement. Family allowance payments were made contingent on the children attending school. As parents moved into communities to be with their young, nomadic camps disappeared. Along with settlements and schools came nursing stations, churches and welfare. The government identified each person by number, issued identification tags, and ultimately conducted Operation Surname, assigning last names to a people who had never had them. In the process, more than a few Inuit dogs were recorded as Canadian citizens.

After half a century of profound changes, what has become of Inuit traditions? Naturally, the people have adapted. The Inuit language is alive. The men are still hunters: they use snares, make snow houses, know the power of medicinal herbs that sprout in the Arctic spring. But they also own boats, snowmobiles, television sets and satellite phones. Some drink, some attend church. As anthropologist Hugh Brody points out, what must be defended is not the traditional as opposed to the modern,
but, rather, the right of a free indigenous people to choose the components of their lives.

Canada, which had not always been kind to the Inuit, has in recent years recognized this challenge by negotiating an astonishing land-claims settlement with the peoples of the Eastern Arctic. In a historic gesture of restitution, the federal government announced on April 1, 1999, the creation of Nunavut, an Inuit homeland of well over 770 ,000 square miles (1 995 000 km
²
). Including all of Baffin Island and stretching from Manitoba to Ellesmere Island, with a population of just twenty-six thousand, Nunavut is almost as large as Alaska and California combined. In addition to annual payments totalling $1.148 billion over fourteen years, funds to be held in trust to finance student scholarships and economic development, the Inuit will receive direct title to over 135 ,000 square miles (350 000 km
²
). More than 80 per cent of the known mineral reserves of copper, lead, zinc, gold and silver in all of Nunavut are to be found on land deeded to the Inuit. In their homeland, where caribou outnumber people thirty to one and where but a century ago nomadic hunters fashioned tools from stone and slate, the Inuit will have total administrative control, the most remarkable experiment in Native self-government anywhere to be found.

There is much to do, many injuries to heal. After years of decay and alienation, substance abuse is chronic and
the suicide rate is six times the national average. When the environmental group Greenpeace shut down the traditional seal hunt on Baffin Island, the annual per capita income dropped from $16 ,000 to nothing. Unemployment in the cash economy of Nunavut hovers at 30 per cent.

But if the challenges are great, so is the opportunity. In the language of the Inuit, the word
uvatiarru
may be translated as “ long ago” or “in the future.” A cultural renaissance is underway, with the Inuit at last in control of their lives and destiny. Tracking caribou on the open tundra during the cold months of the fall, taking narwhal from the ice in July, they will continue to honour a seasonal round that recalls a not too distant era when their people were nomads, hunters of the northern ice. The rhythm of the year will continue to propel the culture, influencing everything from the character of local regulations and the criminal justice system to the manner in which men and women come together, families grow and prosper, power is shared and food divided. In time, the wounds of broken promises and lost dreams, the tortured memories of the residential schools, where children were torn from families and young boys and girls lived at the mercy of priests, will be healed. It may take generations. But then patience has always been one of the most enduring traits of the Inuit. There is a story from Greenland about a group of men and women who walked a great distance to gather wild grass in one of
the few verdant valleys of the island. When they arrived, the grass had yet to sprout, so they watched and waited until it grew.

 

AS YOU READ these last words, consider that everything that has been expressed in this book, every story and myth, each point of conflict and tragedy, has been distilled from my own limited experiences and from what anthropologists have learned from their work among the handful of cultures that it has been my privilege to have known. People sometimes remark that I have been fortunate to have travelled so widely, to have seen so much, but, in fact, I have experienced very little of the world's cultural diversity. Just as a bouquet of a dozen species represents but an iota of the Earth's botanical bounty, so too these journeys and encounters offer but a fragment of the full wonder of the ethnosphere. In this book I make reference to perhaps thirty cultures, discussing at some length a mere fourteen. There remain another fourteen thousand to visit and celebrate, if only there were time.

Before she died, anthropologist Margaret Mead spoke of her singular concern that, as we drift toward a more homogenous world, we are laying the foundations of a blandly amorphous and singularly generic modern culture that ultimately will have no rivals. The entire imagination
of humanity, she feared, might become confined within the limits of a single intellectual and spiritual modality. Her nightmare was the possibility that we might wake up one day and not even remember what had been lost.

