Intro

In Iqaluit, I live in a red house at the top of a hill. On the inside of my window is a modern, well-kept space with nice hardwood and a big kitchen; on the outside is Frobisher Bay, which will thaw over the next few weeks. On the other side of that are rolling hills still covered in ice and a smoky horizon that never blows clear.

In Iqaluit, I have my first legal job. I wear jeans and converse sneakers in the office and spend my days reading about aboriginal law and environmental regulation in the Canadian arctic. I feel very much like myself, only less inclined to complain about law school.

Except that I'm already leading you astray. Inuit are not aboriginals, for one thing, and aboriginal law does not apply to them. Their history is entirely different; no 18th-century collaborations with European settlers, no treaties made under duress in the 1800's, no reserves. While Inuit were classified as Indians for the purposes of the Indian Act and Aboriginal for the purposes of the Charter's s. 25 Aboriginal rights (and, over the years, pretty much whatever else they had to be classified as for federal development, military, and mining to go ahead unimpeded), in 1993 the Inuit of the area now called Nunavut voted to permanently exchange the majority of their legal entitlements (including all coverage under the Indian Act) for the provisions set out in the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement, a treaty negotiated over a decade by the Tunngavik Federation of Nunavut (on behalf of Inuit) and the federal government of Canada, which has found the NLCA rather hexing ever since.

That, it seems, is where I come in. The government committed itself to some pretty remarkable things (which, to be fair, were bought at a high price in a gesture of trust on behalf of Inuit that I can't quite wrap my head around). Some of those things have worked out better than others. Most major areas of governance in Nunavut are now subject to shared jurisdiction, with sovereignty by and large resting with a large network of joint Inuit/federal-government tribunals. If you like acronyms, this is the place for you. A little forbidding to the uninitiated. I'm starting to get my bearings.

In addition to this completely novel model of governance (which I will discuss at length with interested poli sci nerds), the government of Canada agreed to a few other things. One of them is to bring the representative levels of Inuit in government jobs in line with representative levels in the territory - 85% of the general population - across all types and levels of employment (Article 23 of the NLCA). Given that 41% of Inuit have not completed the eighth grade, one wonders what the crap our Dear Leaders could possibly have been thinking.

But here's the great part: they really have bitten off more than they can chew. What can you do, when you're committed by law to constitute 85% of your workforce from a broadly dispersed workforce that hasn't broadly adopted traditional education? You can do three things:

(1) Re-examine every position you have, question whether the educational and experiental 'qualifications' you've listed are really necessary, and strip all requirements down to their most basic parts;

(2) Create an entire system of targeted training, recruitment, on-the-job education, and innovative, flexible post-secondary schooling; and

(3) Look at other barriers that prevent your key demographic from taking the jobs you want them to take, and introduce specific flexibility measures that will allow them to live out their values while still getting the job done (eg. flex hours to accomodate family and elder care, and employee assistance program that is culturally appropriate enough to actually be helpful).

The federal government is trying to do all three. As a result, from what appears to be nothing more than a commitment to affirmative-action, Nunavut is getting a major boost in infrastructure, community support, and innovative education. Solid!

Of course, how well this all gets implemented depends on lots of things - in a very minor way, I'm one of them. Still, pretty cool.

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Nunavut is really big. Like, really big. Like 2, 093, 000 km2 - roughly the size of Western and Southwestern Europe taken together (if you use the UN's definition). It's population is 31, 550. That works out to 0.015/km2 in terms of population density - or one person for every 67 km2. That means if the population of Nunavut was evenly distributed across the territory, each person would have a plot of land 20% larger than Manhattan.

The city of Iqaluit is on a small hill - like in Montreal, you're always walking uphill or downhill. People are beyond friendly - I've had 3 invitations to dinner from complete strangers, each of whom has insisted that that's normal here. I'm saving them for the weekends which I think might get a bit lonely otherwise. I'm alone in the house for another week and a bit until the owners return - a young couple with a three-year-old daughter who seem really great.

The roads are paved but the sides are sand and scree. Already a lot has melted since the day I arrived - even the hills across the bay are showing bare land. There is long grass everywhere but there are no trees. CanLit scholars, think A.J.M. Smith's nature scenes and Al Purdy's frontier towns. For a sense of what's been on my mind, think P.K. Page's "Stories of Snow."

There's more - there's always more - but I'll save it for later.

Let me know how you are.

Troubling predeparture conversations

A: "Where are you flying into?"
me: "Delhi."
A: .....
me: "What?"
A: "You know how people say nothing can prepare you for India? When they say that, they mean Delhi."
me: "I thought when they said that, they meant Mumbai...."

Oh well. They probably meant both, and that's just fine.

So I've set myself up this space to post while on the road, partially as a record for myself and partially to avoid assaulting you all unnecessarily with 'update' emails.

I've been doing some thinking about why I'm doing this trip, why I'm doing it now, and what I'm hoping to get out of it. It's been a strange thing to think through; it's hardly unusual anymore for my demographic to go places our parents would have been unlikely to choose, and for long periods of time. It sort of feels in some ways that travelling outside of North America and Western Europe (I have yet to hear a satisfactory term for this group of areas, probably with good reason) has become for our generation what the two-months-in-Europe-after-graduation trip was for previous generations (though, of course, plenty of us still opt for Europe). I wonder what both of these mean. I certainly see myself wanting many of the same things, and probably sinking myself into similar problems.

