Shane's Report #4

Day 26 - November 28th, 2006

The good, the bad, the amazing, and the unspeakable. NWT has got it all.

I'm based in Inuvik, NWT, which for those into geography, is within the Arctic Circle. In the winter they loose the sun for weeks on end, in the summer they get sun up for weeks on end, and the temperature ranges from +30 to -50 Celsius. If you want the wilds while in NWT quite simple step out of your hotel and walk 15 minutes to the city limits - there you go.

The other day we had to drive from Inuvik to Tsiigehtchic - and again, I can't tell you why or what for, or to see and talk to whom, all part of that non-disclosure thing I signed to take the job. But it is a 1.5 hour drive due south in minus 30 degree clear sky weather. The sun rises at 11 AM and sets by 4 PM (basically) and it just, i mean JUST gets over the horizon when it does rise, but falls back just a quick as it comes up, so the hours of sunlight that you do get here are pretty much twilight. And for film fans don't assume that 5 hours of twilight means the best place on earth to shoot a movie - the minus 30 thing kind of gets in the way: holding the camera and adjusting the focus and options without having your fingers turn blue on the tips is THE challenge (that and the camera freezing up). But the drive: for 1.5 hours there is only a snowy, icy highway that cuts through the Mackenzie River Delta with sad little scraggly pine trees, brittle branched shrubs, and iced over lakes, rivers, and creeks. It's white, it's cold as, and there is NOTHING, I mean NOTHING around for hours in any direction. It's the kind of drive where a skid out into the ditch, the gods in your favour and no one gets hurt, just the car is unmovable, and you are seriously looking at a chance to die. If no one else is on the road that day (and the road is empty for hours and hours on end), good chance you're going to freeze to death. This is a do NOT fuck around kind of place. And I love it.

While we were in Tsiigehtchic (pronounced Tsee-GAY-chick) we met a lovely couple. One (not allowed to say her name - the job thing) is a Gwich'in woman who is married to an Israeli man named Itai. An absolutely lovely couple - these are just flat out ace people. First bit that tells you that? They don't have a TV. They got books, work, a painting room, and a window that overlooks the Mackenzie River 60 feet below them. So, what you do when you go to their house is that you sit by the fireplace in chairs and a sofa that face each other (not the TV off in the corner) and you just sit around and talk. And talk we did.

Turns out Itai (Eee-thai) has a brother and a sister that live in the area and all siblings were born and raised in Israel. We had to ask, what in gods name brought them to of all places in North America, to the outter reaches of NWT. He said he came during the summer and was fooled with the 24-hour sun. It seems that when you talk to a lot of people here they came to the Arctic as a lark, or just to see it, and they couldn't leave. There is absolutely something here, something utterly magical about the land and vast openness of it, not to mention the sky - light down south just does NOT have the tone's that it does here.

One thing we did get to talk about was Aboriginal people and their constant battle for rights, language, and cultural strength. He told me that he couldn't quite understand the battles for Aboriginal Language, that he was tired of hearing about cries for funding to keep the languages going. That in the Jewish experience, during years and years of oppression, including language oppression, the Jews kept the language always alive - they spoke it to each other, even at a whisper at home. To him he can't see how it could ever be lost. I explained to him from my estimation that Jewish people have been on the run for centuries from various persecution (my wife is Jewish and reading from their holy book it is chalk full of escape, punishment, and persecution) and they therefore have had a greater amount of time to adjust to dominate society and still maintain their cultural identity within it (language being one of the absolute keys). I told him that for Aboriginal people the first contact wasn't really that long ago, it wasn't that many generations ago, and in fact, we are on a HUGE cultural upswing in terms of Aboriginal languages, music, history, and education. Yeah, its not perfect, yeah it's full of sad stories and realities, but it is also full of some extraordinary people and changes. I then told him about a school in BC where the kids on the reserve are taught in their Shuswhap language all day. One of the teachers there told Jordan and I that she grew up not knowing her language but went back to learn later in life because she didn't want to face her ancestors as the one that broke the chain. He was happy to hear about these things and this was the second kick in the pants for me about learning my Michif language. Itai's addition being: what kind of funding am I waiting for? This should be fundamental and handed down from generation to generation 'by any means neccessary' (to quote our brother Malcolm).

Itai then went on to talk about living with his wife and learning bits of the Gwich'in language and meanings from her. How he asks her not to give him an English summary of what the word means but a more comprehensive definition of each Gwich'in word. He told us how amazing the language is, how visual and descriptive it is, how full of humour and colour and words and meaning and feeling that doesn't exist in English. How it is so visual, it plays in your mind as layers of images and not the flat-line this exact and that exact of English. How, in his estimation, the language is the source of why so many Gwich'in are so artistic and imaginative - the language itself works your mind to be that way. Again, hearing him talk about this made me kind of bummed out that 24/7 the only language going on in my mind is English and I wonder what it would be like to hear something else originating from me. (Oh, and his wife, in terms of her own English, is, um, killer. She's a killer Scrabble player and she smoked all of us when we played into the night, into the Northern lights taking to the sky.)

But as glorious as this place and people are there is a potential dark cloud on the horizon. You know how we're all up in arms about oil exploration in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, USA? Well, um, while that battle takes the headlines in both the US and us lefty Canadians, and why I never thought this through is beyond me, but the fight isn't just in the mighty old US of A, it's quietly and so Canadian-like going on up here in the Yukon and NWT.

