• About

northierthanthou

northierthanthou

Tag Archives: Progress

What are the Necessities of Life?

20 Saturday Dec 2014

Posted by danielwalldammit in Movies, Native American Themes

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Canada, Eskimo, Film, Foraging, History, Inuit, Movies, Progress, The Necessities of Life

The_Necessities_of_LifeWhat are the Necessities of Life?

We meet the protagonist of this 2008 Canadian film in Baffin Island of the 1950s. Tiivii (played by Natar Ungalaaq) struggles for breath as he ascends a small hill in search of geese, his wife and children are just waking in their tent below. Upon seeing a boat on the half-frozen ocean, Tiivii sets aside the hunt and takes his family aboard for a series of medical tests. As the boat prepares to leave, Tiivii is told he must remain aboard, leaving his wife and children to fend for themselves while he undergoes treatment for tuberculosis.

When next we see Tiivii, he is soon staring at a tree at the hospital in Quebec City, amazed at his new surroundings and quite unprepared for the coming hardships that await him. He does not fully understand his illness, nor does he realize how long it will take him to recover. He also has no idea how his family will fair without him.

An Inuit lost in civilizations? It’s an interesting twist on a familiar theme, that of a stranger in a strange land. The point is soon driven home as we see Tiivii struggle to master the use of a fork and spoon while the other hospital patients consume platefuls of pasta. He figures it out, but not before earning the derision of his roommates.

Through the story, we are invited to see the hospital and western civilization through Tiivii’s eyes, to see common utensils from the perspective of one who has never used them before and to imagine a common meal from the standpoint of someone has never eaten anything like it. We can also imagine his confusion at the sterile bathroom with its flush toilet; his longing for someone to talk to makes perfect sense; as does his desire to eat familiar food.

the-necessities-of-lifeWe’ve seen this storyline before, a person completely out of his element. It is often used to explore the differences between civilization and savagery. This was the premise for Dances With Wolves, and before that with Little Big-Man and A Man Called Horse. It’s a common enough theme in arctic films as well, being found in White Dawn and Snow Walker among others. What makes this film different is the trajectory of the stranger in this case; he has left a world unfamiliar to most of us, to enter one most of us will find rather familiar. We are used to seeing the story go the other way. Still Tiivii’s journey is compelling. Through his eyes, the western world becomes strange, unreasonable, and quite insane.

This particular twist on the stranger in a strange land contains an element of nuance, however, that would be easy to miss. Audiences may think they know what it means for an emissary of modern western society to live amongst primitives, but what does it mean for such an individual to come live amongst us, or at least the 1950s variation thereof? It would be easy to think that Tiivii spends the entire story marveling at the wealth and richness of the city. In the space of a few opening scenes he has made a transition from the life of a forager scratching out a meager existence on the tundra to a cosmopolitan center with all the wonders of contemporary society. Tiivii may see this world from the shelter of a hospital bed, but he does see it just the same. How could he possibly understand the complexities which have put food on his plate in that hospital, or those that enable him to flush that same food away in the porcelain toilet? It would be awfully easy to think of this as the story of a simple man lost in the wealth of the modern world
…except that would not explain the title of the movie.

necThe title comes to us in a scene near the end of the film, one in which Tiivii explains to a young patient named Kaki (Paul-André Brasseur) what it is like to be out on the tundra. Although Inuit himself, Kaki, has spent his formative years in the hospitals. He does not understand the kind of life his own people have led. Asked what his homeland is like, Tiivii explains:

Beautiful. Lots of mountains. From the top you can see everything. You can see exactly where you are going. Not like here, where there are trees everywhere and you can’t see ahead. There’s a huge island. It takes many days to travel around it. There’s everything you need, all the necessities of life. Seals. Caribou. Geese.

Tiivii’s face lights up with each point of his speech, but the point of the scene would be missed entirely if this was thought to be nostalgia. Tiivii’s speech provides the strongest hint in the movie as to just how he sees the world around him. It is not a world of abundance at all; it is one in which he cannot see the materials out of which to make his clothes much to less to build a home. It is a world in which he cannot see food or medicine. All of these things must be brought to him. If this is mysterious, it is not the mystery of a miracle so much as a perverse trickery, one which hides the means of life from him while doling out the necessities a little at a time. Far from marveling at the wealth of civilization, Tiivii has been lost in the desert the whole time. He doesn’t see modern miracles in plumbing or cutlery. Instead he sees a world of mostly useless materials.

