Reconstruction 7.2 (2007)
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The World is White and Slow and Infinitely Flat / Rob Baum
Abstract: Eco-feminism, cultural study and the environment coalesce in the form of poetic cultural commentary, originally fieldnotes. I draw exclusively from my years in the Alaskan Arctic among the Iñupiat Eskimo, who call themselves "the People of the Whale." The striking and severe natural environment, a landscape of endless ice, is central to the poetry, which richly portrays a vision of the Arctic absent from tourist travel guides, National Geographic and anthropological volumes. These magazines vend the Far North's beautiful austerity, including at times the physical beauty of its animal inhabitants, including humans, while disregarding human specificity and violence in the Arctic - aspects inherent to every culture. This article remarks on the cultural tourism and ethnographic subjectivity employed in commercial travel writing, and endeavours to present a more comprehensive view of today's Arctic environment.
Fish! They are so water-colored!
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
<1> This article draws upon my years in the Alaskan Arctic. My title is without irony, but not without simile. In the Arctic's cold months, white dominates: land, sky, bears, hunting parkas. Everything moves slowly, including speech. We seem to hang motionless in a flatland, the past, the "top of the world," and I am merely another reflective surface, like ice.
<2> Human geographer Dagmar Reichert poses the researcher's problem as one of self-reference:
Does not [our] challenge consist of trying to consider both the researchers, as well as the people they describe, as human beings capable of self-reflection? Marked by the fundamental human capacity of self-reference, such a science shows human beings distancing themselves from their selves so as to return to themselves. But the one who comes back is not the same as the one who left. She is another person... (101)
I returned "another person." My Alaskan writing, especially in the Arctic, illuminates the confluence of culture and nature, symbolism and pantheism, ethnicity and environment. Writing need not always be so infused: two poets from our writing "circle," for instance, wrote what we called "nature poetry," without reference to humanity; two others wrote without reference to nature. [1] In my work environment shapes human presence, sometimes intervening in human plans; the human conflicts with nature in my sonnet "Last Glimmer Last," where a wooded glen warns a sprite of intruders; in my prose-poem "Wooden Lies: A Run in Totem Park," a solitary female runner recalls the women raped in that serene space. I do not place nature in service to humanity, but eavesdrop as it continues its "natural" business.
Theorising the voice
<3> Anthropological "write-up" typically takes place as conclusion, sometimes years after fieldwork; fieldnotes underlie anthropological conventions, though rarely published (and then posthumously). Some anthropologists utilise a form of research alongside fieldnotes, called "ethnographic voice," "creative anthropology," "private fieldnotes" or even "headnotes". [2] This form of writing sustains an immediacy and integrity of intention not found in published ethnography that deliberately censors data indicating researchers' subjectivity, singularity and sexuality. "Ethnographic voice" acknowledges fieldworkers' sense of self and play, the expression of thoughts, feelings and images evoked in the field, and is thus considered "fiction" or "narrative" [3] despite its provenance in non-fictive, academic experience (in contrast to nature writing, e.g., Henry David Thoreau, Annie Dillard, or Barry Lopez); painting, sculpture and poetry transplants fieldwork from academic to aesthetic realms. I do not follow the imprint of Scott and Amundsen's polar heroics, but the ethnographic subjectivity of John Chernoff's African Rhythm and Sensibility, persuasive power of cultural symbol in Lila Abu-Lughod's Veiled Sentiments, personal projections in Don Kulick and Margaret Wilson's Taboo. In Taboo ethnographers' sexualities become crucial, disruptive, and eventually the subject of fieldwork [4]; similarly, my "fieldnotes" - which take poetic form - foreground rather than forget cultural collisions, violent rhythms, and eco-politics.
<4> In "I am a Fieldnote," Jean E. Jackson talks about the "possible mystique surrounding fieldnotes" among anthropologists, "unease" signified by interviewees
using familiar words from the anthropological lexicon such as sacred, taboo, fetish, exorcise, and ritual, and by commenting on our tendency to avoid talking about fieldnotes or only to joke about them... (5)
She concludes that "'fieldnotes' is a synecdoche for 'fieldwork' (as well as professional identity), described by one woman queried as 'feminine and osmotic,' 'like a Scott towel soaking up culture'" (16). "Calling fieldnotes "a bizarre genre" (72), Rena Lederman says: "The special value of fieldnotes is their capacity to unsettle, to cause a repositioning of existing boundaries and centers" (75). "Frequently mentioned," Jackson adds, "is fieldnotes' mnemonic function; they become a 'document of what happened and device for triggering new analysis'"( Jackson 20). Some anthropologists admit to thinking of fieldnotes as "individualistic, authentic, impossible to replicate - the art and poetry of anthropology" (32).
