Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic 9780520958555

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Life Beside Itself

Life Beside Itself Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic

Lisa Stevenson

university of california press

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2014 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stevenson, Lisa. Life beside itself : imagining care in the Canadian Arctic / Lisa Stevenson. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-28260-5 (Cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-520-28294-0 (Paper : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-520-95855-5 (e-book) 1. Inuit—Medical care—Canada—History. 2. Tuberculosis—Canada—History. 3. Inuit—Health and hygiene—Canada—History. I. Title. rc314.s74 2014 362.19699'5008997124—dc23 2014006556 Manufactured in the United States of America 23 10

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In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Prologue: Between Two Women Acknowledgments

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Introduction Facts and Images Cooperating Anonymous Care Life-of-the-Name Why Two Clocks? Song Epilogue: Writing on Styrofoam

Notes References List of Illustrations Index

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1 21 49 75 103 129 149 171

175 217 243 245

Prologue Between Two Women

A voice involves the throat, saliva, infancy, the patina of experienced life, the mind’s intentions, the pleasure of giving a personal form to sound waves. What attracts you is the pleasure this voice puts into existing. Italo Calvino, A King Listens

In the midst of a Thanksgiving dinner, with people splayed out on the floor—a middle-aged man with his back against the legs of a chair recounting a road trip across the southern United States, a teenager twisting her hair around her finger and gazing inertly in front of her, a couple of kids lying on their stomachs, engrossed in their own densely laid world of right and wrong—and everyone eating and talking and bickering as most families, happy or sad, eat and talk and bicker, in the midst of all that, two women face each other. The younger one is kneeling on the floor at the feet of the old woman, a woman whose legs can no longer support her weight, a woman who has been lifted from a car into the house and placed on the living room couch. The two women bring their faces close together—so close they are almost touching, their arms resting on each other’s shoulders. They sway slightly as they begin to kataq. The younger woman starts, and the sounds she makes come from the back of her throat, low and thick, almost growling. Ham ma ham ma, ham ma, ham ma—she breathes in and out in a steady rhythm, intensely, her vocal cords bruising each other. Buzzing, panting, the older woman’s voice comes in and moves up and down as if plucking the lower rhythm, teasing it almost. The sounds and rhythms pass from body to body, echoing and playing with each other, growling,

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buzzing, yelping. There’s something machine-like and modern about the sounds, which are also archaic and guttural. Ham me, ham ma, ma, ham ma, ham ma, ham ma Ha ha ha, ha he he, ha he he, ha he he ha ha ha ha Then the old lady breaks off and cackles loudly, hooting almost. The younger woman laughs too and wipes away tears. People smile, clap, and go back to what they were doing. A few months later the old lady dies in her sleep. I am in the house when the young woman returns, but I’ve already heard the news. I hear her shutting the door, putting down her purse. The ordinariness of the sounds is hard. “She’s gone,” the young woman tells me, thinking I don’t know. “My anaana is gone.” In my memory it’s as if she is swaying, but not rhythmically, rather as if she might fall over.

Acknowledgments

The experiences I write about in Life Beside Itself are not fully mine, but neither are they fully other to me. For the most part they are shared experiences—sometimes because I write about things we lived through together, and sometimes because experience is never as discretely hitched to a singular person as we might think. I’m not sure how to acknowledge my debt to the people whose words and experiences I shared and that I try (and sometimes fail) to describe in this book. This book is for them, whether or not they ever choose to read it. I am very aware of the potential violence of my words, of the possibility they will work to fix in place that which moves, that which is not always the same as it was, or is, or will be. One thing I hope is that in taking what I have from the bits of life we shared, the words you offered and the scenes I have stolen from our lives together, that you are able to sense how much beauty I see in that time, in those words, in that life of ours. There is suffering, but there is also laughter without end. My family in Nunavut—especially my brother Romeyn Stevenson and Madeleine Allakariallak—made my fieldwork possible by feeding me, housing me, and standing by me when it mattered. Elisapee Davidee, Qajaaq Ellsworth, Myna Ishulutak, Susie Ishulutak, Margaret Karpik, Jesse Mike, Meeka Mike in Iqaluit, and the late Anna Qaunaq and Sandy Attagutsiak in Arctic Bay were like family to me. Their friendship and love made this book possible.

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There has also been a group of insightful Arctic scholars, activists, and leaders who have been important to my development as an anthropologist in Inuit communities: Jaypetee Arnakak, Terry Audla, Jean Briggs, Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, Hugh Brody, Béatrice Collignon, Gérard Duhaime, Kirk Ejesiak, Errol Fletcher, Jack Hicks, Lori Idlout, Sandra Inutiq, Sheila Levy, Lawrence Kirmayer, Michael Kral, Nobuhiro Kishigami, Alexina Kublu, Peter Kulchyski, Molly Lee, Mick Mallon, Murielle Nagy, Aaju Peter, Marie Kathrine Poppel, Rasmus Ole Rasmussen, Susan Sammons, Ned Searles, Frank Tester, Nancy Wachowich, George Wenzel, Laurie-Anne White, and Karla Jessen Williamson. I would especially like to thank Christopher Fletcher, who read the whole manuscript and asked me questions of it that I still can’t answer. Pamela Stern has read much of my writing over the past fifteen years of our friendship. Her work and her way of being in academia continue to inspire. I especially want to thank Nelson Graburn, who introduced me to Arctic anthropology (and to his mentor Toshio Yatsushiro), and whose openness to new ideas, places, and people is unparalleled. I think their influence on my work is manifest. Many people have played a role in my development as an anthropologist and writer. Della Pollock, my undergraduate thesis advisor at Chapel Hill, taught me early on about the links between scholarship, intellectual community, and politics. William Peck, a true feminist, introduced me to Walter Benjamin and to Guatemala and never failed to see the enchantment of the world around us. My time at Berkeley was especially important to me. I want first to thank my advisor, Lawrence Cohen, one of the most generous thinkers and writers I know. His ability to recognize and draw out the good in those around him (including me) is something I can only aspire to. Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s rigorous creativity, her meticulous attention to writing, and her sense of what is at stake in doing anthropology are some of the reasons I entered academia and have a lot to do with why I’m still here. Stefania Pandolfo’s commitment to other ways of knowing opened a very important space to do and to think anthropology differently. Irina Paperno’s support and incisive commentary sharpened my thinking immeasurably. The late Gay Becker had an ear for narrative and an intellectual honesty I will never forget. Thank you all. At Harvard, Byron and Mary Jo Good, along with Arthur Kleinman, made the thrill of thinking together an everyday occurrence, both in the Friday morning seminars and in research meetings. The sense of community created around the NIMH Fellowship program cannot be surpassed.

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My colleagues at McGill, in the department of anthropology and beyond, have enriched my work immeasurably. I would especially like to thank Gretchen Bakke, Biella Coleman, Ellen Corin, Andre Costopoulos, Nicole Couture, Michael Cowan, Jayne Engle-Warnick, Jennifer Fishman, John Galaty, Sandra Hyde, Nick King, Christine LaMarre, Thomas LaMarre, Katherine Lemons, Stephanie Lloyd, Setrag Manoukian, Kelly McKinney, Toby Morantz, Kristin Norget, Ron Niezen, Tobias Rees, Colin Scott, Hélène Sicard-Cowan, Peter Skafish, Ismael Vaccaro, Alanna Thain, Yves Winter, and Allan Young for their ongoing friendship and support. And, finally, Margaret Lock has been an unsurpassed mentor during my time in Montreal. I am very grateful for her wisdom and friendship. The research represented in this book would not have been possible without a Social Sciences Research Council International Dissertation Field Research Fellowship (2002–3), a National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant (2002–3), and an International Council for Canadian Studies Scholarship (2002). I am also grateful for a Film Study Center Fellowship, Harvard University, 2006–7. Start-up funding was generously provided by McGill University (2008), and later stages of research were funded by a grant from Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture (FQRSC), établissement de nouveaux professeurs-chercheurs (2011–14) and a SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2013–15). I would also like to thank Anne McKeage, archivist at the Archives of Hamilton Health Sciences and the Faculty of Health Sciences, McMaster University, Lois Hewitt, and Bev Speight for help navigating the archives of the NWT Court Registries. I also want to thank Toshio Yatsushiro for generously sharing his research notes, photographs, and home with me when Nelson Graburn and I visited him in Hawaii in 2004. The ideas in this book have been nurtured in many different and important ways. Portions of the argument were presented in the anthropology departments at Cornell University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Carleton University, and the University of Toronto. I am very grateful for those opportunities to think harder and more collectively about my material. I also want to thank the participants of the Literary Anthropology Advanced Seminar at the School of American Research: Daniella Gandolfo, Angela Garcia, Tobias Hecht, Michael D. Jackson, Adrie Kusserow, Todd Ramon Ochoa, Stefania Pandolfo, and especially its organizers, Anand Pandian and Stuart McLean. My time

