Nunavut in Crisis?

Have you ever read the rules that stiffle civil servants as long as they remain in the Government's employ? Have you ever wondered what risks that generates the day one of them ceases to wear the muzzle? Right now I feel like a Wikileak infopipe clogged full of Nunavutian collusion, illusions, delusions and allusions ... and ready to down a can of liquid plumber.

The worst of it? I needed a doctor's prescription before taking such medicine. Was I too much of a wuss? Too stupid to see through the sham? Or just another starry-eyed believer hoping that Nunavut would finally be different?

The mindless, knee jerk, simplistic civil service bashing that passes for political narrative in this community has become the exclusive domain of hypocrites who haven't the cojones to get into the ring and actually do something. They just take the money and run, whether as salaries, advertising revenue, or contract dollars. Do we really lack the wit or daring to confront our false assumptions?

Political scientists write books upon books advising us to "Speak Truth to Power?", but in this instance, we don't even speak to each other. We haven't a clue how influence flows in our case. Are we just lazy? Do we deliberately turn a blind eye. Are we embarrassed? Or are we just not quite sure what to do about it yet? No use shouting until we have a solution, right?

So our civil servants sit in frustrated silence while our politicians pontificate and our media messengers masticate, on the same old cud.

As our much bludgeoned linguistic saviour, Lord Noam Chumpski, says in verse 13.7 of his Sermon on the Ice, "Beware clichés and jargon, for they are the ring through your nose, not the ring in your ear; neither the embellishment in a marine mammal pelt, but the blubber of apprehension that seals your mouths and clogs the arteries of your humanity."

Nunavut in crisis? Damned right.

The good kind.

We're on the brink of a revolution, a civil war over how we think of ourselves. Over how we speak of ourselves. Over what we dare say about ourselves. And the discussion is about to break wide open.

The purveyors of jargon will call it a debate over 'governance'.

This blog will air the people's play-by-play.

(remember to click on the pics...)

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The Spilsbury Underground

. Facebook had a precursor in Nunavut When the Government of Canada began rounding up Inuit from their ancestral homes in the 1950s and locating them in fabricated settlements, many families continued to escape at every opportunity to slip back out 'on the land'. Some only went a few feet each Spring, pitched a tent right beside their settlement house and lived in it until Fall. Others hightailed it back to their accustomed family areas to hunt and trap and gather until winter threatened.

A determined few didn't bother coming back. They resumed living on the land again all year round.

The Government took to calling these Outpost Camps, a very settlement-centric thing to do. When Brigitte Bardot, the aging Caucasoid Tart of European Imperialism outgrew her own role as purveyor of other furry artefacts, she set out to destroy the value of seal products. Canada graciously (sic) responded by creating programs to supplement Inuit subsistence with a few dollars for fuel, equipment and the odd emergency medivac by helicopter.

Which raised an interesting point.

How were outpost camp dwellers to call for that emergency medical assistance? The answer lay in what was to become the bright orange talisman of every outpost camp evening. The Spilsbury SBX-11A SSB transceiver. Nothing was more characteristic of the outpost auditory environment than the gentle background hiss of static weaving in and out of murmuring family chat. Qilujak and Lucaatsi providing life's play-by-play commentary, boiling tea, a Coleman lamp. It is one of the warmest Inuktitut experiences available. Intimate and secluded.

Until the Spilsbury crackled!

"Inukikunnut, Inukikunnut, qajaqtuqtulirijiit, naalappisi? Uuva!" Or if Qilujak was the caller, more like "UUUuuuuUUUUVA!!!!"

Suddenly a whole other world sprang to life. A virtual reality that, especially in its later years, settlement-bound folks hardly knew existed unless an elder kept a Spilsbury in the bedroom, with an inverted-L antenna slipping out the window to a couple of oars propped up with rocks and nylon guy wires.

I thought it was gone. There are so few, perhaps even no truly permanently occupied outpost camps at all anymore. Is there no similarly sane alternative to town-bound inanity available any longer?

Then along came Spilsbook or is it Facebury?

A new Inuktitut underground is emerging. Not the dreary qallunaattitut litany of "I'm making pancakes now", "think I'll go to a movie", but the new soul of Nunavut. An alternate community is floating gently up above the concrete day-to-day of Town life. The word 'virtual' doesn't fit. It's too laden with wispy, ephemeral connotations of artificial realities. The Spilsbury Underground is not only real, it is the very substance of Inuktitut, the way of being, not just the language.

Take a deeper look at Nunavummiut on Facebook. They are already creating something so different from Town-bound culture, so much more like the old Spilsbury Underground, something to which the rest of the community are still oblivious. The quality of life, the way of treating each other, the subtle access into English of concepts that were previously only possible in Inuktitut, the language, so many elements of culture that until now were slipping away, appropriated by well meaning politicians, bureaucrats and policy wonks into stillborn IQ platitudes, the modern equivalent of an earlier and equally insulting equivalent, 'Cultural Inclusion'.

One does not subsume an entire cultural into an element of curriculum, or policy! It is the curriculum and the policy that are mere elements in an overarching culture.

Keep it up you guys. You are Inuit Qaujimajaqtuqangit. You are breathing it into this new community, this late evening social chatter, the new Spilsbury Underground.

For people like me, who understand just enough to lurk and notice, it is a delight. But for your contemporaries and offspring, and for generations world-wide after that, it will be the breath of life.

The attitudes capable of helping humanity navigate the next hundred years of crisis are not surfacing from the First and Second Worlds. They are gurgling and nurturing and re-emerging from the Third and Fourth Worlds.

Keep refining it. The time is coming when it will quietly produce real concensus and influence, the kind that can sway elections and reform planetary discourse.

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