Students in the Faculty of Native Studies. Student at the University of Alberta with the inaugural class of M.A. I am a Beneficiary of Nunavut and a first-year M.A. So much time has stumbled past us all that it is too late for blame, or finger pointing or further repression, it is only time for Tukitaaqtuq, an Inuktitut word meaning, “they explain to one another, reach understanding.” It was my hope in the writing of ‘Eskimo Pie’ that the other side of a ice cream bar is explained and perhaps, understood. Therein lays the irony of it all, the pain and the hard truth that most Canadians don’t want to acknowledge and that is all I ever ask for, acknowledgement. While an entrepreneur in the US was making and marketing a tasty, summertime delicacy Inuit children were being taught that their language, their beliefs and mainly, their very existences were of no true value unless they became a whiter shade of Eskimo.
All of the things that were slowly trying to imprison the Inuit, while the rest of North America was enjoying a treat, called “Eskimo Pie”. For every bite of ‘Eskimo Pie’ by mainstream society, another attempt by an Inuit person to be more than the mainstream image, is chewed up and swallowed and dissolved into mush. I see just another example of expropriation of my culture and the way the representation of the Inuit lingers on, into present day, as a smiling, innocently-stupid type of peoples who remain unable to care for or manage themselves in a way that’s meets the fur-ringed standards of the majority of Canadian society. So when I even see the words, “Eskimo Pie” I see humiliation, degradation and the demeaning of my peoples. Unless you are the child of a residential school survivor, you truly don’t know what was taken away from you because of the experience of your parent. I was thinking, most of all, about all the little Inuit children who were forced into residential schools in order to be able to ‘blend in’ or assimilate with the dominant Canadian society.
The E-number system was followed by Project Surname and later Project Correction, because having a singular, non-gendered name in Canada was prohibited. I was thinking of all the Inuit who had their traditional names and naming systems removed by the Eskimo Identification Canada system, which in turn effected how Inuit view not only the continuing of life but also the ceremony involved in death. When I wrote ‘Eskimo Pie I” and a year later, ‘Eskimo Pie II’, I was asking myself, how many Inuit would have ever eaten such a thing? I was thinking of all the government-driven policy that removed from the Inuit of Canada traditional drum dancing and tattooing. This is the image, which is super-glued into the consciousness of non-Inuit people, globally. This is also the way mainstream citizens related to the chocolate covered ice cream bar called, “Eskimo Pie.” This is not how I react to anything beginning or containing the word ‘Eskimo’ or ‘Esquimaux’ or any of the words that mainstream societies use to bring into the minds of their people, that image of an Inuit person, dressed in a fur-ringed parka, harpoon in hand, waiting with silent patience over a seal breathing hole. It’s so very pleasing that you hear your throat involuntarily murmur in the near sensuous delight of it all. You feel it freeze your intestines in the process, and shock your system into what is called, ‘a brain freeze’-this is how you know that this cold delightfulness is truly very chilling. There is something so delicious in the way your tongue happily accepts this act and how all of this deliciousness, and calorie-filled, mixture slides down your eager throat. There is something so delicious in the placing of a chocolate covered ice cream bar between your teeth and onto your tongue. Smiling inside a padlocked fur-ringed space
Secured in residential school, left to die
0 kommentar(er)
