After ages, a book where you feel at home, a book which is a crucifix against the world, a book which carves a cave into which you can retreat, when incomprehension rages outside. Once in Canada, you wanted to go to Hudson Bay, with a one-way ticket. Actual isolation, perhaps, more bearable, than that within the crowd?
"In 1886, the Ihalmiut people of northern Canada numbered seven thousand; by 1946, when Farley Mowat began his two-year stay in the Arctic, the population had fallen to just forty. With them, he observed for the first time the phenomenon that would inspire him for the rest of his life: the millennia-old migration of the Arctic's caribou herds. He also endured bleak, interminable winters, suffered agonizing shortages of food, and witnessed the continual, devastating intrusions of outsiders bent on exploitation.
Here, in this classic and first book to demonstrate the mammoth literary talent that would produce some of the most memorable books of the next half-century, best-selling author Farley Mowat chronicles his harrowing experiences. People of the Deer is the lyrical ethnography of a beautiful and endangered society. It is a mournful reproach to those who would manipulate and destroy indigenous cultures throughout the world. Most of all, it is a tribute to the last People of the Deer, the diminished Ihalmiuts, whose calamitous encounter with our civilization resulted in their unnecessary demise."
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Reminded me of a person whom I know very little of, maybe just that much as was printed at the time of his demise in The Hindu, a long time ago. What I remember is the idea he brought and how I instantaneously subscribed to the school of thought. Anyway, here is an excerpt from that article : “He felt he was out of touch with this century. He did not like what he saw — globalisation, the destruction of cultures and tribes and he was convinced that small, well-preserved tribal societies were bound to vanish one day soon, to be swallowed up by what he called the ‘mass civilization,’ of a modern ‘monoculture. "
From here : http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article43371.ece
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