This book is about two extraordinary peoples, the Inuit and the Innu (for-merly called Indians) of Labrador, in far northeastern Canada. For the past five decades they have been particularly brutally treated by a domineering state. We cannot start a useful engagement with this current situation, as is often done, by romanticizing yesterday under the label “tradition.” During the period of Native history called “traditional” both Inuit and Innu were also treated very badly, with very high mortality rates.
Before we can discuss Native peoples’ extraordinary resilience in the midst of several centuries marked by high death rates, we have to start with some more general understanding of how Native history has been made, both by Innu and Inuit and by those who conquered and sought control.
Making history, as I use the term here, is rooted in a past that is not quite past and a future that engages, continues, and contests this not- quite- past. In this sense making history is something everyone must do in their ordinary daily lives. As we shall see, history takes on a special dynamic when it happens in Native communities that have endured through much suffering.
Because the issue of suffering has been and is so close to the surface, this is not an easy place to begin, but it turns out to be a useful start on the pathways toward a different tomorrow.
The disasters we will examine are socially produced, not natural ca-tastrophes. Many so- called natural catastrophes, such as Hurricane Katrina and the floods that devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2006, may be triggered by events that are rooted in the natural world, but they usually unfold in ways that are socially shaped. Here each catastrophe, start to finish, has been socially constructed. Disasters happen when only some survive, so in a small community no one is left without long- lasting open wounds. What it means to “survive” a disaster is not a yes or no matter.
On the surface we will be dealing with issues of both survival and failure to survive, or to completely survive, among small groups of marginal peo-ples. On the surface we are dealing with the few thousand Native people of Labrador, along the North Atlantic Ocean in far northeastern Canada. These Native peoples, both Inuit, formerly called Eskimo, and Innu, formerly called Indian, now have one of the highest youth suicide rates in the world, as well as very high rates of domestic violence, adult alcoholism, child substance abuse, and multiple other indicators of severe social stress. Altogether it is a messy combination of collective self- destruction, which may or may not be part of how survival now happens, and multiple kinds of destructive treatment by powerful others.
At first the problems were caused by Hudson’s Bay Company (hbc) and the Moravian missionaries, and now the Canadian federal and Newfound-land provincial governments are more responsible. Especially since the 1970s, imposed destructive treatment has been combined with a substantial amount of nearly unstoppable self- destruction, and that combination is the issue this work addresses.
But we must put this self- destruction in a broader perspective, both so-cially and historically. The news department of the tv network cbs pub-lished on the Internet in November 2007 results of their investigations showing that over a year beginning in 2005 the average weekly suicide rate of U.S. Armed Forces veterans was 120 suicides per 100,000, double the na-tional average for nonveterans. Veterans of the so- called war on terror—the butchery in Iraq and Afghanistan—were far more likely than other veterans to commit suicide.1 Moreover, one- fourth of all the homeless people on the
streets of New York City are reputed to be veterans. In this larger context we are dealing with something more than the problems of small groups of northern Native peoples. We are also confronting one of the key features of our “modern” world, something we might call, just to get us started, the production of overwhelmingly senseless chaos in the lives of vulnerable and disposable people—our soldiers, for a start. These are people who once, at least briefly, believed some of the lies that they were told, or that they learned to tell themselves, while they were being both used and used up.
In place of these rosy lies, usually about a future or a cause, the victims found a chaos that could not be reduced to reason, that could not be ex-plained rationally, not by the victims, and not believably by those who im-posed it. Furthermore, the victims live in a chaos that cannot be attributed simply to chance, accident, or the forces of nature, as was attempted with Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of African American neighborhoods in New Orleans. The victims suffer in part because of their immersion in what seems to have been, or still is, senseless chaos that people have imposed on them:
governments that spend billions bailing out banks to keep them alive while letting millions of homeowners and workers die social death; governments that pay billions for military contracts while sending soldiers to war in un-armored vehicles, so they come back, like the equipment they were sent out with, missing essential parts or capabilities—for the rest of their lives, for lives that will never again have rest. Natives, veterans, those betrayed by banks and dreams of home ownership—despite fundamental differences, all are victims of an endless and senseless violence that tries to hide itself under one name or another: normal, natural, ordinary, usual, necessary, proper, progress. There are thus more issues at stake here than just the well- being of the Native peoples of Labrador.
To call the violence imposed on people, as well as the consequences of this violence, senseless chaos, at least to start, is both to name a problem for the people we seek to understand and help and also to name a problem for ourselves. All my long life in social theory I have had the illusion that the problems before us could be understood and explained, that there was sense to be made. From this starting point it seemed we could help by joining with the victims to oppose what we understood to be the specific social causes of suffering. We could understand causes if only we worked hard enough, thought intensely enough, and began from something more intellectually serious than the seductive but empty platitudes of mid- and late twentieth- century social and historical “science.”
