My life in books

In Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life, James Daschuk sets out to tell the history of the European colonisation of the the Canadian Great Plains as it affected, and continues to affect, the health of Indigenous peoples in Western Canada. As he states in his introduction: “Racism among policy makers and members of mainstream society was the key factor in creating the gap in health outcomes as well as maintaining a double standard for acceptable living conditions for the majority of the population and the indigenous minority.” This book shows how that double standard was created and maintained.

“Canada consistently places among the top nations in the world according to the UN Human Development Index. In its report for 2007–08, only Iceland, Norway, and Australia ranked higher than Canada in the criteria considered by the United Nations. Yet also a regular story is the dismal condition of Canada’s indigenous people in comparison with its mainstream population. The gap between these populations is so wide that official communications of the Assembly of First Nations, the largest aboriginal organization in the country, state that Canada’s indigenous population would rank sixty-third on the same index, the equivalent of Panama, Malaysia, or Belarus. On average, indigenous Canadians can expect to die between five and eight years earlier than other Canadians. Canadians have come to expect the highest-quality medical care as their national right, but indigenous people routinely suffer from poverty, violence, sickness, and premature death. Substandard health conditions are so entrenched that a recent text on the social determinants of health listed aboriginal status as a key predictive variable in the analysis of the country’s overall health outcomes. The chasm between the health conditions of First Nations people and mainstream Canadians has existed for as long as anyone can remember; it too has become part of who we are as a nation. The primary goal of this study is to identify the roots of the current health disparity between the indigenous and mainstream populations in western Canada. Health as a measure of human experience cannot be considered in isolation from the social and economic forces that shape it. In Canada, the marginalization of First Nations people has been the primary factor impeding improved health outcomes for all of its citizens.”

I don’t think I could present a better summary of Daschuk’s work than the one published in the Literary Review of Canada, written by Anishnaabe scholar Niigaan Sinclair, department head of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba, from which I quote below:

“In the book, Daschuk presents an intricate examination of how Canada cleared the plains coldly and opportunistically, taking advantage of a famine caused by the loss of bison populations, due to the flooding of Nakota, Dakota, Nehiyawak, Niitsitapi and Anishinaabe territories by settlers. Methodically, using draconian legislation regarding Indians and starvation, Canadian leaders coerced indigenous leaders into signing treaties and acquiescing to federal control—all in an attempt to exterminate indigenous peoples from the national consciousness. In other words, Indians were forcibly and willfully manipulated, removed, and murdered for the sake of “progress.” None of this is an overstatement: it’s all there in the evidence Daschuk unearths in deft research and prose.

The most remarkable aspect of Clearing the Plains is the narrative arc of the book. He draws a direct line connecting 19th century Canadian Indian policy, Sir John A. Macdonald’s railroad, western settlement, Canada’s economic foundation and territorial theft of indigenous communities, ethnic cleansing and genocide. The conclusion of this story is that indigenous peoples now experience, a century and a half later, dire circumstances due to these events: the lowest life expectancy, the greatest amount of poverty and ostracization, and the highest amount of racism and violence. Simply put, the situation indigenous communities face today is the result of an elaborate and extensive plan in which every Canadian is culpable. Throughout the 19th century, Canada pursued a “state-sponsored attack on indigenous communities,” Daschuk states, that continues to “haunt us as a nation still.”

