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Monthly Archives: November 2013

Uncommonday – The Sun Never sets on the Cricket Empire

25 Monday Nov 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in Anthropology, Uncommonday

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Anthropology, Cricket, Cultural Change, Cultural Diffusion, Culture, Maasai, Sports, Trobiand Islands

Just what ain’t Cricket? I really wouldn’t know the answer to that question, but I am occasionally quite amused to find out just what is cricket, or at least who has learned to play and how they play it. More than most of the big world sports, it seems that cricket lends itself to regional variation, and there are some really interesting variations out there. I’m not a very sporty guy, but I’m thinking Kilikiti Estonian style out on the lagoon for Piuraagiaqta.

Oh yes!

Kilikiti (Samoan Cricket).

This Masai team appears to play a pretty standard version of the game, but you wouldn’t know it from their uniforms.

And heading back out into the Pacific, we get Trobriand Cricket.

This is how they do it in Estonia.

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Sometimes the Story Tells You! A Few Comments on Narrative Scope and Survey Sedatives.

22 Friday Nov 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in Education, History

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

American Indians, College, Dakota, Native Americans, Santee, Sioux Uprising, Story-Telling, Survey Texts, The Dakota Sioux Uprising

006When people introduce a given piece of information as “something you don’t learn in the history books” or “something they don’t teach in history class” I often find myself wondering if the individual in question really has read any history books lately?

I think these are comments that just roll off the tongue while someone thinks about what they are going to say next. When I hear what they do say next, as often as not I find myself thinking; “well I teach that,” or even “Hell, that’s right in my textbook!” Sometimes I even find myself thinking; “Every teacher I’ve ever had and every textbook I’ve ever used teach that very thing you numbskull!”

Just kidding; I don’t actually use the word ‘numbskull’ in my internal monologues.

The kind of history-bashing that I am talking about almost always involves old yarns long since unraveled by the majority of historians out there. Just to provide one example, most of the myths about Columbus fall under this heading. I don’t think I’ve ever had a teacher present the classic myth of Columbus discovering America or proving the world is round, at least not without including some form of ironic commentary. I can think of numerous instances where the critique didn’t go far enough, but even my second grade teacher in a conservative lily-white community way back in the 70s made a real effort to debunk some of the standard Columbian themes. My American history textbooks don’t present the classic Columbus myths and my world history textbook even has a small section about the invention of those very myths. Yet, I still hear people preface the standard critique of Columbus with the pretense that we are about to take on the entire history profession just by listening to them.

I get a little tired of it.

***

This isn’t to say that I don’t have my own complaints about the state of the art in teaching history, and especially about textbooks. It’s a rare day that an encounter with any given survey text doesn’t leave me in tears, or at least put me to sleep, and I regard it as poetic justice that I will forever be teaching introductory classes where these instruments of torture seem to be a staple crop.

The problems that plague survey texts are generally a bit more subtle than Sunday morning historians would have it, however, and those problems are often difficult to resolve without asking students to do more than most wish to. The inaccuracies of history texts aren’t always due to fundamental misunderstanding; they often seem to be the result of narrative choices, choices often dictated by the nature of survey-text sedatives.

Case in point?

I use a reader for my Native American History class, Major Problems in American Indian History. It contains both primary documents (those produced by actual participants and witnesses in various stages of history) and interpretive essays. One of those essays in this text, “The Dakota Sioux Uprising, 1862” by Gary Clayton Anderson, presents a wonderful glimpse into the internal conflicts associated with this event. In this article Anderson takes on a terrible event in the history of Indian-white relations, one in which a number of atrocities were committed against non-native civilians, including women and children. If one were of a mind to tell such stories, this event could easily be the classic ‘Indian massacre’ that haunts the background of virtually the entire western genre in both film and literature. The uprising certainly contains enough frightful particulars to transform any narrative into a genuine nightmare. In fact Stan Hoig makes a point to suggest fears of a similar outbreak helped to explain the actions of officials in Colorado during the events prior to Sand Creek.

Note: I said prior to Sand Creek; Chivington and his men are a special kind of evil, but that’s a rant for another day.

