"When Canada tried to force the Inuit into encampments on Baffin Island in the 1950s, one Inuit grandfather would have nothing to do with it. 'The family took away all of his weapons and all of his tools, hoping that would force him into the settlement. Did it? No. In the middle of an Arctice night with a blizzard blowing, the old man slipped out of the igloo into the darkness and simply pulled down his caribou hide and sealskin trousers and defecated into his hand. As the feces began to freeze he shaped it into the form of a blade. As the shit took shape he put a spray of saliva along one leading edge to create a sharp edge. When the implement was finally created from the cold, he used it to kill a dog. He skinned the dog and used the skin of the dog to improvise a harness and used the rib cage of the dead dog to improvise the sled, harnessed an adjacent dog, and then with shit-knife in belt disappeared over the ice flow.' The elder returned alive and well in the spring. Forty years later, the Canadian government relented and returned the Inuit lands, creating Nunavut, a territory the size of western Europe."
Paul Hawkens, Blessed Unrest, with inner quote by Wade Davis, The Ethnosphere and the Academy
No comments:
Post a Comment