There are many people, of course, who view such a process of condensation as progress, the inevitable consequence of modernity. Without doubt, images of comfort and wealth, of technological wizardry, have a magnetic allure. Any job in the city may seem better than back-breaking labour in sun-scorched fields. Entranced by the promise of the new, indigenous people throughout the world have in many instances voluntarily and in great earnest turned their backs on the old. The consequences can be profoundly disappointing. The fate of the vast majority of those who sever their ties with their traditions will not be to attain the prosperity of the West but to join the legions of urban poor, living on the edges of a cash economy, trapped in squalor and struggling to survive. As cultures wither away, individuals remain, often shadows of their former selves, caught in time, unable to return to the past yet denied any real possibility of securing a place in the world whose values they seek to emulate and whose wealth they long to acquire.

The triumph of secular materialism is the conceit of modernity. But what are the features of this life? An
anthropologist from a distant land visiting America, for example, would note many wondrous things. But he would no doubt be puzzled to learn that 20 per cent of the people control 80 per cent of the wealth, that the average child has by the age of eighteen spent a full two years passively watching television. Observing that over half of our marriages end in divorce and that only 6 per cent of our elders live with a relative, he might question the values of a society that so readily breaks the bonds of marriage and abandons its aged, even as its men and women exhaust themselves in jobs that only reinforce their isolation from their families. Certainly, a slang term such as 24/7, implying as it does the willingness of an employee to be available for work at all times, seems excessive, though it would explain the fact that the average American father spends only eighteen minutes a day in direct communication with his child. And what of our propensity to compromise the very life supports of the planet? Extreme would be one word for a civilization that contaminates with its waste the air, water and soil; that drives plants and animals to extinction; that dams the rivers, tears down the ancient forests, rips holes in the protective halo of the heavens and does little to curtail industrial processes that threaten to transform the biochemistry of the very atmosphere.

Once we look through the anthropological lens and see, perhaps for the first time, that all cultures have unique
attributes that reflect choices made over generations, it becomes absolutely clear that there is no universal progression in the lives and destiny of human beings. No trajectory of progress. Were societies to be ranked on the basis of technological prowess, the Western scientific experiment, radiant and brilliant, would no doubt come out on top. But if the criteria of excellence shifted, for example, to the capacity to thrive in a truly sustainable manner, with a true reverence and appreciation for the Earth, the Western paradigm would fail. If the imperatives driving the highest aspirations of our species were to be the power of faith, the reach of spiritual intuition, the philosophical generosity to recognize the varieties of religious longing, then our dogmatic conclusions would again be found wanting.

Viewed from this broader perspective, the notion that indigenous societies are archaic, that their very presence represents some impediment, is transparently wrong. As David Maybury-Lewis has written, indigenous peoples do not stand in the way of progress; rather, they contribute to it if given a chance. Their cultural survival does not undermine the nation state; it serves to enrich it, if the state is willing to embrace diversity. And, most important of all, these cultures do not represent failed attempts at modernity, marginal peoples who somehow missed the technological train to the future. On the contrary, these peoples, with their dreams and prayers, their myths and memories,
teach us that there are indeed other ways of being, alternative visions of life, birth, death and creation itself. When asked the meaning of being human, they respond with ten thousand different voices. It is within this diversity of knowledge and practice, of intuition and interpretation, of promise and hope, that we will all rediscover the enchantment of being what we are, a conscious species aware of our place on the planet and fully capable not only of doing no harm but of ensuring that all creatures in every garden find a way to flourish.

WADE DAVIS HAS DEGREES IN ANTHROPOLOGY AND biology as well as a Ph.D in ethnobotany from Harvard University. He is currently explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society. Davis is a popular, critically acclaimed and award-winning writer of many books, including the international bestseller
The Serpent and the Rainbow
, as well as
The Clouded Leopard: Travels to Landscapes of Spirit and Desire
;
One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest
and
The Lost Amazon: The Photographic Journey Of Richard Evans Schultes
.

Copyright©2001 and 2007 by Wade Davis

 

 

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The text was first published in 2001 in a book of photographs and essays also titled
Light at the Edge of the World
.

 

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Davis, Wade
Light at the edge of the world : a journey through the realm of vanishing cultures / by Wade Davis.—Text-only edition.

 

eISBN : 978-1-926-70689-4

 

1. Ethnology. I. Title.
GN316.D3752007 306 C2006-905295-6