In Anderson’s view, the uprising is a complex story in which various factions within the Dakota (otherwise known as Santee Sioux) square off against various factions of outsiders. As hunting became impossible, and rations promised by the U.S. government failed to appear, the prospect of starvation became inextricably mixed with questions about ways of living (farming versus hunting) and relations with outsiders. Some Santee had taken up farming; others wanted to resume (or take up) hunting as a primary means of subsistence. Significantly, many of those who had taken up farming had established connections (even marital relations) with local whites. So, the Santee population included a substantial ‘mixed blood’ population, and the local whites included many who had established ties to the tribe, some of which rose to the level of fictive (adoptive) kin ties.

Without going too much further down this rabbit hole (interesting as it is), Anderson does an excellent job of putting the violence of the outbreak in the context of all these factions. He argues that those perpetuating the violence were trying to pull their own community towards hunting as a way of life while punishing those whites they regarded as responsible for their own situation. Mixed bloods and whites with clear ties to Santee were generally spared (with some Santee going to great lengths to protect such people), and significant factions of the Santee pressed to end the fighting. Rivalries between those pressing the fight (which included a conflict over the question of whether to attack civilians or focus on military targets) and those seeking to end the fighting rose to the scale of potential intra-tribal warfare. Indeed, the actions of Santee opposed to the fighting helped to bring an end to the fighting.

One read through this article, and the simple narratives for this uprising go right out the window.

***

So, what do the survey texts in American History classes have to say about all this? Well let’s look at a couple of them…

I used to use a textbook called Out of Many: A History of the American People by John Mack Faragher, et. al. The third edition of this book has the following to say about these events:

Elsewhere in the West, other groups of Indians found themselves caught up in a wider war. An uprising by the Santee Sioux in Minnesota occurred in August of 1862, just as McClellan conceded defeat in the Penninsular campaign in Virginia. Alarmed whites, certain that the uprising was a Confederate plot, ignored legitimate Sioux grievances and responded in kind to Sioux ferocity. In little more than a month 500-800 white settlers and an even greater number of Sioux were killed.  Thirty-eight Indians were hanged in a mass execution in Mankado on December 26, 1862, and subsequently all Sioux were expelled from Minnesota. In 1863, U.S. Army Colonel Kit Carson invaded Navajo country in Arizona…

Let’s look at another text called Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People (Concise Fifth Edition) by John M. Murrin, et.al. This book has the following to say on the subject:

The civil war set in motion a generation of Indian warfare that was more violent and widespread than anything since the 17th century. Herded onto reservations along the Minnesota River by the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux in 1851, the Santee Sioux were angry in the summer of 1862 that annuity payments did not arrive, threatening them with starvation. Young warriors began to speak openly of reclaiming ancestral hunting grounds. Then on August 17, a robbery in which five white settlers were murdered opened the floodgates. The warriors persuaded Chief Little Crow to take them on the warpath, and over the next few weeks at least 500 white Minnesotans were massacred.

Hastily mobilized militia and army units finally suppressed the uprising. A military court convicted 319 Indians of murder and atrocities and sentenced 303 of them to death. Appalled, Lincoln personally reviewed the trial transcripts and reduced the number of executions to 38, the largest act of executive clemency in American history. The government evicted the remaining Sioux from Minnesota to Dakota Territory.

My current textbook, The American Promise: A Compact History, Fourth Edition by James L. Roarke, et. al. has the following passage on the uprising:

The Indian wars in the West marked the last resistance of a Native American population devastated by disease and demoralized by the removal policy pursued by the federal government. More accurately called ‘settlers’ wars’ (since they began with ‘peaceful settlers,’ often miners, overrunning Native American land, the wars flared up again only a few years after the signing of the Fort Laramie treaty. The Dakota Sioux in Minnesota went to war in 1862. For years, under the leadership of Chief Little Crow, the Dakota, also known as the Santee, had pursued a policy of accommodation, ceding land in return for the promise of annuities. But with his people on the verge of starvation (the local Indian agent told the hungry Dakota, ‘Go and eat grass’), Little Crow reluctantly led his angry warriors in a desperate campaign against the intruders, killing more than 1,000 settlers. American troops quelled what was called the Great Sioux Uprising (also called the Santee Uprising) and marched 1,700 Sioux to Fort Snelling where 400 Indians were put on trial for murder and 38 died in the largest mass execution in American history.

