The Wonder of the Ethnosphere

As we drift toward a more modern, homogeneous world, the loss and transformation of indigenous societies and their knowledge, myths and imagination is a indeed a blow to the richness of humanity's diversity.    I just read  Light at the Edge of the World:  A Journey Through the Realm of Vanishing Cultures by renowned anthropologist Wade Davis.  It's an eloquent and passionate portrayal of traditional peoples in remote areas and their different ways of thinking,  living and being.  I chose to simply provide you with a few excerpts from the book which, I hope, will inspire you to look into his work.


"Worldwide, some 300 million people, roughly 5 % of the global population, still retain a strong identity as members of an indigenous culture, rooted in history and language, attached by myth and memory to a particular place on the planet.  Though their populations are small, these cultures account for 60 % of the world's languages and collectively represent over half of the intellectual legacy of humanity. Yet, increasingly, their voices are being silenced, their unique visions of life itself lost in a whirlwind of change and conflict.

There is no better measure of this crisis then the loss of languages.  Today, of the roughly six thousand languages still spoken, fully half are not being taught to children, meaning that, effectively, they are already dead, and only three hundred are spoken by more than a million people.  More than a cluster of words or a set of grammatical rules, a language is a flash of the human spirit, the filter through which the soul of each particular culture reaches into the material world. A language is as divine and mysterious as a living creature.  The biological analogy is apropos. Extinction, when balanced  by the birth of a new species, is a normal phenomenon.  But the current wave of species loss due to human activities is unprecedented.  Languages, like species, have always evolved.  Before Latin faded from the scene, it gave rise to a score of diverse but related languages.  Today, by contrast, languages are being lost at such a rate, within a generation or two, they have no chance to leave descendants.  By the same token, cultures have come and gone through time, absorbed by other more powerful societies or eliminated altogether by violence and conquest, famines, or natural disasters.  But the current wave of assimilation and acculturation, in which peoples all over the Earth are being drawn away from their past, has no precedent.

Each language is, in itself, an entire ecosystem of ideas and intuitions, a watershed of thought, an old growth forest of the mind.  Each is a window into the world, a monument of the culture that gave it birth, and whose spirit it expresses.  When we sacrifice a language, we might as well drop a bomb on the Louvre.  The ultimate tragedy is not that archaic societies are disappearing but rather vibrant, dynamic, living cultures and languages are being forced out of existence.

Even among those sympathetic to the plight of small indigenous societies, there is a mood of resignation, as if  these cultures are fated to slip away,  reduced by circumstance to the sidelines of history, removed from the inexorable progression of modern life.  Though flawed, such reasoning is perhaps to be expected, for we are all acolytes of our own realities, prisoners of our perceptions, so blindly loyal to the patterns and habits of our lives we forget that, like all human beings, we too are enveloped by the constraints of protection of culture.  To dismiss indigenous peoples as trivial, to view their societies as marginal, is to ignore and deny the central revelation of anthropology.

In Haiti, a Voudoun priestess responds to the rhythm of drums and, taken by the spirit, handles burning embers with impunity.  In the Amazonian lowlands, a Waorani hunter detects the scent of animal urine at forty paces and identifies the species that deposited in the rain forest.  In Mexico, a Mazatec farmer communicates in whistles, mimicking the information of his language to send complex messages across the broad valleys of his mountain homeland.  It is a vocabulary based on the wind.  In the deserts of northern Kenya, Rendille nomads draw blood from the faces of their camel and survive on a diet of milk and wild herbs gathered in the shade of frail acacia trees.  In Borneo, children of the nomadic Penan watch for omens in the flight of crested hornbills.  On an open escarpment in the high Arctic, Inuit elders fuse myth with landscape, interpreting the past in the shadows of clouds cast upon ice.

Just to know that such cultures exist is to remember that the human imagination is vast, fluid, infinite in its capacity for social and spiritual invention.  Our way of life, with its stunning technological wizardry, its cities dense with intrigue, is but one alternative rooted in a particular intellectual lineage.
The Polynesian seafarers who sense the presence of distant atolls in the echo of waves, the Naxi shaman of Yunnan who carve mystical tales into rock, the Juwasi Bushmen who, for generations lived in open truce with the lions of the Kalahari, reveal that there are other options, other means of interpreting existence, other ways of being.

Every view of the world that fades away, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life and reduces the human repertoire of adaptive responses to the common problems that confront us all.  Knowledge is lost, not only of the natural world but of realms of the spirit, intuitions about the meaning of the cosmos, insights into the very nature of existence."

Wade Davis

Inuit Sculpture

As long as I can remember (and even before I was born) there was an Inuit sculpture on the knick knack shelf of my suburban family home in Winnipeg.  It's a heavy sculpture as it is a fairly big piece of soapstone,  about 10 inches high by 7 inches long and 5 inches wide.  It is a dark grey, a bit green, with a few lighter veins running through it.   A typical piece of a daily routine, a woman breast feeding her child. We are not really sure where my father got it as he had traveled to the Arctic several times for work as a cameraman with CBC.  One of his favourite places was Rankin Inlet, so we figured it had to be from there.  He had also gone to Baffin island.  However, that was quite a bit later than when he had acquired the sculpture, according to my sister who also remembered it being there as a child.

