Choosing a life
I’ve been (and still am for a few more hours) away from home in the desert visiting my mom. Traveling Outside from Alaska is always a mild shock. The flood of people in the Seattle airport is the first jolt. And from that point on, I’m out of place, feeling a bit alienated and strange wherever I go. Like visiting a foreign country, except that I understand what everyone is saying - mostly.
I took some books along, and one of them, Ordinary Wolves by Seth Kantner, was a great companion. It is probably one of the most honest books I’ve ever read about cultural turmoil in Alaska Native communities. Kantner handled this difficult subject with a lot of sensitivity and directness, not an easy thing to do.
Cutuk, the main character, is a white man with an Eskimo nickname who was raised with his brother and sister by his single father, in a sod igloo.
Our family lived out on the tundra. Abe had dug a pit, old Eskimo style, and built our igloo out of logs and poles, before I even grew a memory. Eskimos wouldn’t live that way anymore, but for some reason we did.
Later in the story, he speaks for anyone who’s ever felt lost, displaced and yearning for a way of life that is gone, vanished like his friend Enuk Wolfglove.
I think I know how the guys feel. Real hunting is gone….Trapping feels phony; things cost so much and furs are worth so little. Every time I get a grip on what matters, then I’m all confused again. A white-person career, with insurance? And a pension? Something is missing in me - that feels like being born a wolf and choosing a dog’s life.”
I’ve been watching people while I’ve been out and about, thinking about wolves and dogs’ lives, wondering where we’re all headed, and how any of us can avoid being trapped or domesticated into a life that mainly serves someone else’s purposes.
Self-determination was a theme for this trip, since my mother recently moved into an assisted living senior community. She feels more independent now, relieved of care. And yet how easily this same situation could have felt like a trap if it had been someone else’s choosing. Making our choices freely is a challenge at every turn, and necessary if we expect to retain our human dignity.
Standards for living are deeply personal, and they reflect our core values. The choices we make in living are a form of self-expression, limited by our creative ability to make use of the world around us, and many of the choices people make aren’t very nice. Coming to an understanding of what’s good for all of us, it seems, is the major challenge of our time.
Michael wrote,
‘The choices we make in living are a form of self-expression, limited by our creative ability to make use of the world around us, and many of the choices people make aren’t very nice. Coming to an understanding of what’s good for all of us, it seems, is the major challenge of our time. ‘
Doug, I thought that was really well put and it’s eternally (it seems) pertinent to any overview of what’s happening with Aboriginal peoples world-wide.
I guess the corollary is that nobody - but nobody - is in a position to determine precisely what’s good for someone else who lives to other cultural imperatives.
A recent illustration of the pitfalls is our current Minister for Indigenous Affairs who is convinced the home ownership is central to any ‘progress’ in the lives of Aboriginal peoples.
He’s just come back from inveiling four new houses in a bush outstation community about 200km to the south-west of Darwin and 40km from the nearest Aboriginal town.
Four lucky Aboriginal families will get to ‘own’ the houses (in other words get into the mortgage syndrome) IF they agree to pay rent every week, keep the houses clean and tidy AND make sure their kids go to school every day over a two-year period.
And someone’s going to check on ‘the choices they make in living’?
Looks like somebody failed the challenge!
Link | May 3rd, 2007 at 3:36 am
Doug Noon wrote,
Michael, I was thinking a little bit about you and your blog when I put this up, and I’m glad you jumped in.
“…nobody - but nobody - is in a position to determine precisely what’s good for someone else who lives to other cultural imperatives.”
This sentence captured my meaning quite nicely, thank you.
As for the idea that owning a house is central to progress, Kantner describes the condition of some government houses that his characters live in, and you can probably imagine that the “clean and tidy” clause would be a problem. It’s the “other cultural imperatives” problem all over again.
Link | May 3rd, 2007 at 5:14 am
Michael wrote,
Reading over your original post again, I was forced to consider the question of ‘choice’ in the way we live, particularly in reference to the dilemma of wolf’s or dog’s lives. And I was nudged by something that’s been preoccupying me for some time: the use of the word ‘lifestyle’ as a modern synonym for ‘culture’.
Our politicians here in the Territory continually talk about Aboriginal ‘lifestyle’ (or gay ‘lifestyle’ for that matter) as if the way people live is truly a matter of choice, rather than cultural imperative.
It seems to me that if you use that term, it’s easier to write people’s cultural aspirations off as a matter of whim and therefore you take the concept of inherent Aboriginal rights way out of the equation.
And then it’s much, much easier to blame Aboriginal people for their poor health, inadequate housing and low levels of white man literacy.
Link | May 3rd, 2007 at 3:23 pm
Susan wrote,
Thoughtful and thought-provoking as always. I struggle with finding a path for my family between the pull of consumer-culture and the push of the stories I choose to live by - Mennonite-Christian stories stretched with a need for social justice and environmental sustainability. I feel out of step with the surrounding culture and yet somehow compelled to engage with it - Jacob and the Angel. I don’t know if I am willing to accept the disfiguring results.