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in Santa Fe reinvigorated my sense of anthropology’s possibilities and renewed my desire to write a little better. Felicity Aulino gave this book the generous reading that it so desperately needed, and her comments and interventions pushed me to think harder and more clearly about things I didn’t always want to think about. I think that’s one definition of friendship. Liz Roberts saw things in this book I hadn’t even begun to see. But that’s how it’s always been. Cristiana Giordano’s friendship has been essential to my surviving and even thriving in this academic life. Her readings of this text, as with her readings of countless other texts over the years, gave me the confidence to put them out in the world. Eugene Raikhel has been a constant friend to me and to this text, reading various iterations of my work over the years. Alberto Sanchez immediately got what I was trying to do and could take every argument one step further. Early morning conversations on the stoop with Joshua Moses made the writing of this book far less solitary. Discussions with Clara Han as well as her insightful readings of my work have made this book stronger in so many ways. Jaypeetee Arnakak and my brother, Romeyn Stevenson, read chapter 6 for me and gave me the courage to continue with it. Their influence can be felt throughout the text. My students continue to inspire me in their thoughtfulness, their perseverance, and their generosity. Monica Cuellar, Darcie DeAngelo, and Josh Eisen read the book at a moment when I was inclined to erase large swaths of it, and they made important suggestions that got me back on track. Greg Brass, Gillian Chilibeck, Carolina Pineda, and Nicole Rigillo were already off doing their own things, and those things continually renew my sense of the possibility of anthropology. I have also had a series of remarkable research assistants, including Megan Atkinson, Ariel Appel, Megan Galeucia, and Alonso Gamarra, whose insight and doggedness have made this a better book. Sheehan Moore, who ultimately prefers the endnotes to the text, suffered through countless readings, always gave incisive comments, and was a true friend to me and to the text. Thank you all. I want also to thank all my other colleagues and friends whose work and lives inspire my own. Their thoughts and questions about my own work have been crucial along the way: Anne Allison, John Borneman, Philippe Bourgois, Joyce Canfield, Veena Das, Bob Desjarlais, Duana Fullwiley, Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi, Laura Hubbard, Katherine Ibbett, Frederic Keck, Mariella Pandolfi, Sadeq Rahimi, Lucinda Ramberg, Jennifer Scheper-Hughes, China Scherz, Audra Simpson, Caroline Tait, Lucien

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Taylor, Jason Throop, Radha Vatsal, Ken Vickery, Marina Welker, and Alexei Yurchak. I also want to thank Reed Malcolm, my editor at the University of California Press, for his support, for his sense of humor, and for waiting so long for a manuscript that must have seemed like it would never materialize. I also wish to thank Stacy Eisenstark; my meticulous copy editor, Sharron Wood; and my wonderful project manager, Dore Brown. Finally, I am indebted to my extended family for seeing me through the process of writing this book. Joe, Anna Rosa, Alicia, and Emma Kohn, as well as Christine Stevenson, have always asked important questions of me and of my work and believed, even when I wasn’t sure, that this was an important thing to be doing. My parents have been my most constant advocates and interlocutors. It was my father who taught me to love the north in the first place, and my mother (who ultimately prefers trees to icecaps) who taught me the most significant anthropological tool—the art of listening to what isn’t being said. My mother gave so much of her time to help me finish this book that it belongs partly to her. My brothers Michael, Romeyn, and Jamie have always been my best friends, and their generosity of spirit has shaped who I am and how I try to write. My sons, Benjamin and Milo, with their constant questions and ideas, have made me think harder than I ever have before. As Benjamin told Milo when he asked why God lets bad things happen, “A cow has horns and gives milk.” I hope this book is also about that. And finally my greatest thanks to Eduardo Kohn, who has accompanied me into the dark corners and the startling openings of a life dedicated to making things. I would not, could not, do it alone.

Introduction

uncertainty as mode Sitting around a smoking fire of Arctic heather and driftwood, a young boy, Paul, told me the story of his best friend’s death.1 He was racing his snowmobile when he hit a guide wire. It caught him at the neck. Paul had been to the hospital to visit his friend, and his friend had tried to speak to him but no words would come out. Our conversation around the fire soon moved to other deaths and other stories. But a little while later, reflecting on what happens after death, Paul remarked, “My sister used to say my uncle came back to life as a raven, and that raven is living behind our house.” “Does she still think that?” I asked. “I don’t know.” He pauses for a second and then adds, “It’s still there.” The raven is still there. Is the raven that lives behind the house really Paul’s dead uncle? Perhaps, or perhaps not. But it’s still there.2 Life Beside Itself is a reflection on the role of such ravens in anthropological fieldwork and in life. It is a reflection on the relationship we make with the raven as a form of productive and even hopeful uncertainty, something that stubbornly remains (it’s still there) even as it refuses to be neatly resolved. What, for example, does it mean to be dead? What “thereness” do the dead share with the living? And what does it mean to know something?

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I want to consider a mode of anthropological listening that makes room for hesitation—a way of listening for that which persistently disrupts the security of what is known for sure. This entails taking the uncertain, the confused—that which is not clearly understood—as a legitimate ethnographic object. Fieldwork in uncertainty would be less about collecting facts than about paying attention to the moments when the facts falter. Such attention to moments of doubt, of hesitation, dissolves the professional distance between the ethnographer and her subjects. For a moment both are thrown into the same existential frame: it is not simply that I am documenting the uncommon things my young friend believes, but also that I am arrested by his uncertainty. I am arrested by his sense that he may never know for sure whether the raven is his dead uncle, and yet there is something about the raven’s thereness that is important to him. It seems too that such thereness must be experienced rather than simply cataloged by the intellect. It also seems that uncertainty, like pain (Das 2007), requires not resolution but acknowledgment, and thus implicates me as an anthropologist in a mutual project of describing a world beset by uncertainty. Anthropology, as an act of listening for what is, what has been, or what will be, regardless of whether it makes sense, blurs any easy distinction between the epistemological and the ontological, the methodological and the ethical. It becomes a practice of the self in which, in the interest of making common cause with others, we allow ourselves to be shaken, displaced from our customary dispositions and beliefs and even from our customary forms of love. We could say that the mode of this book is an attention to uncertainty, hesitation, and undecidability with regard to questions of life and death—I don’t know but it’s still there.3 Do we really know what it means to be alive or dead in the same way we know a fact like the date of someone’s death? Can we so easily identify the ways the dead continue to have a life, to have a hold on us? How do we talk about the ways that life is constitutively beside itself? Fieldwork in anthropology often occurs in the shadow of discursive certainties—ways of knowing and acting in the world that keep doubt or uncertainty from emerging. Such fixity works to prevent any transfiguring encounter from taking place—we already know who we are and what we came to find out. Ethnography, as I have come to practice it, entails being attentive to—even opening oneself to—those moments when the facts falter and when things (and selves) become, even just slightly, unhinged. Life is beside itself.

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care as object Like the raven/uncle who comes back to keep his family company, care in Inuit communities often binds the living and the dead in ways that are not always straightforward or obvious. To take seriously Paul’s statement, “I don’t know. It’s still there,” we must account not only for his hesitation over whether the raven is his dead uncle, but also his assertion, in response to whether the raven is the dead uncle, that the raven is still there. The raven/uncle that comes to stand guard behind the house is enacting a form of care, a way of keeping his family company even in death. The raven’s thereness is a form of care. If the mode of Life Beside Itself is uncertainty, its object is care—both the everyday forms of care, like the raven, that I encountered in Inuit communities, but also the forms of bureaucratic care that structured Canadian attitudes and policies toward Inuit during the tuberculosis epidemic (occurring from the 1940s through the early 1960s)4 and the subsequent suicide epidemic (from the 1980s to the present).5 In this book I conceive of care as the way someone comes to matter and the corresponding ethics of attending to the other who matters. Shifting our understanding of care away from its frequent associations with either good intentions, positive outcomes, or sentimental responses to suffering allows us to nuance the discourse on care so that both the ambivalence of our desires and the messiness of our attempts to care can come into view.6 Thus, since people can come to matter in all kinds of ways, it is not an oxymoron to talk about colonial forms of care during the tuberculosis epidemic among the Inuit, even though I hope to make visible the suffering those forms of care produce.7 One of the premises of this book is that there is something to be learned by juxtaposing the response of the Canadian state to the tuberculosis epidemic—which was often couched in humanitarian or lifesaving terms—with the contemporary response to Inuit suicide. Such a juxtaposition allows signature forms of care to come into relief. In fact, what becomes clear through comparing the archival record on the tuberculosis epidemic with contemporary ethnography in a time of suicide is that the forms of bureaucratic care in question may best be characterized as “biopolitical.” Throughout this book I use the term “biopolitical” to describe a form of care and governance that is primarily concerned with the maintenance of life itself, and is directed at populations rather than individuals. However—and this is central to the argument of the book—biopolitics as a logic of care informs not only the

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way policies concerning the population are enacted, but also how individuals engage with other individuals while adhering to the logic of biopolitics—a logic that treats individuals as members of a population.8 Further, these forms of biopolitical care, while working to maintain the physical life of Inuit qua Canadian citizens, may also reveal a kind of indifference on the part of the Canadian state. That is, as the stories in this book will make clear, it often seems to make no difference for whom the state cares. Such indifference is sometimes perceived by Inuit as uncaring, even at times murderous, though it is always couched by the state in terms of benevolence and concern. Examining the Inuit perception that there is something uncaring, even murderous, about such bureaucratic care allows me to address an intransigent problem in Inuit scholarship: how to adequately represent the continuing psychic impact of colonialism (in this case a form of biopolitics) on the Inuit. Given that the development of the Canadian North proceeded through a kind of welfare colonialism (Paine 1977), a form of care in which the best interests of the Inuit were, and continue to be, at the forefront of administrators’ minds, how can we understand the magnitude of the anger expressed by the Inuit over the actions of the state?9 Why is it that Inuit do not always experience such interventions as caring when that appears to be the way they are intended? And also, what can we say about the psychic life of such forms of biopolitics that continue into the (post)colonial present? To represent the complexity of this political moment, I move back and forth between the terms “colonial” and “postcolonial” to describe the situation in Nunavut, Canada’s northernmost territory, in whose Inuit communities I conducted my fieldwork for this book. Nunavut came into being in 1999 as a result of the largest aboriginal land claim in history, with Inuit gaining title to 355,842 square kilometers of land in addition to the creation of Nunavut (approximately two million square kilometers) as a political entity (Statistics Canada 2008: 22; Marecic 1999: 282). There are currently twenty-seven communities in Nunavut (ranging in population from less than five hundred to the capital, Iqaluit, with a population of almost seven thousand) spread out over the northeastern Arctic regions of Canada.10 Thus, my use of the prefix “post” in postcolonial gets at the important fact that the creation of the territory of Nunavut has led to far greater Inuit control over their affairs. But, as the editors of the volume Postcolonial Disorders (2008) contend, our contemporary worlds are often haunted by the colonial in ways we do not fully understand. So I

