When I traversed the territory we call The Northwest Passage four years ago on an educational ship, I’d read much about John Franklin — how in portly middle age he perished trying to sail, for England, through the Northern ice toward a promise of gemstones and mineral wealth in a storied Far East.
Today people sometimes think of The Northwest Passage as having been a goal in itself, akin to other heroic quests carried on for their own sakes. From the colonial age until now the romance persists that pushing through uncharted land contains intrinsic higher purpose, a fata morgana whose attainment makes heroes out of ordinary sailors.
Throughout the Canadian government’s supposed search for the Franklin ships, the spin has been that their loss was a Canadian story of great historic importance, and finding them is evidence that we have arrived, by the grace of the government, at some apex of historical knowledge: we have conquered the Franklin mystery.
More quietly but with increasing bravado as we allow it to flourish unchallenged, the Canadian government also attests that its submarine probes, icebreakers, and its oil and military partners, are writing new business and militaristic storylines that veer sharply from the poetry of Franklin’s tale. A byproduct of the original search, so the story goes, is that we have now mapped the floor of an Arctic Ocean made navigable by a new melting North.
In pursuing the higher cause of the Franklin search, we have, by-the-way, just happened to amass data making the old promise of mineral wealth loom from 19th-century mists and project larger than ever on our national screen.
When I travelled through the place we call The Northwest Passage, pack ice forced our ship into an unplanned route that followed Franklin’s exactly, and this felt exciting. One of the startling aspects of travelling in that region is that bones and artifacts lie dotted about the tundra exactly where their owners died or abandoned them years or decades or even centuries before. The land lies open under the Arctic sun like a book whose words are three-dimensional and very powerful.
Mingling with these texts come other kinds of language, once you leave behind southern semantics and become open to things the air, rock, sky and water are saying. Then there are the powerful animals: polar bears, snow geese, muskoxen. I learned more from these, and from Inuit people who taught us about the land where they have always lived, than it is possible to learn from the government’s purported discovery of Franklin’s sunken ships.
How many splinters from Franklin’s vessels does it take to make up the value of one bright petal of Arctic mouse-eared chickweed? How much rusted iron is worth a living red-throated loon? How long do we refrain from challenging a national government that uses sad, outworn tales of lost Franklin ships like a magic lantern, superimposing a narrative of patriotic swagger over the real north — a land whose elements, people and animals are trying to tell us something about what it might really mean to be Canadian in this melting global world.
What would happen if we Canadian people woke up and began a real dialogue about how we can learn from the land instead of allowing corporations and their subservient governments to extract and drain the only wealth they imagine it contains? What might we discover if we looked together at that forlorn, sunken Franklin vessel not as a triumphant boast to Canada’s sovereign prowess, but as a reminder that here lies the fate of a crew who viewed land as an inanimate thing to be conquered, instead of a living and equal partner.
Original Article
Source: thestar.com/
Author: Kathleen Winter
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