Nunani: Of cabbages and kings (Part two)

By NUNATSIAQ NEWS

RACHEL ATTITUQ QITSUALIK

The army cadets started off the first day going out to do “fire building,” starting a fire with a single match (in rather soggy, windy weather), heat a can of beans with it, then put the fire out safely.

The adult officers who were supervising, asked me if I would like to contribute, but they were going to fire-build in the woods — and what did I know about woodlands? Sure, I knew what made good kindling in the Arctic; even little kids could start fires where I grew up. But I felt that I wasn’t qualified when it came to trees and brush. I agreed to come along, but just as an observer.

I didn’t remain an observer for long.

The instructing officers quickly became frustrated with the cadets, who barely grasped any aspect of fire-building. Despite better advice, they chose the most crazy fire-sites — high ground, where wind scattered their sites every few seconds, or boggy areas where sites were instantly saturated with ice-water. One kid tried to start his fire in the crook of some tree-roots, it obviously not occurring to him that — if he ever got it blazing — it would burn a tree down. The Commanding Officer (CO) leaned toward me and whispered,

“Don’t stop them. They need to learn for themselves why their sites suck. And don’t worry about the kid at the tree there — he’s never going to get his fire started like that, so the tree is in no danger.”

The more I watched, the more I became convinced that something was wrong with these kids, but I couldn’t place my finger on it. For one thing, they wouldn’t use the natural tools around them, such as sticks or rocks. The officers explained time and again all about tinder and how to light a fire with it; but still, the kids would go from nodding at the lesson examples, even repeating back what they had been told, to wandering about as though lost and confused.

After a while, I couldn’t stand it any more, and started taking an active part in the fire instruction. I stopped a boy who was dragging a dripping log over to his non-existent fire-site.

“Wait! Wait! Where are you going with that?”

He directed a stunned sort of look toward me, saying,

“Fire.”

“Turn it over,” I said.

He did so, revealing that the log was soaking wet.

“What do you see?” I asked him.

“Wet.”

“So you remember what the CO was saying earlier, right? Is it good or bad for burning?”

He looked like he just wanted me to tell him the right answer, so that he could repeat it back properly, so that I would get out of his hair.

Another cadet, at another time, was emitting a lot of “ooches” and “ows” because he kept shifting his burning tinder around with his fingers, when there was a perfectly good stick sitting next to him. Not one cadet thought to ring any rocks, which were numerous in the area, around their fire. One boy thought he would be clever, and actually sat there rubbing two sticks together futilely — later explaining that he had seen this done on TV.

And I just about screamed when I saw two girls shivering as they used their bare hands to scoop icy water into a bowl — instead of just scooping the water up with the bowl itself.

Not one cadet ever thought to use their bean can label as kindling.

It came to me in a flash: Inuit have it much better than southerners. Inuit children are taught critical thinking all their lives. Classic Inuit education means teaching a child how to treat the world like a universal tool — an object can take on any use you can think of for it, as long as it makes you live.

These army cadets, conversely, were struggling because they had always been taught to cough up specific, pre-set answers to specific, pre-set questions. Every object or action had its designated place. A bowl was something that one put things into, never a scoop, because no one had ever “authorized” them to use it as such.

As any hunter could tell you, imagination is crucial to survival. But because survival had never before been important to these cadets, imagination had never become important, either.

(Continued next week.)

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