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also use the term “postcolonial” “to indicate an era and a historical legacy of violence and appropriation carried into the present as traumatic memory, inherited institutional structures and often unexamined assumptions” (Good et al. 2008: 6). While Good et al. speak in the register of haunting, we can also think about the way specific forms of governmentality traverse the so-called colonial and postcolonial periods in Nunavut. Foucault’s concept of governmentality, which Wendy Brown glosses as “techniques of governing that exceed express state action and orchestrate the subject’s conduct toward him or herself” (2005: 43), allows us to broaden our conception of colonial power to include forms of social control embodied in institutions like schools, prisons, and even therapeutic settings, as well as in more diffuse constellations of power and knowledge. Thus it becomes possible to talk about the way certain colonial attitudes and colonial forms of governance have not actually ended, and in fact are powerfully at work, embedded, as they are, in inherited modes of conduct and care, even after the creation of Nunavut. Recognizing that colonial attitudes and power structures persist does nothing to diminish the beauty and promise of Nunavut as a political project.11 It may, however, put a finer point on what it means to decolonize the forms of governance and care that structure the contemporary response to suicide. To draw out the persistence of certain forms of colonial care, the first part of this book, consisting of three chapters, traces the biopolitical insistence on caring anonymously—the insistence that care should be administered indifferently, without it mattering for whom—through the colonial and into the postcolonial period. The second part of the book, consisting of the final three chapters, is an ethnographic exploration of alternative forms of care that have emerged in Inuit communities where I have worked and lived, as well as in places that I have encountered in the words and stories of others. Let me briefly illustrate the importance of something I call “anonymous care,” a concept that threads its way through the first part of the book, with a story that I will flesh out in the first chapter, “Facts and Images.” In 1956 an Inuit woman named Kaujak was taken by ship from her home in Arctic Bay (Ikpiarjuk) to be treated for tuberculosis in a southern hospital. She died en route. The story of Kaujak’s death— what happened, who she was with, where her body was taken—is an enigma that has never been resolved. Each time the ship returned her son would go to the beach where people were loading and unloading its cargo and listen. He was listening, his daughter explained to me, in the

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hope that someday someone would mention her, her death, or anything about her. We could say that he was listening for the end of her life story, for that which was often erased by the Canadian governmental effort to deal with the tuberculosis epidemic among the Inuit, when Inuit were buried in unmarked graves and news of their deaths often took years to make it back to their families. The anonymous care of the Canadian state left Kaujak’s family twice bereft—without Kaujak to be sure, but also without the story of her death. In chapter 2, “Cooperating,” I elaborate on the possibility that such anonymous forms of care, especially when they attend indifferently to the physical lives of others, can, in a certain sense, be understood as murderous. In the late 1950s, when the tuberculosis evacuations were taking place, the Canadian North was imagined as a laboratory for a massive social experiment that would transform Inuit into bona fide Canadian citizens by, among other things, reducing their death rate. The “experiment” demanded Inuit cooperation with the forms and logics of the biopolitical care the state provided—including the evacuation of Inuit sick with tuberculosis, like Kaujak, to southern sanatoria. Between 1953 and 1964, approximately half of the total Inuit population was institutionalized (Nixon 1988: 67), and 75 to 80 percent of those institutionalized were sent to southern sanatoria in places like Hamilton, Toronto, and Moose Factory (Wherrett 1977). Such forms of care, as I will show, hinged on the conception of the Inuit as so many serialized bodies that needed to be brought back to health.12 Not all Inuit cooperated willingly or gladly with the forms of care provided, and the chapter ends with the story of Jamesie, who allowed himself to wonder, in the midst of a scandal about the shooting of Inuit sled dogs in 1956, whether the authorities would shoot the Inuit next. Jamesie, for one, recognized the indifference—or, to use Weber’s term, the unbrotherliness—of biopolitical care. Of course, murder was never the explicit goal of the Canadian state. As the Canadian government struggled to bring the tuberculosis epidemic under control—to care for the Inuit—there was one central certainty: keeping Inuit alive longer was a good thing. Although the tuberculosis mortality rates for Inuit before 1960 are difficult to estimate, it has been suggested that the situation in the early 1950s was “probably worse than that observed in any of the developed and developing countries where data on tuberculosis for the last hundred years are available” (Grzybowski, Styblo, and Dorken 1976). The evacuation of Inuit to southern sanatoria was just one of numerous measures to reduce the death rate and improve the standard of liv-

Introduction | 7

ing among Inuit in the Canadian Arctic. For instance, in chapter 2 I tell the story of a woman who was sent to a residential school as a young child. Upon her arrival she was informed that her name was Miriam— and with the gift of that non-Inuit, or Qallunaaq, name, a whole way of life was occluded.13 Such a disregard for the identity of one Inuit girl is telling, and in the third chapter, “Anonymous Care,” I consider what it means to cooperate with a regime of care that requires life to become an indifferent value—that is, a regime in which it doesn’t matter who you are, just that you stay alive. It turns out that indifference to the identity of the person being cared for is also central to the development, in the late 1950s and 1960s in England and the United States, of the “suicide hotline,” a form of care that was enthusiastically adopted in Nunavut in 1991. However, returning to the question of the psychic life of biopolitics, the ultimate irony of such forms of anonymous care in the colonial/ postcolonial context is that caregivers exhort Inuit to live while simultaneously expecting them to die. Let me explain. With the conjunction of biopolitical and colonial reason in the Canadian Arctic a series of curious logics come into play. That is, one might argue that the “indifference” with which the state views its deceased Inuit may simply be the affective valence of any biopolitical endeavor of public health. Indifference may simply be that “structure of feeling” (Williams 1977) such a population-level intervention requires. One cares, but indifferently. Yet the attempt to think colonialism and biopolitics together requires us, insofar as we are able, to account for the sense of expectancy that accompanies the indifference— the sense in which we, as bureaucrats and citizens of a bureaucratic and biopolitical regime, are also awaiting the death we are indifferently trying to prevent. Thus it happens that the death of the tubercular or the suicidal Inuk comes as no surprise. Today in the (post)colonial moment, Inuit youth suicide is described as an “epidemic,”14 a social emergency (Abele 2009: 52), and a “routine part of life” (Brown 2001).15 As Jack Hicks reports, “During the first nine years of Nunavut’s existence (April 1, 1999, to March 31, 2008), there were 247 suicides. All but three were by Inuit” (2009: 474). The most recently calculated suicide rate for Nunavut is 52.2 per 100,000 inhabitants, which is more than five times higher than the Canadian national average (Statistics Canada 2013).16 During a suicide epidemic such as the one we are witnessing in Nunavut, the focus of caregivers often turns to preserving life. The value of life becomes the ground from which all efforts and arguments about

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caring stem. The self-evident truth of the “suicide apparatus,” its unquestioned certainty, is that life is worth living, that life itself is its own value. Indeed, suicide prevention functions as a structuring discourse in Iqaluit. It inflects much of the daily work that goes on. A kind of sociality has sprung up around suicide prevention, which some Inuit see as a white person’s club. Government bureaucrats, many of them transplants from southern Canada, have described themselves sheepishly as participating in a competition to see who “cares the most” about suicidal Inuit. Yet despite all the attention and resources this issue has received, the suicide rate among Inuit youth in Nunavut continues to rise, and Inuit have, to a large degree, lost faith in the ability of professionals to help. To be a good citizen means to cooperate in this regime of life.17 As postcolonial subjects, Inuit must come to understand that death is not a thinkable option—that death is to be conceived only as the unfortunate consequence of aging or diseased bodies—even as their inability to live up to this norm of staying alive is heralded in endless newspaper articles, radio interviews, and television documentaries. In Nunavut this desire for cooperation is most ardently given voice today in what I call the “suicide apparatus,” the network of researchers, doctors, nurses, school counselors, ministers, teachers, and bureaucrats that have joined forces to confront suicide and keep Inuit alive. The individuals who make up this apparatus are kind, thoughtful people dedicated to improving the lives of Inuit in Nunavut. In what follows I don’t want to diminish the intensity of their efforts nor the decency of their intentions. I was often humbled by the energy, perseverance, and compassion of the people who work in this field. As an anthropologist among Inuit youth, and an interloper in the suicide apparatus, I have tried to listen differently, to provide what Stefania Pandolfo calls “une autre écoute” (2006: 262–63). Pandolfo describes a way of listening that does not fix the other in place but is open to the possibility of questioning, of change, of reformulating lines of debate. To listen differently inevitably means to silence certain voices while amplifying others. This gesture enacts its own violence, but at the same time I hope it is able enact an alternative way of responding to the “call of the world” (Das 2007: 39). And the reality is that death—by accident, violence, or suicide—is something Inuit teenagers know intimately. While undertaking my fieldwork in Iqaluit, Nunavut, I worked closely with a group of about twenty Inuit youth. Several of them attempted suicide while I was there. All of them had witnessed suicides or suicidal acts in their lifetimes. One of

Introduction | 9

them was constantly asking to die. A thirteen-year-old girl I worked with was raped and murdered. Suicide, rather than a philosophical decision or a liminal act, had become part of their everyday fabric of life, and death was something that had to be attended to—again and again. The call of the world, in this case, could not be separated from the call of death. When Danny, an Inuit youth I came to know, recounted his experience with suicide, the words poured from his mouth. We can hear in his words the way suicide saturates his lifeworld, but also, later on, his lack of certainty about what it all means: I seen somebody suicide. I couldn’t do nothing. I tried stopping it. I was too late. My cousin. She killed herself at our old house. That time I went there . . . I can hear somebody from upstairs crying or something. So I started going up, thinking that nobody’s there. I was kind of scared. Nobody’s there. And then when I went upstairs I see my cousin holding a gun on her face. Shotgun. I tried stopping it. She pulled the trigger. I ran out of the house. I was scared. I couldn’t do anything no more. . . . I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do nothing then. Too scared. I didn’t leave my room for three days straight. Till the funeral we went. They were telling me to come out. Go eat. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t do nothing.

