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I for one am NOT ignorant to my culture.
But on a side note, I do think some people are ignorant how to treat other people with respect and kindness.
here's an article :
| quote: | Left to starve
(Tuesday 12 September 2006)
INTERVIEW: Melanie McGrath
by IAN SINCLAIR
INTERVIEW: IAN SINCLAIR talks to MELANIE McGRATH about the Inuit that Canada cast into the frozen wasteland.
Every nation tells itself stories to make itself feel better. Canadians seems to be better at this than most, tending to define themselves in opposition to their more powerful, aggressive southern neighbour.
Although Canada has always prided itself on not having had an indigenous peoples' genocide like the United States, Melanie McGrath says that the "Canadians still have their skeletons in the cupboard."
In her new book The Long Exile, McGrath cuts through the popular mythology that clouds our understanding of Canadian history by telling the story of what the head of the 1993 commission on aboriginal peoples called "one of the worst human rights violations in the history of Canada."
The story begins with the film-maker Robert Flaherty travelling to the Arctic in the early 1920s to make Nanook of the North, now seen as one of the greatest documentaries ever made, lauded by such cinema greats as John Huston and Orson Welles. Before he returned south, he had a brief affair with an Inuit woman and fathered a son.
Flaherty's son Josephie was raised as an Inuit in the settlement of Inukjuak in northern Quebec, which had come to be seen as a problem by the Canadian government by the 1950s.
Concerned about the Inuits' dependency on government welfare, which, in itself, was a product of white peoples' historical interference, it was decided to relocate a number of Inuit to more northern location.
In July 1953, having been deceived and pressured by local officials, 33 Inuit were transported over 1,000 miles north to settlements on Ellesmere Island. Josephie and his family followed two years later.
McGrath argues: "The decision to move them at all was something to do with the welfare issue, but the decision to move them to the High Arctic that caused them so much suffering was to do with geopolitics."
They chose the High Arctic because "the Canadian sovereignty over those areas was questionable."
Indeed, since World War II, the United States had become increasingly interested in the Arctic as a military base to counter the Russian "threat," with more US citizens stationed in the Canadian Arctic during this period than Canadian citizens.
"The shocking thing was, there was no malice," says McGrath. In fact, "quite a lot of them (the Canadian administrators involved in the enforced relocation) were avowed socialists."
The problem was that "they still came with these wonderful colonial ideas of the Inuit being children."
Although McGrath's previous book, the bestselling family memoir Silvertown, is set a world away in the East End of London, she believes that a common thread runs through her work. "Families, who, through no fault of their own, find themselves in incredibly difficult circumstances. Who, either through malice or ignorance, find themselves exploited or dispossessed in some way," she says.
Arriving without adequate clothing, housing or hunting equipment in the most isolated and northerly settlement in the High Arctic, Josephie and the other Inuit struggled to survive from the start.
In perpetual darkness for four months of the year and constantly on the edge of starvation, they were, at times, forced to eat their own dogs and reduced to scavenging for food in the rubbish dump of the nearby air base.
Living in these alien, extreme conditions produced an unnaturally high infant mortality rate among the Inuit and, with the Canadian government refusing to allow him to return home, Josephie's mental health slowly deteriorated. He started becoming violent towards his family and suffered a mental breakdown in 1968, dying in 1984.
Throughout this period, the Canadian media produced reports which closely followed government press releases, ignoring or downplaying the terrible conditions in the north.
McGrath thinks that this was "because no one actually went up there. Part of the problem is that you can't travel on your own. It's just too dangerous. It was sort of the original embedded journalism if you like. There was no-one independent."
Remarkably, even without extensive support from the south, by organising and agitating, the Inuit managed to get a hearing for their case at the 1993 royal commission on aboriginal peoples.
The commission found in their favour and, although the Canadian government has never offered a formal apology, a $10 million heritage fund was set up to compensate the families who had been forcibly relocated.
McGrath is in awe of this "tiny group of people, who were, for the most part, illiterate" and "completely disenfranchised. It took them 40 years, but they made themselves heard."
Today, McGrath believes "Canadians remain extraordinarily ignorant of the north," which is becoming "increasingly important in environmental terms and in terms of natural resources."
She points to the creation in 1999 of the mammoth Inuit state of Nunavut - "the only semi-autonomous area created in a Western state for indigenous people" - as evidence of how far Inuit rights have progressed but also notes the continuing "problems with alcohol, substance abuse and a high suicide rate. Problems of indigenous people throughout the world."
Indeed, the dispossessed Inuit to whom McGrath gives a voice are the same "unpeople" as the indigenous population of Diego Garcia that the historian Mark Curtis shines a light on - those "whose lives are deemed worthless, expendable in the pursuit of power and commercial gain."
Carefully plotted, with well-timed, extraordinary anecdotes, such as the story of the Inuit man who came across his father's skeleton in a New York museum, The Long Exile reads like a novel, with all the subtleties, contradictions and thought-provoking insights that good literature provides.
McGrath concludes: "I liked the story because it wasn't about bad guys and good guys. It was a story about people making assumptions about what other people want. In a democracy, you can't do that. You have to ask people what they want."
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DALLAS STAR ™ °¤§£¤y°
Treat people as if they are what they ought to be and you may help them to become what they are capable of being.
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