WHAT WE CAN LEARN WAY UP NORTH

Neil Shubin

As it turns out, reconciling the discoveries explained in “Your Inner Fish” by Neil Shubin with one’s own body physiology is much easier and more rewarding that reconciling traditional psychoanalysis with the new neurology discoveries.  It helps to have such a cheerful and humorous guide as Shubin.  But also, all along the way I was having insights about practical medical things as well as deep philosophical issues, which others have also loved.

PBS did a video version of this information, but I couldn’t find more than clips without paying money.  At least one can see Neil Shubin who turns out to be as appealing on vid as in print.  http://www.pbs.org/show/your-inner-fish/  (I grow increasingly impatient with what was supposed to be public education as it gets more commodified, but the future doesn’t hold much hope for it to develop as I would like.  The evolution of media follows money.  The evolution of life follows food.)

But the evolution of life begins with water, makes a jump when oxygen provides the energy to climb to land (if you count mud), and begins a long journey by mutating a few limb bones into a four-part formula:  one big bone, two smaller bones capable of turning around each other, lotsa little bones, and five digits (usually).  This becomes the basic pattern unfolding from flat-headed fishes with necks (a major step of evolution from cone-heads with no-necks) whose cumulative changes over millennia finally resulted in humans who can crawl around in arctic stone rubble with a magnifying lens, their noses two-inches from the ground, and deduce the little mud skippers who started it all.

As it happens, I was/am also reading Farley Mowat’s “People of the Deer” about the tribe called “Ihalmiut,” a small group of Inuit people who had learned how to survive by eating caribou that swept through the area in huge numbers during migration.  The wonders of technology, industry, and science in this case meant the reduction of the caribou in just the same way as the bison herds on the prairie, seeming impossibly unending, were wiped out by modern guns, railroads, and racism.  In the case of the far north this was blamed on wolves.  Farley Mowat was there for two years as a witness and concluded that this theory was demonizing fantasy.  Thus his testimony in “Never Cry Wolf.”

Richard Harrington, an extraordinary Canadian photographer, arrived in time to document the last days of the Ihalmiut as the Fifties began.  Americans might know Harrington for his work in “The Family of Man,” and for “People” magazine.  His lens did not reveal tiny fossils but rather people who had found a way to live in the most extreme circumstances this side of outer space.  It was not just the loss of the caribou that wiped them out, but also the penetration of the ways and material cultures of the outside world.  Their successful existence depended upon a culture evolved just like a physical body, preserving any small advantage and destroying whatever didn’t contribute, all of it fitted together as one whole.  

Harrington’s photos in particular show what it is to live in snow: the light, the effect of being always against white as though it were a sheet of paper.  This photo of mother and child rubbing noses, which so captured the imagination of people who like to kiss, was made in 1950 when the people were starving.  We don't know whether either one of them survived.  The Canadian government moved them closer to surviving caribou herds and provided canned food, but that was only stalling the inevitable.

The photo was in "The Family of Man"

The old woman in the next photo was so near death that she could no longer draw on her pipe.  Harrington had packed and lit it, even put it in her mouth in hopes of comforting her, but he watched her die as he took his photo.

This is the culture that teaches its people that the old should accept death because it means more food for the young.

These girls are not dead but merely sleeping, nestled together for body warmth.  The photos are from the third book I'm reading, "Richard Harrington, Canadian Photographer."  I know about them because of Paul Seseequasis' photo project on Twitter, which is recovering so many of the old faces.

What conclusion can I draw from pondering these three books about fish, caribou and humans?  Of course they tell us that famine is always in the shadows and those who didn't escape have disappeared into the deep past.  But also they left traces that we can search for knowledge.  Life is a torrent of interlocking small bits that form swirls and currents, some we call species and some we call tribes, some so divided that they will never meet again, and some still like enough to rejoin.  We had no idea there were several hundred variations on the theme of hominin, and were shocked to discover mergers between today's humans (which we privilege as unique and "better") and yesterday's Neanderthals (knuckle draggers).

They say that both Inuit and Navajo make good mechanics because they care about how things fit together and because they never discard any pieces, no matter how small and insignificant they may seem.  In fact, it may be their very smallness that makes them valuable, as Shubin explains that the gill arches of the fish became the tiny mechanisms of our hearing, deep in our heads.

How is it then that we can so carelessly discard people we don't much care about.  Is it because they compete with us for food?  How do we know whether they might be the only ones who could survive in the future?  Will it be dream analysis as in psychoanalysis or neurological brain structures as in empathy studies that show us the way?  I think it will be both.