The point here is different: it is to challenge the idea that we can com-pletely explain what we see and hear, and that our success in developing and organizing a helpful intervention turns on that. There may be other ways to intervene than starting with a neat explanation, other routes to effective struggle for a better world, routes that are fully social but follow different kinds of maps.2 Making sense of largely senseless chaos may do little more than utterly miss the main point. Here, by way of a few brief examples, I introduce the notion of partial and incomplete ways of “making sense” of suffering—for that perspective guides this work.
When children sniff gasoline, which, as they well know, both produces an unusually intense high and at the same time does severe neurological damage—as the kids themselves say, “This shit rots your brain in about two years”—we may well be dealing with something more, and more complex, than what can be reduced to a completed explanation. Sometimes it helps just to worry and wonder about it all. The following is an example that has caused me a lot of both.
Many Native children in northern Canada (and elsewhere of course), starting at eight or nine, sniff gasoline, which they steal. They do not, or very rarely, use alcohol, although that is around in ways that could be pilfered without too much difficulty. Perhaps alcohol, being expensive, would be more closely watched, and the punishment for taking it more severe. Adults, as much as they use alcohol, scarcely ever inhale gasoline. So there is a per-haps useful question before us: why do children use gasoline and adults alco-hol? As difficult as it might be for youth to get alcohol, it would save adults a lot of money to use gasoline for substance- inducing change. But they don’t.
Let me offer a speculation, not so much to answer the question but to suggest one way of thinking about the problem of addictions. Gas, people say, gets you very “high.” It is, in common knowledge, the most intense high of any substance. A bit of alcohol also gets people “high,” but this point is very quickly passed, if it occurs at all, in serious long- term drinkers. Mostly alco-hol in that context suppresses some feelings and self- control, making people either more passive and socially relaxed or more violent, and then “putting people out”—making them fall asleep or pass out.
So we might well look at the difference between the use of gas and that of alcohol by saying that children still want to get high, to rise above their situ-ation, and adults who have learned that this is scarcely possible want to just forget, to “get out” not just socially but away from their bottled- up feelings.
This attempted interpretation might just be nonsense, empty speculation.
But it has one useful virtue: it points us toward thinking about how people’s actions are situated in the ongoing history of their lives—the pasts that they still carry with them, the futures they dream, desire, dread, deny. This inter-pretation leads, in sum, to what we will discuss as historical violence, not as a generalizing concept but as a way of getting our hands and our minds around the specifics of specific lives. The question about the different uses of alcohol and gasoline may or may not be answerable, but the question itself points us in useful directions. It is worth wondering and worrying about, even though or because it may not be an answerable question. Another still open question may take us further on that journey.
The addictions in many Native communities are severe and getting worse, although they are still far from universal, even in the most intensely stressed communities. In 2007 I spent part of the summer in Labrador, on one of my research trips. A woman who has worked with Native peoples’ health for a decade and a half, lovingly, sympathetically, and intensely, told me that since 2005 some parents had started placing gasoline- soaked tarpaulins or blankets over the cribs of their infants, because “it keeps the infants stoned quiet for four or five hours while the parents go out drinking.” The shock of hearing this was like being hit in the pit of the stomach. These were their own infant children being sacrificed to an addiction. More may be at stake in this than the addictive pull of alcohol.
In the late mid- nineteenth century, across the rather narrow sea from Labrador, on the northwest coast of Greenland, Inuit people developed a truly intense addiction to coffee. Traders and administrators from Denmark, who had colonized Greenland and the Inuit there, were writing back to their homeland saying that the Native people were starving and freezing because they had such an intense craving for coffee that to get it they were trading sealskins they needed for their clothing and to build the kayaks they used to hunt food and fur (Marquardt 1999).3
Without denying that caffeine can engender some craving, probably not as intensely as does alcohol, this situation suggests that something even more profound than the addictive properties of alcohol as a substance is happening. This intense and destructive addiction to coffee might be rooted in something that has to do with what I will call incoherent domination, un-speakable domination, and the nearly uncontrollable cravings that emerge within and against this domination.
It suggests cravings that both join you to the foreign and alien world that came to assault you, merging you with the alien invader’s powerful substance
or allowing you to incorporate within you what they brought from afar, and simultaneously distance you from that same alien world that was imposed in your midst. Alcohol makes people uncontrollable in many ways; coffee in Greenland almost doomed the Inuit as trading “partners.” These are cravings that join you to the substances of the dominant and simultaneously, in their effects, or in the effects of what you have to do to get access to these sub-stances, break you apart from the “rational” demands domination imposes.