<5> Not naturalist but naturist, the following poetic excerpts explore life in an Iñupiat Eskimo village, a landscape of endless ice. My Arctic memories are discursively constructed from imagistic writings that represented me then and now make me present in other senses, re-envisioning the severe natural environment of Alaska's North Slope, the Arctic and its inhabitants. Many aspects of Iñupiat culture are absent from tourist travel guides, National Geographic and anthropological volumes, which vend the beautiful austerity of the Far North or consciously eliminate domestic references. The Iñupiat are inseparable from the land because they are of the land; their political and social location within land, water and animal resources constitutes a Native Alaskan claim. This human reflection, or inflection, is one reason my writings do not differentiate between people of the land and land itself. For instance, "Dirge for the Iñupiat Eskimo," a collage of mythic elements, chronicles changing ways of life in Point Barrow - such as the new utilidor [5] - alongside Iñupiat legends about the great spirit animals, and local tragedies - such as the crash of an airplane bearing the village's young people. The tone is sad, harsh and dire, predicting the end of village culture:
And they tell me the spotted seal
came to meeting
The Real People did not recognize their friend
without his salty coat
Natchik swam far from the hunters that yearYou trim your mukluks for the day of feasting
but the umiaq has gone
to work the oil fieldsNalugmiut does not fill your belly
You cannot harpoon the whale
with a pencil
Nalugmiut does not fill your heart...
<6> In "The Last Frontier: Reinventing Alaska," Eric Heyne suggests that Alaskan literature is synonymous with tourist literature (Heyne 9). Alaska may signify "the last frontier," "uncharted" or "virgin lands;" for me it is home, family; while I mean to demythologise Alaska I view the recent US Senate vote (51 to 49 in favour) to despoil the Arctic Refuge as tantamount to raping my sister. When I lived in Point Barrow, the largest Arctic village, the population was circa 3,000 including 1,000 tunaqs (white folk). It is difficult to conduct a firm count of the Iñupiat because they are still semi-nomadic, have extended families, and frequently visit relatives in other villages, staying indefinitely. A wonderful notion of what constitutes family provides the majority of Iñupiat with a place to stay in any village - as well, perhaps, in Anchorage, Fairbanks and the State of Hawaii. Moreover, "aunties" (basically any close female, not necessarily related by blood) customarily "adopt in" babies born to girls unready for childrearing; I know of no orphanages in the Arctic. The downside of family is its Christianised, hetero-normative structure. [6]
Voicing the experience
<7> Iñupiat means "Real People;" Iñupiat claim to have parented the Inuit (simply, "People"). The Iñupiat are part of the land of seasonal ice and tundra, travelling by Sno-Go or dogsled to nearby "fish camp" or other native villages. This excerpt from "Sometime Before Light" describes the landscape, wistfully comparing it with remembered images from urban society [7]:
The edge of this flat northern world
is white and slow.
Not silver with the glint
of city traffic.
Not blue as a distant ocean...
green like sumptuous lawns...The world is white and slow
and infinitely flat.
Only the sugar bicycles
await the thaw of their summer riders.
Only the boats marooned in the sea ice
rock on invisible corals...
<8> This "voice" is not native to the environment, but by the end of the poem has fallen prey to its enchantment. In "Rites: The Dead of Barrow," the whimsical narrator disappears, to be replaced with a colloquial voice humorously telling the story of a woman buried on the tundra. I remember writing this in the winter, beginning around three a.m. while watching an enormous digging machine slowly worry at the permafrost in order to bury a man who had died two weeks earlier. The noisy, laborious digging would require another week.
Hard to bury a body in the darkness, here
Even in summer, the all-day sky piercing
As walrus tusk
The earth rejects a shovel.
In the winter months, mute still mornings
Without a sliver of light through the blanket
Cold fills up the ground
Hugs it tight.
...