Anyway, that’s three texts. I have a couple more that don’t even mention this event, which is a little disturbing.

***

So, what do we get out of all this?

Well, first, you gotta love the way one book describes the event as the largest use of executive clemency in history and another describes it as the largest mass execution in American history. There is probably an interesting lesson in fact selection there, but the most interesting thing about that little point may well be that both facts seem to be part of the same story. In one text, that is a story of great mercy, and in the other it’s a story of slaughter, and neither story is contradicted by the facts (at least not at this level of detail).

Ah well, moving on…

The first thing that I would say here is that none of these texts paints the natives in an overtly negative light. These were not written with the intention of slandering the Santee and pleading the cause of manifest destiny after the fact, so to speak. Such narratives do exist, but I didn’t find them in my stack of survey sedatives. If anything, each of these narratives seems almost painfully to be pleading the Sioux’s case and working hard to ensure the reader understand they had their reasons, so to speak.

The distortions here are a little more subtle; most of them being a function of basic story telling technique. Simply put, the question here is one of peopling the story-line. Where Anderson talks about multiple factions in and around the Santee community, each of these authors is telling a story about whites and natives. When they choose to break that down a little, we get references to ‘warriors’ and to Chief Little crow. Gone is the conflict within the tribe between pro-war and pro-peace factions, the entire existence of mixed bloods, arguments about who should and who should not be killed, and especially the active opposition of some villages to participation in the fighting. The decision to spare some whites while killing others is nowhere on the horizon here. And of course the notion that Little Crow simply led his people ‘on the warpath’ (reluctantly or otherwise) simplifies the nature of his leadership as well as the politics of the uprising itself. None of these sub-themes can be worked into the narrative (or even envisioned within it), because the characters are not even in the cast. There is simply no place for them.

So, what do I expect? Pretty much this, actually. These are survey texts, and the authors are struggling here to get a complex story into a paragraph or two. This means simplification, even oversimplification. It seems to me that in each of these cases, the author has made choices based at least partly on the larger narratives in which this story fits. Where Anderson is telling the story of a specific event, each of the survey text authors is treating this as a moment in a larger narrative about Indian-white relations in the west. They identify the participants in the Santee Sioux uprising based on the characters already filling that larger narrative.

Of course one of the central ironies here is that having put an insufficient number of players on the stage, so to speak, each of the survey authors is then at pains to make understandable the actions of the fictional Santee tribe which has become responsible for these events. Unable to assign specific actions to specific agents in the story, these authors must then work to keep us from walking away with a great big anti-Santee bottom line. But that bottom line is precisely a function of the narrative decisions they have already made. If we knew more about who was doing what and why, that impression would have no place to creep into the story, but we don’t. In the end, I suspect that anti-Santee bottom line will be the take-away for so many students, no matter how many sympathetic comments an author works into the text. In the larger story of American growth, the Santee can’t help but appear as an obstacle to that growth. You can make them sympathetic, but the only way to make them something other than an antagonist is to change the larger story altogether. Nothing done within the space of a couple paragraphs is going to work.

But a couple paragraphs are all the Santee uprising are going to get in the average textbook.

Now, just imagine that same kind of trade-off in every paragraph of virtually every page (side-bars excepted) of every history text out there. So, you see, this isn’t a problem of what is and isn’t taught; it’s a problem of how it’s taught. Many of these stories are just begging to be forgotten. You can see it in the way they are written.

Enjoy your reading kids!

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Please Make a Note of it

20 Wednesday Nov 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in Politics

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Aphorisms, Arrogance, Assumptions, Condescension, Fishing, Hunger, Poverty, Undeserving Poor

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.

Just because a man is hungry doesn’t mean he knows any less about fishing than you do.

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Uncommonday – An Overly Honest Funeral Sermon

18 Monday Nov 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in Movies, Uncommonday

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Ambivalence, Death, Funeral, Humor, Irony, Schizopolis, sermon, Steven Soderbergh

Awhile back I posted a film clip featuring a wonderful wedding sermon. Today, I thought I’d post my favorite funeral sermon. This scene is from the movie Schizopolis, one of Soderbergh’s lesser known films. If you’re feeling a little left of your own mind, let me assure you the rest of the film is no closer to normal than this scene.