The cravings, the addictions, also break people apart from each other, and ultimately from their prior selves. This is not a coherent package, in any sense of coherent: glued together, or cohering, in the middle, or coherent in the sense of easily and understandably speakable.
Neither is domination coherent, in either sense of coherent. That domi-nation produces incoherence in its victims—being both chaotic and often unspeakable in its consequences—is a good part of how domination works, as we shall see. Because domination produces at least partly incoherent lives among its victims, it cannot itself be as orderly, routine, and predictable as it pretends to be and still maintain the control it seeks. Bureaucracies are both the reality and the fantasy of domination (see Lea [2008] for evidence of this in Native lives). The incoherence and the chaos of domination and the incoherence and chaos it produces in the lives of its victims, with and very much beyond the addictions, are separate issues and separate problems. We will consider both.4
But this perspective also does not lead to fully answerable questions. With women who drink so intensely while pregnant that it damages their children, we may be dealing with parents for whom the world seems so awful that at some level they do not want their children to grow up clearheaded, for it is widely known that children born with what professionals call “fetal alcohol spectrum disorder” (fasd)—and some locals call children born “hurt” or
“damaged”—have trouble making connections in their minds by the time they are school- age. However well their teachers say they can think specific points, their teachers also often say these children cannot make connections.
This might well be a temptation to a woman suffering from a childhood and a marriage marred by seemingly or actually inescapable domestic violence.
Why would you want your baby to grow up clearly and fully understanding what lies in their future, particularly if you thought that their chances for a different future were small? Or this kind of child- damaging drinking could be encouraged by a number of other reasons that we cannot yet know or name.
There have recently been a lot of very simplistic interpretations of
prac-tices now called “the weapons of the weak” (for example, Scott 1985). We need to consider not just individualistic ways of making life a bit uncomfort-able for the dominant but the potential of the weak to find those even weaker among themselves and make weapons that work on them, or work them over.
A simplistic “weapons of the weak” perspective turns out to be an obstacle to understanding, in large part because it poses domination as a simple two- sided relationship between the dominant and a multitude of individuals in the category that is dominated—peasants, Blacks, Natives, whatever.
More generally, we should not be tempted to reduce complex issues to simple—and worse, complete—explanations. We should not try to invent what social scientists call “hypotheses to test” (we could also call them fancy- dress guesses about causes or connections). Let us put this temptation aside, even though it leads to well- paying research grants and high consultant fees, and immerse ourselves in what is happening. We must also do this without letting ourselves sink into mindless description, for simple description is al-ways not just incomplete but inadequate, more incomplete and inadequate in more important ways than it pretends to be.
Several years ago a construction worker and my neighbor in the north-lands, with whom I was quite friendly, said to me one late afternoon, in a mo-ment of intense and shared closeness about the difficulties of building a good family life up there, “Gerry, I don’t know what the fuck it all means. I don’t know what the fuck is happening. I don’t know why the fuck things are this way”—over and over again repeating and emphasizing his litany of confusion and sorrow. The worst and most alienating response I could have given to this open wound he was showing and sharing would be to say, “I know what is happening: have a look at pages 15 to 25 of my last paper, or my new book.”
Moreover, such an answer to his sorrow and his unhappiness, to the im-possibility of understanding, to the largely imposed incoherence of his situa-tion, would not only have been foolish and arrogant; it would have been a lie.
What we need, here and now, is an admittedly partial understanding, in both senses of the word partial: limited and sided. It will be an understanding that at its best is very limited, grasping only a piece of the problem, and it will be an understanding that takes sides, for such disasters as we will address do not just happen, but are made, and hopefully can be at least partially unmade by taking sides with the victims. So this will be, at its best and if we can get there, an engaged work, formed with and not just about the needs and
feel-ings and experience- rooted understandfeel-ings of the people whose situations we “study.” This is very far from a comfortable starting point, for it requires us to abandon our idea that our theories elevate us above the sufferings that our world has imposed upon the peoples we have made vulnerable both to our doings and to our theories.5
Part of the discomfort of this position is the muddiness of trying to write something more than a description of a major social problem without being able to offer much by way of understanding. What else, if not understanding, is the job of social science? Suppose, though, we say that while this has been the job of social science, we might do something else, perhaps something more and better, or at least less in the service of state power? For state power
Part of the discomfort of this position is the muddiness of trying to write something more than a description of a major social problem without being able to offer much by way of understanding. What else, if not understanding, is the job of social science? Suppose, though, we say that while this has been the job of social science, we might do something else, perhaps something more and better, or at least less in the service of state power? For state power