Book Reports

I have finished North Spirit, Sojourns Among the Cree and Ojibway by Paulette Jiles. Also this week I read The End of Days by Zecharia Sitchin.

Telling you this is supposed to disguise my own current inability to think beyond the mundane.

As I reported when I started North Spirit, my friend Merlene loaned me the book almost a year ago. I was just coming out of a time when I'd been reading a lot because I had to stay off my (stinking, stupid, puny, dumb) feet. But then Merlene showed me I could travel. I could sit on my butt in a car and not just in a chair. So away I went!

Now I'm back in a chair with an entirely different foot ailment, but with the same orders: stay off my feet. So I'm reading again.

North Spirit is an interesting look into the everyday lives of people who live way too far north in Canada for my tastes. The author wasn't there in a "superior" role, she had the same attitude that you or I would probably have had: admiration for people with good survival skills and delight at making new friends.

The author compared the lives of Ojibway who still followed the traditional ways to those the Canadian government had attempted to "modernize."

Western society puts so much hope in education. Jiles wrote that the Ojibway children needed to know how to raise and use sled dogs, or even - if they were to modernize - how to fix snowmobiles. They needed to learn how to survive cold winters. But the government insisted the children had to go to school and get a traditional education. The sort of education that only prepares a student for further education and eventually poops him out of the system totally unprepared for self-preservation. He'd even have to move somewhere else because he couldn't survive in his own native environment. Requiring an Ojibway kid to be in school all day meant that his family couldn't maintain its trap lines in the winter because the kid couldn't go with them. Within a single generation, the only things kids learned were how to fill out welfare forms and to live in government-subsidized housing.

Jiles said, "The worst of it is our conviction that we are well-meaning. That we can pour down goodness and rightness from the top. We are maple syrup. The rest of the population is a stack of pancakes." p.134

From suburban California, we look down on third world countries and tell ourselves, "Tsk tsk, yes, it's difficult for them to live in today's society because THEY aren't educated."

Are we really better off? In the third world, there are still people who can take care of themselves. In the U.S., especially in suburban California, we are at least 2 generations away from a population that can do that. And people are being herded into living situations - master planned communities - where it would be impossible, anyway. In a prolonged emergency, the people in Anatolia, the local development that often draws my ire, don't even have enough room in their miniscule yards to house a purloined goat. If electricity is off for a week, if no water is dribbling out of their faucets, if no fuel is available so they can drive somewhere to get things they need, they are helpless. Totally helpless in a sterile "community."

For the Ojibway, if the village store has no gasoline for a couple of months in the winter and you can't use your snowmobile, you might still have dried fish or meat and other things stocked away, and you have a supply of wood for the stove. And some of the older folks might still run sled dogs. In Anatolia, the stuff in your refrigerator will be rotten in a week. If you can't find more Cheerios and milk, what are you going to do? Grow your own? Just throw that last handful out in the dirt and you'll be harvesting more in a week or so. Isn't that how it works?

After living with the Ojibway and witnessing their frustrations, Jiles concluded: "I was sick of government. I had never had to deal with government so much in my life. It was everywhere, it made up rules for every aspect of one's life. All these government agents and ministers and assistant secretaries had to be paid high salaries with travel and per diems. Why did we put up with them? Why were they so necessary? Where did they come from? Were they from outer space? Have they all just taken over our brains?" p.198

And that leads me to the next book. I'll tell you about it tomorrow. Or maybe it will take longer than that.