* By ‘Honest’ I might mean ‘cynical’ in which case I think we can dispense with the ‘Overly’ part of the title.

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A Bullet Point Mind

17 Sunday Nov 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in Education, The Bullet Point Mind

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

Communications, Critical Thinking, Education, Power Point, Public Speaking, Slideshows, Speech, Visual Presentations, What not to do

Irrelevant Image! ...or is it?

Relevancy – Perhaps Paradoxical

I still remember the first day I learned to dread the power point presentation. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve seen good ones. I have at times been well pleased to take in a well designed power point presentation. If only I could have more of those days, and fewer of the kind that I have so often grown to expect.

Anyway…

I was sitting in a lecture hall many years ago listening to a colleague do a training for the rest of the faulty at our college. She was trying to teach us something about assessment techniques for accreditation, but the fact is that this particular colleague had nothing to say about the topic, and she was painfully slow in the way she was not saying it. The overall effect was a lot like a sedative and one of Pink Floyd’s longer and slower songs. Every point this woman made began with a new slide that added a phrase or quick sentence. She would stop talking, click a button, wait to see the new phrase appear and then pause long enough for us to read the phrase ourselves (twice). She would then read the phrase and give us a little more time to let it sink in. In a rare moment of personal empowerment, our illustrious lecturer would add a comment or two about the phrase before moving onto the next one. Mostly, she just let us take in the power of each individual bullet point. So, I’m sitting there watching this and trying desperately not run screaming from the room as I study the slide-show and wonder why I hated it so much. Of course training days are often a painful experience, but this was a special kind of heck, and the source of my particular sorrow on that day wasn’t immediately apparent. Eventually, I come to a realization.

It’s her outline!

What my colleague had chosen to pass off as a power-point presentation was nothing more than the outline for her speech, exactly the sort of outline we had all learned to write in our Freshmen Composition and Speech classes. There it was, unfolding there on the screen, one line at a time, as if it were some sad librarian’s version of dramatic tension.

Far from enhancing the presentation, this visual was slowing the speaker down and enabling her to avoid the responsibility even to explain the connections between the points of her talk. The speaker didn’t need to decide how each individual bullet point related to the major themes of her discussion; all she needed to do was read them at us. The visual served to occupy our attention and help us to forget that she had crammed a whole 5 minutes of information into an hour-long presentation. In effect, the presenter had looked into the heart of her software and found a new and improved means of bluffing.

…Would that this was a unique experience!

This technique also seemed to lend an ontological claim to the individual bullet points. Things that a person might just say offhand, or as part of a larger argument often seem to acquire a objectivity all their own, standing up there on a screen. A list of bullet points might contain causes, effects, and side comments to a larger heading, all quite unmarked in the visual. The verbal presentation did nothing to clarify matters. I grew slowly to realize the presenter did not herself know exactly how each sub-point of her presentation related to the main themes. She knew only that the topics traveled in a pack together, so to speak, and she wanted us to know that too. The visual solved this problem by telling us exactly how each point related to the next.

…mainly vertically.

This was the secret of the power-point visual, it lent the illusion of mystic substance to each individual point while undermining the need to explore rational connections between the. Each individual point on the screen in front of us looked terribly important in its own right, certainly more important than the explanations that connect each point to the others. Those connections didn’t appear on the screen. the bullet points did. They mattered more.

…and critical thinking wept!

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Damn the Science Exhibit; We’re Looking at Dioramas!

15 Friday Nov 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in Alaska, Museums

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Alaska Natives, Aleutians, Anchorage, Anchorage Museum, Athabaskan, Dioramas, Haida, Inupiat, Museums, Tlingit

I'm not sure what community this represents, but I really like the scene.

A small community on the coast.

A couple of months back I found myself in Anchorage without too much to do. On my last day down there the devil that sits on my shoulder lost a debate with the nerdy bookworm that sometimes passes for my angelic adviser, and so I actually chose to do something instructive and educational. I went to the Anchorage Museum.