A LITTLE STORY ABOUT A CHIPPEWA GIRL AT BLUEBERRY CAMP (fiction)

Paul Seesequasis is a Canadian Cree/Ukrainian man who works with early photography in the high northern prairie and boreal lands during the early twentieth century.  Sometimes as far north as Inuit country.  He caught my attention because he uses the photos of Blackfoot taken by Walter McClintock and Thomas Magee.  I’m white, but since I came to Browning in 1961, sometimes I recognize people or know something about what they are doing.  The photos are remarkable, not just because of content but also because of their high skill and great beauty.

https://twitter.com/paulseesequa?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

These images tell stories of domestic life and the last gatherers of the old ways.  No war stories.  Rather gambling games, dances, cookfires, and horse races.  You might say the Real Lives of the Real People, not Hollywood melodrama.  So I’ve felt free to make comments on Paul’s Twitter posts.

These two photos, esp. this first one, were so eloquent and open that it was as if the girl were telling a longer story.  This is what I imagine her story might be at that moment.

Prairie Mary

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GROWING UP IN BLUEBERRY CAMP

"Clair Ann"

The cousins always loved blueberry camp because they were good friends and liked being together while they picked and then chatting later when they spread out the berries on a clean blanket to pick the leaves out — how do they get in there when they pick so carefully?  Their mothers might suggest it was because they had too much fun and didn’t pay attention, but then the grown women would laugh at their happy girls.  They were growing up, but there was no hurry.  Berries and girls ripen in their own time.

This year did seem a little different.  The basic structure of the camp had evolved over the years so that the fireplaces and the big stones marking out camp spaces stayed in place and most people put up their tents in the same places.  Just because it was a camp didn’t mean it could be cattywampus and mixed up.  The old people especially liked the reminders of earlier years and sat in their same places while they smoked and told jokes.  They loved being under the trees but having the tents nearby for sheltered naps.

Maybe it was the girls who were a little different from last year.  They were approaching womanhood and knew it.  The berry stains on their skirts reminded them.  Jean Marie had bobbed her hair in the modern way, but Claire Ann left hers long.  Now and then the chatter stopped and the girls were silent for a bit, lost in thought, staring off into the trees at the edge of the meadow as though they could see into the future.  Then one would begin a soft song and the other would join.

"Jean Marie"

One day Jean Marie’s granny, who usually took care of the summer baby and the toddler, wanted to do laundry and so Jean Marie had to stay in camp to do the Granny’s usual job so her mother could continue to pick.  Claire Ann didn’t look for anyone else to pick alongside.  Instead she enjoyed making her own decisions and went apart from the others to a place the others never went.

The picking was good and she filled her pail earlier than usual.  It was a warm day, but breezy enough to be comfortable.  Over at the edge of this good place she saw a sandy bank with fox burrows in it and then, as she sat quietly, the cubs came out to play.  Their antics were so funny that she lost herself in their pouncing and tussling, their mouths gaping and their tails sticking up in an arc.  She would like to hold one, but she knew that she must sit quietly — not even laugh — or they would disappear.  The bushes rustled a bit in the wind and the reverie of the moment held her.  

This last year she had become more aware than usual that the lives of the People were changing.  Not a lot yet, but the grownups were wary of what might happen.  They looked at her sideways and talked about traveling to schools far away.  She didn’t want to leave her family — her family was herself.  But also she began to understand that the world was a huge place with a lot of different people in it, and that they might even think about her.  They had power she couldn’t understand and seemed able to even oppose the older people in the webwork of people who claimed her as her relatives.  

Even beyond that, her body was changing and might entice her into new behavior.  And yet she would like to be a mother, to have children who played like little foxes, happily content in a place they fit and understood.  There were certain boys who caught her attention with their energy.  They were showing off, but it was meant to impress her, maybe not even Jean Marie.  Her, for herself.  Jean Marie was different.  She was very curious and had even said she might like  school.  She had heard about cities and wanted to know more.  The nature of these two good friends might pull them in very different directions.

A soft clinking sound made her look behind her where she had set her blueberry pail.  The mother fox had the wire bail in her mouth and was tugging on it while her eyes rolled over to see what Clair Ann was doing.  This bounty of berries all in one place had made her bold.  The girl could see that the mother fox was thin except that her belly was dotted with clean little nipples from nursing.  The babies were keeping her hungry.  Just as Clair Ann realized and shouted, the fox pulled hard, the babies went down the holes, and blueberries spilled in every direction.  She didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.  Mama Fox went off making her funny nattering fox commentary with her ears back and her tail high.

She knew what to do — get busy to fill the pail again.  It wasn’t a disaster — just an incident — and she would make an amusing story about it when she and Jean Marie ate supper together.  In a way without words, she knew it was about babies and growing up.  A little scary but natural.