The United Nations has ventured into children’s publishing with a scary story about a small boy who loses a dogsled race because of global warming. In November the odd little picture book cum policy brief, Tore and the Town on Thin Ice, made the rounds at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Kenya.
The night after he loses the race by falling through a weak place in the ice, Tore has a dream in which he sees the Inuit goddess Sedna, who warns him that “rich countries use—and waste—an awful lot of energy. Huge cars. Too many cars instead of efficient trains and buses.” The animal kingdom comes out in full force with some nightmarish warnings of its own. A snowy owl tells Tore winning dogsled races “might not be your top worry” soon, since “some people who hunt for a living are already going hungry because a lot of seals and walruses are heading north.” A polar bear moans that he is starving, and then—when Tore gets upset—a whale calls to him: “That’s the spirit! Get good and angry. You’ll need all that energy to make a difference.”
Tore awakes, furious and full of resolve to build solar panels and to nag his parents about their gasoline consumption—the United Nations’ idea of a happy ending.
Since I actually LIVE with Eskimoan people (mostly Yup'ik, Chup'ik, and Inupiaq) I can say with certainty that the book as outlined is bullsh**.
Arctic people in North America use fossil fuel and modern technology as much as anyone else on the continent, excluding Amish and Mennonites. They drive snowmachines which exude huge clouds of exhaust, unless they have newer 4-stroke models; the boats are equipped with 110-horsepower Yamaha and Mercury motors; homes are usually heated with diesel fuel; and the kids, whom I teach, are fully technological with IPods, CD players, MySpace accounts, and the ubiquitous PlayStation or XBox. Those who live in smaller villages don't have cars because there are few roads; those of us in the larger towns all drive cars. It is true we do hunt - with rifles, scopes, a GPS to guide us, and a freezer to store the food.
The book, at least as presented here, is the high point of demeaning racism. Arctic people are some kind of hunter-gatherer remnant living, no doubt, "in harmony" with nature while worshipping the "old ways." The fact is that there are more pagans among the Americans and Canadians who have moved there in the past few decades than there are among indigenous people. In our village, most of the Native people go to the Catholic church. Sorry, no nature goddesses. Only a bigot could look at a modern Native person and imagine that they are some mystical nature-worshipping ur-human.
Thanks for letting me rant. Nothing pisses me off more than liberal racism. It reminds me of what I've read about the attitudes of southern whites during Jim Crow - "those blacks are simple people." Eskimos deserve a lot more respect than they're getting from this book.
