The Wayfinders (20 page)

If you want to know what happens when the
constraints of culture and civilization are lost, merely look around the
world and consider the history of the last century. Anthropology suggests
that when peoples and cultures are squeezed, extreme ideologies often
emerge, inspired by strange and unexpected beliefs. These
revitalization
movements
, a terrible and misleading academic term, may be benign.
In Jamaica, 300 years of colonialism followed by the economic doldrums of
independence sent scores of young men to the shanties of Trenchtown where,
infused with perhaps too much marijuana, the Rastafarians cast Haile
Selassie, a minor African despot, as the Lion of Judah. This was a peculiar
notion to be sure, but ultimately harmless.

More typically, such movements prove deadly both
to their adherents and to those they engage. In China at the turn of the
century, the Boxer Rebellion did not seek just the end of the opium trade or
the expulsion of foreigners. The Boxers rose in response to the humiliation
of an ancient nation, long the centre of the known world, reduced within a
generation to servitude by unknown barbarians at the gate. It was not enough
to murder the missionaries. In a raw, atavistic gesture, their bodies were
dismembered, their heads displayed on pikes.

In Cambodia, Pol Pot, humiliated at home by the
French and in Paris when he went abroad to study, created a fantasy of a
renewed Khmer empire, a nation purged of all things Western, save the
essential ideology that rationalized murder. Thus, while the great
twelfth-century temples of Angkor were spared destruction during the civil
war, all those who wore reading glasses or had the soft hands of scholars,
poets, merchants, and priests were liquidated in the killing fields.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, systematic
rape is today codified as a weapon of terror, the only coherent strategy of
war, while in Uganda militias of orphaned youth ravage and pillage in the
name of Christ. In Liberia naked children high on drugs went into battle as
the Butt Naked Battalion, a cult led by a messianic warlord, Joshua Milton
Blahyi, who convinced them that his satanic powers would make them
invincible. In fourteen years of civil war they murdered, raped, and
cannibalized thousands. With the peace, General Butt Naked, as Blahyi was
known, reinvented himself as an evangelical preacher and set out in search
of converts and redemption on the streets of Monrovia, the Liberian capital,
where he lives today.

In Nepal rural farmers spout rhetoric not heard
since the death of Stalin. In Peru the Shining Path turned to Mao. Had they
invoked instead Túpac Amaru, the eighteenth-century indigenous rebel, scion
of the Inca, and had they been able to curb their reflexive disdain for the
very indigenous people they claimed to represent, they might well have set
the nation aflame, as was their intent. Lima, a city of 400,000 in 1940, is
today home to 9 million, and for the majority it is a sea of poverty in a
sun-scorched desert.

Torn between worlds, al Qaeda followers invoke a
feudal past that never was in order to rationalize their own humiliation and
hatred. They are a cancer within the culture of Islam, neither fully of the
faith nor totally apart from it. Like any malignant growth they must be
severed from the body and destroyed. At the same time, we must strive to
understand the roots of this and other such movements, for the chaotic
conditions of disenfranchisement are found amongst disaffected populations
throughout the world.

We live in an age of disintegration. At the
beginning of the twentieth century there were 60 nation-states. Today there
are 190, most of them poor and highly unstable. The real story lies in the
cities. Throughout the world, urbanization, with all of its promises, has
drawn people by the millions into squalor. The populations of Mexico City
and São Paulo are unknown, probably immeasurable. In Asia there are cities
of ten million people that most of us in the West cannot name. In the next
twenty years the world’s population will grow from 6 to 8 billion, and 97
percent of this increase will occur in nations where the average individual
income is less than $2 a day.

The nation-state, as Harvard sociologist Daniel
Bell wrote, has become too small for the big problems of the world and too
big for the little problems of the world. Outside of the major industrial
nations, globalization has not brought integration and harmony, but rather a
firestorm of change that has swept away languages and cultures, ancient
skills and visionary wisdom.

