Nunani: Of cabbages and kings (Part four)

RACHEL ATTITUQ QITSUALIK

Before I knew it, it was next day, and my turn to instruct the army cadets was up. Up until this time, I had been wracking my brain for the solution to a single, great problem: How was I going to teach cold weather survival to some urban kids who didn’t even possess the basic skills of Inuit children?

In Inuktitut, we would have been making a priority of manual dexterity, spatial understanding, hand-eye co-ordination, and team working skills from the earliest ages.

I decided to begin with hand-eye co-ordination. I had seen these cadets trying to build fires earlier in the bush, and half the time their problem seemed to be that they couldn’t physically handle small objects, such as matches or twigs for tinder — they just kept fumbling with everything.

And I had been horrified when I told a cadet to cut something with his knife, only to find out that he didn’t have one. I asked around, and none of the cadets had knives. “How are you supposed to survive without a knife!?” I gasped.

The supervising CO just shook his head, saying, “I know, Rachel. That’s one of the problems. The cadets used to carry Swiss Army knives, but we started to get complaints from parents who felt it was too dangerous to allow ‘children’ to carry sharp objects. So they have to request use of a knife from an adult now.”

This was madness. No wonder the cadets had no manual dexterity. They weren’t even allowed blades, like any Inuit child. They couldn’t while away their time digging, cutting, whittling, boring, or doing any of the fun things that depended upon a knife — and consequently never developed the spatial skills that accompany such activities.

It was explained to me that parents were afraid the children would cut themselves, and I thought: So what? Of course they cut themselves, just like we did as well. But your finger heals and you know better next time. One who never cuts himself slightly as a child is guaranteed to cut himself severely as an adult.

I guess that I had taken for granted, as a child, the chance to handle a lot of tools Inuit regularly used in harvesting wildlife for food and clothing — matches, gas lamps, camping stoves, axes, knives, ulus, dog sleds, tents, ropes, fish-hooks, and rifles. I had assumed Qallunaat children all grow up with the same experiences, which they apparently don’t.

When it was my turn with the cadets, I began lecturing about some cold weather tricks, which was expected of me. As I mentioned before, I went through a check list of tactics — getting emergency water, determining direction. But I really wanted to get on with what I saw as “fundamental” skills.

I had requested some string, and we all sat there cutting up lengths of it and tying bits together in loops. Once everyone had a loop of the right size, I began to show them ajaraaq — traditional string games. I showed them the “snow house”, the “shovel,” and “cat’s cradle” (interestingly, a string figure from the times when white people used to teach their children traditional string games of their own).

I was surprised at how fast they soaked it up, at how most of them fumbled along, but gave it their all, nonetheless. I could tell it was frustrating for many of them, since their fingers had never been forced to exhibit such dexterity before, but they were young, and displayed an intense fascination with the games, with “getting it,” that was very rewarding.

Then we were on to the most important lesson: team work.

It is a well-known fact that Inuit dislike being bossed around, a tendency that hearkens back to their roots. The greatest “cold weather survival trick” that Inuit ever learned was to collectively repress individual ego in order to work efficiently as a group — to be efficient without ranks and without a heroic leader to save the day.

Inuit learned how to live in as complete a state of equality as has ever been seen in a society, a society in which everyone agreed upon the single most important goal: surviving.

And it begins with Inuit games, since the games you teach your children set the precedent for the activities they carry out as adults.

(To be continued.)