A lonely world apart
Andrew Lodge Volunteer Staff
CHURCHILL — Isaiah stares across the rough ocean ice surrounding the town of Churchill on the coast of massive Hudson’s Bay in northern Manitoba. He doesn’t say a word. He stands like this for a long time and then finally turns and walks slowly back inside the hospital, his face remaining expressionless the entire time. Isaiah is an Inuk, and right now he seems to be a living representation of the celebrated and romanticized Inuit patience.
Isaiah has seen his father today for the first time in over 10 years. He has been away from his father and community, sitting in jail down south during that time and much has changed. Today, he found out that his father is dying.
Isaiah’s father, Samuel, has been in Churchill hospital for three months, ostensibly because there is no one to care for him in Sanikiluaq, on the lonely Belcher Islands in the middle of Hudson’s Bay, where Samuel and Isaiah are from. While there are Inuktitut translators here in Churchill, none can speak Samuel or Isaiah’s dialect, and Samuel cannot speak English. This, coupled with the hearing loss of old age, means that Samuel has lived the last three months in a world where no one can understand him and he understands no one.
The health care professionals have written Samuel off as “demented,” which means that he’s crazy. In the medical world, old crazy people earn the right to be treated like children. It is all very Shakespearean: in A Midsummer’s Night Dream, Puck describes the seven stages of man — and the first and last ones are the same. This is the hell Samuel is caught in; he is treated like a child and powerless to do anything to change it.
The helplessness and rage are obvious in Isaiah’s eyes but he doesn’t say anything; perhaps jail has taught him that complaining can only cause more problems. Perhaps he knows that going up against a huge and faceless system, be it the justice or medical system, is futile and only causes more harm. Wait patiently for the ordeal to end appears to be his motto.
It is my role to formally ascertain Samuel’s (in)competency. To do this, I need Isaiah’s help. The interview involves set questions, questions that are both culturally and linguistically specific, and communication quickly breaks down. After a few moments Isaiah stops translating and angrily snaps at me, “this means nothing to him.” The test cannot be completed. It doesn’t matter anyway, everyone is already convinced that Samuel is incompetent, and the test was essentially academic, a formality for completeness’ sake.
This is living colonization, a level of cultural imperialism most post-colonial scholars only dream of watching in action. While Indigenous people in most of the world are trying to stave off encroachment of McDonald’s, Pamela Anderson and Coldplay, having long abandoned pre-contact patterns, Samuel’s life unfolds almost symbolically.
Born on the land in a skin tent, growing up in an igloo, he now has only to die in a white room (figuratively and literally). Samuel was a proud man, a hunter, Isaiah tells me.
For some segments of the Inuit population in Canada, government encroachment only arrived in the middle of last century, still within living memory. Only 50 years ago, many were being born, living and dying the same way that they had throughout their entire collective memory. Much has changed.
Samuel and Isaiah’s stories follow almost archetypal paths. There has been little actual ill will on the part of the colonizers — paternalism and condescension to be sure, but little in the way of malice. Samuel is in the hospital “for his own good,” because “there is no one to care for him at home” — he “needs to be here.” These beliefs are genuine in their sincerity, however banal.
When asked, through Isaiah, what he wants — the first time he has been asked since being here — Samuel replies emphatically that he wants to go home. This shouldn’t be surprising, but it is apparently for those who are convinced that Samuel is being provided with the best care possible. So much so that such a statement alone is enough to define him as crazy and therefore incompetent, which means that he has no decision-making capacity. In other words, if Samuel doesn’t have enough insight into his situation to understand that “he needs to be here” then he must be crazy. And if he’s crazy, he can’t make decisions regarding his future. A real life Catch-22, Inuit-style — Joseph Heller would be proud.
Like the colonizers, Samuel and Isaiah are textbook caricatures. Samuel doesn’t know what day of the week it is and likely never did. His world is one of endless skyline and the logic he understands is the logic of the hunt.
Isaiah, for his part, plays the role of the lost generation. His father’s world is fading just as his father is, but without education and with only a rudimentary grasp of English, Isaiah stands little chance of walking in mainstream Canadian society. His interaction with that world is similar to Samuel’s in terms of dysfunction, only in contact with it as a captive, all of his agency lost.
The lives of Samuel and Isaiah follow a path familiar to many of those affected by colonization. The subject culture is denigrated, its difference with the dominant one equated with presumed weakness and inferiority. This must be so, as post-colonial writers like Edward Said have emphasized. Otherwise, there would be no way to justify the dominance and destruction by one culture over another.
The ensuing tragedy is predictable and is no different in kind to the tragedy of colonization throughout history. One way of life is shattered, but the actors have no means nor are they equipped to function in the new dominant knowledge and culture systems.
Samuel’s own personal story is not unique. It is too common for people to live out the end of their lives in a manner completely foreign to their world, to their way of life, to their understanding. Nor is Isaiah’s. If statistics are to be believed, the jails are full of Indigenous men and women whose most notable contact with mainstream Canadian society is through the bars of Canadian prisons.
Samuel will continue to be wheeled around through the white walls, surrounded by beeping machines and voices he can’t understand. In all probability he will die this way, no doubt dreaming of time past and the very different place where he once was. As for Isaiah, if statistical trends are at all accurate, he will more likely than not return to jail at some point, a free trip off of the Belcher Islands for a tour of southern Canada and all the penal system has to offer.
It is easy to forget that the lives of these people fall within the national boundaries of this country. Their voices are muted and ignored. Such is the legacy of la mission civisilatrice — the great civilizing mission.