Don’t be too disappointed; it was actually kinda cool. My favorite part of the museum was actually the science exhibit, much of which was interactive. sadly, I don’t think my pictures and videos did much to capture the brilliance which was that particular part of the museum. Being a museum, the place was of course full of wonderful artifacts and displays casting light on all manner of things Alaskan. Being a cruel fellow, I am not going to show you much of that.

…at least not today.

No.

Today, we are looking at dioramas. A number of these were strewn about the museum, and I managed to get few decent pictures of some. I won’t pretend that this is a complete set, so to speak, as I am pretty sure that a few of thee exhibits told my camera to screw off and I completely neglected to right those wrongs, but at any rate, these are the pics I got. Both my devil-advisor and my nerdy-near-angel hope you enjoy them.

Quick Note: rather predictably, the scenes depicting Alaska Natives seem to have got most of my attention here. Depending on how broad you want your paint strokes to be we can bundle the Native Alaska population into 3, 5, or lots of general groups. I would normally go with 5; the natives of the outer Aleutian Islands (Aleutian or Unangan, depending on who you ask);  the Alutiiq (or Sugpiak) of the Eastern Aleutians parts of the Southwest coastal region; Yupiit of the Western coast, Inupiat of the Northern coasts, and Athabaskans who occupied interior Alaska. For those wondering, the Yupiit and Inupiat are the natives once commonly referred to as ‘Eskimos’, but we aren’t going to do that here. …oh, and let’s not forget the Northwest Coastal natives, who are ironically located in Southeast Alaska. When I say “Northwest Coast natives” I am referring to a common classification used by anthropologists to break the Native American population into about 10 distinct culture areas. So, ironically enough, Alaska’s Northwest Coastal natives are in the Southeast. …and if that manner of speaking seems weird, then the devil on my shoulder is well pleased.

I don’t seem to have pictures (even bad ones) for Yupiit or Alutiiq populations. I don’t know if Missed an exhibit or if I just wasn’t in a button pressing mood when I happened upon them. So, we have here representations of 3 native populations (depicted more or less as they might have lived prior to contact). I also have a few other pieces on the Alaskan Railroad, the Aleutian Campaign of World War II, and one beautiful scene of a community that I failed to identify (cause I’m a bad man).

A small community on the coast.
This piece represents Northwest Coastal natives.
The Northwest Coastal Natives (mainly Tlingit and Haida)

This part of Alaska is about as far from Barrow as Orlando is from New York.
Elder Native.
Elder from another angle.

Inupiat hauling up a Bowhead Whale
Lots of mini muktuk for the mini villagers!
Yes, they still do this. Add a few modern tools to the diorama, and this could be a Spring hunt today.

These are the railroad shops of about 1919.
The shops are of course where railroady stuff got fixed.
This represented an Athabaskan community hunting caribou.

Definitely not the best picture, but this is another pic of the Athabaskan village.
Aleutian village.
Aleutian Villager.

Aleutian Home haunted by a reflection from some other exhibit.
Aleut Village Again.
Moar Aleutian Goodness!

This depicts the Aleutian Campaign in World War II.
More from the Aleutian Campaign
The weather was probably as much trouble in the Aleutian campaign as the Japanese

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Unommonday – The Fightin’ Whities!

11 Monday Nov 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in Native American Themes, Uncommonday

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

American Indians, Basketball, Native Americans, Sports, Sports Mascots, The Fighting Whites, The Fighting Whities, University of Northern Colorado

fightinwhitesSince sports mascots are on the public mind once again, I thought it might be a good time to post my all-time favorite team. Mind you, I don’t follow sports. When people talk about sports, to me it sounds a lot like the adults in a Peanuts cartoon. When a game is on the tube, I just see a blue screen. And I must say that I have never seen these guys play, nor do I know anything about their record. I just know the name of the mascot for an intramural basketball team at the University of Northern Colorado: It’s ‘The Fightin’ Whites’, or the ‘fightin’ whities’ as they were more popularly known. Their motto was “Every thang’s gonna be all white.” And just in case the ironic tone isn’t clear, let me point out that the school used sales of team merchandise to fund an excellent scholarship program for Native American Students.