In 340 pages Daschuk’s Clearing the Plains does more to tell the true story of Canada’s history than the entirety of Eurocentric pioneer narratives, “award-winning” textbooks, and self-congratulatory encyclopedias that flood bookstores, libraries and classrooms across this country. Daschuk announces the secret that indigenous peoples have been telling all along but Canadians weren’t ready to hear (frankly, until one of their own said it): Canada’s settlement, growth and economy was not a simple, earned and positivistic set of events but a cold, methodical and exploitative plan built on sacrifices by and theft from indigenous peoples.”
(http://reviewcanada.ca/the-lrc-25/clearing-the-plains/)

This is the story of a genocide, in which all settler Canadians are complicit. Daschuk begins with a picture of life before the influence of English and French fur traders began to affect the Indigenous Great Plains peoples, a semi-nomadic life that hunted bison in a sustainable manner, and prohibited hunting of beaver to ensure the water supply, dependent on the dam-building behaviours of beavers, remained stable. The coming of white settlers and traders was felt on the Plains long before whites actually reached the area. The growth of European colonies in the east pushed the Indigenous peoples of Central Canada westward, destabilising conditions across the continent. Trade in horses along the north-south trade routes with Mesoamerica brought changes to long-established hunting methods. And with both these movements came smallpox, which would irrevocably affect both the demographics and the population levels of the Plains peoples. Other diseases - tularaemia, tuberculosis, whooping cough, venereal disease, measles - followed as contacts with Europeans increased and the fur trade encroached on the Plains economy and ecology. The fur trade, with its insatiable demand for beaver pelts, its introduction of highly distilled alcohol products, and its creation of competition for hunting grounds among the peoples who took part, further impacted the Indigenous Plains nations’ stability and way of life. Food shortages became a serious threat to the Plains peoples. Violence between Indigenous peoples, between whites and the Indigenous hunters they exploited, and between rival trade companies Hudson’s Bay Co. and North West Co. was endemic. “By 1821, the Canadian northwest was in social, demographic, and environmental crisis. Harsh climatic conditions compounded by the eruption of Mount Tambora, along with catastrophic disease episodes, created severe conditions for the physical environment and people of the northwest.”

Throughout the 19th century, as the fur trade, followed by the beginning of white agricultural settlement, followed by successive gold rushes, and an increased military presence, brought more and more movement of white people into and through the plains in both Canadian and American territories, waves of infections swept through indigenous communities, decimating populations already weakened by malnutrition due to the hunting out of fur-bearing species and the buffalo and bison. With the end of the traditional bison economy and the more recent fur-trade economy, the only option for many Indigenous communities was to negotiate treaties and convert their economies yet again, this time to an agricultural economy under the reserve system. Many treaties included, at the insistence of the Indigenous parties, the provision by the government of a “medicine chest” to combat the frequent epidemics, and rations during times of famine - provisions rarely honored by the government once its goal of isolating Indigenous peoples on reserves was achieved.

The deadly conditions continued, exacerbated by Government policies and lack of concern at the highest levels for the suffering of Indigenous peoples, bereft of their traditional ways of life, hemmed in by restrictive laws, weakened by famine and disease, subjected to multiple forms of abuse by Department of Indian Affairs employees and agents.

Daschuk’s account concludes with the following comments:

“This study has shown that the decline of First Nations health was the direct result of economic and cultural suppression. The effects of the state-sponsored attack on indigenous communities that began in the 1880s haunt us as a nation still. The Cree negotiators at Treaty 6 recognized the need for their people to adapt to the new economic paradigm taking shape in the west. They acknowledged that the conversion would be difficult. What they failed to plan for was the active intervention of the Canadian government in preventing them from doing so. Tuberculosis and pathologies that have emerged in aboriginal communities in recent decades are the physical manifestations of their poverty and marginalization from mainstream Canadian life.

The gap between the health, living conditions, and other social determinants of health of First Nations people and mainstream Canadians continues as it has since the end of the nineteenth century. While Canadians see themselves as world leaders in social welfare, health care, and economic development, most reserves in Canada are economic backwaters with little prospect of material advancement and more in common with the third world than the rest of Canada. Even basics such as clean drinking water remain elusive for some communities. Identification of the forces that have held indigenous communities back might provide insights into what is required to bridge the gap between First Nations communities and the rest of Canada today.”

Canada’s genocidal war on Indigenous peoples continues.