How much better off were we when burials occurred above ground - hence the numerous skeletons or skulls to be encountered when walking on the tundra, buried on top of rather than in graves. Here the same narrator stumbles upon a familiar shape:
'Course she's too much gone to be sure
But it does look like granny
Eye sockets red-rimmed, even now
Wide hole of a mouth...
There is no horror in meeting the ancestors in this way, only humour, an understanding of how environment (in this case the inability to bury in permafrost) practically determines human ritual, and human remains.
<9> Writing about the "reinvention of Alaska" as a "hypernatural landscape," Susan Kollins notes the need to
highlight connections between nature advocacy, the politics of landscape representation, and formations of national identity...
Much work in the field tends to see nature writing and environmental criticism primarily through an aesthetic or psychologising framework, only to overlook the ideological and social aspects of narrative (Kollins 43-4).
I shudder to think you may perceive my writings as "nature paintings" - Tundra with Eskimos - like John Muir's unfortunate cataloguing of national treasures in Our National Parks (Muir 7). The kind of comparisons intrinsic to literary metaphor should not be confused with fetishism. Although I went to the Arctic for anthropological study, I abandoned my project almost immediately upon learning of the local hatred for anthropologists: early on I decided to live in Barrow, not perch like a devouring bird, a "ghost." The North Slope was "founded" by Dutch explorers - the Brower name is legendary, and legion - but Iñupiat are tired of being specimen. Visiting anthropologists were viewed with great suspicion; Iñupiat avoided conversation, fearing objectification. Similarly, I did not buy the "artefacts" sold by local craftsmen and entrepreneurs (scrimshaw, model frigates of baleen, fur masks), in part because of the tourist target. (Honestly, where would these people have seen frigates? Clever work, but not native.) I despised the exploitation: one wealthy broker showed me a beautiful soapstone carving, to which he'd attached a price tag of $3,000 US, and proudly told how he'd bought it from the artist one night for a bottle of cheap whiskey. I rarely took photographs of people, though many were taken of me - by tourists for whom my wolf ruff, mukluks, and intimacy with locals signified Iñupiat. Because of their bright costumes and warm weather appearance we called tourists "Easter eggs [8]," facetiously posing for their photographs.
<10> In "Inuit Woman Sings Fish," the voice is that of an Eskimo woman aware of the limitations placed upon women in her own culture. I wrote this early in my first year, perhaps the reason I distanced the anonymous woman narrator, locating her in Canada among Inuit rather than in Alaska with Iñupiat: I may have needed to make her foreign in order to permit her plaint:
I sing a new fish
Jerk hard the hook
The scales leap at my throat
In the single thought
Of fish song
Because I am a woman
I must look inward
To the spawning place
I must hold the drum
While others dance
Bait the hook
While others eat the fish
This nascent feminism, though true to some Iñupiat women's experiences, evaporated in my work, replaced by prosaic postscripts about domestic violence.
<11> In that same year, while working in the Arctic's only battered women's shelter, I wrote "Apiqqun Has a Question." Icons and symbols of (white) Western childhood vie with the lived experience of the small dark child as she reads a picture book. Because the only picture books about Eskimos were, at least then, junior documentary fiction belittlingly written by white visitors, Apiqqun's alienation is revealed as a series of questions. (Offered in its entirety, two worlds emerge in one small child.)
Apiqqun Has a Question
Apiqqun turns the pages of the picture book
naming the gentle creatures
of the fable.
There is the still-wet Ugly Duckling
three hungry, tired Bears
a lean Wolf in a red scarf
like Little Hood's Grandmother.
All the animals run
before her round brown fingers.Where are the shapes of my white-blue home
the mirrors of the old World
ice and sky?
Do I not have stories of The People
to drag across the frozen tundra
in a sled of sinew and bleach bone
tales to sing to listening seals
in deep sunlit night?The picture book is too clumsy for her hands
used to looping string for foolish birds
Duck Bear Wolf never look this way
in carvings of ivory and bone
on the handle of Mother's ulu.And who is the mother of this Goldilocks
that so small a girl
may visit the faraway house of Bear
without being missed?
Arigaa.Apiqqun lifts the picture book and shakes it
as if the meaning of these riddles might
drop off the page into her lap.
The book is strong and dry.
It will not open any further.But Father and Uncle
brave hunters
will bring home unhappy Duck
dark Bear
long-toothed Wolf
to the fur-warmed house of the family.And Apiqqun will eat these fables before bedtime
answering the questions for herself.
