Light at the Edge of the World

by Wade Davis

  The Europeans who first washed ashore on the beaches of Australia lacked the language or imagination even to begin to understand the profound intellectual and spiritual achievements of the Aborigines. What they saw was a people who lived simply, whose technological achievements were modest, whose faces looked strange, whose habits were incomprehensible. The Aborigines lacked all the hall-marks of European civilization. They had no metal tools, knew nothing of writing, had never succumbed to the cult of the seed. Without agriculture or animal husbandry, they generated no surpluses, and thus had never embraced sedentary village life. Hierarchy and specialization were unknown. Their small semi-nomadic bands, living in temporary shelters made of sticks and grass, dependent on stone weapons, epitomized European notions of backwardness. An early French explorer described them as “the most miserable people of the world, human beings who approach closest to brute beasts.” As late as 1902 , a member of the Australian parliament claimed, “There is no scientific evidence that the Aborigine is a human at all.”

  By the 1930 s, a combination of disease, exploitation and murder had reduced the Aborigine population from well over a million at the time of European contact to a mere thirty thousand. In one century, a land bound together by Songlines, where the people moved effortlessly from one dimension to the next, from the future to the past and from the past to the present, was transformed from Eden to Armageddon.

  Knowing what we do today of the extraordinary reach of the Aboriginal mind, the subtlety of their thoughts and the evocative power of their rituals, it is chilling to think of this reservoir of human potential, wisdom, intuition and insight that very nearly ran dry during those terrible years of death and conflagration. As it is, Aboriginal languages, which may have numbered 250 at the time of contact, are disappearing at the rate of one or more per year. Only eighteen are today spoken by as many as five hundred individuals.

  Despite this history, the Aborigines have survived and, in time, may still have a chance to inspire and redeem a nation. Reconciliation and the building of partnerships between Aborigines and non-Aborigines, including serious efforts to resolve land disputes and address historical wrongs, today dominate the Australian political agenda. The languages and cultures of the Aborigines are taught in universities, extolled in popular song, featured in films. Aboriginal notions of design and decoration, transferred to canvas in the 1970s, have given rise to an art form celebrated throughout the world. In a symbolic moment, charged with emotion, an Aboriginal athlete inspired the world when selected to ignite the ceremonial flame at the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games.

  BUT WHAT OF the other victims of European expansion? The people of Tasmania were exterminated within seventy-five years of contact. The Reverend John West, a Christian missionary, rationalized their slaughter: “Their appearance is offensive, their proximity obstructive, their presence renders everything insecure. Thus the muskets of the soldier, and those of the bandits, are equally useful; they clear the land of a detested incubus.”

  Within a generation of Captain James Cook’s landing in Oahu, only thirty thousand Hawaiians survived out of an original population of some eight hundred thousand. In the Caribbean, on the island of Hispaniola, the Arawakan population of well over a million was eliminated within fifteen years.

  To take full measure of what contact implied for the peoples of the Americas, recall that the word “decimate,” horrific as it is intended to be, means to kill one in ten. Within three generations of contact, over 90 per cent of Native Americans, people of hundreds of nations, each with its own vision of reality, living from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego, had succumbed to measles, smallpox and other European diseases that spread like an evil miasma. In central Mexico, the population, densest in the Americas, collapsed from twenty-five million to two million within sixty years of the conquest of the Aztec. As late as 1800, California had an indigenous population of three hundred thousand; by 1950, their descendants numbered only ten thousand. Nine million died in Peru. Twenty-three million in Mexico. Another five million in the Amazon alone.

  Echoes of this holocaust are still heard in every corner of the globe. Indeed, in many lands the carnage continues. Throughout this century, indigenous societies in Brazil have disappeared at the rate of one per year. In Colombia, as recently as 1974 , a group of white miners appeared in court charged with the murder of several Cuiva Indians. In their defence, they professed not to believe that the Cuiva were humans.

