The Writing Life – In a Northern Climate teaches Much

Often, life is full of simple messages. One such message is if you want to learn, teach. At the end of last July, I travelled north to participate in Somebody’s Daughter, a two-week camp for Inuit women that takes place in Nunavut, in the eastern Canadian Arctic. This project blends sewing, healing and writing in an unusual but very specific way.

Sewing and hunting are the foundations of traditional Inuit life. For many centuries, the Inuit lived in one of the most unforgiving climates on earth. Their tools were stone and bone; they wore skin clothing; they ate seal, caribou, polar bear, walrus, whales and fish. Men and women were interdependent: The hunters provided the meat, but unless the women made the clothing well, the hunters could freeze and die. Each set of skills was necessary for survival, and each was respected.

Then came the Europeans, and new tools and products and the gathering of a nomadic people into settlements; there was a break with traditional ways and a sharp increase in drinking, violence and suicide. In the old culture, sons were taught hunting skills by fathers and uncles, daughters sewing skills by mothers and aunts, but now — after two generations of forced education in residential schools — many younger people are cultural orphans. But many elders still remember the old ways, and the Somebody’s Daughter camp aims to reconnect the generations.

[More/Source: The Writing Life]