Danny continues telling his story a little later: I almost killed someone too before. My mom’s boyfriend, Ezekiel. He was beating up my mom. They wouldn’t open the door when I tried going there. I could hear my mom crying, shouting, getting beat up. So I just kicked the door open. Then I grabbed a harpoon. And then I started hitting Ezekiel on the head and on the back. All over with the harpoon. Just started hitting him. [The description continues . . . ] I went to my grandparents. I was thinking about it. Long time. Then I just started saying, I should just kill myself. I’m going to go jail for sure. I should just kill myself. Something like that . . . Then I started talking to my grandparents, telling them that I almost killed Ezekiel. I was trying to beat him up to death. And they started freaking out and they started telling me lots of shit about killing people’s no good. And I just told them I’m going to kill myself. They started telling me not to think like that. I just told them I can’t help it. After what I’ve seen I can’t help it. He was trying to stab my mom.

A few years after the incidents he recounts, and during the time I was in Iqaluit, both Danny and his friend Bobby, whom I would come to know well, participated in a suicide-prevention training course. Danny was really proud of himself for sticking it out, for hauling himself out of bed to get to the Brown Building, where the course was held, by 9 a.m.

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every day. After the course was over I asked Bobby how it went. He told me that the “instructors had been talking about how lots of people when they commit suicide, they think their life will get better. When they said that, Danny just looked at me and we both said, ‘It probably will,’ and we just started cracking up. Everybody else was just looking at us. We couldn’t stop laughing.” The image Bobby gave me of his laughter without end challenges the confidence of the discourse on suicide. It indexes a darker and perhaps less certain way of thinking about life and death, one that such suicide prevention trainers usually disavow. After what Danny has experienced it is not so clear that life always trumps the possibility of a life after death—and it may be that any hope one has lies beyond life itself. We witness a life that is beside itself with both laughter and grief. It became evident to me that presuming the value of life, staging it as the ultimate good, could be as dangerous as negating it. If listening to the pain in the lives of suicidal youth is only a means to the end of keeping Inuit youth alive, one ceases to hear much of anything. Listening— when life is radically in question—meant taking very seriously uncertainty about life and death. Only when I was able to hold life as a value in abeyance could the outlines of a more indistinct, darker perhaps, and definitely more uncertain way of thinking and caring come to the surface.

image as method If the mode of this book is uncertainty, and its object is the forms of care in the Canadian Arctic, its method is an attention to the images through which we think and live. The raven, for instance, is an image that works on several registers. For my friend it is an image of a form of care—a dead uncle keeping vigil behind the house. For me it is also an image of a kind of ambiguity—undecidability—that which does not need to be resolved. Is the raven really the dead uncle? It doesn’t matter. The raven is still there. Images—in the broad sense that I use the term—are useful precisely because they can capture uncertainty and contradiction without having to resolve it. (The raven is still there, whether or not it is the dead uncle.) I hope that drawing our anthropological attention back to imagistic rather than discursive modes of knowing allows us to be faithful to a whole range of contradictory experiences that have often gone unthought in ethnography.

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There is, however, a certain resistance to thinking the image in anthropology. Michael Taussig describes a “hiatus or no-man’s land between picture and text in the anthropological tradition” (2009: 268), and Lucien Taylor (1996) describes anthropology as “iconophobic.” Images may have a power over us that we can’t fully control: it’s always difficult to translate them into the singular and incontestable facts that the social sciences seem to demand. It’s difficult to contain photographic and filmic images as straightforward representations, because, in a certain sense, they drag the world along with them. While Taylor refers almost exclusively to photographic and film images in that influential essay, in Life Beside Itself I want to think the image in a more general sense. That is, I want to try to understand what the disparate kinds of images that anthropologists encounter—photographs, films, memories, sounds images—have in common. What, I want to ask, is imagistic about an image? Walter Benjamin’s writings have proved helpful to me in thinking the image in this more general sense, since he is not constrained by a need to distinguish between visual, sonic, or even verbal images. In fact, for Benjamin, words themselves can serve as images and draw to them the multiple sensations corresponding to the word. For him, the memory of his childish way of mispronouncing the name of a nursery rhyme (“mummerehlen” instead of “Muhme [Auntie] Rehlen”) immerses him again in the mundane everyday sounds of his childhood. What I hear is the brief clatter of the anthracite as it falls from the coal scuttle into a cast-iron stove, the dull pop of the flame as it ignites in the gas mantle, and the clinking of the lampshade on its brass ring when a vehicle passes by on the street. And other sounds as well, like the jingling of the basket of keys, or the ringing of the two bells at the front and back steps. And, finally, there is a little nursery rhyme.18 (2006: 98)

The story of the mummerehlen belongs to a book called Berlin Childhood around 1900, in which Benjamin calls up image after image of his childhood in an attempt to inoculate himself against the pain of saying goodbye to his native city for the last time.19 In the book he describes images such as the memory of the mummerehlen as “precipitates of experience” and says that they are neither to be understood as straightforwardly biographical, nor even true. Instead, such images record the “whole distorted world of childhood.” Like a precipitate in chemistry, Benjamin’s images are condensed and concentrated forms of the original—that which falls out of solution.

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While Benjamin turns to images of his past—precipitates of experience—in order to work over the pain of separation from Berlin, the dreamer descends into the night to experience the everyday world transformed into a collage of images. For, as Freud insisted, dreams “think predominantly in visual images” (2010: 79). Since dreams are “without the power of conceptual speech,” what they wish to say they must express “pictorially” (2010: 110). Although dreams may occasionally make use of remnants of speech and other nonvisual material, still, according to Freud, what is characteristic of the dream “are only those elements of their content which behave like images, which are more like perceptions, that is, than they are like mnemic presentations” (2010: 79). The dream, according to Freud, hallucinates. But why? Why are our hidden desires and lurking animosities given expression through the image? It is Michel Foucault who asks this question for us, the question that always seems to go begging in discussions of what an image is. “Why,” he asks, “does the psychological meaning take shape in an image, instead of remaining implicit or dissolving into the limpidity of a verbal formulation?” (1993: 36). Foucault, elaborating on Freud, provides two answers to this question. First, the image is “a language which expresses without formulating, an utterance less transparent for meaning than the word itself”; and second, the satisfaction of desire has a “primitively imaginative character,” that is, “desire first finds satisfaction in the narcissistic and irreal mode of fantasy” (1993: 36). Thinking of an image as that which “expresses without formulating,” it is possible to see the kinship between the kinds of images I have discussed so far—visual, sonic, even linguistic images. For, as Foucault goes on to argue, we grasp someone’s anger also through the vocal melody of his voice, not only “by a meaningful grasp of the words he uses and the sentence structures he puts into play.” The angry man does not need to formulate his anger in order to express it, nor, as I point out in chapter 5, does a depressed teenager need to formulate her depression.20 That images resist formulation is something Roland Barthes (1977) also draws our attention to through what he calls the “third” or “obtuse” meaning of an image. After meticulously describing the informational and symbolic meaning of a couple of stills from one of Eisenstein’s films, Barthes asks, “Is that all?” and he responds, “No, for I am still held by the image” (53). For Barthes, the third meaning of an image is what goes beyond the meanings it communicates or the information it symbolizes (the image’s “obvious meaning”). It is the way an image can “hold” us with something beyond formulation that makes an image an image.21

Introduction | 13

And, as Freud teaches us, there is something in us that craves the image in its plenitude rather than only the facts in their austerity. Joan Didion, in her book The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), written after the sudden death of her husband, captures this longing. She recounts a dream she has after her husband’s death in which they are to fly to Honolulu with a group of other people. Realizing that her husband is not with her, she leaves the group to wait for him. One after another the planes take off, leaving her, alone, on the tarmac. In analyzing her dream she asks herself: Did I feel abandoned, left behind on the tarmac, did I feel anger at John for leaving me? Was it possible to feel anger and simultaneously to feel responsible? I know the answer a psychiatrist would give to that question. The answer would have to do with the well-known way in which anger creates guilt and vice versa. I do not disbelieve this answer but it remains less suggestive to me than the unexamined image, the mystery of being left alone on the tarmac at Santa Monica Airport watching the planes take off one by one. (2005: 161)

Didion wants the image to remain suggestive rather than to be fully decoded.22 Turning to images as an ethnographic method means listening for those moments when the formulation of a fact—even an indisputable fact transmitted over CB radio such as, “Your mother passed away of tuberculosis on the train from Churchill to Hamilton”—does not satisfy. This is where Freud’s intuition about the link between image and desire comes in. We do not always want the truth in the form of facts or information; often we want it in the form of an image. What we want, perhaps, is the opacity of an image that can match the density of our feelings. We want something to hold us. So Sakiassie, whose mother passed away on the train to a southern sanatorium, was hardly able put into words, to formulate, his own desire to know more of what happened to his mother. For years he goes to the beach when the C. D. Howe arrives and listens for news of her. Years go by but he doesn’t hear anything. I suggested above that he was listening for the end of her life story. And to a certain extent he was. But when I went with his daughter to conduct an interview with someone who had been with Kaujak on the train as she lay dying, what he shared with us were the sonic and visual images of her death. First our interlocutor described the animal noises she made, and then the derision of the nurses who wanted her to keep quiet, and then he gave us an image

