Akaka Sataa - Grace-Filled

Every death over the years feels like a piece of life ripped away. A hole left in the very air we breathe. When it concerns an elder, we often add the phrase "end of an era" to emphasize our sense of loss.

But this time, with the passing of Akaka Sataa, the watershed is real, the demark historic, and the significance worth pausing over.

Others will testify better than I can to the sheer competence that would have led to pride and impatience in most other men. But Akaka's humility was utter. Gentleness radiated from him. His strength was profound, bespeaking a phenomenal courage acquired and tested in solitude.

What made him an archetype, however, a rare example of human potential, was the sheer intensity and purity of his attention.

In later years, as his body bent and the daily trek into the public square left him almost unable to straighten, his impact on anyone who greeted him remained electrifying.

I have met very few people during my own nearly seven decades of life who, when their gaze turned towards another human being, it almost bowled them over with its sheer openess. English doesn't have as good a word for this as French does: "disponibilité". The closest we can come to it is 'availability', but that doesn't convey the active intensity. Somehow, 'available' leaves us still aware of the distractions that have temporarily been set aside.

With Akaka, you were everything. The universe paused and focused on your next breath to the exclusion of all else. A moment of pure awakedness.

Those who could make the transition quickly enough had an opportunity to tumble into a sample of eternal peace. Those whose own attention was too preoccupied to surrender to the moment could mutter a perfunctory greeting and move on without giving offence. Yet the experience lingered. Perhaps for a few seconds, perhaps to return days or months later. A realization of an opportunity squandered.

With Akaka's death, what has passed from the experience of life in Iqaluit might indeed be epocal. An era in which interpersonal grace could seem routine, if we chose to indulge.

Creeping Yellowknification

. Forty years ago Kenneth Boulding cracked up Toronto's York University audience with an opening sequence to his celebrity lecture there. "I couldn't help but wonder at the architecture as I drove in." (a few snickers in the audience)

"I had some trouble, at first, placing it in the correct period." (more chuckles and a few outright guffaws)

"Then it came to me," he said. "Early Brutal!" (pandemonium of uncontrolled laughter.)

"I will suggest to you that it falls into the broad contemporary trend of creeping Wichitization, that remorseless and rather disconcerting pressure where Bangkok, Bombay, Beirut and Budapest become more and more like Wichita." (No more laughter.)

Twenty years later, in a column for Yellowknife's News North amidst the struggle for division of the old Northwest Territories and creation of Nunavut, I borrowed from Boulding by describing Yellowknife as a victim of creeping Sudburization. A tendency for once predominantly aboriginal communities across North America to become more and more like Sudbury, with increasingly white, Euro-Canadian administrations and business communities supplanting increasingly marginalized aboriginal and Métis inhabitants.

I concluded with a fervent plea to our N.W.T. neighbours to admit the demographics were hopeless in the West, to graciously relinquish the fractured and bare aboriginal majority they could only temporarily maintain with Inuit influence, and to allow the Eastern Arctic to go its own way in order to benefit from its overwhelming majority Inuit electorate.

They did. A deliberate and noble sacrifice. Surprising and historic.

So "Here's the question", as Jack Cafferty would say. What do you detect in the following sequences of names?

(1) Carmen Levi, Rosemary Keenainak, Koovian Flanagan, Alooki Rojas, Victor Tootoo, Melinda Janes and David Akeeagok, et al;

(2) Bob Long, Janet Slaughter, Kathleen Lausman, Louise Wasson and Markus Weber, et al.

That's correct. They have all been appointed Deputy or Assistant Deputy Ministers with the Government of Nunavut at some point.

Yet there are other thought provoking patterns that emerge. One group consist entirely of beneficiaries to the Inuit Land Claim, the other none, and the other has largely replaced the one.

Coincidence? Possibly. A sign of the times? Probably. Creeping Yellowknification and Ottawization? Almost certainly. Discouraging? Can the Nunavut and Tamapta dreams survive it? Too soon to tell.

Our kids will decide.

Meanwhile, we do need to clean up our finances, housing, health, educational effectiveness and the environment. Leona, Eva and Elisapi seem sincere in their desire to provide better governance and services to citizens in each of these regards.

But you tell me. Are the cultural distinctions, the deeper IQ, the language, the precious payload of Inuktitut Social Values slowly slipping away as an inevitable part of the process?

Say it ain't so. ..

Crib Chronicles

Bon Stewart’s latest post on CribChronicles should be mandatory reading for all new bloggers.

The fifty odd comments that follow it are like a crash Drivers Ed course for newbie bloggers, a reasonable alternative to the period of lurking before blurting required to absorb blogging tradition and protocol. I took the pill. If it dissuades my motor mouth from launching a five-hundred-and-fiftieth edition of the Hair-Channel for Men, we could even dub it blog-control!

I gave up classical guitar when I heard Andres Segovia. Then I gave up writing mystical essays when I discovered that Rainer Maria Rilke had bequeathed a little prose to the Western Canon too, not just poetry. Now Bon Stewart's blog makes me feel like trashing mine... almost.

She’s that good.

I guess I’m older-than-that-now, as the song says, so I’ve decided to persist awhile with two motives in mind:

First is the cold fury I feel at reporters and pundits who try to fool us with opinion disguised as questions, declarative sentences disguised as interrogatives. Philosophers call them Logical Fallacies, but to the rest of us they are just plain lies. Carefully embedded outrageous lies. They drive me nuts!

Remember when Lou Dobbs was on CNN every night? He violated the subtlety constraints of ‘embeddedness’, became the laughing stock of US journalism and had to be canned. He was too obvious and Fox News isn't far behind. More troubling is that the rest of our mass media are nearly as dishonest; they only disguise it better.

A rising tone on the final syllable does not a question make!

Nunaview and Influential Liars are two blogs intended to neutralize some of that poison. One is dedicated to Nunavut affairs, the other to broader national and world affairs.