I'm staying at a hotel/suite complex in Inuvik, which is the gateway to the outter reaches of the Arctic ocean. It's the last main town - hotels, stores, etc. In this hotel there are all kinds of men and women from Shell and Esso, and I can only assume others without big logos on their winter parkas. They are here because natural gas is up here. They fill this hotel up, their giant trucks are parked in the lot, and they go around in large jovial groups from plenary meeting rooms to drive out to the woods together and check it out trips. They seem like really nice average north american suburban upper middle class types. And quietly but most assuredly they are building, exploring, and bringing via a giant pipeline through the Aboriginal lands, natural gas from the north to the south. And it isn't cheap up here, nothing is, so being up here en masse means there is a large amount of money to be made, shipped, and moved (no one is in business to lose money).

What is interesting is that the players are the same. In Alaska the Indian Band that is battling it out on both sides of the for and against Alaska pipeline/exporation is the Gwich'in Nation. Well, aside from the Canada-US random boarder thing, the Gwich'in Nation historically and today straddles both countries. And also on this side ("our" Canadian side) you have those against the pipeline and those for the pipeline. Those for argue that jobs and income are an absolute need, that the pipeline is going through anyway you cut it, so may as well be a participant and let it help the nation grow and sustain itself - "after all, money is the means to self government." For those against, it too is familiar, being more about what would the environmental impact be of such a project and what kind of jobs are we talking about - low paying low skill jobs with no real long term prospects or real equal player type jobs, and therefore what would be the overall impact of such a project on the people. Both sides it seems have a lot to argue.

But if I may, from the outside, walking the hallways, eating in the same hotel restaurants as these fine oil men and women, let me ask this: what is their bottom line? Here I am, a film crew guy traveling about, meeting nice people, zipping in, setting up the camera and the lights, really enjoying the people, really being with them, then I pack up and fly back south. ANY impact I've made to the environment driving around, flushing the toilet, and so forth, really has nothing to do with me. My bottom line is, get the shots I need for this job, send the footage back to Toronto, and get on a flight home without freezing my toes off. What then is the bottom line for these oil people? They got, seemingly, scientists, lawyers, geologists, and corporate executives and mangers all over this hotel. I just heard one guy in his 50's flirt it up with a co-worker woman in her 40's about what to say when getting pressed for answers at the "open" community tribunal on the whole issue of the pipeline - what the lawyers prepped him to say and not to say and how to not get stuck "with the ball in the endzone. You gotta learn how to punt." I can tell you flat out, and I'm a good read on people: they do NOT care what happens here long term. Seriously. They want their kids to go to college, they want to make money to renovate their kitchen next year, they want to sleep with their co-worker after drinking too much in a Arctic hotel bar, but what they absolutely do NOT care about long term is the land or the people who've been on it since time immoral. They can not and will not make plans for MULTI-generations of people in communities. It is quite simply NOT in them.

How can I be so scathing? How can I judge so many really nice people in the elevator and nice people from church and people we'd have a laugh with while we played 18 holes in some community tournament? Because I, in a way, am like them. As I said, I whipping in and whipping out. I care about the people here, sure I do, but I didn't grow up here, I don't live here, and I don't plan on seeing many generations of people and culture of MINE survive here. I'm in and out. And so to are the oil men and women with their giant corporate parkas and binders full of oil secrets.

But allow me to summarize as you've heard me summarize these kinds of issues before. I AM a hopeful guy, a truly hopeful guy, and I LOVE to be up, and this kind of down talk is a real toll on me. But sitting in the restaurant tonight I kind of lost my appetite watching the corporate guy and girl flirt over work and glasses of wine, telling another co-working passing by "no, I'm outta here tomorrow at noon, " and that guy responding "yeah, lucky you, I'm back at the home away from home for a couple more months." And they laugh and pat each other on the shoulder. It's a nice all-american middle manager boys club moment. And hear me when I say this: it isn't their fault. We vote (or we can) and we buy gas down south. Why WOULDN'T they be up here trying to find it, extract it, and ship it any way they can muster if we're so hog wild on buying the stuff? It puts their kids through college, gets them the new kitchen by next summer, and allows for reward in their high school-ish competitive game of "who makes the pie chart better." And for the people here fighting for the pipeline, their calls being always about jobs and local economy, how can you blame them? We all, flat out all of us, want stuff. We do. I do. We want things. We want many, many things and the wanting and the getting and the wanting more means this pipeline is going to happen - even while all us Canadians are crying about Bush and the Alaskan oil development it will quietly come to the same fruition here in Canada. Are we ever going to change our energy needs and sources? Ever? We're all helplessly pursuing the "get it while you can" approach to all things and why then would the oil people here be any different ... bottom line.

Let me end with this little bit though: if you can, if you really want to see something utterly amazing, forget about your stupid trip to Florida and your lame-ass all-in trip to Mexico; travel to Canada's great white north. I'm serious, I really am. It is like nothing you've ever seen before in your life. And yeah, they don't have chain-stores here, they don't have box malls. But they do have an utterly amazing landscape and ways to explore it. You know, it's like going to Mars (you hear about these millionaires buying flying in space tickets), but you get to do it right here IN Canada. I give you my personal guarantee, if you make it north and you step outside for 10 minutes, EVEN IN the minus 40 degree weather, you wont regret it. And the secrets that are way up here shouldn't be secrets anymore - I feel like we as Canadians should all get on buses and go on shifts to each and every other Canadian place and watch each other and then start to really, truly dialogue about Nationhood, the Environment, and Culture. I think we gotta blow our fucking TV's up us what it is, and get out here. Seriously.

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