People have tended to react to my trip in one of two ways. The first, which tends to come from the older generation, is a mix of cautious support and curiosity as to why in the world anyone would choose India as a destination. (Early email a concerned family member: "Italy, France, Belgium, Germany, England, Scotland, Ireland, Greece, Austria. Even Hungary. All these countries have bathrooms in them. And did you know that India was right beside Pakistan? I'm sure you didn't." [NB: I did.]) I haven't really been able to explain it to anyone who's had this reaction, and don't expect I'll be able to. The second reaction, which has usually come from my own generation (and community) has been one of total understanding and excitement.

There is, however, a difficult subset of this group, who follow up their approval with a question to the effect of, "Are you going there as a spiritual journey?"

That question sends me off in a million directions. My gut wants to say no; I'm not expecting some mystical experience to happen; I feel like this question comes from an embarassingly orientalist set of ideas about what India is; I have never had a moment of transcendence triggered by bright colours, a foreign language, or the smell of incense or curry* here, and don't really expect it to work any differently there; I feel that human beings are basically the same everywhere, and I don't expect any one or group of people overseas to answer my questions any more than I expect anyone here to; that it's not appropriate to look at other parts of the world (or anyone else) as answers to the parts of ourselves that remain mysterious.

But I also know that that answer is disingenuous. First, of course I believe that we do define ourselves with and against others, and that on some level, you need to allow yourself to do that in order to accept other people's humanity - at its best, it's an act of sympathy. Second, although it's easy for me to say that I'm not seeking any kind of religious experience, spirituality is an entirely different question.

I consider myself a spiritual agnostic. I'm moved by beauty, by suffering, by justice, by history. I'm moved by chaos and paradox. In this spirit, I can say that the last few years have been a profoundly disorienting and grounding experience for me; I believe strongly that the organizing principle of the world and of life is chaos (mantra #1: "crazy shit happens all the time") and that this needn't dislodge our sense of self and justice (mantra #2: "don't be a dick"). Trying to understand my place in this world, and in history, has become very spiritual.

And this trip has a lot to do, for me, with locating myself within these things. Our generation does not have the option of ignoring the non-Western world, and we have good reason to be angry with our parents (where applicable) for doing so. I think I'm drawn to India, specifically, because it strikes me as a particularly hard place to rationally come to terms with; it doesn't fall easily into the "developing world" paradigm that gets applied so liberally** to anyplace that doesn't have easily visible markers of 'advanced democracy' and ' late capitalism,' and allows us to, for example, talk about areas as bafflingly varied as "Africa" and "South Asia" as if they were homogenous. Without having been there yet, India (and here I do mean the whole of India) encapsulates something for me about both the mechanics of the world and our moment in history, and I think this comes from the contraditions and multiplicity of things it contains. Within four months, and within a single nation, I'm going to see some of the oldest structures on the planet (some of which predate the Roman ruins by hundreds, even thousands of years), and then move on to a few cities which are becoming some of the most important technological and economic hubs in the world. India is a constitutionally secular society which has been dealing with issues of religious and regional plurality (with varied degrees of success) since long before Canada was a twinkle in some British lord's eye. Not to mention the issues of population management, which will become a serious global concern over the next century, not only due to the increasing global population but due to scarcity of resource concerns, displacement due to climate change and...

Well, I could go on, but I'll save all of that for the road. In the meantime, I'll be trying not to think every experience into some abstract comment on the cosmos and its relation to worldly justice, and to see the places I'm going to as openly as I can, and for what they are. This is by no means the end of my reservations, intentions, hopes, or assumptions.


In closing, a word on the title of this blog: last year I read Anne McClintock's brilliant article, "The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term 'Post-Colonial," which got me thinking in a serious way about the current prevalence of the prefix post-. We're stuck, we're told, in a culture*** that's post-modern, post-capitalist, post-communistic, post-democratic, post-feminist (yuck), post-9/11, post-just-about-every-movement-that-has-tried-to-take-the-world-seriously. Post-colonial, of course. McClintock's insights about the way these terms obscure our ability to talk about so many problems that still exist are great, and I won't repeat them. But I think what all this adds up to is a sense of floating in a void, of being disconnected from what's happening around us and in the places we can't see, and of feeling like no one's contributions are meaningful. I worry that the term that's missing from this list, and is the sum of all those terms, is post-responsibility. One major artistic theme of the twentieth century was our individual dislocation from history, our inability to see any semblance of ourselves in the stories of the past, and how that prevents us from seeing and telling the stories of the present, and worse, of the future. I think this view requites an awful inflexibility in the way we look at history; it may not happen on horseback anymore, but I'm not sure it ever really did.

I want to work through these ideas; I think the post is bullshit. I think we all need to get back into our bodies, back into history. I think I'm going to India on a spiritual quest to confront the question of where and who I am, and where and who we all are.

(Of course, I also enjoy the pun on traditional mail; these are my letters to you, which appropriately enough will come electronically rather than by the actual, traditional post.)

And, of course of course, the 'comments' button is at the bottom of each post for a reason.





* Okay, so I've had some pretty transcendent curries... but I think this has more to do with how badly the traditional Anglo-Saxon diet accomodates vegetarians than some spiritual property inherent to the spice. I'll let you know later whether this was, in fact, curry witchcraft.
** Wording deliberate.
*** Few words make me cringe harder than "culture," but there it is.