XPost: alt.native, rec.arts.movies.past-films   
   From: floyd@apaflo.com   
      
   "azindn"  wrote:   
   >I liked the film "A Map of the Human Heart" with Annie Palliard and   
   >Jason Scott Lee as a aboriginal and Inuit couple who fall in love   
   >set against the back drop of WWII London.  The early storyline of the   
   >film when the characters were children in a tuberculosis hospital for   
   >treatment   
   >presents the real situation of the tribal annimosity that exist   
   >between the Cree and Inuit groups rather than the positive stereotype   
   >of all native   
   >groups getting along as one happy egalitarian society.   
      
   And what makes you think Cree and Inuit groups didn't get along?   
      
   White Man's history recorded what?  Two or three instances where   
   the two groups weren't getting along, so therefore they never   
   did, eh?   
      
   That's just the same as how the Athabascans and the Eskimos in   
   Alaska didn't get along.  White Man's history says so!   
      
   Except 40 years ago I lived in a Yup'ik village where old men told   
   stories of before Whites came, when they were small and traveled   
   on the Holitna and Hoholitna Rivers, where "Ingalik" (Deg   
   Hit'an) people lived.  They would pass the Indian villages in   
   the darkness of the early morning hours, and adults made the   
   children lay down in the bottom of the boat, telling them if   
   they made a noise that woke up the savage Indians, they would   
   all be killed!  Hence, White man's history says they fought   
   all the time.   
      
   Of course nobody could remember *anyone* ever being killed.  And   
   the Eskimos traveled between the Kuskokwim drainage and the   
   Nushagak drainage to get to Bristol Bay with regularity, passing   
   two Ingalik (which is Yup'ik for "people with lice") villages on   
   the way.  (And Wendell Oswalt has spend literally decades   
   studying the existence of Yup'ik kitchen tools found in Deg   
   Hit'an villages.)   
      
   And a bit north of there, I have a lot of Inupiat friends who   
   grew up in Allakaket, which is just across the Koyukuk River   
   from the village of Alatna.  Everyone in Allakaket tells me they   
   know exactly who is from Allakaket and who is from Alatna.  It   
   isn't hard to tell which village they grew up in, because   
   Allakaket is Inupiat Eskimo and Alatna is Koyukon (Athabascan)   
   Indian; but telling which side their biological parents were   
   from is a whole lot more difficult!  (These folks haven't been,   
   ahem, getting along for hundreds of years...)   
      
   You see, the idea that Indians and Eskimos didn't get along is a   
   myth.  There are literally *hundreds* of places where they lived   
   within easy walking distance of each other, and it wasn't graves   
   that littered the trails...   
      
   --   
   Floyd L. Davidson               
   Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)                         floyd@apaflo.com   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)