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of her there, laid out in the hallway that he had to traverse to get to the bathroom. It is Kaujak’s story, and it is true, but it is a story told in images, not with facts. What did she die of? How old was she? What was her heart rate? None of these things we find out. Instead we have an image of her body left alone near a bathroom after being ridiculed by some nurses. We want such images—they satisfy what Freud thought of as our “primitive” desires—and yet they knock the air out of us. The image takes hold of us, registering, but not formulating, the fact that we die, and that sometimes even in death we are misunderstood. Could that ever be simply a fact? The distinction I am making between facts and images draws on Walter Benjamin’s distinction between information and storytelling. Benjamin contrasts storytelling with the information that newspapers seek to convey. He suggests that information, unlike a story, “lays claim to prompt verifiability. The prime requirement [of information] is that it appear ‘understandable in itself’ ” (1968a: 89). Storytelling, on the other hand, “does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report” (1968a: 91). Neither does it aspire to appear understandable in itself. In fact, one of Benjamin’s storytellers says, “You can learn nothing from the [news]papers.” “They always want to explain everything to you” (Benjamin 2005: 660). Images, like stories, resist explanation and therefore resist the demand for objectivity that is caught up in the question of replicability. In anthropology we often think of ourselves as attending to what happens repeatedly. Our version of the empirical thus depends on a conception of the everyday that is stabilized through repetition—of what is repeatedly, even ubiquitously, the case. Repetition, for anthropologists, becomes something of a harbinger of ethnographic truth. But I think there are other anthropologies to be done, in this case an anthropology through the image. Sometimes it is the truth of the possible as opposed to the actual that needs to be conveyed. Sometimes it is the psychic truth of a negation or an absence, or of doubt (as it is with the raven). But sometimes the images also point to the way the everyday is best communicated not through the piling up of examples, but through the condensation of experience in an image that cannot be approached as a fact to be tested. Another kind of approach to the world needs to be forged, another way of dealing with the image, which, like the raven’s resolute presence, has the potential to turn our everyday world upside down.

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I should note here that although this is an ethnographic book—one that attends to the words, gestures, sights and sounds, thoughts and feelings that emerge in everyday life—I do not privilege the factual above other less certain ways of knowing. This means that I do not privilege what is called social science literature above what is called fiction or philosophy, and thus stories from disparate sources find their way to my work.23 Although most of the stories I tell come from the Inuit communities of Iqaluit, Pangnirtung, and Arctic Bay, I also draw from ethnography and literature from other parts of the world. In this way I work more like a collector who brings disparate objects, images, and narratives into a constellation of her own making than an archaeologist with commitments to maintaining the integrity of the site, its contexts and its relationships. Sometimes, as in chapter 5, the collection of ethnographic objects occurs as a dreamlike set of associations, where memories and objects of other times and places intrude onto the subject at hand, just as in Stuart McLean’s work peat-bog corpses are regurgitated from the black goo of the Irish and Scandinavian bogs to become an “unsettling (yet secretly familiar?) presence among the living” (2007: 63). At other times, as in chapter 4, the collection occurs more selfconsciously—as a way of disrupting the hegemony of Walter Benjamin’s “homogenous empty time” (1968a: 261) by bringing events from different times and places into conversation. In my own attempt to craft this other kind of anthropology something curious happens—something I didn’t expect or fully understand as I began to write—that is, the book’s mode (uncertainty), its method (image), and its object (care) begin to merge. In the second half of this book I describe an alternative politics of care, one that is concerned less with facts and with certainty and more with the uncertain and imagistic ways of knowing the other I have been describing. I take for granted the fact that while anonymous care may be a dominant mode of being together in our contemporary world, and one that structures politics as usual, it does not exhaust the possibilities for attention and care for others. Thus chapter 4, “Life-of-the-Name,” relates how the way in which the name-soul of a teenager who dies in a snowmobile accident comes to reside in the newborn baby who carries his name. In the baby, Daniel’s life continues. Through Daniel’s story, I consider the political possibilities of living mournfully, that is, of refusing the radical separation of life and death.24 Can we imagine or locate another kind of politics, another form of caring, that conceives of life both in its exposure to death and in its imagistic relation to the other, to others? Mournful

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life—that term I have developed for an alternative way of thinking about life and the forms of care that sustain it—is not primarily concerned with keeping people physically alive. Instead, who one is matters intensely, and caring occurs through the recognition of and responsibility to the unsettling image of the other. The next chapter, “Why Two Clocks?,” gets its name from the caption of an image found in a government publication. The image reveals a tidy Inuit tent that features two alarm clocks side by side. I argue that as anonymous/biopolitical forms of care are indifferent to who is being kept alive, they are also indifferent to forms of temporality that exceed the time of the clock. The anonymity of the person being cared for is thus related to the homogenization and instrumentalization of the time of care, represented in the image of a single clock. “Why two clocks?” is thus a question that haunts Arctic administration to this day. The chapter begins with the story of Sila, an Inuit teenager, who can’t get out of bed and then describes an evening spent “driving around” going nowhere in particular, having nothing to accomplish. Returning to a series of dreams that Sila recounts to me years later, I reflect on ways of being in time that disrupt the notion of time as a resource to make good on. The coexistence of past and present, the dead and the alive in Sila’sdreams make the question “Why two clocks?” seem particularly apt. The last chapter, “Song,” which begins with the story of a twentyone-year-old Inuit youth who is charged with arson turns to the possibility of an imagistic form of care we might call song. As an anthropologist, a friend, and an activist, I was personally caught up in the tumult of emotions and events that followed from the charge. Reflecting on that train of events, I try to describe something other than simply the violence that suffuses the situation. Instead I look for a way to talk about a form of care, figured as a kind of sound image—or song—that is not primarily interested in the assignation of identity, essence, or even guilt but instead recognizes that the other is present. This presence, figured in the prologue as the breath that passes from an old woman to her daughter when they are throat singing, does not always depend on the physical presence of another body. Song can be a way of conjuring up a life that is very much “beside itself.” This book reflects two periods of fieldwork. The first involved working alongside a group of Inuit youth on a video project. Working in and through existing community groups and Inuit organizations, I helped bring together a group of youth who were interested in producing a video on the subject of suicide. In the end this strategy would position

Introduction | 17

me as a “participant-observer” in the classic sense, but in a mutual project that was partly of my own design. The group, which met for more than a year, was a fluid coalition of youth, youth workers from the community, and interested parents. At the beginning the group met twice a week to brainstorm, hold writing workshops, and to get training in video production skills. Over time the alliance became less formal; meetings were called only when they were perceived to be necessary, and groups of two or three individuals would sometimes meet independently to organize specific events and activities. Eventually the group took on a life of its own, becoming a theater group and finally an Inuktitut-language gospel choir. As I came to know the youth involved I also came to love them and, in the process, to desire their life. Fieldwork became a mutual project of reflection on the impenetrable residues of daily life—the things that persist, like the raven, in their uncertainty. This meant asking whether it is possible to articulate my own desire for the life of an other without making that desire an imperative—without, that is, demanding that he or she cooperate in assuming my desires. It has also meant asking whether there are different affective and political bonds to be formed, different ways of caring that presume neither the certainty of life as ultimate value nor the discreteness of life and death. In undertaking my work with Inuit youth during a time of suicide, I came to realize that the time of the discourse on suicide was not fully its own, that the discourse on suicide echoed yet another discourse, that of the colonial discourse on public health. Hearing the uncanny echoes of one form of speech in another—the way, as we will see, becoming “clean” and “staying alive” had been figured as the impossible ends toward which Inuit must strive—made me realize that I needed to do fieldwork in the colonial archive as well, which represented the second period of my fieldwork. This meant unearthing the voices and photographs of Inuit who had been taken south from their Arctic communities to be cured of tuberculosis in the 1950s and 1960s. After collecting hundreds of such images, I then worked to reunite some of the photographs and recordings I found, mostly in the archives of McMaster University’s Health Sciences Library, with the family members of the people captured by film and tape more than forty years ago. In so doing, I gathered many stories of the time of tuberculosis and came to know people still searching for news of the people they lost to tuberculosis. This research into the images and sounds of that period of colonial history provided the material I needed to be able to describe what I have

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been calling the psychic life of biopolitics—the way our desire to “make live” at the level of a population can sometimes be experienced as murderous. In the face of such desires that are not, and can never be, voiced (suicide prevention, like tuberculosis eradication, by definition wants only to be life promoting), articulating a mournful form of care, in which the death of the other is what allows for new life to exist, seems paramount. Does admitting to the murderousness that makes us human allow us to face up to the consequences of our contemporary forms of care? The image of the raven, as both a tentative expression of death in life and an expression of the uncertainty of what it means to be alive or dead, allows us to let go, if only for a moment, of the dichotomies such as clean/dirty and alive/dead that have structured our ways of caring. What if staying alive has something to do with witnessing the death in life? What if dying, and being borne along by those who love you, is also a way of being alive? How might we come to care for life that is constitutively beside itself, life that could never be fully itself?