Unlike a Western child who might be concerned with her own relevance (needing others' validation in order to become Snow White or Cinderella), Apiqqun literally knows herplace; she conquers the quandary between competing narratives by believing in her own culture. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it in his essay "Nature," "Whilst the abstract question occupies your intellect, nature brings it in the concrete" (42).
<12> Extreme weather conditions such as a wind-chill factor significantly lower ambient temperatures. Local custom is to suit up very small children, particularly infants, in fur-lined wear that fully protects and encloses all extremities in attached slippers and mittens. Whereas Apiqqun contests nonsensical images, recognising her own worth, "Handless Doll" describes a small child I found on the playground, literally sewn into her helpless female body:
small flowered parka
with its lamb-lined matt
ruff a mangy quilt of scraps
no mother would sew for her child.
Too old, I think, for that raggedy parka
with stumps of hide-stitched sleeve and mitten.
What will you do, I wonder
when the other kindergarteners pack snow
to burn across your face?
The poem continues with the disturbed narrator pushing the "doll" in a swing - "higher than a baby bird!" the child begs - while wondering what awaits the "handless doll" at home:
Was it your father
thrust upon you
a woman's guilty knowledge
forced apart your smile
gouged you with that bearded tusk?
Or perhaps some other stranger
harpooned you in the endless dark
made those trusting, too-white arms
ice-bound.
<13> I recorded no rosy visions of cultural tourism. As the foreword to Norman Chance's Eskimo of North Alaska announces, ambivalence is central to
the modern Eskimo. The Eskimo of the outboard motor, electric lights, fuel-oil heat, canned goods, clinic and hospital care, Levis and jackets, and the twist. ...and a people who still hunt walrus, seal and whales, who wear caribou parkas, and who observe the nalukatak (spring whale festival) each year. (ix)
Baby bottles leaked Coca Cola. Children etched circles into denim pockets from thin cans of chewing tobacco. Mothers shopped for frozen beef in Stuaqpak (general store), then cooked it in seal oil. Native land claims were swapped for timeshares in Hawaii. Two small boys at school, watching two rats coupling in their cage, exclaimed, "They're raping!" - and no one corrected them. One of my only prose poems, "Case No. 1057, Intake, Arctic Women's Shelter," attempts to articulate such details without succumbing to pathos. The voice is that of an intake counsellor, but not my own; interspersed with intake case notes personal comments appear as if written in another pen, or in the margins of officialdom:
Saw 1057 today. Last time she came in July her husband had busted her lip with the end of a shotgun lucky girl because look this up she had been drinking with a guy from Point Lay. Same argument, new day: taxi dropped her off at 1500 with blood on her feet, a five-year old holding her hand. Haven't seen this child before. He was unharmed visual only, medical examination refused. Nothing wrong with 1057's feet, only the ulu cut on her forehead bleeding so well her house slippers were ruined. Never saw blood on someone's feet that way, not in years of it and the boy wasn't even crying. Found her some slippers, a t-shirt to replace what was left of hers.
The prose poem discusses the case, listing a few days of treatment, and as suddenly ends when the beaten woman leaves the Shelter. The work concludes with a note on seeing the woman in the street months later, accompanied by a new boyfriend. The tone is carefully neutral:
Her boyfriend seemed nice, smiling and waiting for her to finish; we're in a hurry, he said. Everything is fine, according to M. It must be the training: I saw the bruise and wondered how long it took him.
I did not write another such poem so absent of metaphor. I note with curiosity now that landscape is also absent from this poem. It is written as if shut off from the world, a dispassionate outsider, a paper voice.
<14> Returning to imagery and nature, the poem " Barren Grounds" evokes the pathos of a woman whose child has died. Ostensibly, the land is synonymous with a woman's womb, not a new idea. Colonial writers have typically depicted the natural environment, with the "primitive" natives inhabiting it, as female (Moore 1988, Ortner 1974). In Writing Women and Space, Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose remark the collation of woman and landscape:
The feminization of colonized landscapes can illustrate the positionality inherent in viewing/reading landscapes... Imperialist literature often incorporated sexual imagery to create and sustain the heroic stature of male colonizers who conquered and penetrated dangerous, unknown continents, often characterized by the fertility of both indigenous vegetation and women (Blunt and Rose 10).
