Nunani: Of cabbages and kings (Part three)

RACHEL ATTITUQ QITSUALIK

Dealing with these southern army cadets was as illuminating as any cross-cultural workshop, if not more so. I learned as much as I taught.

It occurred to me, while witnessing their unfortunate attempts at building a fire with a single match (they could have multiple tries, but they were only allowed to use one match at a time), that they were having difficulty not because fire-building is hard, but simply because they were approaching it as though it were a school project.

In my mind, one word summed these kids up: Suburbia. They were too used to their specific environment. It was obvious that much of their energy went into keeping adults — along with adult concerns — off their backs, to the point where they approached every learning experience as though it were an equation, a process with distinct steps.

A) An adult proposes a project (eg., “Today we’re going to learn X.”)

B) The adult asks perfunctory questions concerning the project’s nature (eg., “Anyone know how X works?”)

C) The kids wait for the right answer (“right” meaning whatever the instructor wants to hear), faithfully jotting it down.

D) The kids regurgitate whatever the instructor wants to hear.

E) The lesson ends and the kids are free from temporary bondage, so that they can get on with their real lives.

Inuktitut teaching is completely different, because it is not about lessons or programs. It is about tapping the children’s natural talents, encouraging them to use their minds in an expansive, alternative way.

An Inuk child would not be taught to make a kamotik, for example, by being told one day, “A sled is made of the following materials… the pieces are set together in the following manner…” Instead, he or she would assist in the construction of a kamotik and participate in its use, so that the child can develop his or her personal sense of what makes a sled functional.

I once saw some hunters substitute caribou legs and frozen fish for slats in the kamotik. The fact that they didn’t have enough wood didn’t stop them. They were thinking in an expansive, adaptable way, instead of giving up because they didn’t have the parts that were “needed” for a sled.

Without the tenuous web of infrastructure that keeps an urban environment going, such expansive thinking is the difference between life and death. It’s what pulled our species out of an Ice Age, while most species around us went extinct. Think that cities are impervious to nature? Ask those residents of Quebec and eastern Ontario who endured the ice storm a few years ago if they feel that way.

So when it was my turn to have the cadets for the evening, to lecture them on cold weather survival, I decided that we had to start at the beginning — to alter their thinking. I had to dig down through the urban bull, and awaken their instincts, the animal part of the brain that is infinitely flexible, because its priority is staying alive.

Oh sure, I ran them through the standard tricks, such as finding water, conserving heat and eating proper foods. But I really wanted to re-orient their thinking toward survivalism, as in an experiment I once heard of. Some scientists had trained lab rats to run a series of mazes with cheese at the end. The rats got quite good at it, and the scientists wanted to see how a wild rat would stack up.

They were shocked when, instead of running the maze, the wild rat simply smelled the direction the cheese lay in, and chewed right through the maze walls to get it. I wanted these city kids, spawn of a southern metropolis, to break out of the lab. I wanted to be a wild rat (figuratively speaking, of course) teaching the lab rats how to chew through the maze.

So I spent a night on an uncomfortable, airless air-mattress, planning my lesson. Up to this point, I had been unsure of what to do, what I was going to instruct. But here I was, sleepless on a cold camp-kitchen floor, with the shockingly loud snores of little girls all around me (I hadn’t known that little girls snored), and some ideas began to come to me.

They wouldn’t be rats — they would be wolves. That, and I needed some string.

(Continued next week.)