Nunani: Want (Part one)

RACHEL QITSUALIK

Do you know yourself?
How little of yourself you understand!
Stretched out feebly on my bench, my only strength is in my memories.
Game! Big game, chasing ahead of me!
Allow me to relive that!
Let me forget my frailty, by calling up the past!
I bring to mind the great white one, the polar bear, approaching with raised hindquarters, his nose in the snow – convinced, as he rushed at me, that of the two of us, he was the only male!
This is how it was.
Now I lie on my bench, too sick to even fetch a little seal oil for my woman’s lamp…

– Song of Orpingalik, Netsilingmiut

Of all the questions that explorers and anthropologists have asked early Inuit over time, the most common ones are also the most basic: What do you like? What do you want? What do you fear?

The answers to such questions have also been the source of the greatest frustration to explorers, as well as to other southerners wanting to learn more about Inuit culture. In the past, I have made it clear that traditional Inuit (especially elders) used to consider a direct, personal question to be exceedingly rude. Their way of dealing with such rudeness was to become evasive, even tricky, in the hope that the one asking the questions would simply go away. But while this is true, there is another side to “Inuit evasiveness,” as well, a cultural side. So bear with me while I have a look at it.

While we have all heard it time and again, I have to repeat it here: It cannot be stressed enough how hostile and uncertain the world of pre-colonial Inuit used to be. We all know how adaptable Inuit culture is, but most people think that this adaptation is a matter of technology. Look at how clever Inuit are for doing so well with so little to work with. But in having such a cushy existence ourselves (let’s face it, life isn’t a fraction as hard for us as it was for many of our ancestors, no matter what part of the world our genes hail from), we too easily overlook the fact that survival is not simply a matter of technology. At least two-thirds of survival is attitude, mind set, culture.

While I was living in the South, I had the privilege of conducting a seminar on cold-weather survival. One of the people attending it was a U.S. Marine, a veteran of the Vietnam War. As individuals who pride themselves on their ability to survive anything, Marines love any extra tips they can get on survival in any climate. To my great pleasure, this fellow was extremely excited by the seminar. Just ask my husband. The Marine kept pumping his hand, saying, “You’re lucky to have that one – she can take care of herself!”

Perhaps ironically, my culture is such that I am not even comfortable relating the above story, in part because the survival knowledge that I was imparting during the seminar was commonplace when I was growing up. You did not have to be a great hunter to know how to dress properly, how to conserve heat in oneself or a shelter, how to make cord or clothes, how to find and melt drinking water, how to do basic tracking, or how to orient oneself when lost. You were considered incompetent if you did not possess such knowledge, in the same way that modern, urban folk are considered incompetent if they do not know how to buy groceries or use an elevator.

The one thing that I was concerned about during my seminar, however, was that I could not impart to my listeners the survival “mind.” I was certainly not worried about the Marine – years of soldiering and past trauma had ensured that he already possessed it. But my milder listeners were convinced that survival was guaranteed by simply knowing some cute tricks.

If I could go back and tell them all one thing, it would be this: Traditional Inuit culture is the environment, and nothing other than this.

The Arctic has not simply forced Inuit to develop certain technologies. It has created, sculpted, determined the entire culture, including the way in which the people think. It has made the Inuit mind unlike any other on Earth.

(Concluded in part two.)