[PEN-L:329] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Inuit and ecology

[Mark Jones <Jones_M@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Frances Bolton (PHI) wrote:

> On Tue, 28 Jul 1998, Mark Jones wrote:
> >
> >  I'm sorry I've copped out of this debate: you and Lou and others
> don't need my help anyway, but my two
> > penn'orth is that I support what you are doing down the line; and (not that they need my support anyway) I
> > also believe that the Inuit right to hunt is clear, unarguable and cannot be qualified by talk about
> > 'waste', which is simply racist nonsense, in context.
>
> Mark,
> Since I made a comment about the whale not being used, I'm going to ask ou
> to expand on this comment a bit. The account I read in today's paper said
> that some of the whale was eaten, and the rest was fed to sled dogs. The
> article also stated that whales had not been hunted for 50 years, mostly
> because the whale was sold and there was no market for
> whale products anymore. How is that "racist nonsense"?
>
> Frances

 Frances, I know your work too well to ever call you racist. I
meant the word 'waste'; for any comfortable westerner (we are
the most evolved of all detritovores) to accuse
anyone of waste is actually worse than racism, it's the same
cultural perversity as accusing Native Americans of being a
threat to our way of life, ie, it's an unspeakable outrage.
Of course, no-one supposes (do they?) that the Inuit only ever hunted
whales to satisfy western markets. If they are now restoring
that tradition, perhaps they will reappear in our minds as what
they truly are: custodians of the wildernesses, guardians of
the life they live among. Jim Craven is right: the hunter
always thanked the prey and apologised to it; a hunter who
did not honour the prey rightly tended to starve, for he
was a poor hunter.

There is an idea going around, which I think David Harvey
may have resurrected, that humankind became settled
agronomists only after hunter-gatherers created such
carnage among the other animals that there was nothing left
to hunt. The truth is that hunters were nomads who liked
the cold and trekked across the frozen waters which
were the land bridges; settled communities, like arthritis
and bad teeth, only came with the end of the last Ice
Age, when the melted ice-caps marooned the tribes amid swampy,
malarial marshes that cut the hunters off from
the prey amid the risen waters of the flooded world.

The present Interglacial was a biblical disaster which we
unfortunately adapted too well to. The Inuit are relicts
of a world that knew how to sacralise nature. To accuse
them of 'waste' is a joke in very poor taste. And if they
stumble and make mistakes because they have only just begun
to pick themselves off the ground where we threw them, are we to
blame them for that? Would it not be better to acknowledge
with some humility their prior claims to the world they are
repossessing, instead of suggesting that their heroic efforts
to challenge our detritovorism should be banned on the grounds
that it only encourages our wickedess -- is it not blaming
the victim for the crime, to accuse the Inuit of being
responsible for Japanese whaling, for example?

Lou Proyect and I have both dwelt much on the interesting
fact that the Indigenous peoples are thrust to the forefront
of the struggle to liberate us from ourselves, because the worst
plunder, rapine and genocide goes on precisely in the most
vulnerable and most precious wildernesses. That is also a
reason why should pay homage to their struggle, give them
unstinted support and not, above all, presume to sit in
judgment on them. We who live as comfortable hypocrites in the
thanatocracy whose politics of exterminism gouge out their
lives with hard and greedy hands, better first look to our
own sin before condemning theirs.


--
Mark Jones
http://www.geocities.com/~comparty