Paolo Bacigalupi's near-future dystopian thriller The Water Knife is a fast, hard ride through a drought-ridden Southwestern America where what little water remains is under the control of endlessly warring robber barons who live in sealed arcologies while the thirsty multitudes live in a hell where the strong rule and everyone else scrabbles to survive - but only barely.

Bacigalupi's novel belongs to the relatively new genre of what is called "climate fiction" - speculative novels, almost always dystopias, in which the effects of climate change on human life are a crucial part of the work, and as so, it is inherently a criticism of our lack of will and foresight in allowing such a future to be possible. But it is also, and perhaps more deeply, an examination of how far the concept of civil society can be degraded, how much of their dignity, morality and sense of connection people in desperate times will sacrifice to live one more day, how ruthless those with access to a limited power - in whatever sense - will go to hold onto their status. This is a world in which no one can be trusted, because anyone can be broken, and anyone will betray you for the dream of water.

The narrative focuses on water rights - in particular, documentation concerning senior rights to the Colorado River that will put anyone who owns them in the position of controlling the entire Southwest. Every major player is after them, and the list of mutilated bodies of people who someone thinks might know where they are hidden is growing. Angel is a water knife - a man whose job it is to cut through all the niceties to get whatever his employer needs to keep her control over the water she owns. And when he stumbles across the story of these old water rights, he knows it's up to him to get the rights for his boss. But no one knows who has them, and everyone, even Angel, is suspect. Also caught up on the bloody trail is Lucy, a journalist whose friend is seduced and murdered because of what he knows, and Maria, a destitute water peddler whose best friend is the mistress of another man who knows too much.

Toward the end of the novel, Angel and Lucy share a conversation that goes to the heart of the question Bacigalupi is asking. And the answer this novel gives us is grim indeed.

He shrugged. “Maybe people got choices. But mostly they just do what they’re pushed to do. You push, they stampede.” He nodded down at the screen and restarted the video. “And when shit really starts falling apart? Sure, people work together for a while, but not when it gets really bad. I read this article about one of those countries in Africa—Congo or Uganda or something. I was reading, thinking how shitty people are to each other, and then I got to a part where these soldiers, they…”

He glanced at Lucy, then looked away.

“They did a bunch of shit to a village.” He shrugged. “And it was exactly what some militia I worked with did to a bunch of Merry Perrys who tried to swim across the river to Nevada. And that was exactly like the cartels did when they took Chihuahua for good.

“It’s the same every time. All the rapes. All the chopped-off cocks that get shoved in dudes’ mouths, all the bodies burned with acid or lit on fire with gasoline and tires. Same shit, over and over.”

Lucy felt sick, listening to him. It was a view of the world that anticipated evil from people because people always delivered. And the worst part was that she couldn’t really argue.

“Like there’s something in our DNA,” she murmured, “that makes us into monsters.”

“Yeah. And we’re all the same monsters,” Angel said. “And it’s just accidents that turn us one way or another, but once we turn bad, it takes a long time for us to try to be something different.”

A taut, well-written suspense thriller with thought-provoking undertones.

Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature, by Felipe Fernández-Armesto

Scholars of history have conceived of a great many schemes for dividing human societies and civilisations into groups, ranging from such basic identifiers as time and place - where they are/were in the world, the time in which they flourished – to linguistic and ethnic groupings to social characteristics such as kinship customs or political organisations. In Civilizations, Felipe Fernández-Armesto has chosen instead to organise this overview of many of the world’s cultures, past and present, according to the nature of the physical environment in which they developed. In the process, broad themes about how humans adapt, modify, or adapt to specific kinds of environments emerge and allow us to look at the history of humans on this planet in new and thought-provoking ways.