But the colonial experience rarely emerges in my writing, and the "woman without a lamp" (a childless woman) tells her own story, bitterly ironic about her relationship to her people as a woman. The "People of the Barren Ground" are starving, a deprivation she sees as deserving: for the narrator "barren" means heartless.
Last darkness our traps sang with ermine
arctic fox snowshoe jerky
The wooden runners whined along thin veins
binding home and hunter...
Now the riders of the narwhal
creep out upon the ice
never fearing its crack
Their sealskins are bursting with blubber
and dark berries
But the people of the Barren Grounds
follow their hunger across the unforgiving whiteness
and each meal is twelve dogs away
<15> After leaving my position at the Arctic battered women's shelter I worked in the local school as teacher's aide. I taught the entire school population, K-12, becoming the children's swim teacher when "discovered" swimming. Subsequently I began to teach in a classroom. My ambivalence is apparent in these pieces. The position severely altered my dealings with the kids, especially as most children grew up with an intense hatred of all formal education, a legacy from their parents or even grandparents, punished by Christian missionaries for being themselves: eating raw fish, wearing fur parkas, speaking Iñupiaq. Curiously, while the antagonism towards education abides the majority of the Iñupiat population is Christian. The group to which I was assigned was the "problem class": I was considered the only one able to handle these pupils in large part because of our prior association in the "day-night reversal" of summer. "When the Roll is Called (Down Yonder)" plays on the correlation between religion and school, both in the title and in the abrupt, sometimes moralistic language; it begins with the memory of being at school, and advances into the present.
Before dawn, the teachers magically appeared
I remember
They may have slept at their barricades, anxious
for the single, horrible bell
to cancel freedom again.
They ate you up with monstrous smiles
as you struggled through the yawning doorway,
aware that no hurricane flew your house
no fire consumed your homework
that you slept through the screams next door.
It is impossible to escape violence, omnipresent in the village environment. From the first "I remember," the voice belongs to the schoolkid mystified by a bulletin board with bizarrely irrelevant shamrocks, falling leaves and pumpkins:
And when you got to the end
they turned the page.
There were more missing pieces than fingers. [9]
Some of the kids were getting hairy.
Sex films explained away
the blood.
Playing Doctor failed to prepare you for
the man on the road with the open coat.
...
<16> By the time I wrote "A Dim View from Room 9" the evocative narrator had "gone south;" the teacher speaks, tired and foreign, barely in charge of a remedial class. The cadence is deliberately sing-song and self-consciously foolish, juxtaposing the detestable reality of Arctic school education with fanciful images from southern climes:
...
Sam's geometry's improving: his last airplane hit me.
Bruce typed "I hate teachers" without missing a key.
Yet they still beat up Ricky for having blonde hair -
his sister buys-off the bullies by letting them touch her.
And could so many desks
tumble over as one
without a single brown hand being near?Hell, there's no sense
when I'm longing for colour,
the pink and blue places on the classroom globe.
My friends send me mangos
and newspaper clippings
for jobs where it's warmer, the bruises are fewer
and the language that's spoken is English, and clean.
<17> In contrast, an "ethnographic present" rather than ethnographic subjectivity is strong in "Where White Bear Laughs," which emphasises mythic relationships between the animals, including humans:
In the fading month when calving ice cracked the sky,
Vijik courted Bearded Seal.
Ocean daughter Sedna sent chill wind-birds
at the small kayaq.
But Vijik overtook the storm to enter the soul of Bearded Seal
and married her to his twice-toothed point.
This is the reason ugruk is sweetest
in fading month.He who once ran with Wolf
now sits among the children in the happy sun.
Now when the hunters rip red flesh from its bone
Vijik praises akutuq with eyes full of meat
For this writing I adopted Iñupiat storytelling rhythms and animalisation, as well as Iñupiaq language constructions, for instance, ways of referring to months as types of tatqiq, moons, in which various animals can be hunted and the sun may be a small strange object at the edge of vision.