Link | May 3rd, 2007 at 3:50 pm
Doug Noon wrote,
After I posted this, I fretted over the use of the word, choice because it is often used as a club to beat or blame people for what seem to be the consequences of their actions, and it’s also used to sell the idea that we can each develop our “potential” to whatever degree may be necessary for success. It assumes that we have the freedom to exercise options that might not be available, in actuality. These words refer to some messy abstractions. Coupling it to the perjorative use of the word lifestyle as you did here, exposed that little rough spot in what I was trying to say. Thank you.
It’s important, also, to acknowledge the idea of cultural capital, which accounts for the limitations that govern our so-called choices.
I’m grateful to you both, Michael and Susan, for your help with my thinking on this.
Link | May 3rd, 2007 at 4:01 pm
Michael wrote,
Cultural capital is extremely pertinent. Consider how much cultural capital (and yes, it’s replete with the kind of conflicts that Susan mentions) our kids begin with and then further absorb as they learn to read, write and number.
Aboriginal kids start with a different cultural capital and they’re struggling against the odds to make the transition from oral culture to a literate one when they don’t have the capital from the latter culture to help them work their way through. And how are they going to get it and at the same time maintain their own cultural capital against the onslaught? Because unless they do both, it’s going to be their noses pressed against the outside of the windowpane, eternally looking in and locked out.
Link | May 3rd, 2007 at 5:36 pm
Doug Noon wrote,
….and doing both is a problem, at best, when you consider that traditional ways are being erased by political initiatives, environmental degradation, and technologies that make many cultural practices irrelevant and quaint. That choice between the dog’s life and the wolf’s is all about integrity, and the dignity that follows from finding a way to maintain it. Your question, “And how are they going to get it?” is the core issue. And as you said, nobody who lives to other cultural imperatives is in a position to answer it.
Link | May 4th, 2007 at 12:16 am
Michael wrote,
Integrity is what it’s all about, isn’t it?
We all feel that still small voice in the back of our heads that tells us what we can go along with and what we can’t.
In Western cultures, it’s our version of wolf and dog.
And, reviled or feted as he may be by the spectrum of modern ideologues, it’s one of the things that gnawed at George Orwell’s sense of what was right and what wasn’t throughout his writing.
If we have a true and open discussion of ideas such as blogs like yours make possible, and if we’re working in and across Aboriginal domains, then we have to look at how we can learn to support wolves and their dignity as much as we support dogs and their specious, opportunistic adulation.
Doing the former is a hell of a lot harder than going through the motions on the latter.
But we’re the ones who have to learn how to do it.
Link | May 4th, 2007 at 5:25 am
Michael wrote,
Doug: A propos cultural capital, here’s a very rich piece of dialogue from one of our national newspapers today which expresses succinctly a cultural dissonance between two people who have enormous good will towards each other and immense mutual respect.
Rolf de Heer, the narrator, is a brilliant Dutch-Australian filmmaker who made a movie with the Yolngu people of Ramingining, a tiny community at the edge of the Arnhem Swamp several hundred kilometeres to the east of Darwin.
The movie - Ten Canoes - features only Yolngu people and tells a tale, in Ganalbingu language, that is essentially a cultural shaggy dog story; and it’s based on a photo of ten Yolngu goosehunters - all ancestors of the actors - taken by anthropologist Donald Thomson in the 1930s.
de Heer is talking to his co-director, Richard Djigirr, on the phone:
‘Djigirr! You’ve won an award!’
‘Right….what’s that thing?’
‘Like a prize.’
‘A prize?’
‘You know, recognition for doing good with the film.’
‘Oh yeah…a prize.’ Djigirr pauses. ‘Any money?
‘No, no money, just the award.’
‘No money! What is it then?’
‘Er, not sure about this one. Probably a piece of plastic.’
A long pause. ‘Plastic?’
‘Yeah, like a statue or something.’
‘Ahh…what do I do with it?’
‘Take it home, put it on a shelf.’
There’s a long pause, as Djigirr tries to digest the lunacy of everything I’m saying.
‘I haven’t got a shelf.’
- From de Heer, Between Two Worlds, The Weekend Australian Magazine, May 5-6, 2007
Link | May 5th, 2007 at 5:12 am
Doug Noon wrote,
Too bad you can’t hear me laughing. Thanks.
Link | May 5th, 2007 at 5:41 am
Borderland » And tonight we still remembered wrote,
[...] Duffy’s site, Duffy Writes. A story that Michael tells on his blog, and which he posted as a comment to a recent post here, reminded me of something from Ordinary Wolves, a book I can’t [...]
Link | May 6th, 2007 at 1:44 am