I think this is the real genius of Necessities of Life, that it actually flies in the face of conventional notions of the difference between foragers and civilized folks. Ever since Nanook of the North, mainstream film-makers have marveled at the struggle of arctic hunters against hunger and the elements. Time and again, Hollywood’s ‘Eskimos’ have been portrayed as dwelling on the edge of starvation, and it would be awfully easy to see in Tiivii’s story just another chapter in that narrative, one in which one of these primitives actually gets to experience the wealth of modernity. And yet, what Tiivii actually tells us is just the opposite; wealth is waiting for him back home on Baffin Island, and he cannot wait to leave the extreme poverty of the modern world behind.

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr
  • Print
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

Quanah Parker, Progress, and the Lack Thereof, …Christmas and Torture!

18 Sunday Dec 2011

Posted by danielwalldammit in Books, History, Native American Themes

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

American Indian, American West, Comanche, Cruelty, Native American, Progress, Quanah Parker, Texas, Torture

There is always one! One book in the airport bookstore that looks like something I might actually want to read. This time it was “Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History,” by S.C. Gwynne (Scribner, 2011).

Mind you, the title alone carries at least one red flag. Were the Comanche really the “most powerful Indian tribe in American history?” Reading the book, I began to wonder if there was ever a raid, or a battle, or a tribe that didn’t strike the author as “the most’ or “the greatest” something?  Seriously, this book, has the most superlatives contained in any volume published in this century. (Okay, not really, but it has enough of them that it looked kind of fun. So, I thought I’d try it.) But faced with 16 hours in the hands of the airlines (the most air-time ever… Okay I’ll stop, really, I will), it just looked like the kind of fun-read that might do the trick for all those hours imitating a sardine. So, I bought it and put my larger, more theoretical, volume on the back burner, at least until Quanah could be “tamed,’ as I thought surely the book would put it.

I was not disappointed.

It is certainly an enjoyable yarn, and I learned a few things while reading it, but excessive superlatives aside, there are also a number of factual problems in the book. Gwynne, for example credits Spanish failure to protect the Pueblos with the cause of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. This is simple confirmation bias. It ties their story more closely to the one Gwynne is telling. But it’s outright fiction. The Pueblo’s rebelled against the Spanish because what the Spanish were doing to them, not because of what the Spanish were not doing for them. Other critics have raised similar objections to other parts of the book, but I’m not really interested in picking apart the details.

What does strike me about this work is its use of a familiar spin. Gwynne is a firm believer in the march of progress, and he does not hesitate to frame the Comanche squarely in this larger story. Channeling Frederick Jackson Turner, Gwynne is telling the tale of the clash between savagery and civilization at the edge of the frontier. And Comanche play a damned familiar role in that story.

It is not really that Gwynne describes the horrors of Comanche raiding in vivid detail, or that he recounts the torture and execution of white captives in numerous chapters. I don’t need sugar-coating in my history books, nor do I need constant reassurance that an author is not a racist. But “progress” is a faith I can do without, and this book would have been much better without it.

Simply put, Gwynne sees Comanche’s as exemplars of a more primitive life-way than Europeans, or even a number of other Indian peoples. His reasons are familiar; they are hunter-gatherers, which sets them apart from and well behind the progress of agricultural societies, from the Pueblos to the Spaniards, …maybe even the Texans. To Gwynn, the cruelties that Comanche’s inflicted on their enemies stem from their lack of progress in comparison to Agricultural tribes such as those found in Mexico.

If the irony of that comparison doesn’t scream in your ears, then perhaps we could take a little time to discuss the history of Central American civilization. …Well some other time, anyway.

On some level, I cannot help but think Gwynne must know better. He certainly does not hesitate to tell us about the atrocities committed by other peoples, including Texans. At times, he seems quite prepared to concede all the facts which should suggest a degree of moral parity. Yet Gwynne sees a difference between the cruelties of commanches and those of other people.

Gwynne has at least the beginnings of an explanation for the difference. He maintains that other peoples consistently show some level of condemnation for the act of torture. Such brutal violence may be carried out by civilizations as modern as our own, but Gwynne seems to suggest, we at least know it is wrong. The Comanche however, revel in it. And that makes all the difference in the world to Gwynne. It is the difference between a “savage,” a “low barbarian,” and someone from a civilization.