<18> My relationship to the Iñupiat people with whom I lived was complex. I was a woman as well as a tunaq - a word meaning "spotted seal" but used to denote white people, like the Maori term pakeha (meaning "white pig"). I had worked in the battered women's shelter, accompanied women and children to court - and hospital, retained intimate knowledge of villagers' domestic "situations": threats, fights, alcoholic binges, blackouts, kidnappings, beatings, rapes, attempted murders. I was also a recognised friend to the children, one of the few tunaq who became part of village life, and possibly the only tunaq who went on "day-night reversal" with the children, running around with them at two o'clock in the morning. In my second year, at a conference off the Slope I was asked to talk about daily life in Point Barrow and "why on earth" I continued to live there; this led to the rather flippant poem "The Point of Barrow." I supply it in entirety because it is precisely the kind of uncensored fieldnote I advocate. The natural environment is never merely glimpsed through a window but seeps in through wide cracks in the weathered boards; temperatures indoors may simulate temperatures outdoors, and food can be refrigerated by placing it on the linoleum. Even life basics cannot be taken for granted: water for cooking, drinking and bathing is delivered by large trucks, just as urine and excrement is collected and taken away by large trucks; in fact, one tunaq family ran both services. [10] Tone prevents the work from being sentimental, casting a frank portrayal of disease, imported corruption, and belonging:
The Point of Barrow
You've asked how it is
so I'll tell you
We have the sun all night or never
sleep in shacks or packing crates
Attention: BLACKSTOCK [11]
knock down bootleg vodka [12]
with lagoon-flavoured water
behind a film of nicotine, frost
and rumour
where pictures of trees and Jesus
grace the slop-stained sheetrockYes, I like it
living like the ice children
in sunset
when the rage of wind and brittle sky
murders sleep
on my splinter-pine pallet
of mouton, wool, and letters homeMy senses ferment
I become real
the wolf, the wolverine, the whale
I accept my own violent stink
chewing, chewing time's sinews
and running the ocean
on the feet of a seal [13]
<19> "First Strike: Whaling in Utkiagvik," tells about the first whale to be successfully harpooned by villagers in two years. (Barrow had been grief-stricken by its hunters' misses.) The work conveys the excitement of the hunt and harvest with briskly flung details:
Bells horns hungry dogs
enthusiastic rifle volleys
firecrackers shrilling unseen
in the all-night sunshine.
Snowmachines scream into precarious motion
sleds slamming behind.
It also faithfully records the background noise of the event, precisely the sort of fieldnote excised from anthropological work - if ever noted.
A high garble comes over
audible soup rich in consonants
"Get off the CB" a man cuts in
enveloped by a woman's excited static.
Shrieks, whines.
"Get off the CB" the voice warns darkly
"or else."
The woman continues to keen
presumably in Inupiaq
but not a polite form.
The poem returns to the "poetic" voice with deliberately abbreviated lines, yet continues an ironic commentary:
Those who knew the way have gone, criss-
crossing hunter tracks in the ice.
Men shout directions, warm gloved hands
by sputtering engines.
Some head for Monument, others, The Point,
squinting into the winds of midday dawn,
wishing more for blankets than whales
<20> Because this event is one I imagine most hearers will not have experienced I'll let the narrative play:
The first sled stops. I leap onto its icy slats,
unable to wedge my parka beneath me.
A waxen tow rope
swings between the sled and its metal dog Skidoo.
Blue ice careens by
between gusts of gas, ice fog, and rotting
caribou. Every break in the ice buries a bruise
in my sweatpants.Forever or a moment we ride,
the old Eskimo couple grunting privately
that being tunaq I speak too much
but almost anything is too much.We smell it first:
seal oil, smoke of a tent fire
tea and salt.
The lead lies open,
a cut in the clouds
beyond and beneath
the whale floats
dreaming of lost migrations
<21> "First Strike" is longish so I will conclude with a final image:
Now is the time for the women
to take their own portion.A sudden silence throbs.
In one hooded whisper they close upon the whale
in terror I leap away
escaping their ulus' swift brilliant arc.
<22> I began this paper with the desire to make known the complex negotiations of life in an Artic village, to argue for the subjective imagining of fierce beauty and violent nature, to couple the "pristine" with the "obscene." Alaska is so bound up with policies of extraction and exploitation that a view of nature does not exist apart from them: I cannot get (back) to Point Barrow except by small plane (or the Russian ice-breaker, rarely glimpsed). In attempting to demystify a region so distinct, troubled and gorged on its own wealth, I end in producing other stories, overlaying narrative with nightmare.