  In the upper reaches of the Orinoco, a gold rush brings disease to the Yanomami, killing a quarter of the population in a decade, leaving the survivors hungry and destitute. In Nigeria, pollutants from the oil industry so saturate the floodplain of the Niger River, homeland of the Ogoni, that the once fertile soils can no longer be farmed. A vortex of violence and famine in the Sudan claims the lives of tens of thousands of Nuer. The Efe pygmies, forest dwellers of the Congo, dwindle toward extinction as sexually transmitted diseases ravage the population. In Siberia, Soviet authorities, frustrated by their inability to control the nomadic Ul’ta, oblige the children of the reindeer herders to attend Russian-language schools, thus severing the bonds of family and violating a way of life. Today, only a single herding group remains, ten Ul ’ta men who still follow ancestral migratory routes so familiar to their animals that the reindeer lead the way.

  These are not isolated events but elements of a global phenomenon that will no doubt be long remembered as one of the tragedies of this age. As essential to humanity as the environments they steward, indigenous societies throughout the world are under siege. Well over half are moribund.

  The notion that these societies are simply fated to fade away is quite wrong. In virtually every instance, these indigenous peoples are being torn from their past and propelled into an uncertain future because of specific political and economic decisions made by powerful outside entities. The plight of the Penan in Sarawak, as we have seen, is the result of government policies that promote and reward the unsustainable extraction of timber from a forest that was once their homeland. The case of the Rendille in Kenya reads as a parable for what can happen when, in the name of development, good intentions come together with bad ideas. Tibet is a tale of brute conquest. That all of these conflicts result from deliberate choices made by men and women is both discouraging and empowering. If people are the agents of destruction, they can also be the agents of cultural survival. Happily, there are examples of redemption that can inspire us all.

  IN THE ARCTIC, one marvels at the art of survival. Bears hunt seals, foxes follow the bears and feed on their excrement. Inuit women cut open animals to feed on clam siphons found in walrus stomachs, lichens and plants in the guts of caribou, mother’s milk in the bellies of baby seals. They store meat taken in August in skins and bladders cached in rock cairns, where it ferments to the consistency and taste of blue cheese.

  In winter darkness, when temperatures fall so low that breath cracks in the wind, Inuit men leave their families to follow the open leads in the new ice; there, they kneel motionless for hours at a time over the breathing holes of ringed seals. The slightest shift in weight will betray their presence, so they squat in perfect stillness, all the while knowing full well that as they hunt, they are being hunted. Polar bear tracks run away from every breathing hole. If a seal does not appear, the hunter may roll over, mimicking a seal to try to attract a bear so that predator may become prey.

  The northern landscape is empty and desolate. On the horizon, islands, ice and sky meld one into the other, and the black sea is a distant mirage. But the Inuit seldom lose their way. In driving snowstorms, they watch for patterns in the ice, small ridges of hard snow that run parallel to the prevailing winds and reveal where they are. They study a map of the land reflected on the underside of low clouds: open water is black; the sea ice, white; ground covered in snow and traces of open tundra are darker than the sea but lighter than snowless land.

  When the Inuit first encountered Europeans, they mistook their wooden ships with bil
lowing sails for gods. The white men viewed the natives as savages. Both were wrong, though the Inuit did more to dignify the human race. The entire history of European exploration was coloured by a single theme: those who ignored the example of the Inuit perished, whereas those who imitated their ways not only survived but achieved great feats of endurance and discovery. In the end, it was the English who suffered most for their arrogance, dying by the score at the entrance to the Northwest Passage.

  When the last of John Franklin’s men died at Starvation Cove on the Adelaide Peninsula, their sledge alone weighed 650 pounds (295 kg). On it was an 800-pound (360-kg) boat loaded with silver dinner plates, cigar cases, a copy of The Vicar of Wakefield—in short, necessities for a gentleman traveller of the Victorian age. In the leather traces of the sledge were the frozen corpses of young British sailors. Scorning the use of dogs, the English had planned to haul this cumbersome load hundreds of miles overland in the hope of reaching some remote trading post in the vast boreal forests of Canada. Like so many of their kind, as one explorer remarked, they died because they brought their environment with them and were unwilling to adapt to another.

