Saturday, April 12, 2008
Sunday, April 06, 2008
ilaaniungituk II
Hi all,
My post about my most rotten experience up here (which I've gotten over) has attracted some attention that frankly, I don't want.
So, I've taken down my archives and am going to take a break from blogging. I need to reflect on this.
James.
My post about my most rotten experience up here (which I've gotten over) has attracted some attention that frankly, I don't want.
So, I've taken down my archives and am going to take a break from blogging. I need to reflect on this.
James.
Friday, April 04, 2008
Sunday, March 30, 2008
April 1st
I remember the first time I thought about teaching in Nunavik. I was loitering in the stacks in Concordia's library, and I came across an MA thesis about teacher turnover in the North. The stats in the study were staggering. It seems that on average, people hired from the South were leaving after two years. Imagine being a student in a school in which one-quarter of the teachers leave every year (half of the teachers, the Inuit, do not turnover nearly as quickly). Just when you get to trust someone, they're gone, and you never see them again. It must be heart-breaking.
April 1st is the day by which a teacher in Nunavik has to decide whether or not he or she is coming back the next year, or will take a leave of absence, from which few come back. Today is the last day of spring break. The week off has given Sophie and I a lot of time to reflect on the pros and cons of coming back for another year. Tomorrow, I have to let the school board know of my intentions.
We decided to make a list.
Pros:
The people are nice
The fall is beautiful up here
I can come home for lunch
I leave the house at 8:45 and come home as early as 3:45
I will be able to teach secondary next year
We'll be able to leave in March (more on this later)
I can play in the hockey tournament (possibly)
Sayard, Neil, Forbes, and Solange are all coming back
I'll have a reason to continue writing this blog
Berry picking
The scenery
We won't have to pack
Money
Cons:
Noah will see less of his grandparents and other relatives
Possible face/feces incidents
The rest of our friends are not here
I'll follow the boy who bit my foot to secondary
Winter lasts forever
2 hours of sun for two months
Our apartment in Montreal?
The dilemma has been appearing throughout our conversations in one way or another for months. Our dreams are to travel and to grow our own food (we can dream). We want to save to buy a house, yet we want to live in places that will impede our ability to save for one. I've been reading two books: Neither Here nor There by Bill Bryson, an account of three trips through Europe, and A Place of My Own, by Michael Pollan, in which he recounts his experience building his house in the woods, a (post)modern version of Thoreau's Walden. This summer, we will travel out to Gaspesie where Sophie has some land upon which we will erect a place of our own some day. This was far too much for a simple list to solve.
Only a long bout with narrative can successfully resolve this particular manifestation of one of human nature's most primal decisions: to stay or to go.
Our need to explore and discover is apparent from an early age, but so is the desire for the familiarity of home. At Christmas, when Sophie and I were driving all over Alberta to satisfy too many people's desires to see Noah (that was the last time), the strength of the natural desire for home became apparent. We had slept in three places in as many nights, and had gone to friend's house for a dinner party. Noah was asleep in the car seat when we arrived at the party, so I just carried him in with a blanket over the car seat. Half an hour later, he woke up. When I pulled the blanket away to reveal yet another new environment, he was inconsolable. You should have seen his face. Only a boob would do.
The temptation to travel and the comfort of home both continue to haunt us as adults. As teachers, we have many, many options. A friend who is a principal in Uganda, Sophie used to teach in Japan, the superintendent of the Banff school board used to teach at Arsaniq school.... The desire to flesh out what each of these and many more possibilities holds is, I believe, exceptionally strong in both of us. I have lived in several different places in Canada and have traveled fairly extensively in Latin America. Sophie, well, she's been everywhere. But even our styles of travel reflect the two sides of this conundrum. When Sophie goes somewhere, she likes to go to one place and relax. The style I've adopted for the past ten years has been not to travel at all, but to live in as many different places as I can.
These contradictory desires have played out culturally throughout history. Ghengis Khan's nomadic raiders thought little of the sedentary peoples they conquered and slaughtered. The sedentary Chinese dynasties erected the Great Wall to keep the nomadic barbarian hordes at bay. Europeans, at the apex of an agricultural revolution, exported their sedentary ways to the new world in a contradictory display of both taking up and putting down roots. One of the final frontiers for this battle happened here, in Nunavik, some 60-odd years ago, when the Canadian government decided that there was only one way to "civilise" the nomadic Inuit: to make them stay.
Complicit in the latter though we may be, our decision has little cultural consequence when weighed against the grand forces of imperialism. Sophie once told me something when I was really struggling with what to do with a student, and with the fact that nothing I was doing was helping "on est juste des petites bibittes sur le terre". What we do is only more than superficially consequential to us, and us alone.
I'd like to say that we're on the horns of a dilemma. I want to take the feelings of the kids I teach into account. They have seen so many people come and go: teachers, nurses, sadly parents and friends too. I want to take the feelings of Noah's grandparents into account. How distant they must feel from their first grandchild. Granted, these things do matter a great deal to us. However, no matter how much I would like to think that altruistic reasons are what is driving our decision, it is the selfish reasons that weigh more heavily on our minds. And that's how it has to be. Otherwise, every decision would be far too overwhelming.
Call us crazy, but we want to keep Noah out of daycare and spend as much time with him as possible. These are things that are easy to do here in Wakeham. We want to be able to save some money on one full-time income. Also easy here. There is a teacher who will be on mat. leave until March. She teaches secondary English and Math, which will be a refreshing break from being a primary teacher, and will be more familiar waters for me.