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Barrow on the Big Screen, A Little at a Time

06 Wednesday Nov 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in Alaska, Movies

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Alaska, Barrow, Ethnicity, Film, Film Reviews, Movies, On the Ice, The Big Miracle, Thirty Days of Night

38483_1544951388794_3220306_nOne thing about coming to Barrow, it has made conversation much easier, at least in the lower 48. All I have to do is tell people I am from Alaska and the conversation is well on its way. They will ask more questions than I could possibly answer, and once I start telling them about Barrow I can generally be assured of willing and sympathetic audience. I’m a socially awkward kinda guy, so yes, this is a good thing. Anyway, I’m happy to talk about my new home. Barrow can be damned interesting!

…so I suppose it should come as no surprise that this town has made its way into the occasional television show or movie production. Three particular movies about Barrow seem to have made it into the popular culture to one degree or another. These films couldn’t be more different from one another. Each tells a different kind of story to a completely different audience, and each portrays the community of Barrow in a very different way. I’m always fascinated to see the community change its shape in order to meet the needs of the film-makers behind these project.

…fascinated enough to write a post about it anyway!

***

30-days-of-night-poster-1_6599Barrow as Darkness: Thirty Days of Night is of course the most well known movie about Barrow. In this film based on a graphic novel) vampires descend upon the town at the outset of Polar Midnight in order to enjoy a month-long feast in the safety of a season without sun. Thirty Days of Night wasn’t filmed here; it was filmed in New Zealand. Still, the central premise of the film is very much about Barrow and the dramatic significance of a long polar night.

The small hills and valleys of the movie’s opening sequences were about all it took to shake my sense that this film had much to do with the Barrow in which I live. The exaggerated sense of polar midnight didn’t help either. Once it goes dark in this film, it stays dark, …completely dark. What a lot of people don’t realize (and what the film-makers didn’t seem to find interesting) is the fact that we get a kind of fake sunrise here. If you can imagine the moment before the sun actually rises, that’s what we get in the midst of polar midnight, only it isn’t followed by an actual sunrise. You could swear the big ball of warmth was just about to pop over that horizon, and then the light just starts to fade.

…yes, it can be a little disappointing.

…kinda like Thirty Days of Night.

30DaysofNight_6lgBut perhaps I am being too harsh. Barrow does one thing only for this film and that is to provide the central premise, a vampire paradise. So, it should come as no surprise that the movie makes no attempt to convey anything meaningful about the people of this community. Still, you would think the directors would be kind enough to give their villainous horde of undead a bit of variety in their diet? Nope. The  Barrow of this film is a lily white community if ever I saw one before. As I recall, a token native does make an appearance in the living feast that is Barrow’s population for this film. Other than that, the menu is white meat only.

This is a fun film in its own right, but it is definitely, not the Barrow I know.

***

bigmiracleartworkpic1Barrow as a Big Warm Hug: Hollywood has made one popular film here in Barrow, and they did it since I arrived, The Big Miracle. At least it was about Barrow, and they did shoot some film up here. Some residents even made it into the movie, as did natives from other parts of Alaska. With a cast featuring Drew Barrymore and Ted Danson, this film recounts a real event in the history of this community. In 1988, three grey whales became trapped in the ice not far from here. The entire town as well as a number of outsiders (including a Russian icebreaker) worked hard to break them free.

The ironic thing about this movie is that it was based on a rather cynical book, ‘Everyone Loves Whales’. I gather the original script may even have had a little bite to it, but the final cut of this film is a feel-good celebration of compassion, humanity, and …whales! By the end of the film, the plot is fully focused on efforts to save the big lugs of the sea, but the early scenes focus on political questions about whether or not anyone will help them. One of those questions was apparently whether or not to eat the whales instead of saving them. The Iñupiat community of the north slope harvests Bowhead whales every year, so that possibility could hardly be described as a stretch. This plot point is eventually resolved when the whaling captains of the town decide instead to help free the whales.

(Big sigh folks!)

images (2)The eat-or-save sub-theme provides The Big Miracle with its main window into the community up here. Unlike Thirty Days of Night, this film actually finds a place for the Iñupiat community of Barrow in its storyline. They start out as potential villains and end up being god guys in the end.

…kinda like Clint Eastwood, only with chainsaws and snow-machines instead of Colt Walkers and a horse. (Let’s not talk about the harpoons.)