chapter 1

Facts and Images

On August 10, 1956, an Inuit woman named Kaujak left the Inuit community of Arctic Bay on the ship the C. D. Howe to begin her journey to the Mountain Sanatorium in Hamilton, Ontario.1 For months Kaujak had been getting weaker and weaker. She was increasingly unable to hunt and fish, and the medical personnel on the patrol ship had diagnosed her with tuberculosis. Her grandson Sakiassie, standing on the shore, followed the ship with his eyes until it passed out of sight beyond Uluksan Point. He never saw her again. In June 2008 I received an email from Anna, Sakiassie’s daughter, who for several years had been trying to figure out what happened to Kaujak.2 “My name is Anna,” she wrote. “A few years ago I was in search of my dad’s grandmother that passed away on the train to Hamilton[;] they unloaded her body before reaching Hamilton.” The only trace of Kaujak Anna had been able to find was an index card from the municipal offices with Kaujak’s name and disc number typewritten on it. Handwritten in ink was the word “Dead” and the year “1956.” A month later I arrived in Arctic Bay, a hamlet of approximately eight hundred people at the north end of Baffin Island, to speak to Sakiassie and other survivors of the tuberculosis epidemic that ravaged Canadian Inuit communities during the 1950s and ’60s. Surrounded by high hills and rocky cliffs, the houses in “Ikpiarjuk” (literally, “the pocket”) cluster around an almost landlocked bay. Children play unattended on the gravel roads and at the shore, skipping rocks and jumping from one 21

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piece of ice to the other. ATVs and pickup trucks careen through the streets, spewing rocks and dust, but inside Sakiassie’s house it is neat, orderly, and quiet. His house looks out at the bay toward Uluksan Point. Anna serves as my interpreter as we begin to talk. Kaujak raised Anna’s father, Sakiassie, as her son after his own father drowned in a hunting accident when Sakiassie was only a year old. Anna tells me that Sakiassie was very attached to Kaujak and that she “was able to do things a man could do. She was a very good fisher. She would go fishing, dry fish.” Each spring when Sakiassie goes fishing, “a lot of the techniques [he uses] he learned from her.” Anna continues, “She was very able woman . . . She was able of doing things that men were capable of doing. She was able to build qarmat [sod houses]. The year before she left she couldn’t build the qarmaq and she developed an infection on her stomach and on her back . . . When the ship came in to screen people for TB they screened her, and that’s when they sent her away.” Sakiassie was fourteen years old when Kaujak was sent away on the C. D. Howe. I ask him whether he remembered the day of his grandmother’s departure. “Yes, I remember very clearly,” he tells me. Her illness had been getting worse and she began to pay visits to family members, even distant relatives, saying she might not live long enough to see them again. Sakiassie was very worried. “It was very painful when the helicopter came from the ship to pick her up to move her,” he tells me. Kaujak was taken from her camp outside town to the ship where the medical team was waiting. Kaujak tested positive for tuberculosis. When the x-ray technician discovered a shadow on the lung, Inuit generally weren’t allowed to return to shore for fear they would never return to the ship. But for some reason they made an exception for Kaujak. She made a last trip to shore in a small skiff. Sakiassie didn’t get to speak to her. He was unloading the ship’s supplies at the time, and he saw his grandmother smiling and posing for a photograph—all from a distance.3 That fall—it was in October, though Sakiassie doesn’t remember the exact date—the Hudson’s Bay Company manager called him on the radio to let him know that Kaujak was dead. Nothing else was said. For years after that, when the ship returned on its yearly patrol, Sakiassie would go to the beach where people were loading and unloading its cargo, and patients were disembarking after being at the sanatorium, to listen. He listened for his grandmother’s name in the hope that someone would mention her, her death, or anything about her. As Anna described it:

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Each year, whenever the ship came in to do a screening, he would rush over to where the patients’ area was near the ship to see if he could overhear anyone talking about his grandmother. He was afraid to ask about her so he wouldn’t ask. He would just hang around to listen to see if anyone would mention her—to see if they’ve seen her or there’s any news of her—and he would check to see if she was on the boat . . . He did this for many years.

I was confused and tried to clarify. “Each year when the ship came . . . he still didn’t know if she was alive or not?” She left in August and in October they heard she had died and that’s all that was said. No mention of where her body was, how she died, nothing. They were just informed that she had passed away. That’s all the news that they got.

identifying inuit Kaujak’s story, although unusual in that she died on the train and not in the southern sanatorium, is not an unfamiliar one. In the 1950s and ’60s tuberculosis was known as the “Scourge of the North,” (Albrecht 1965: 153) and “that ubiquitous disease of the Northland” (Ward 1952: 292).4 Between 1954 and 1964 approximately 8,600 Inuit patients were looked after in southern hospitals, and $12.5 million was spent on their hospitalization (Moore 1964: 1193). In 1956, the year Kaujak left Arctic Bay for the sanatorium, the tuberculosis mortality rate among Inuit was calculated to be 232 per 100,000 (Grygier 1994: 84) and it was estimated that one out of every seven Inuit was in a southern hospital being treated for tuberculosis (Phillips 1967: 219–20). Dealing with the epidemic was a priority for Canada’s Northern Administration and especially the Indian Health Services Department,5 and segregation of tubercular Inuit in southern sanatoria was considered the most expedient way to curb the rate of infection (Ward 1952; Phillips 1957; Grzybowski, Styblo, and Dorken 1976: S8).6 In the Eastern Arctic where Kaujak lived, most of the tuberculosis evacuations occurred via the C. D. Howe, the ship the RCMP used for their annual patrol of the region. The ship was equipped with “a complete sick-bay, operating room, x-ray room, dental office and laboratory, and a complete medical party and dentist to staff it” (Moore 1956: 232). In fact, the C. D. Howe, which appears in many of the photographs and stories I collected, becomes something of a minor character in the history of the period. Leah Idlout d’Argencourt, an Inuit woman from Pond Inlet who published an account of her evacuation in the

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magazine Inuit Today, captured the momentousness of the C. D. Howe’s annual arrival: “The first glimpse we had of the C. D. Howe was always amazing to me. Rounding the side of a steep cliff, she would suddenly appear in view. I found it hard to believe that a thing so enormous could move so fast. Her white bow seemed to cut through the water like a knife, sending huge waves that hissed and rolled all the way to where we would be waiting at the water’s edge” (1977: 33). After the ship dropped anchor, Inuit would be brought onboard and screened for tuberculosis, and those suspected of harboring the disease would be kept on the ship to begin their journey south. Being transported from a life in Canada’s North—either from a small settlement or an ancestral hunting camp out on land—to a hospital where none of the doctors or nurses spoke Inuktitut and Inuit patients were largely confined to their beds, was an experience of radical disjuncture.7 D’Argencourt said of her trip to the South that it “changed my life so completely it made it difficult for me [afterward] to remain a full Inuk living in the North” (1977: 31). In 1951, at twelve years of age, she was sent by ship to a southern sanatorium all by herself. It all happened so fast I scarcely had time to think. By the time we arrived back on the ship, I knew for sure it was true, that I was really going, although I was totally unprepared and didn’t even have any baggage to take along. . . . I hardly remember anything that was happening or being said to me at the time of departure except that my dear oldest sister Rebecca (Qitsualik) was crying. Was I going away for good? I didn’t feel sick. Was I going to die in the white man’s hospital? It terrified me to think of these things. (1977: 35)

By 1959, Otto Schaefer, the doctor onboard the 1955 and 1957 Eastern Arctic Patrol, would write, “Many old Indians and Eskimos are still more afraid of evacuation to the white man’s land than of death” (Schaefer 1959: 249). In addition to uncertainty about how long Inuit would be separated from their families, the inability of the doctors, nurses, and hospital administrators to communicate with their Inuit patients often led to confusion about the identity of their Inuit charges, especially the children. In 1950, the governmental list of Inuit in southern hospitals had 119 names. Patient identification details for 42 of those listed were “either omitted or incomplete, or wrong” (Grygier 1994: 27). Children quite literally went missing, some of them eventually adopted into white families in the South (Grygier 1994: 126). Donald Marsh, bishop of the Anglican Diocese of the Arctic from 1950 to 1973, dramatized this confusion in a collection of short stories

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he wrote about the Inuit, Cry the Beloved Eskimo. In one of the stories collected there an Ottawa bureaucrat wonders what to do with fifteen Inuit children cured of tuberculosis and ready to return home from the hospital. “ ‘They can’t speak a word of English,’ says the bureaucrat helplessly, ‘we don’t know who they are or where they came from’ ” (Marsh 1991: 187). In addition to the confusion about identities, Inuit patients who died in southern hospitals were generally buried in unmarked graves in southern cemeteries. Families were not always informed of these deaths or the whereabouts of the burial sites.8 Even when the news did arrive, it was only a bald statement that so-and-so had died. There were no details about the cause of death, no information about the burial, no letter of explanation or condolence—just a radio call or cable or, later, a telephone call through an official (Grygier 1994: 128). Reflecting on the situation years later, an Anglican missionary to the Inuit concluded, “They did not think the Eskimo people were worthy of being informed of where they precisely were, and didn’t think it important that relatives should be informed, that parents should be told where their children were. There was none of that. The authorities didn’t think it important that they should get their names right” (cited in Grygier 1994: 123). In some sense Sakiassie was lucky that he heard so quickly about his grandmother’s death. Other Inuit would spend years wondering whether their child or mother or father was dead or alive, and some would never know for sure (Grygier 1994). Sulaa Kublu didn’t hear anything for two years. When the C. D. Howe medical ship came to Arctic Bay for the first time in 1951, [my husband] Kublu was x-rayed and told he would have to go to hospital in the South. It was two years later, in May 1953, when the RCMP told me that my husband was coming back in the summer. They told me he had gained a lot of weight and looked healthy again. But only his belongings arrived with the boat that summer. I looked for him at the place where they kept the patients on the boat, but he wasn’t there. When I finally realized what happened, I went numb with shock. People had to hold onto me. For several days I couldn’t cry, sleep or react in any way. I was only a breathing, existing thing with no life in me. (Kublu 1978: 63–64)

The striking thing is that although the authorities were uncertain who had died, and who was buried where, they were very clear about how many Inuit they had in their care. We know, for instance, that in