One day, while walking in a section of the Vancouver International Airport,  I noticed amongst their Inuit art section,  a sculpture that looked remarkably similar to the one we had at home.  I took a photo of it. The name of the artist on the name tag was that of Mary Kunalik,  from the community of Salluit, in what is now called Nunavik,  (a part of Nunavut) which was previously a part of arctic Quebec.  The date of that sculpture is 1954,  probably only a few years earlier than when my father got his sculpture. That got the ball rolling for me to find out once and for all who was the sculptor of that piece.

There is no better place to find out about Inuit Art than the Winnipeg Art Gallery,  as they have the most extensive and important collection in the world.   After making a phone call to someone from their library/archives department, we were told to look for a number and possible name, in Inuktitut syllabics, on the bottom of the base of the sculpture.  My father had glued a felt to the bottom of the piece to prevent it from scratching the wood it was sitting on for all those years.  So we took it off and sure  enough, there was the number and an Inuktitut script.  On a side note,  I also learned that numbers were actually like names given to people as they were being recorded by the government when the Inuit came off the land and into settlements.  Part of that was to facilitate the recording of the high number of tuberculosis in northern communities.  However, you can also imagine how priests, who found that most of their real names, besides being unpronounceable, were names of animals or spirits and associated with shamanism.  Christian names were given, as well as the numbers, which also indicated from which part of the Arctic they were from.   It was also a way to identify sculptors in the burgeoning art market for "Eskimo Art".  Until Inuit began studying in the south, many didn't know that numbers were not normal parts of Christian and English naming systems. In 1969, the government started to replace number-names with patrilineal "family surnames".  But contemporary Inuit carvers and graphic artists still use their disk number as their signature on their works of art.

The next day I visited the Winnipeg Art Gallery and gave the number to the librarian.  She typed it in and came out with the name of the artist; Miaiji Uitangi Usaitaijuk, from Salluit, the same settlement as the other sculptor in the airport.  I was shown a few books and catalogues  with photos of other pieces from that time, the 1950's,  and many of them had a similar style, not so polished, a bit rough on the surface and quite primitive looking. In a word, amazing!

Discovery Islands

Hot sun, blue skies, warm breeze, short summer....  I needed a break from work and the city.  So I threw my kayak on the roof of my car and escaped to Cortes island, part of the Northern Gulf islands between the east coast of Vancouver island and the mainland.  After a couple hours of driving and three ferries later,  I met up with my friends Erik and Naomi who had just finished building their outrigger canoe that they had been working on for a couple of months in East Vancouver.  They had spent a few days motoring there from False Creek, up the Sunshine Coast and 'Seaweed', as the outrigger is called,  still needed some work done. They were set up on a beach at Manson's Landing, one of the several picturesque bays and coves of Cortes island.  Their friend Max, who lives nearby, was there to help put up a mast and rigging and was to join us for a week of cruising around some of the other islands further north.

I set up a tent on the beach and it was so nice to be back in the ocean environment, the rhythm of tides, the sound of waves, salt in the air.  We asked the locals about red tide and it did not seem to be a problem, despite the warning signs put up by the government (they are there  permanently I was told).  There were thousands of oysters at low tide and a nearby lagoon also provided us with an abundance of clams.  Fruits of the sea!  We boiled the clams and they were delicious with some white wine sauce, onions, garlic and pasta.   The oysters were almost too big and it was a bit hard going shucking them. They still tasted great though, raw with some hot sauce and lemon.  We fried some up as well.

Cortes is a pretty laid back place.  There is no real main town,  not even where the ferry docks,  just a few communities spread out throughout the island.  It's probably not unlike what Salt Spring island was 40 years ago with some oyster fishermen, hippies and natives,  each doing their own thing.  It was interesting meeting some of the locals as well as visitors who lived on their boats.  Unlike the marinas of Vancouver, there were not many of the huge, ugly modern yachts but rather old wooden ketches, converted fishing boats, homemade trimarans,  sleek schooners.  It was pretty much the same on Quadra and the other islands as well.

There was an opaque smoke in the air from the hundreds of forest fires burning all over BC.   The haze made for a perfect red sphere at sunset,  a sort of sun you see in the fields of India or industrial Japan. It finally cleared up with a stiff breeze and we motored  (surprisingly fast)  out to Heriot Bay,  on Quadra island and had some brewskies at the local pub to celebrate Max's birthday.  It was there that Erik's 30 year old 9.9 Envinrude outboard motor died the next day.  There was nothing to be done until Monday so we hitched a ride on a boat to Read island to go to the locale "Surge Festival" near Surge Narrows.  More hippies... but there was some great music in the community hall.