  In dismissing the Inuit as savages, the British failed to grasp the measure of intelligence necessary to thrive in the Arctic with a technology limited to what could be made with ivory and bone, antler and animal skins, soapstone and slate and precious bits of driftwood. The Inuit did not merely endure the cold, they took advantage of it. Three Arctic char placed end to end, wrapped and frozen in hide, the bottom greased with the stomach contents of a caribou and coated with a thin film of ice, became the runner of a sled. A knife could be made from human excrement. There is a well-known account of an old man who refused to move into a settlement. Fearful for his life, and hoping to force him off the ice, his family took away all of his tools and weapons. So, in the midst of a winter gale, he stepped out of their igloo, defecated and shaped the feces into a frozen blade, which he sharpened with a spray of saliva. With the knife, he killed a dog. Using its ribcage as a sled and its hide to harness another dog, he disappeared into the darkness.

  Blind to the genius of the Inuit, the early European arrivals imposed their own order. Along with traders who brought diseases that killed nine of ten Inuit, came missionaries whose primary goal was to destroy the power and authority of the shaman, the cultural pivot, the symbolic heart of the Inuit relationship to the universe. The priests forbade the use even of traditional names, songs and the language itself.

  By the early twentieth century, the seduction of modern trade goods had begun to draw people away from the land. As they concentrated in communities, often around missions and trading posts, new problems arose. A distemper outbreak led Canadian authorities to rationalize the wholesale slaughter of sled dogs, in whose place the Royal Canadian Mounted Police introduced snowmobiles, with the first one arriving on Baffin Island in 1962 . In the settlements, health conditions deteriorated. A tuberculosis outbreak in the 1950s, and the desperate attempts by medical authorities to curtail its spread, resulted in 20 per cent of the entire Inuit population being forcibly removed to sanitaria in Montreal, Winnipeg and other southern cities.

  In two decades of destruction, beginning in the late 1940s, the Inuit drifted toward dependency. As the Cold War escalated, the Canadian government, compelled to bolster its claims to the Arctic, actively promoted settlement. Family allowance payments were made contingent on the children attending school. As parents moved into communities to be with their young, nomadic camps disappeared. Along with settlements and schools came nursing stations, churches and welfare. The government identified each person by number, issued identification tags, and ultimately conducted Operation Surname, assigning last names to a people who had never had them. In the process, more than a few Inuit dogs were recorded as Canadian citizens.

  After half a century of profound changes, what has become of Inuit traditions? Naturally, the people have adapted. The Inuit language is alive. The men are still hunters: they use snares, make snow houses, know the power of medicinal herbs that sprout in the Arctic spring. But they also own boats, snowmobiles, television sets and satellite phones. Some drink, some attend church. As anthropologist Hugh Brody points out, what must be defended is not the traditional as opposed to the modern, but, rather, the right of a free indigenous people to choose the components of their lives.

  Canada, which had not always been kind to the Inuit, has in recent years recognized this challenge by negotiating an astonishing land-claims settlement with the peoples of the Eastern Arctic. In a historic gesture of restitution, the federal government announced on April 1, 1999, the creation of Nunavut, an Inuit homeland of well over 770 ,000 square miles (1 995 000 km2). Including all of Baffin Island and stretching from Manitoba to Ellesmere Island, with a population of just twenty-six thousand, Nunavut is almost as large as Alaska and California combined. In addition to annual payments totalling $1.148 billion over fourteen years, funds to be held in trust to finance student scholarships and economic development, the Inuit will receive direct title to over 135 ,000 square miles (350 000 km2). More than 80 per cent of the known mineral reserves of copper, lead, zinc, gold and silver in all of Nunavut are to be found on land deeded to the Inuit. In their homeland, where caribou outnumber people thirty to one and where but a century ago nomadic hunters fashioned tools from stone and slate, the Inuit will have total administrative control, the most remarkable experiment in Native self-government anywhere to be found.

  There is much to do, many injuries to heal. After years of decay and alienation, substance abuse is chronic and the suicide rate is six times the national average. When the environmental group Greenpeace shut down the traditional seal hunt on Baffin Island, the annual per capita income dropped from $16 ,000 to nothing. Unemployment in the cash economy of Nunavut hovers at 30 per cent.