This does not have to happen. To acknowledge the
wonder of other cultures is not to denigrate our way of life but rather to
recognize with some humility that other peoples, flawed as they too may be,
nevertheless contribute to our collective heritage, the human repertoire of
ideas, beliefs, and adaptations that have historically allowed us as a
species to thrive. To appreciate this truth is to sense viscerally the
tragedy inherent in the loss of a language or the assimilation of a people.
To lose a culture is to lose something of our selves.

SOME YEARS AGO I
found myself in Borneo sitting by a fire with
an old friend, Asik Nyelik, headman of the Ubong River Penan. The rains that
had pounded the forest all day had finally stopped. The head of a barking
deer that Asik had killed roasted in the coals at our feet. The clouds
opened and through the branches of the canopy the light of a full moon
suddenly illuminated our camp. Asik looked up at the moon and casually asked
if it was true that people had gone there, only to return with baskets of
rocks. If that was all they had found, why had they bothered to go? How long
had it taken and what kind of transport had they had? It was difficult to
explain to a man who kindled fire with flint a space program that had
consumed the wealth of nations and at a cost of nearly a trillion dollars
placed twelve men on the moon. Or that after travelling several billion
miles through space they had indeed brought back only rocks and lunar dust,
828 pounds altogether.

But the answer to Asik’s question was in a sense
obvious. We did not go into space to secure wealth. We went because we
could, and we were curious, and we returned not with treasure but with
something infinitely more valuable, a new vision of life itself. The seminal
moment came on Christmas Eve, 1968, when Apollo 8 emerged from the dark side
of the moon to see rising over its surface a small and fragile planet,
floating in the velvet void of space. Not a sunrise, or the shadow of a
moon, but Earth itself ascendant. This image more than any amount of
scientific data showed us that our planet is a finite place, a single
interactive sphere of life, a living organism composed of air, water, wind,
and soil. Story Musgrave, the first physician to walk in space, once told me
that to have experienced that vision, a sight made possible only by the
brilliance of scientific technology, and then to recall the callous and
unconscious manner in which we treat our only home, was to know the purest
sensation of horror. But also, he added, the excitement and anticipation of
a new beginning, because peoples and nations would have to change their
ways.

And they did. Just forty years ago simply getting
people to stop throwing garbage out of car windows was considered a great
environmental victory. Rachel Carson was a lone voice in the wild. A mere
decade ago scientists who warned of the gravity of global warming were
dismissed as radicals. Today, it is those who question the significance of
climate change who occupy the lunatic fringe. When I was a graduate student
the words
biosphere
and
biodiversity
were exotic terms, familiar only to a handful of
scientists. Today they are part of the vocabulary of schoolchildren. The
biodiversity crisis, marked by the extinction of over a million life forms
in the past three decades alone, has emerged as one of the central issues of
our times. Though solutions to the major environmental challenges may remain
elusive, no government on earth can ignore the magnitude of the threat or
the urgency of the dilemma. This represents a reorientation of human
priorities that is both historic in its significance and profoundly hopeful
in its promise.

A similar shift is occurring, and not a minute
too soon, in the way that people view and value culture. In many ways Canada
is leading the way, not only as a model of a successful multicultural
country, but as a nation-state prepared to acknowledge past mistakes and
seek appropriate means of restitution even as it charts a way forward as a
pluralistic society. I am reminded of this every time I travel in the
Arctic, especially to Nunavut, the new territory, a homeland roughly the
size of western Europe now under the administrative control of 26,000 Inuit
people. With the possible exception of Colombia, I cannot think of another
nation-state that has made such a choice. Nunavut’s very existence is a
powerful statement to the world that Canada recognizes that unique
ethnicities, indigenous peoples, First Nations, do not stand in the way of a
country’s destiny; rather they contribute to it, if given a chance. Their
cultural survival does not undermine the nation-state; it serves to enrich
it, if the state is willing to embrace diversity. These cultures do not
represent failed attempts at modernity, marginal peoples who somehow missed
the technological train of history. On the contrary, these peoples, with
their dreams and prayers, their myths and memories, teach us that there are
indeed other ways of being, alternative visions of life, birth, death, and
creation itself. When a nation-state is prepared to acknowledge this, then
surely there is hope for all the peoples of the world.