The result of Felipe Fernandez-Armesto's work is a series of startling and illuminating juxtapositions - the maritime civilizations of the Venetians and the Polynesians; the mountain cultures of Tibet and Papua New Guinea; the lifestyles of the English and the Iroquois. Societies that flourished in the Arctic, the Rain Forest and the Desert are re-evaluated alongside those of the ancient river-valleys of Mesopotamia, Egypt and China, where civilization is conventionally supposed to have started. In this book the search for civilization leads not to Imperial Rome, Enlightenment Paris and Renaissance Florence but rather to the Sahara of the Dawada people, the Aleut Islands of the icy northern Pacific, and the Indian Ocean where the Oran Laut 'boat people'. (source)

Readers of Jared diamond’s work will find some similarities between the approaches of the two authors, although Fernández-Armesto focuses more on the physical geography of environments while Diamond is looking more at ecologies and resources set. Both scholars, however, make us think about our species’ past in terms of its interaction with the world around it, rather than as an isolated force moving though the world, and in today’s world, where our interactions with the world may very well put an end to the future of our species, that’s an important paradigm shift.

Fernández-Armesto is more than an environmental historian, though – he is also a raconteur, and his discussions of each of the civilisations included in this volume contain fascinating bits of information about the people, places and times, small exemplars of the cultures he explores that make even those societies most separated in time and space from the modern developed nations his readers most likely inhabit seem vivid and immediate.

From my point of view, Fernández-Armesto’s argument becomes problematic when he goes beyond categorising civilisations by their physical environments and seems to place greater value on those civilisations that have more completely altered their environments to meet the needs and preferences of humans:

Civilization makes its own habitat. It is civilized in direct proportion to its distance, its difference from the unmodified natural environment.

The degree of civilisation thus becomes a measure of how much of a mark humanity has made on the environment. At the same time, the author is clearly aware that the transformation of environments can lead to catastrophes, resulting in a tension between his admiration for the most transformative of civilisations and the unavoidable realisation that without sustainability, transformation is ultimately a dead end.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond

This is an interesting exploration of the role that ecology and social/political choices about ecological issues have played in the survival or failure of a number of cultures at various times and places in human history.

Perhaps in response to some criticism of his previous works that seem to make geological and ecological environment the determining factor in the development of civilisations, Diamond goes out of his way several times in the book to stress that in his analyses, the basic environmental/ecological conditions are only one of many factors that affect how - and whether - a society thrives or fails, or just barely manages to survive. Good versus poor soils, local biodiversity in terms of exploitable food sources and both food and working animals, water sources, weather patterns, degree of physical isolation and so on, influence societies, and in extreme cases may determine success or failure by themselves, but the most important element is how societies choose to address environmental and ecological concerns.

Diamond looks at a range of societies in terms of how environment and choice affected historical development, including the inhabitants of Easter, Pitcairn and Henderson Islands in the South Pacific, the Anasazi of the North American southwest, Mayan civilisation in the Yucutan, Norse settlements in the North Atlantic from the Shetlands and Orkneys to Iceland, Greenland and Vinland, New Guinea highlanders and Tokugawa Japan. He also looks at several modern situations from the same perspective of environment and choice, including China, Australia, Rwanda, Haiti and The Dominican Republic, and Montana and California in the U.S.

The detailed analyses of conditions and developments in all of these areas, viewed from this perspective of environmental and ecological situation and societal and political choices (or lack thereof) make interesting reading. What delivers the punch is the final chapters, where Diamond takes his theses and applies them to the situation of the world as a whole today.

The chapter on choice, entitled "Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions," contains a number of insights and analyses worth thinking about, especially if you're one of those people who, like me, has a sound loop running in the back of her mind that goes something like "the sky really is falling, the seas are rising, the weather is changing, species are dying out, the air, the water, the soil, everything is really poisoned and polluted and just plain fucked up here and why isn't anyone doing anything?!?!?"

The final chapter stresses that one of the consequences of our current levels of technological activity and globalisation has been that we are all connected. The world is a single ecosystem, a self-contained environment, a polder, and if we don't all find a way to make the choices that will preserve and sustain the ecological base that we have built our common human civilisation on, then the dam will fail and the ocean will sweep us away.