Take Your Culture Calmly

I am not much to be giving advice, but I'll try.

Do you ever get the feeling that what you do in life is a result of culture?

School is culture. Reading, writing, eating, speaking, dancing, singing, clothes and many more are all part of your culture. Prisons are part of culture. Shunning and ridicule are a big part of culture. Some cultures are pretty good at creating and adding new bits of life into their ways of life. Smoking weed is culture. Drinking alcohol is culture. Rubber boots are part of some cultures. Culture is everyone's. We fight on behalf of it, cry for it, and laugh at its expense.

My culture is proud, sometimes too much. My culture is of the colder temperatures and eater of raw meat foods. My culture is a hunter, a seamstress, an ingenious machine when it comes to fixing anything. My culture wears kamiks, mitts and homemade parkas.

I have talked to many of Inuit ancestry who are so proud they get offended when you say you are tired of "we are environmentally-friendly-sustainable people that burns garbage" or "throatsinging and ajajajaas are so outdated" or "Susan Aglukark is out-rated" or "English can be easier" or "thank god the English brought tea huh!" and so on...

culture is just an extension of life, and everyone of us, has life (or so we like to think). What i am trying to say is, culture is not stagnant, nor is it dead. Culture is like a little child at the age of two and four, acquiring every form of information at an increase rate. He learns so quickly its astonishing, speaks and imitates language and is always improving his physical ability. Culture is like that, cannot keep it in one place because its already off somewhere doing and re doing something to make it its own.

At the state that we are now, in Canada, as Inuit, we are forgetting the fact that culture is alive and we have control and no control over it. Just like a kid, we can control but we can't always stop them from putting something into their mouths. We cannot always stop a child from saying fuck you or shit or even "i'm from the government and i am here to help." Impossible.

We are trying to treat our lifestyles as if we are trying to resuscitate Sedna to help us out. Sedna has long been dead, and you wouldn't want to do a mouth to mouth procedure with her (imagine the stink of her breath after so many years.) Our lives are moving objects. All we can do is respect the past and hopefully learn from it. We don't have to do all the things they used to do, we can just respect it.

Which brings me to: We can practice culture, any culture, be it Inuit, Japanese, Greek or Italian and keep it alive by being let it be. There are people all over the world dying in the cause of culture. what a waste.

I suggest that Inuit take it easy on the cultural front. Let's not get militant and take it easy. If we are going to use culture as a political scapegoat, we might as well think about it as hard as we can. If any of the candidates for NTI presidency mentions culture, don't vote for them. They are using your lifestyle as a way to get people to like them. If a person says culture this and that, don't trust them because they are insecure about their own.

That was my advice, do with it what you will!

-Radio #5