Wasteoidurbia

Search

March 21st, 7:41pm 0 comments

Native Studies; Reaction 7

Indian Givers, Weatherford

 

It is safe to say that I knew none of the history described within this reading. How fascinating that so many of our modern medical advents have come from Natives and how hopelessly sad that the rain forests are bulldozed by an industry that will dry up while potential cures for maladies may be uprooted and made extinct as result.

 

I liked how the piece began, with the journey to Timbuktu, like something out of Heart of Darkness, a five day trip on the river, two days of desert travel through a trail that would be obscured if not for the mummified skins and bones of camels and donkeys. How fitting that Weatherford begin here before delving into the history of medicine where roles are reversed. Europeans are dying from conditions such as scurvy and are shown the cure from Natives. Cartier who's men were afflicted on this journey gums bleeding with erupting sores, emitting a vile stench showed his appreciation to the Donnaconna tribe chief by kidnapping him so that he might show them mountains of gold. Isn't this always how the story ends?  

Mummified_camel

Mummified camel

reasoning for the term appear to me to be comprehensive and spot on.  I think this social suffering is beginning to invade white, middle class decedents of European expansion or colonizers, and they don’t like it.  Remarkable in the case of modern day suburbanites is the lack of shared material and social culture to begin with as they’ve hermetically packed themselves in a homogenous white, middle class enclave.  The suburbanites are experiencing severe depression at astounding levels.  Their culture is separation and they’re beginning to feel the squeeze of a lack of meaningful work.

This “healing” movement sounds like something society as a whole could benefit from.  I think the Occupy movement provided a venue for this sort of gathering.  Like the Anglicans strangling animism and Natives’ harmonious relationship with nature from their spiritual philosophy are neoliberal forces stomping out a counterculture movement from spreading values that run in contrast with their own.  At least these forces are more rational than religion!  I think in many ways, the Natives of North America are the canary in the coal mine, a harbinger of the dystopic future waiting to embrace all but the elite.

 

 

Posted
March 10th, 9:21pm 0 comments

Native Studies Reaction 5

The came, they saw, they wiped out the entire population of South Hampton Island with Western disease.  Chapter 8 had many memorable passages, but an inadvertent genocide has to be about the damndest thing I've read about.  Though the susceptibility to disease kept Native American's off limits for the most part, as far as slavery was concerned.  To think about a single white man being a biological weapon of mass destruction, it is fitting as they've invented rules in this text to accomplish what they couldn't do with their mere presence.  Talk about a toxic person.

Reading about the first white man washing up on Innuit shores dead in a battered raft with his living son has me searching for the empathic reasoning behind shackling a boy in dog restraints, leaving him to be consumed by the harsh elements.  Had they taken him in, he very well may have died anyway, but it's curious that after not being able to communicate with the boy, his fate was decided.  

The crew of the Discovery chewing on candles and sucking vinegars socked gull bones as they floated in Hudson Bay.  A great body of water that is much colder than the open ocean at similar latitude since it is cut off from warm ocean currents.  The temperatue in mid-chanel has been measured as low as -63 degrees Celsius.

Meahwhile Paddy Aqjatusuk has landed with his hoodwinked family members in their new home.  An area immediately regarded as alien.  An area so far north, the northern lights no longer dazzle the sky.  Truly a barren frozen desert hellscape.  Supplies are quickly consumed and their is no repletion, months can pass between deliveries.  The Innuit have been expected to live off the land, because that is what they've been able to do.  They know nothing of this land.  Vaccination vessels, which had historically been avoided and resisted, like an extraterrestrial-like abduction, now became a sought after method for departure of this island.  The white man had once again done what he does, who could have prepared?

Posted