Inuit Film and Law - Class 2

Week One - Wednesday, January 13, 2021

In our Law and Inuit Film class, Rebeca asks us, “What is the archive of experience you bring to the class?” My mind slips away from what she is saying and though she is continuing to talk, I try to answer that question. I find myself trying to create too fulsome an answer. I think she just wants everyone in the class to use her question as a touchstone for later work in the class, so I bring myself back to the moment and pick up my pen, a pen whose present destiny is to take random notes. I like using the keyboard instead of handwriting. But I have dedicated a 3-ringed scribbler to catching bits and pieces of thoughts as I listen in class, and see if I can create a summary of the ideas instead of capturing every word she says.

Rock Garden on Back River in July 2006

In our sharing circle one of the participants notes that when she tells people she is from the North, they have no real idea of how to pin her location down on a map. 

Whoops. I don’t know her very well, but if she talks to me later in the class, I don’t want to be that person, and I decide to tune up my geography.

I am going to really look at the North, try to draw a map of that huge land mass; I feel I can learn to put some of the cities on a clean map, identify the rivers, the islands, the bays, and see if I can paint the Canadian present on the map as well as the Canadian past. 

So when I pick up a book to skim: Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family. I see a map at the front of the book and I pause and really look at the map -- I wonder if I could redraw that area with the names of the inlets if someone gave me a clean map. Back River. Thelon River. I haven’t ever taken a close look at these Canadian northern rivers before

I can see Rebecca’s face in front of me on the Mac screen -- leaning into the camera and then back, but her voice is in the background of my mind as I am thinking about how little I know about the geography of the North. She is now listing the films we will see: Nanook of the North, Atanarjuat, Kikkik, The Journals of Knut Rasmuseen, Before Tomorrow, Why White People Are Funny, Angry Inuk, and perhaps Map of the Human Heart. She is telling the class her syllabus is flexible -- the class will speed up and then slow down, depending on what we bring to the films and what we want to take away. I find myself anxious to throw myself into this material.

I can hear the class ending. She is asking the class, What is our responsibility to know the other?, and Can film help us in that journey?

Arta