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1956, the year that Kaujak left Arctic Bay, “1,578 Eskimos with active tuberculosis were in sanatoria. That was one-seventh of the Eskimo population, and it did not include Eskimos fallen prey to other diseases or accidents.” In fact, as officials liked to point out, “the largest Eskimo communities were the tuberculosis wards of hospitals in the cities of southern Canada” (Phillips 1967: 219–20). The statistics are precise: 1,578 Eskimos, no more, no less.

inuit as statistics Keeping track of Inuit became a central concern for the Northern Administration, which found it difficult to accept and work with the Inuit lack of surnames. Administrators argued for the necessity of a system that “would enable the government administrators to distinguish each Eskimo from every other and facilitate the taking of censuses, the keeping of records and the registration of vital statistics” (Roberts 1975: 2). Dr. A. J. MacKinnon, a medical officer in Pangnirtung, wrote in 1935 to the Department of the Interior with a suggestion—that at birth each Inuit child “be given an identity disc on the same lines as the army identity disc and the same insistence that it be worn at all times. The novelty of it would appeal to the natives” (Roberts 1975: 6). MacKinnon wrote again in 1936, restating his case and emphasizing, “As far as the Eskimo is concerned, it does seem to me that this names business is of no great concern to them. They have got on nicely for a long time without cluttering up their minds with such details” (Roberts 1975: 8). Despite some resistance to the idea of identification discs, including the concern that “misunderstanding might easily arise if Eskimos wore chains” (Roberts 1975: 8), in 1941 the Northwest Territories Council passed a motion to institute a “system of identification discs for Eskimos,” which meant that each Inuit would be given a serial number (much like a social insurance number today) that he or she would be required to wear on a pressed fiber tag around the neck. By August of that year, officials on the Eastern Arctic Patrol were distributing the discs. The response, according to the arctic administrators, was enthusiastic. “Everywhere the idea of native identification has been welcomed by all concerned,” was how the superintendent of the Arctic described their reception (Roberts 1975: 15). Although each disc number was unique and designated a specific individual, the individuals identified were also, in an important sense,

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equivalent. Derek Smith has suggested that the disc list system reduced “the Eskimo population to identical constituent atoms of the same type for the purposes of state operations” (Smith 1993: 67). Thus, as MacKinnon made very clear, it didn’t actually matter what the names of the Inuit were; it simply mattered that a system be developed that would allow administrators to enumerate them. Such equivalence—the ability to replace one item in a series with another—is at the heart of the colonial and bureaucratic reason through which the Canadian Arctic was governed. As the anthropologist Robert Williamson reports, the RCMP depended heavily on the disc numbers and would even use them in their reports without any corresponding names (Williamson 1988: 255). This “turn toward seriality and uniformity” (Duttlinger 2008: 82) is something to which Walter Benjamin, writing in Europe in the 1930s, was also attuned. Calling our attention to the way a work of art’s “aura” withdraws in the age of mechanical reproduction, when every original begets a duplicate, he describes this as a symptomatic shift in our mode of perception, our way of seeing the world. “What withers in the age of the technological reproducibility of the work of art,” writes Benjamin, “is the latter’s aura.” More importantly, “the process is symptomatic; its significance extends far beyond the realm of art” (Benjamin 2008: 22). The destruction of the aura is a signature of a new mode of perception, one “whose ‘sense for all that is the same in the world’ has so increased that, by means of reproduction, it extracts sameness even from what is unique. Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing significance of statistics” (2008: 23–24). Borrowing Benjamin’s words, the disc numbers given to the Inuit, like the withering of the aura of the artwork, are the signature of a perception whose sense for all that is the same in the world makes it irrelevant who actually dies. The analogy MacKinnon makes between disc numbers and dog tags is telling. Military dog tags designate bodies whose very lives are interchangeable (Does it really matter which soldier dies? Is there such a thing as a unique soldier?), as well as bodies that are in some sense the property of the state. The pressed fiber tags Inuit were supposed to wear seem to work in a similar fashion. They designate interchangeable lives (and deaths) that somehow belong to the Canadian state. In any event, the disc list system, like their model the military “dog” tag, brings to light a lingering relationship between seriality, substitutability, and animality. Abe Okpik, the Inuit man who in 1969 would be

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appointed to lead the government’s effort to replace disc numbers with surnames, described the introduction of disc numbers in an interview: How it started was . . . when they were setting up the United Nations in 1945. I was sixteen years old then, but I listened to it on the radio. Lester B. Pearson made a presentation . . . he was representing Canada at that time. He said they should do something about the North—they were dying like muskrats, or something to that effect . . . There was only two hospitals in the whole of the Northwest Territories run by Anglican mission, and maybe three by Roman Catholic. There was no administration. So in 1945, when Parliament opened the Family Allowance and Old Age Pension, they started the numbers. (Alia 1994: 30)

Okpik’s account links the implementation of disc numbers to both the emergence of a kind of “humanitarian reason” (see Fassin 2012) and the establishment of the United Nations, as well as to the incorporation of the Inuit into the social welfare state.9 But he also remembers Lester B. Pearson, who would later become prime minister of Canada, saying that something had to be done because the people of the North were dying like muskrats. I haven’t been able to find any reference to Lester B. Pearson using those words, although I have little doubt he or someone else did say something to that effect. But what did Pearson mean? That their deaths, or the rates of their deaths, were somehow not quite dignified? That they were dying as animals do, without distinction, en masse? Obviously Okpik is outraged. What might it mean to die like a muskrat, without even a name to identify you? What might it mean to a sixteen-year-old to hear his people described in that way? This is a question that relates intimately to what I will call the psychic life of biopolitics. That is, Pearson was trying to promote a lifesaving initiative in the Canadian Arctic, but the Inuit were left feeling like that very impulse to save lives actually effaced who they were, their histories, their cultures, their desires. They became so many animals to be saved from death. The association of Inuit with animality, and animality with seriality, is ubiquitous in the archival record of the postwar era. Alex Stevenson, a senior administrator in Canada’s Department of Northern Affairs, suggested to a CBC reporter that it was the lack of surnames and the “migratory habits” of Inuit families that “cause each Eskimo to be given a special identity disc at birth. This greatly facilitates location and identification” (Barry 1961).10 In the same CBC program the chief doctor and executive officer onboard the C. D. Howe, Dr. J. D. Harmon, applauded the RCMP for their efforts with the medical survey, crediting their “master list of statistics” with permitting the Eskimo to be located

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so efficiently. “I doubt whether they [the RCMP] will ever receive the credit that’s really due to them. Without the census, without the tabulating . . . without the actual locating of these Eskimo, this Patrol could not be possible.” The doctor’s words carry echoes of the biologist, the lab technician, but also the police officer. Inuit need to be located and identified—and doing so presents challenges that are at once bureaucratic and linked to techniques of animal husbandry. Dr. Harmon describes realizing that someone from the RCMP’s list had failed to arrive at the ship to be tested: I took the helicopter, went ashore, found his tent, and on examination found that this man was obviously a pulmonary or chest case. He was brought to the ship by helicopter and examination confirmed the diagnosis of a virulent, far advanced, pulmonary tuberculosis. Now the interesting thing about this man [was that] he was the village storyteller, and being the storyteller, his contacts, obviously, were generous to say the least. We feel that this is a particularly interesting case and confirms our opinion that it is absolutely essential that we cover every possible Eskimo available.

What the doctor says makes good epidemiological sense. His language, however, reminds us of the ways statistics are a technique of surveillance, a way of tracking and “covering” the “migratory” Inuit that reimagines them as “cases” and “vectors” of a devastating disease—so many muskrats dying in the North. The serialization of human bodies, which is at once central to many public health efforts and also always potentially dehumanizing, becomes quite literal in the Inuit case (see Tester 1993).11 As Inuit arrived at the C. D. Howe for examination, the nurse made a record of each person by name and by identity disc number. Then a new serial number was recorded on the patient’s chart, and that serial number was written with “ball point pen on the back of the left hand of the Eskimo concerned.” On one level, the dog tags and the writing of the number onto the Inuit’s skin are both innocuous gestures intended to keep track of potentially sick Inuit.12 On another level, the inscriptions mark the degree to which Inuit bodies actually became statistics in the eyes of the Canadian state and its agents.13 At the very least, what Kaujak’s story makes clear is that the Northern Administration at times seemed to lose sight of the fact that Inuit were anything other than bodies needing care. Who an individual Inuit was—her life story and familial connectedness—no longer mattered.14 In fact, “The only legitimate way for a person designated as an Eskimo to interact with the state was as a solitary individual identified by a unique Disc List number” (Smith 1993: 43).

