Nanook of the MacGregors
The jumps in the Porcupine Hills have been used for 6,000 years. Cairns form the drive lines from the gathering basin to the jumps, "V"s of stone persons between whom the runner lead the curious yearlings followed by the cows, calves and bulls, ten miles to the pis'kanii, the jumps. The consumer of the images, from the runner to the stone persons, made live by persons and sticks and robes, was the curious, social, short sighted ini. There are thousands of cairns on the gathering basin and along the drive line complex to the jumps, and many texts in the aakaitapitsinniksiists describe them and the ini'skim that call the ini.
I have no insight into Inuit culture, other than time in skin boats, but I cracked up when I read Sewart Philip's comment on the "Ilanaaq" (image). "I can't help but notice the remarkable resemblance it has to Pac-Man." It still makes me crack up, hours later, writing this. Chief Philip is the President of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, one of the two political formations I pay attention to, the other being the Atlantic Policy Congress.
Grand Chief Edward John of the First Nations Summit, which represents the interests of First Nations west of the Rockies that have chosen to participate in the treaty-making process with Canada, commented "The person who put this together is not Inuit."
No. The graphics designer probably hasn't used stone cairns for navigation in fog or white-out, going towards, then away from, taking rock to, maintaining and rebuilding. If she had, she wouldn't see it as five wicked heavy rocks, erected by vannished giants, a megalithic henge, but either as whole, the way it is seen as intended, a distant shape, a navigational mark, or as a stonework, the built and rebuilt and rebuilt work of many hands over deep time. The Inuit were the last to cross the ice, they have been on the back of the turtle, at the edge of the ice, for as long as jump complex in the Porcupine Hills has been maintained. The ice is receeding now, but the circumpolar inuktut have been in place for as long as people have needed navigational referents.
It could have been worse. The MacGregor design could have been for a skin boat.
Oki, ki animaayi ihkakottsii.
Comments
The designers thought "rocks + 4,000 BC = The Flintstones." From there the marketing department had to figure out a way to give it a "native" feel.
This is all Australia's fault, but it shows the international PR power of the Olympics. Australia bent over backwards to glorify their aboriginal cultures, and two weeks later the world, or at least most Americans, thought that was they way it had always been.
I can't wait for Beijing.
Posted by: tom | April 26, 2005 09:43 AM
While I was in Beijing there was an exhibit of Meso-American pre-contact art, and the English language daily ran a longish cultural piece on ... the Jomon-Ecuadorian link -- the mid-1960s nuttery of Betty Meggers, Clifford Evans and Emilio Estrada, published as "The Early Formative Period in Coastal Ecuador", yes, by none other than the Smithsonian.
Hyperdiffusion isn't unique to Euro-cranks, there are Sino-cranks who can't live with the idea that humanity was partitioned for the last 20 to 40 k years, and that there was both independent invention, and a profound cultural dissimilarity between, the two isolate populations.
Anyway, I'm sure the focus of the Beijing games will be on modernity, not reconciliation of colonialism through mythic gesture.
Posted by: Eric | April 26, 2005 11:07 AM