So, apparently, cognitive dissonance is a virtue. If you have to torture someone, then you should at least have the decency to feel bad about it.

But I cannot help thinking we can do better than that! We can relegate the job to soldiers serving on some far-flung corner of the world, and if those soldiers should fail to be just as violant as we wish them to be (no more and no less), or should they fail to cover up any actual cruelties they might commit, then perhaps we can just disown them. If nothing else fails, we can at least wring our hands about it, schedule a few talking heads to debate it on the news channels, and sweat a lot over the whole thing. Because knowing at least that torture is wrong sets us apart from those that do not, or so it would seem

In torture, as in Christmas gifts, it is apparently the thought that counts.

It is an interesting question, just how it is that societies allocate boundaries within which cruelty becomes objectionable, and how do they square those boundaries with the interests of military defense, …or outright conquest? Both of these are damned tough problem to sort out, and woe be unto those who end up on the wrong side of the sorting, at least when someone with a camera-phone is around to record it!

The story of Quanah Parker would not be a bad spring board for addressing questions about the cultural construction of violence. It certainly provides enough fodder to get the issue squarely on the table, but of course all this falls by the wayside when the author has recourse to a convenient explanation with a lot of cultural force behind it. The Comanche’s are cruel because they are savage. Others are cruel because their civilization has yet to be perfected.

Problem solved!

This probably is not the best place to try to refute the notion of progress. Suffice to say, that I consider it largely a dead issue, at least as applied to the history of Indian-white relations, and certainly in reference to the comparison between hunter-gathering economies and those of settled agriculturists. Hell, the critique of this notion has been done and redone for a couple of generations of scholarship now. Were I to come across a learned article purporting to refute the notion of progress, I would no doubt feel sympathy for the dead horse that was about to be kicked. And yet, in this book, I find that dead horse alive and grazing in the pastures of every airport in the country.

When the average American reads about Comanche history for the next few months anyway, there is a damned good chance they will read it in this book. They will learn a lot to be sure, much of it reasonably accurate, informative, and interesting. And they will also read in that book yet another chapter in the myth of the progress of civilization.

It is just a little depressing.

71.271549 -156.751450

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr
  • Print
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

Top Posts & Pages

  • And ...winner!
    And ...winner!
  • An American Flag as a Weapon, Redux.
    An American Flag as a Weapon, Redux.
  • Geronimo: A Manly Legend, No Women Allowed!
    Geronimo: A Manly Legend, No Women Allowed!
  • Timothy McVeigh Would have Been Proud!
    Timothy McVeigh Would have Been Proud!
  • Oh Come On!
    Oh Come On!
  • Mothers Can be Mortifying
    Mothers Can be Mortifying
  • An Uncommon Security Guard: Dave Eshelman, AKA 'John Wayne'
    An Uncommon Security Guard: Dave Eshelman, AKA 'John Wayne'
  • The Ocean in a Surprisingly Liquid State
    The Ocean in a Surprisingly Liquid State
  • A Very Soylent Spoiler Alert
    A Very Soylent Spoiler Alert
  • The Politics of Personification
    The Politics of Personification

Topics

  • Alaska
  • Animals
  • Anthropology
  • atheism
  • Bad Photography
  • Books
  • Childhood
  • Education
  • Gaming
  • General
  • History
  • Irritation Meditation
  • Justice
  • Las Vegas
  • Minis
  • Movie Villainy
  • Movies
  • Museums
  • Music
  • Narrative VIolence
  • Native American Themes
  • Philosophy
  • Politics
  • Public History
  • Re-Creations
  • Religion
  • Street Art
  • The Bullet Point Mind
  • Travel
  • Uncategorized
  • Uncommonday
  • White Indians
  • Write Drunk, Edit Stoned

Blogroll

  • Bob's Blog
  • Disaster Film Blogspot
  • Dr. Gerald Stein
  • Hinterlogics
  • Ignorance WIthout Arrogance
  • Im-Nort
  • Insta-North
  • Just a Girl from Homer
  • Multo (Ghost)
  • Norbert Haupt
  • Northy Pins
  • Northy-Tok
  • Nunawhaa
  • Padre Steve's World
  • Stop and Smell the Lichen
  • The History Blog
  • The Mudflats
  • What Do I Know?

Archives

  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011

My Twitter Feed

Follow @Brimshack

RSS Feed

  • RSS - Posts
  • RSS - Comments

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 8,018 other followers

Blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
%d bloggers like this: