The Singing of the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page A

across the pond, and suddenly everybody's wringing their hands and bemoaning their brown brothers' fate, damning Americans for the closet Nazis they were, and elevating the Native to the status of sainthood.” Her mouth pulled into a wry expression. “All of a sudden, the Native way of life is perfect, or was, before the big bad Western Europeans came along and ruined everything.”
    “And it wasn't,” Bobby said.
    “What's perfect? I know an Inupiaq elder from Barrow. She was telling me stories about life up there, about whale hunting, and the big dance festival they've got every winter, and the polar bears coming in off the ice so you have to be careful before you go outside so you don't run into one.” She paused. “The one thing I remember most vividly is when she told me about the whale hunting, the strikes, the landings, the town getting together to butcher the whale and cut up the maqtaq. It's a delicacy now, she told me, not a staple, and then she looks at me and she says”—Anne's voice slowed and an almost imperceptible rhythm began to shape her words—“ ‘In olden days,’ that woman says, ‘we hunt to eat. Now we have stores. We buy food. Some years we get a whale; some years we don't. When we get a whale, that's a good thing for the people. It brings us together; it reminds us of the olden days.’
    “And then,” Anne said, “and then she dropped her voice so no one else could hear her say it, and then she told me, ‘I lived in olden days. Olden days was not so good. Nowadays is better, because everybody has enough to eat.’ ”
    Bobby, for probably the only time in his life, was at a loss for words.
    “If it really was the olden days,” Anne said, “and the town didn't get its whale, it became the duty of the eldest and most useless of the tribe to walk out on the ice as far as they could and stay there until they died, of starvation or exposure, whatever came first.”
    “I thought that was just an old fairy tale,” Bobby said.
    “Not unless real people die in fairy tales,” Anne said. “And, yes, baby girls born to a tribe living on the edge of starvation were put to death as another useless mouth to feed too.” With deliberate intent, she looked at Dinah, still holding Katya on her hip. “You know who had to kill them?”
    “No.” But he did.
    “Their mothers.”
    There was another moment of dead air. “I'm not saying there weren't real wrongs perpetrated against Alaska Natives and Native Americans,” Anne said. “Even Disney couldn't pretty up what turned out to be genocide. But what I really hate is the mythology that seems to be growing up around this new awareness of Native life. Nobody talks now about the wars fought between tribes years ago, even though you can see examples of the armor the warriors wore into battle in museums, but you call your friend Mary Ellen the Athabascan an Eskimo one time and see what she says. And we, the Native peoples, a lot of us are buying into it, into the myth. Everything was wonderful then, everything's lousy now, and it's all the Anglos' fault. Baloney. All that attitude does is nourish resentment, perpetuate stereotypes, and fund political campaigns. Turns us into victims. I am not in any way, shape, or form a victim. Rousseau has a lot to answer for.”
    “Who?”
    “Jean Jacques Rousseau, a French philosopher back in whenever, precolonial days. Inflicted the idea of the natural man or the noble savage on the rest of the world. I had to study him in Humanities at college, and I'll tell you right now I never read such nonsense in my life. There's nothing noble about hunger. Hunger is a stronger force than either fear or sex. It always, always takes priority. In the olden days, like my friend in Barrow knows only too well, the bottom line was you did what you had to for the tribe as a whole to survive, and if that included killing off the elderly when they became less of an asset and more of a liability or killing a baby because you