I seem to be harking back on my heritage a lot this week,
but that’s how it goes sometimes I guess. When I was doing research for my book
Arctic Destiny, I came across so many interesting and difficult to read stories,
and much of what I read stuck with me. And there were times were I found myself
pondering similarities between the Inuit experience and that of the slaves
brought to the new world. While the Inuit had to put up with interlopers coming
onto their land and insisting on changing their way of life, the slaves were
taken away from their homelands and thrust into an entirely new, and horrific,
way of life. But in both cases these groups of people lost their names.
In an effort to control, the slaves were stripped of
everything that reminded them of where they came from, and who they were before
they were stolen. They were separated from their tribesmen and women, given
new, Western-style names. Children born to a slave mother were also given a
name by the slave master, with no record of a father and no surname.
In an effort to control, the Inuit were given numbers and
told that they must guard them with all care, as though those numbers held
greater weight than their traditional, ancestral-based names.
Eventually, as time passed, the slave masters were told to
prepare for emancipation by registering all their slaves by name—first and
last. Some gave all their slaves their own surname, one last act of ownership
in my opinion; others simply picked names seemingly from the air. Some were
honest enough to recognise the children they had fathered, others didn’t care
to. Who would make them?
Far later, in the 1970s, the Canadian government decided the
Inuit must have surnames, although that was never a part of their culture.
Again, it was to make them easier to track, and control. During this time many
of the Inuit first names were misspelled, distorted and twisted to fit norms
that had nothing to do with their culture. Even the ancestors of Europeans, who
knew the last names those men carried and tried to use them, often ended up
with something that bore little or no resemblance to the original name, since
the people recording them didn’t take the differences in pronunciation into
account.
Around the same time, many descendants of slave in the
Americas were going through a period of reclaiming the heritage they’d been
stripped of. Of course, there was no way to know exactly what tribe you were
descended from, where in Africa, exactly, your ancestors had lived. There could
only be a blanket acceptance of African culture, a taking on board of enough to
give a sense of belonging. Strange new names began turning up in black
communities across the western world, names that were derided and ridiculed,
but that were intended to form a bond between that child and something bigger
and better than the reality it was born to.
Full circle, for the Inuit have been reclaiming their names,
having misspellings corrected, taking back not just their names but the
meanings, the symbolism of them. They already knew the traditional names had
meanings far beyond the understanding of those who so carelessly mangled them. That
the bestowing of those names was a link to, and bond with the past—to something
important, bigger than the present reality.
Neither of these stories are unique. The movement, subjugation
and control of people has been going on since the dawn of man. In fact, what it
shows is that if you look deep enough we, collectively, are more alike than it
might first appear.
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