Folks up here are of mixed minds about how whether or not the film does justice to Iñupiat community of Barrow. Drew Barrymore (who plays a Greenpeace activist in the film) gives a pretty brutal speech about the native community and its whaling practices, and its hard to shake the sense that some of her points in that speech might have served as the voice of the film-makers. Later attempts to show the native community in a more positive light may or may not be enough to settle concerns about the politics of the movie, and for those here still very much committed to whaling, the major theme of the movie itself may be a little discomfitting. Barrow’s native community gets some love here precisely to the extent that their actions do not reflect what natives of the North Slope normally do with whales. It’s a conditional kind of love, and I can’t blame folks for being wary of the conditions.

For what it’s worth, this movie at least knows that natives exist in Barrow. It even kind-of likes them, so long as they aren’t eating muktuk.

***

imagesBarrow as Native Youth: I can think of one REALLY good film set in Barrow, and that is On the Ice by Andrew Okpeaha MacLean. MacLean is from Barrow, and he uses the film quite deliberately to tell us something about life here at the top of the world. On the Ice tells the story of two young Iñupiat men with a secret they’ve been concealing from the rest of the community. And while this main story plays out, the film does a wonderful job of revealing the interplay between indigenous values and outside cultural influence in the native youth of this community.

On the Ice is a tense drama, and one which portrays the native community with a deliberate sense of realism. This film was shot in Barrow, and it features a number of residents in the supporting cast. It’s both amusing and a little disconcerting to see scenes on street corners I pass regularly, and even more so to see people I know in various scenes, but that is definitely one of the film’s charms. If the other films are set in Barrow (or at least an imaginary version thereof), the real Barrow jumps right out at you from this film.

…at least it does for me.

On-the-ice-premieresWhat’s missing from On the Ice is everyone else! …besides the Iñupiat community, I mean. Every once in awhile you can catch a glimpse of a non-native somewhere onscreen in this film, but that is definitely the exception. For the most part this film has eyes only for the native population. Gone are the white folks, yes, but so are the Koreans, the Thais, the Tongans, the Samoans, and the Filipinos, each of whom has a substantial place in this town.

On one level, fair enough. This movie is about native youth not the rest of us. On another, it’s a simplification, perhaps even an over-simplification. I can’t help but think it makes a difference that the outside influences (and the people who represent them) are present here in Barrow itself, and I would think that would be part of the story of native youth, at least if that story is to be a realistic portrayal (perhaps it is not). It would have been interesting to see how these characters dealt with ethnic relations over the course of the story. Leaving out all the sub-communities from the town simplifies the storyline and that is the one thing that jars me a bit when I watch it. But seriously, I mean to praise the film with faint damn. Because what this film does, it does well.

If you want to watch a movie about Barrow, this is the one.

***

So there it is. The community in which I live takes on radically different forms whenever a camera is pointed at it. It is darkness for those seeking a fright, a reluctant helper for those seeking a heart-warming smile, and in it’s best incarnation to date, it is an all-native community. The full community of Barrow never seems to make it into these stories, and the interplay between all the ethnicities of this town has yet to make it onto the big screen.

Ah well, goodnight.

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Uncommonday: Great Show, but Who is the Drummer?

04 Monday Nov 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in Music, Uncommonday

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Impromptu Performance, Pete Townsend, Quadraphenia, Rock&Roll, San Francisco, Scot Halpin, The who

Scot+Halpin“Can anybody play the drums? Can anybody play the drums? I mean somebody good.”

These aren’t the words one would expect to hear at a major rock concert, but that is exactly what Pete Townsend asked the crowd at The Cow Palace in San Francisco on November 20th, 1973.

It was the opening date for the start of the Quadraphenia tour, which is to say that this was one of the biggest bands out there at the peak of their popularity. Drummer Keith Moon had just passed out for the second time that evening, and apparently there was no reviving him. So, in what has to be one of the greatest rock&roll moments in all of history, Townsend turned to the audience and asked for a volunteer. What they got was Scot Halpin, a recent high school graduate who hadn’t played the drums in a year.

Halpin played three songs with The Who that night and closed the show.

(Short version, skips the songs)

(Full Concert)

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