Me, on the welcome desk in the library: Good morning, how are you today?
Customer: I have welcomed Jesus into my heart and so I am well today and every day.
Me, a little unnerved: Okay then! Is there something I can help you with?
Customer, digging around in his bag and pulling out an iPhone in a box: Unfortunately, Jesus can't help me with this fucking phone, so I came to the library.
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https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/theyre-not-human-how-19th-century-inuit-coped-with-a-real-life-invasion-of-the-walking-dead
Indigenous groups across the Americas had all encountered Europeans differently. But where other coastal groups such as the Haida or the Mi’kmaq had met white men who were well-fed and well-dressed, the Inuit frequently encountered their future colonizers as small parties on the edge of death.
“I’m sure it terrified people,” said Eber, 91, speaking to the National Post by phone from her Toronto home.
And it’s why, as many as six generations after the events of the Franklin Expedition, Eber was meeting Inuit still raised on stories of the two giant ships that came to the Arctic and discharged columns of death onto the ice.
Inuit nomads had come across streams of men that “didn’t seem to be right.” Maddened by scurvy, botulism or desperation, they were raving in a language the Inuit couldn’t understand. In one case, hunters came across two Franklin Expedition survivors who had been sleeping for days in the hollowed-out corpses of seals.
“They were unrecognizable they were so dirty,” Lena Kingmiatook, a resident of Taloyoak, told Eber.
Mark Tootiak, a stepson of Nicholas Qayutinuaq, related a story to Eber of a group of Inuit who had an early encounter with a small and “hairy” group of Franklin Expedition men evacuating south.
“Later … these Inuit heard that people had seen more white people, a lot more white people, dying,” he said. “They were seen carrying human meat.”
Even Eber’s translator, the late Tommy Anguttitauruq, recounted a goose hunting trip in which he had stumbled upon a Franklin Expedition skeleton still carrying a clay pipe.
By 1850, coves and beaches around King William Island were littered with the disturbing remnants of their advance: Scraps of clothing and camps still littered with their dead occupants. Decades later, researchers would confirm the Inuit accounts of cannibalism when they found bleached human bones with their flesh hacked clean.
“I’ve never in all my life seen any kind of spirit — I’ve heard the sounds they make, but I’ve never seen them with my own eyes,” said the old man who had gone out to investigate the Franklin survivors who had straggled into his camp that day on King William Island.
The figures’ skin was cold but it was not “cold as a fish,” concluded the man. Therefore, he reasoned, they were probably alive.
“They were beings but not Inuit,” he said, according to the account by shaman Nicholas Qayutinuaq.
The figures were too weak to be dangerous, so Inuit women tried to comfort the strangers by inviting them into their igloo.
But close contact only increased their alienness: The men were timid, untalkative and — despite their obvious starvation — they refused to eat.
The men spit out pieces of cooked seal offered to them. They rejected offers of soup. They grabbed jealous hold of their belongings when the Inuit offered to trade.
When the Inuit men returned to the camp from their hunt, they constructed an igloo for the strangers, built them a fire and even outfitted the shelter with three whole seals.
Then, after the white men had gone to sleep, the Inuit quickly packed up their belongings and fled by moonlight.
Whether the pale-skinned visitors were qallunaat or “Indians” — the group determined that staying too long around these “strange people” with iron knives could get them all killed.
“That night they got all their belongings together and took off towards the southwest,” Qayutinuaq told Dorothy Eber.
But the true horror of the encounter wouldn’t be revealed until several months later.
The Inuit had left in such a hurry that they had abandoned several belongings. When a small party went back to the camp to retrieve them, they found an igloo filled with corpses.
The seals were untouched. Instead, the men had eaten each other.
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As someone who works with social history for a living, I feel like I’m the aggressive opposite of an anti-vaxxer
I fucking LOVE vaccines, friends. Give me the science stab. I’m so ready. it’s a beautiful day to not die of a Bajillion and one diseases that carried off like half the population before they had even reached age 10, and a significant portion before they made it to old age, 150 years ago
I go to the old cemetery. I see the vast numbers of infant and child and young adult graves. And then I go to my doctor and get injected with Potion of Fuck That Noise. This is beautiful and miraculous and I do not remotely understand how some people can reject it – not just for themselves, but for their children
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Fun game for Pride Month:
When you're at a event, count how many people with mobility aids there are. If it seens low, think about why that might be. Count how many disabled bathrooms. Count how many unavoidable steps. Try and find one accessibility issue at the event and afterwards contact the organisers to ask them to fix it.
Many disabled queer people are left out of the Pride month celebrations due to accessibility issues, so if you're able to be there, you're already in a position to make it better.
Don't forget your disabled siblings this Pride!
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