The power of this idea grows even stronger when
you consider how far we have come as Canadians in redefining this
relationship. For the Inuit, in particular, the original clash of cultures
was traumatic in the extreme. When the British first arrived in the Arctic
they took the Inuit to be savages; the Inuit took the British to be gods.
Both were wrong, but one did more to honour the human race. The British
failed to understand that there was no better measure of genius than the
ability to survive in the Arctic environment with a technology that was
limited to what you could carve from ivory and bone, antler, soapstone and
slate. The runners of sleds were originally made from fish, three Arctic
char laid in a row, wrapped in caribou hide and frozen. The Inuit did not
fear the cold, they took advantage of it.

European expeditions that mimicked their ways
achieved great feats of exploration. Those that failed to do so suffered
terrible deaths. When Lord Franklin’s men were found frozen to death at
Starvation Cove on the Adelaide peninsula, the young sailors were stiff in
the leather traces of a sled made of iron and oak that weighed 650 pounds.
On it was an 800-pound dory loaded with all the personal effects of British
Naval officers, including silver dinner plates and even a copy of the novel
The Vicar of Wakefield
. This they somehow expected to drag
across the ice and through the immense boreal forests of the north, all with
the hope of encountering another ship, or perhaps an outpost of the Hudson’s
Bay Company.

The Inuit, by contrast, moved lightly on the
land. I once spent a few days with several families from Arctic Bay in a
hunting camp at Cape Crauford at the tip of Baffin Island. Each summer in
June, in one of the most epic animal migrations on earth, 17 million marine
mammals return to the Arctic, passing through the open waters of Lancaster
Sound. Admiralty Inlet, which clefts the northern shore of Baffin Island,
remains icebound, and the hunters travel along the floe edge, where the ice
meets the sea, and listen as the breath of whales mingles with the wind. One
day, or perhaps it was night, for the sun in June never fades, Olayuk
Narqitarvik told me a remarkable story. During the 1940s and 1950s, a dark
period in the history of the country, the Canadian government, in order to
establish sovereignty in the Arctic, essentially forced the Inuit into
settlements, in some cases moving entire populations hundreds of kilometres
from their homes. There was one old man who refused to go. Fearful for his
life, his family took away all of his tools and weapons, thinking this would
oblige him to leave the land. Instead, in the midst of a winter storm, he
stepped out of their igloo, defecated, and honed the feces into a frozen
blade, which he sharpened with a spray of saliva. With this knife, forged by
the cold from human waste, he killed a dog. Using its rib cage as a sled and
its hide to harness another dog, he disappeared into the darkness. This
story may well be apocryphal, though I did find a reference to just such an
implement in the Arctic journals of the Danish explorer Peter Freuchen. But
true or not, it is a wonderful symbol of the ingenuity and resilience of the
Inuit people, traits of culture that have allowed them to survive.

I was reminded of this on a more recent trip to
the Arctic, as Canadian filmmaker Andy Gregg and I joined Theo Ikummaq and
John Arnatsiaq and a party of hunters from Igloolik as they set out on the
sea ice in search of polar bear. We were travelling perhaps 150 kilometres
offshore, and with the wind chill the temperature hovered around minus 50
degrees Celsius. A snowmobile pulling a fully loaded
kamotik
hit a piece of rogue ice, spun out of control,
and the momentum of the sled carried it up and over both driver and machine.
One of the skis twisted like a pretzel, the other was torn completely in
half. I watched in astonishment as Theo and John pounded out the metal,
blasted four holes into it with rifles at close range, improvised clamps
from a scrap of iron, scavenged a splint from a hockey stick, and had the
entire works bound back together in twenty minutes. We pushed on into the
night, and it was only days later that the driver casually mentioned that in
the accident he had broken his foot.