Wasteoidurbia

Search

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