  But if the challenges are great, so is the opportunity. In the language of the Inuit, the word uvatiarru may be translated as “ long ago” or “in the future.” A cultural renaissance is underway, with the Inuit at last in control of their lives and destiny. Tracking caribou on the open tundra during the cold months of the fall, taking narwhal from the ice in July, they will continue to honour a seasonal round that recalls a not too distant era when their people were nomads, hunters of the northern ice. The rhythm of the year will continue to propel the culture, influencing everything from the character of local regulations and the criminal justice system to the manner in which men and women come together, families grow and prosper, power is shared and food divided. In time, the wounds of broken promises and lost dreams, the tortured memories of the residential schools, where children were torn from families and young boys and girls lived at the mercy of priests, will be healed. It may take generations. But then patience has always been one of the most enduring traits of the Inuit. There is a story from Greenland about a group of men and women who walked a great distance to gather wild grass in one of the few verdant valleys of the island. When they arrived, the grass had yet to sprout, so they watched and waited until it grew.

  AS YOU READ these last words, consider that everything that has been expressed in this book, every story and myth, each point of conflict and tragedy, has been distilled from my own limited experiences and from what anthropologists have learned from their work among the handful of cultures that it has been my privilege to have known. People sometimes remark that I have been fortunate to have travelled so widely, to have seen so much, but, in fact, I have experienced very little of the world’s cultural diversity. Just as a bouquet of a dozen species represents but an iota of the Earth’s botanical bounty, so too these journeys and encounters offer but a fragment of the full wonder of the ethnosphere. In this book I make reference to perhaps thirty cultures, discussing at some length a mere fourteen. There remain another fourteen thousand to visit and celebrate, if only there were time.

  Before she died, anthropologist Margaret Mead spoke of her singular concern that, as we drift toward a more homog
enous world, we are laying the foundations of a blandly amorphous and singularly generic modern culture that ultimately will have no rivals. The entire imagination of humanity, she feared, might become confined within the limits of a single intellectual and spiritual modality. Her nightmare was the possibility that we might wake up one day and not even remember what had been lost.

  There are many people, of course, who view such a process of condensation as progress, the inevitable consequence of modernity. Without doubt, images of comfort and wealth, of technological wizardry, have a magnetic allure. Any job in the city may seem better than back-breaking labour in sun-scorched fields. Entranced by the promise of the new, indigenous people throughout the world have in many instances voluntarily and in great earnest turned their backs on the old. The consequences can be profoundly disappointing. The fate of the vast majority of those who sever their ties with their traditions will not be to attain the prosperity of the West but to join the legions of urban poor, living on the edges of a cash economy, trapped in squalor and struggling to survive. As cultures wither away, individuals remain, often shadows of their former selves, caught in time, unable to return to the past yet denied any real possibility of securing a place in the world whose values they seek to emulate and whose wealth they long to acquire.

  The triumph of secular materialism is the conceit of modernity. But what are the features of this life? An anthropologist from a distant land visiting America, for example, would note many wondrous things. But he would no doubt be puzzled to learn that 20 per cent of the people control 80 per cent of the wealth, that the average child has by the age of eighteen spent a full two years passively watching television. Observing that over half of our marriages end in divorce and that only 6 per cent of our elders live with a relative, he might question the values of a society that so readily breaks the bonds of marriage and abandons its aged, even as its men and women exhaust themselves in jobs that only reinforce their isolation from their families. Certainly, a slang term such as 24/7, implying as it does the willingness of an employee to be available for work at all times, seems excessive, though it would explain the fact that the average American father spends only eighteen minutes a day in direct communication with his child. And what of our propensity to compromise the very life supports of the planet? Extreme would be one word for a civilization that contaminates with its waste the air, water and soil; that drives plants and animals to extinction; that dams the rivers, tears down the ancient forests, rips holes in the protective halo of the heavens and does little to curtail industrial processes that threaten to transform the biochemistry of the very atmosphere.