Orion Magazine - March/April 2009

THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT l 1

a v. _pVrtifice a s tor a l

The world of fakery and its war on all things natural

JAY GRIFFITHS

PHOTOGRAPHS BY REBECCA HORNE

The oceans were just beginning to freeze over and the polar bears were prowling, in this, the hungriest season of the bear year. For the Inuit in the high Arctic, it was one of the last whale-hunting days of the season, and the seas were colder by the day, with bear-paw ice and ice plates forming. The implacable ice, imprisoning waves.

In the home where I stayed, the small son spent hours every day engrossed in a computer game, the character called Spyro. Part of the game included an old man o=ering to tell Spyro stories. “Stories? Aw, no thanks,” says Spyro, scornfully. “Stories, aw, no thanks,” imitated the child aloud. His grandfather, one of the community’s elders, was a fund of tales: of foxes and men, bears and ice, stories with truths deep within them.

“This is a flight simulator,” enthused one man, showing me the virtual-reality program on his computer. “You can fly over this exact place.” You can, in other words, pretend to be where you already are.

For those younger than about forty, hunting was a lost skill. These generations were forced to go to White (Qallunaat) school, so had no childhood apprenticeship in hunting. Not knowing how to survive on the land, they were dependent on jobs and housing fixed up by the government from way down south, and on store-bought food.

One young man, with no money and no knowledge of the land, tried to go hunting to feed his family. He took his son with him and they never came back. The bodies were found eventually, the son’s face eaten by ravens. This is a stark result of the strange

artifice of their lives. Younger people become e=ectively imprisoned in these tiny, claustrophobic communities, and Pink Floyd’s The Wall is popular. (“We don’t need no education.”) The rates of suicide, violence, alcoholism, and drug use have rocketed.

I asked one Inuit woman how she felt about the land. “I remember it was beautiful,” she said wistfully. The land was still there, a few yards from her door, thousands of miles of land as wide and beautiful as it ever had been but she was weirdly— artificially—alienated from it. Not so the elders, traveling by boat, Ski-doo, or dog-teams. They knew how to hunt, they knew the language of the land, those dozens of distinct words for snow and ice, on which your life may depend. They cherished the freedom of the land, that non-negotiable authenticity.

The elders are less confident of their knowledge now, because of climate change; I was told of an elder who went through the ice and drowned in a place where it never would have happened before. We’re north of everywhere, they say, and the first to feel these changes. “I’m the last man standing, so be careful with me,” says one, in elliptical vulnerability.

Climate collapse has weird echoes of the financial collapse of recent months, and at the core of both is what I’d call the Politics of Artifice. Perverse and cruel, it is an almost unexamined ideology, one which commits itself to the primacy of the fake and declares war on all that is natural.