So, for now, we'll stay. We've found a way to put off the decision, which is what every qalunaat teacher in Nunavik who has to actively decide to stay does. For the qalunaat who do not sire Inuit children (and sadly many who do) the decision is not whether to stay or go, but when to go.
It seems that imperialism has had some strange consequences up North. Before whitey came up here, the Inuit were nomadic, following their food and good living conditions. Now, it is the Inuit who live in houses and basically stay put while the qalunaat come and go, following their meal ticket.
Taima.
April 1st is the day by which a teacher in Nunavik has to decide whether or not he or she is coming back the next year, or will take a leave of absence, from which few come back. Today is the last day of spring break. The week off has given Sophie and I a lot of time to reflect on the pros and cons of coming back for another year. Tomorrow, I have to let the school board know of my intentions.
We decided to make a list.
Pros:
The people are nice
The fall is beautiful up here
I can come home for lunch
I leave the house at 8:45 and come home as early as 3:45
I will be able to teach secondary next year
We'll be able to leave in March (more on this later)
I can play in the hockey tournament (possibly)
Sayard, Neil, Forbes, and Solange are all coming back
I'll have a reason to continue writing this blog
Berry picking
The scenery
We won't have to pack
Money
Cons:
Noah will see less of his grandparents and other relatives
Possible face/feces incidents
The rest of our friends are not here
I'll follow the boy who bit my foot to secondary
Winter lasts forever
2 hours of sun for two months
Our apartment in Montreal?
The dilemma has been appearing throughout our conversations in one way or another for months. Our dreams are to travel and to grow our own food (we can dream). We want to save to buy a house, yet we want to live in places that will impede our ability to save for one. I've been reading two books: Neither Here nor There by Bill Bryson, an account of three trips through Europe, and A Place of My Own, by Michael Pollan, in which he recounts his experience building his house in the woods, a (post)modern version of Thoreau's Walden. This summer, we will travel out to Gaspesie where Sophie has some land upon which we will erect a place of our own some day. This was far too much for a simple list to solve.
Only a long bout with narrative can successfully resolve this particular manifestation of one of human nature's most primal decisions: to stay or to go.
Our need to explore and discover is apparent from an early age, but so is the desire for the familiarity of home. At Christmas, when Sophie and I were driving all over Alberta to satisfy too many people's desires to see Noah (that was the last time), the strength of the natural desire for home became apparent. We had slept in three places in as many nights, and had gone to friend's house for a dinner party. Noah was asleep in the car seat when we arrived at the party, so I just carried him in with a blanket over the car seat. Half an hour later, he woke up. When I pulled the blanket away to reveal yet another new environment, he was inconsolable. You should have seen his face. Only a boob would do.
The temptation to travel and the comfort of home both continue to haunt us as adults. As teachers, we have many, many options. A friend who is a principal in Uganda, Sophie used to teach in Japan, the superintendent of the Banff school board used to teach at Arsaniq school.... The desire to flesh out what each of these and many more possibilities holds is, I believe, exceptionally strong in both of us. I have lived in several different places in Canada and have traveled fairly extensively in Latin America. Sophie, well, she's been everywhere. But even our styles of travel reflect the two sides of this conundrum. When Sophie goes somewhere, she likes to go to one place and relax. The style I've adopted for the past ten years has been not to travel at all, but to live in as many different places as I can.
These contradictory desires have played out culturally throughout history. Ghengis Khan's nomadic raiders thought little of the sedentary peoples they conquered and slaughtered. The sedentary Chinese dynasties erected the Great Wall to keep the nomadic barbarian hordes at bay. Europeans, at the apex of an agricultural revolution, exported their sedentary ways to the new world in a contradictory display of both taking up and putting down roots. One of the final frontiers for this battle happened here, in Nunavik, some 60-odd years ago, when the Canadian government decided that there was only one way to "civilise" the nomadic Inuit: to make them stay.
Complicit in the latter though we may be, our decision has little cultural consequence when weighed against the grand forces of imperialism. Sophie once told me something when I was really struggling with what to do with a student, and with the fact that nothing I was doing was helping "on est juste des petites bibittes sur le terre". What we do is only more than superficially consequential to us, and us alone.
I'd like to say that we're on the horns of a dilemma. I want to take the feelings of the kids I teach into account. They have seen so many people come and go: teachers, nurses, sadly parents and friends too. I want to take the feelings of Noah's grandparents into account. How distant they must feel from their first grandchild. Granted, these things do matter a great deal to us. However, no matter how much I would like to think that altruistic reasons are what is driving our decision, it is the selfish reasons that weigh more heavily on our minds. And that's how it has to be. Otherwise, every decision would be far too overwhelming.
Call us crazy, but we want to keep Noah out of daycare and spend as much time with him as possible. These are things that are easy to do here in Wakeham. We want to be able to save some money on one full-time income. Also easy here. There is a teacher who will be on mat. leave until March. She teaches secondary English and Math, which will be a refreshing break from being a primary teacher, and will be more familiar waters for me.
So, for now, we'll stay. We've found a way to put off the decision, which is what every qalunaat teacher in Nunavik who has to actively decide to stay does. For the qalunaat who do not sire Inuit children (and sadly many who do) the decision is not whether to stay or go, but when to go.
It seems that imperialism has had some strange consequences up North. Before whitey came up here, the Inuit were nomadic, following their food and good living conditions. Now, it is the Inuit who live in houses and basically stay put while the qalunaat come and go, following their meal ticket.
Taima.
Saturday, March 29, 2008
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