<23> On an ordinary day this life is too distant for me to recapture; photographs do not convey more than an idea, often blurry from cold [14], of a past so strange as to seem dissociative. I do not look at my photographs for this reason. But this last written image explodes my memory of the red, the reek, the ruined ice, the whale, and the size of its death - and in doing so restores me to the community, this harvest, our catharsis, my village.
References
Baum, Rob. White Skin: Poems from the Far North. Unpublished manuscript.
Blunt, Alison and Gillian Rose, Eds. Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies. New York: The Guilford Press, 1994, pp. 1-25.
Chance, Norman A. The Eskimo of North Alaska. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966.
Cornberg, David, ed. Thursday's Circle. Eagle River: Alaska Nature Press, 1985.
Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. 1st Perennial classics Edition. New York: HarperPerennial, 1998.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Nature." The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York: Modern Library, 1950, pp. 3-42.
Geertz, Clifford. "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight." The Interpretation of Cultures. New York : Basic Books, 1973, pp. 50-62.
Heyne, Eric. "The Last Frontier: Reinventing Alaska." Desert, Garden, Margin, Range: Literature on the Frontier. Ed. Eric Heyne. New York: Twayne, 1992, pp. 3-15.
Jackson, Jean E. "'I am a Fieldnote:' Fieldnotes as a Symbol of Professional Identity." Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology. Ed. Roger Sanjek. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990, pp. 3-33.
Kollins, Susan. "The Wild, Wild North: Nature Writing, Nationalist Ecologies, and Alaska." American Literary History 12: 1 (2000), pp. 41-78.
Lederman, Rena. "Pretexts for Ethnography: On Reading Fieldnotes." Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology. Ed. Roger Sanjek. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990, pp. 71-91.
Moore, Henrietta. Feminism and Anthropology. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988.
Muir, John. Our National Parks. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1991.
Ortner, Sherry. "Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?" Woman, Culture and Society. Eds Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974, pp. 67-88.
Ottenberg, Simon. "Thirty Years of Fieldnotes: Changing Relationships to the Text." Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology. Ed. Roger Sanjek. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990, pp. 139-160.
Reichert, Dagmar. "Writing Around Circularity and Self-Reference." Ground for Common Search. Ed. Reginald G. Golledge, Helen Couclelis and Peter Gould. Goleta: Santa Barbara Geographical Press, 1988, pp. 101-125.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Civil Disobedience. Harmondsworth , England : Penguin Books, 1983.
Notes
[1] "Thursday's Circle" produced an eponymous volume: Thursdays Circle (Eagle River: Alaska Nature Press, 1985). [^]
[2] "Headnotes" is Simon Ottenberg's term for the evolution of fieldnotes into art following fieldwork (Ottenberg 144). [^]
[3] Some examples: Clifford Geertz' contested essay about the "Cockfight," Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and Henry David Thoreau's On Walden Pond. [^]
[4] John Miller Chernoff, African Rhythm and Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Don Kulick and Margaret Wilson, eds., Taboo: Sex, Identity and Erotic Subjectivity in Anthropological Fieldwork (London: Routledge Press, 1995). [^]
[5] Obviously not all of us had running water, though most had electricity; power lines necessarily ran through the utility corridor in order to maintain their flexibility longer; the village's computer was inside the ground. [^]
[6] In the 1980s, at the height of U.S. gay and lesbian political activism, there was no place for lesbian and gay Iñupiat to go. [^]
[7] Most of the examples presented here are excerpted, in the interests of time. [^]
[8] One tourist company costumed its clients in brightly solid-coloured jackets cut in the shape of Eskimo parkas, but unlined, the cold-weather equivalent of crotchless underwear. [^]
[9] Counting derives from hunting logic rather than Base 10 (ten fingers), with terms for one/single, two/pair, three-five, and more than five. [^]
[10] This would not have been the case had I lived on the "Browerville side" of the lagoon, or in apartments built beneath the primary school. [^]
[11] The name of a prominent construction company stamped onto the sides of packing crates and pallets. [^]
[12] Point Barrow was a "dry town," meaning that alcohol was not sold there. It could, however, be bought: lines of people wrapped the bank every Thursday as customers placed liquor orders. [^]
[13] Iñupiat women, generally the older ones, chew sealskins for use in sewing mukluks, hence the ground-down quality of the women's teeth. [^]
[14] I refer to the film, not my hands, which were naturally cold outside my sealskin mittens. At such low temperatures, photographic film does not advance normally, if at all. [^]
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