We’ve been questioning a lot about our lives lately, and native culture has given us some answers. It explained the pain of leaving a place that we’d known for a long time, where we had ties going back generations, where we had well-worn purposes.
It also offered alternative ways to raise kids. We learned how Inuit parents warned their kids to wear warm hats outside because the northern lights would swoop down and cut off their heads if they didn’t, and kick them around on the ice for fun. And of course there were sea monsters in the water, so stay well away. We hesitated about lying to our kids, but then admitted that we lie to them in many other ways. Maybe less consciously, but also less usefully.
And the root of why Inuit don’t discipline or raise their voices at their kids is because they believe that children have the soul memories of their ancestors. It just takes them time to grow back into, to remember who they are. We wouldn’t yell at our grandparents like that, unless they were hard of hearing. But not with that tone. We met a big part of our family on a Zoom call a few days after thanksgiving and were reminded that our daughter looks a lot like Grammarie. And Tephra was born exactly a year after Grammarie died. They say no in the same way. So we considered doing away with discipline, but feel like we have too many expensive, fragile objects in our lives, a rented house with big windows, a car that isn’t paid off, computers, things Inuit parents didn’t traditionally have to worry about. But they may have invested just as much of their wealth and time in a sealskin tent, or dogsled, and they could allegedly keep their cool if they broke. Could we handle that?
Maybe the First Nations had it figured out better than the first world. Have we overshot the mark for an ideal life?
The mythological cowboys, mountain men, and explorers made a habit of rushing past the people already here, past many living in relative comfort and harmony. The cowboys fretted over herds of imported cattle after wiping out the bison. Then there were the fences to be strung and kept up, and the beef prices to bet on. The mountain men, grunts of the fashion industry, depended on trading bales of pelts for flour, sugar, and salt at trading posts. Miners hardly glanced at the rivers choked with salmon as they sloughed hillsides downstream with placer mining. Explorers were glorified highway department surveyors, looking for more efficient trade routes, more often than not rushing into new country faster than they could learn to survive there, and with too much pride to take notes from the natives.
Now, most of us work inside, since we’ve been told that’s the most sensible place to make a living. It’s possible to make plenty of money that way, and earn enough free time to spend that money on scenic vacations or expensive toys. Only with the latest technology can we expect a fun outdoor experience. But there’s only so much vacation time. We have to fly to visit most of our family, and at least drive to get anywhere new in a weekend.
We lose our temper when we get our kids to school late. But we aren’t allowed to show up too early either. For millions of years, no one got angry at anything not happening in a specific five-minute window. There were no flights to miss. Things were easier if we timed our work with the daylight and tide, but not impossible if we didn’t.
In summer, whole villages packed up to follow the food. Piling thirty people in a canoe, or pulling possessions on tipi-pole sledges across the prairie on foot or later with horses, or riding sleds behind teams of dogs on the tundra. Sailing, backpacking, skiing, we all know people who’ve spent a few weeks pay on something like that.
In winter, we spent more time inside, under furs, around the fire, telling stories, carving, weaving, painting. Now our busy lives confine us in a more anxious and inescapable way, even as we move more than ever. Our brains are fooled into fight-or-flight stress more often than an average hunter-gatherer.
Our hurry and hunger has taken us far beyond subsistence, to the point where it’s mostly illegal to live on the land, even as a consenting adult. Let alone the fear of child protective services should we dream of raising our kids in a tent. And if that’s not bad enough, the hurrying itself risks the possibility of any subsistence lifestyle. There are few places with enough wild food to follow, property lines or no. And there are too many people now for everyone to live without agriculture, fences, fertilizer, and factories.
But how many of us would prefer a place in an ancient tribe? Would we trade it all, our commute and office, our cars and computers and plane tickets?