We returned the following day and Erik tackled the motor problem, with the help some nice guys we met at the campground in Heriot Bay.  While he got a ride back to Campbell River for parts,  I was asked if I wanted to help Dale, one of the guys,  retrieve some prawns from his traps that were set out in the bay.  He told me to bring my fishing rod and off we went in his big new power boat. We stopped out past the spit where the locals told us was the spot where the fish were biting.  After the second cast I caught a 4 lb salmon which gave a good fight but we threw him back.  Ten casts later, wham!  I saw a big fish jumping 50 yards away.  I reeled him in and had an 11 lb Coho into the net.  Nice...!  After helping Dale haul up six of his traps, he gave me a bag of jumbo prawns and I returned with the bounty, thinking of a good meal that evening.

I had brought with me some Japanese paper, block print ink and a brush to pull off a few fish prints and with Erik's help, in a strong wind, we managed to get a few good ones of that nice looking Coho salmon. I had practiced as well on a smaller rock fish the day before.  Of course, once the print was done,  you just wash off the water-based ink and fillet the fish to eat.  We moored up next to 'Samsara' an old wooden ketch belonging to a pirate dude named Dan and, along with a friend of his,  had an awesome dinner of prawns and salmon, with some Havana Club rum on the side.

The motor was fixed and we went back to Cortes, hoping to see some orcas that were reportedly cruising the Straight. We left Seaweed moored in the bay as they were returning for some sailing in September, and headed back home by car.  First though, we got a bucket full of clams and some oysters to bring back.   The ferry crossing from Nanaimo was beautiful.  The ocean was like glass and you could see way up the Georgia Straight (or the "Salish Sea" as it has recently been re-named) in a golden orange sunset light.  As usual, it went by too quickly. 

Gyotaku 魚拓

"Gyotaku"   (gyo 'fish' + taku 'rubbing') is a traditional form of Japanese fish printing, dating from the mid 1800s, a form of nature printing used by fishermen to record their catches.  My sister Nicole and I had discussed it a while back and after having seen a few examples on you-tube, we decided to give it a go during my recent visit to her house in Winnipeg.

The selection of fish was not the greatest at the local Superstore,  so we went with a frozen 'white fish' because it had a pretty nice pattern of scales.  It's apparently better to use a freshly caught fish that has not been gutted because then you don't have to fill in the underside with paper towels to give it body. Once thawed, we dabbed some paper towels in vinegar to wipe off as much slime as possible, while drying it out.  Filling in with bits paper tissue behind the gills, in the nostrils and covering the eyes (which are then painted in later) helps prevent wet spots of fluid blotting the ink.  We also used plasticine underneath the fins to keep it propped up for when pressure is applied with the paper.

The next step is to paint the fish.  We used a black block print ink.  You dab the paint with a sponge or rag to make sure it gets into the surface but also to remove some of the ink where it is too thick.  Using Japanese rice paper, you then spread a piece over the fish and and apply pressure with your hands and rub the paper with your fingers.

Et voilà!   You then take a brush and ink to add in the eye as well as enhance some of the spots that did not pick up enough ink during the rubbing, like the dorsal fin and tail.  I'm looking forward to trying it with nicer looking fish,  freshly caught on my next camping trip.

Here are two fish prints I did the following summer whilst visiting Quadra island.  The one above is a 2.5 lb rock fish.  I had brought a roll of rice paper, tissue with the ink and brushed it on the fish on a stump near where I landed my kayak from which I caught the fish.  

It was the same for this nice 12lb salmon a few days later.  You have to bring enough paper to make several prints because inevitably you will screw one or two of them up. There is a variety in each print as well, some picking up the detail of scales and fins better than others.  The one below, I stuck onto a canvas with acrylic medium and I added some paint and other strips of paper to give some texture.   The best part of it all is that after you had fun creating a work of art from a fish,  you just rinse the water soluble paint off of it  then it's ready to be cleaned, cooked and eaten. 

Frame of Time

Whenever I enter a second hand store or flea market,  I can't help but notice old photographs and pictures that are in old frames.   The other day,  I picked up two identical gold wooden frames to put up some art I that I have on a wall in my bedroom,  a layout of twenty or so odd pictures and photos...  all in old frames.

When I took out one of the prints,  a copy of the famous Blue Boy painting by Thomas Gainsborough,  I thought about the time when this frame and print was put together.   Who was it for?  Who was the person that cut the glass or chose the print?  Where was this store?  Were they also mounting posters for war bonds,  asking the public to support the fight in Europe against the Nazis?   Or was it during the fifties, the era of Life magazines,  Frigidaire and Cadillac automobiles that had wings and massive chromium bumpers.   Where did the image hang?  On some wall in a suburban house or in an old turn-of- the-century apartment,  in the hallway or in a bedroom?   How did it end up in that second hand store?  Was it from a box that a dutiful daughter packed up the last of her parent's belongings from the family home,  after the last remaining parent either passed away or moved to a senior's institution?   As I took out the nicotine stained glass,  the paper matte was brown and flaked away.   I wondered in how many more quick years would someone else perhaps find this same frame, and perhaps think about this time,  fifty years from now,  how it must have been,  when there was a war on terror and i-pods and i-pads were the now quaint gadgets that everyone had.