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In 1967, R. A. J. Phillips, a senior officer in Canada’s Department of Northern Affairs, would write that “Eskimos, in their short recorded history, have been all things to all men” (1967: 219). He illustrated this claim by citing an explorer who thought they were “very strange and beastly,” a missionary who experienced them as “sullen, wild, dirty pagans,” and a trader who saw them as part of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s “large happy family.” He added (somewhat enigmatically), “Indians and Eskimos are also statistics.” To illustrate this he provided a series of statistics about First Nations and Inuit, including the information I provided above about the number of Inuit in sanatoria in 1956. What does it mean to be a statistic?

shock and inevitability This new statistical awareness of the Inuit in the North brought Canadians “face-to-face with a system of population dynamics that was shocking to them. That the government would intervene in order to ‘correct’ that system was a moral inevitability from the first” (Paine 1977: 12). This led P. E. Moore, acting superintendent of Indian Health Services, to declare in 1946, “Although neither law nor treaty imposes such a duty, the Federal Government has, for humanitarian reasons, for self-protection, and to prevent the spread of disease to the white population, accepted responsibility for health services to the native population, and Parliament each year votes funds to supply medical services to Indians and Eskimos” (Moore 1946: 140). Over the next two decades this language of humanitarianism and self-protection would shift to the rhetoric of citizenship (Barry 1961; Phillips 1967).15 Inuit were citizens of Canada after all, and they deserved the same protection as its other citizens—or so the argument went, notwithstanding the multiple ways the Inuit fell short in measures of health, education, and economy. Officials made it clear that to become Canadian was to become healthy. By 1966, discussing the efforts to provide better health care to the North, P. E. Moore would write, “Only then [once something is done about the high mortality rates] will our northern regions and their people be truly part of Canada” (Moore 1966: 136). In a curious formulation, becoming Canadian meant, in part, to die at Canadian rates.16 How, precisely, to go about lowering the Inuit death rate and bringing Inuit into the fold of the Canadian state was a vexing question for Northern administrators. In the moment of optimism about the future

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of Canada that followed World War II, the North began to be imagined as a laboratory in which new social worlds might be established, as long as the “filthy” living conditions of Inuit could be improved. Phillips at one point suggested it would be useful to “think of the 9,000 Eskimos [in Canada] as a laboratory experiment and to give the imagination full rein on what might be done to improve their culture” (quoted in Marcus 1995: 33).17 This language of experiment and improvement marked a whole generation of Arctic bureaucrats for whom Inuit death loomed (at least on the surface) as a kind of defeat. Assimilating the Inuit meant controlling their deaths. Although Inuit were generally grateful for the medical attention they would receive, they were perhaps not prepared for what it would mean to become a statistic.

facts and presences In her moving essay “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” Cora Diamond suggests that philosophy may not “know how to treat a wounded body as anything but a fact” (Diamond 2008: 59). For the Canadian state, the fact that Inuit were dying of tuberculosis at elevated rates was relevant—even morally significant—but the suffering caused by certain forms of indifference (to Inuit forms of life, including life after death) was not. Thus Cora Diamond’s statement regarding philosophy—that it knows how to treat a wounded body only as a fact—seems to be all the more true of dead bodies; it also seems to be as true of the forms of thought proper to bureaucrats and philanthropists as it is of philosophers. To treat a wounded body as a fact is to ignore its hold on you and to know in advance what is at stake in any wounding. Diamond wonders what it would be like to treat wounded bodies instead as “presences that may unseat our reason” (Diamond 2008: 74). To do otherwise seems to Diamond a form of deflection from what she calls the “difficulty of reality.”18 Of course, anthropologists also traffic in facts. Of Kaujak’s death we know certain things. For instance, she was picked up by helicopter in 1956. She was taken to the C. D. Howe by helicopter for an x-ray. Contrary to protocol, she returned to shore after the x-ray. A photograph was taken (by whom?). The C. D. Howe travelled to Resolute. A plane took Kaujak and her fellow passengers from Resolute to Churchill. They boarded a train. Somewhere before reaching Hamilton, while still on the train, Kaujak died. A call was made to Arctic Bay to confirm her death. Those are the facts as I know them.

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How does a wounded or sick or even dead body become a fact? Or, perhaps better, what explains our thirst for facts that anchor our sense of the due process that carries sickness into death? Alex BetancourtSerrano links the fetishization of facts to the calmness of the historical project. “The ‘fact,’ as the historicist object of desire . . . made history a calm enterprise,” he writes, continuing, “The fact is out there, lying calmly, uncontested, and frivolous, waiting to be discovered” (Betancourt-Serrano 2006: 37). Joan Didion, in The Year of Magical Thinking, describes wanting desperately to piece together the medical facts of her husband’s death, as if then she could somehow do something to prevent it from having happened. If facts are calming, they are also magical, functioning as a kind of epistemological anxiolytic. The best image we have of/for the facts pertaining to Kaujak’s disappearance is the index card that her great-granddaughter Anna found when the municipal offices were moved to a new building in Arctic Bay. The typewritten index card bears Kaujak’s name and her disc number and the names and disc numbers of her husband and three of her children. In ballpoint pen, beside Kaujak’s name, is written “(Dead) 1956.” One fact of the matter is thus made very clear. Why is it that with regard to the Inuit the “facts” often seemed to revolve around life and death? That is, why does what we “know” about the Inuit so often have to do with their forms of death? In 1964, for example, the Canadian government’s Subcommittee on Eskimo Housing Programs prepared a report on the state of Inuit housing in the Arctic. The report was supposed to contribute to the debate about what to do with the Inuit shacks clustered around the Hudson’s Bay Company and RCMP posts around the region as well as about the merits of settlement life versus life in “traditional” hunting camps. Would providing better housing for the Inuit population create relations of dependence on the state? The authors of the report argued, “As far as subsidized housing damaging Eskimo character is concerned, this is an extremely questionable assumption. Surely, in any case, it is more desirable to have a live and slightly disturbed Eskimo than a dead one” (Subcommittee on Eskimo Housing Programs 1964: 8). The bureaucrats’ musing assumes the form of a thought experiment in which the physical survival of the “Eskimo,”19 curiously bereft of kith and kin, is at stake.20 Northern administrators had to make many difficult decisions regarding how to govern their territory. And, indeed, this thought experiment has the form of a double bind, in which death and disturbance are weighed against each other. The bureaucrats argue,

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“Tuberculosis rates, infant mortality rates, and the incidence of environmental diseases can be cut by improving housing. Cutting these rates means that lives are saved: failure to cut them means those lives are lost” (Subcommittee on Eskimo Housing Programs 1964: 5). In this equation, Inuit shacks are seen as vectors of disease such as tuberculosis; the construction of colonial settlements is seen as the only way to reduce disease and provide adequate access to medical care. The housing report pleads for political correctness—surely we will do the right thing in this situation, and surely the right thing can be made obvious to all. To convince readers of the correctness of their recommendations regarding the provision of public housing, its authors appeal to the sanctity of life itself. Do you want to have a dead or live Eskimo on your hands? Emphasizing the high infant mortality rate, they write, “It is difficult to place a ‘value’ on the ‘life’ of a child—most would agree that the ‘gift of life’ is as priceless as our old Masterpieces” (Subcommittee on Eskimo Housing Programs 1964: 6).21 In a certain sense, by that point in the history of biopolitics it had simply become a matter of good etiquette for agents of the state to invoke the sanctity of the life under their care. But I am also interested in the way the bureaucrats’ use of the verb to have invokes the other sense of propriety—as the “right of possession or use.”22 Of what use is an Eskimo to the colonial bureaucracy—dead or alive? Understanding what it might mean, in the bureaucrats’ terms, to “have” a dead Eskimo—“surely, in any case, it is more desirable to have a live and slightly disturbed Eskimo than a dead one”—and how it becomes possible to imagine “having” someone dead without ever knowing who that someone was seems essential to understanding why Kaujak’s body disappeared. I have come to think that “having” a dead Eskimo amounts to treating the dead as stately statistics rather than as presences that might unseat our bureaucratic reason. Let me elaborate. Although the conundrum of a dead versus disturbed Inuit is a thought experiment whose ostensible purpose is to move Inuit out of makeshift shack housing, the bureaucrats imagine (just for an instant) the situation in which instead they have a dead Inuk on their hands. And given that the biological life or survival of the Inuit had become the primary object of Canada’s northern policy in the postwar era, “having” a dead Eskimo would be tantamount to bureaucratic failure.23 Kaujak’s body is treated as an unfortunate but inevitable, unsurprising, and ultimately insignificant loss—collateral damage in the war on tuberculosis. The fact is that one more Eskimo lives or dies, and that

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fact is what is carefully recorded on the index card. The whereabouts of her dead body, transformed into a fact, become irrelevant. But to treat Kaujak as just one more fact to be “had” by the Canadian state was to ignore her presence as a mother, grandmother, and friend, a presence that continued to have a hold even after her death. It was to ignore the grievability of her life (Allison 2013). During my interview with Sakiassie I became confused about Kaujak’s story, confused about what might be called the facts of the matter. At first it sounded as if there were years when Sakiassie didn’t know whether Kaujak was dead or alive, years when he would patiently hang around the ship when it came to unload its passengers and cargo, hoping to hear news of the woman who raised him as a mother and who had sailed out of his sight forever when he was only fourteen. But then Anna, who was translating for me, told me that Sakiassie received the news of her death in October 1956, just three months after she died. So what was he hoping to hear when he would go to the beach and listen? Who was he looking for? I couldn’t reconcile these two pieces of information. I assumed there must be a mistake, or that I had misunderstood something, so I asked again. When did Sakiassie hear of his grandmother’s death? But what is it that I have misunderstood: the facts or what it means to know something? What does it mean to know that Kaujak died? I just listed the facts I thought I knew. Some of these facts I have tried to verify in the archives. But, discomfitingly, once I was in the archive, the facts begin to falter. It seems that in 1956 the boat didn’t go to Resolute, as Sakiassie reported. It did go in 1957. Could it have been in 1957 that she left? The questions mounted in my mind as I searched for any trace of her, of what happened to her after she died. And yet one thing I noticed is that whether the facts are incontestable or not, factual they still are. The destiny of each detail in the anthropologist’s narrative is to become a fact. Or perhaps better, each detail strives to be a fact and gains recognition through its status as a fact. But can facts exhaust the question? Do facts exhaust what we know? I am drawn back to the index card, where it is written in ink “Dead” and “1956.” And I realize that the handwriting (understood to reveal so much about the uniqueness of the writer) gestures to the doleful absence of the one who wrote those words, an efficient bureaucrat surely, but someone who might have known something more, who might have received the news of Kaujak’s death, who might have somehow been connected to her death, the way the pen was connected to the writer’s

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body, and the ink to the pen from which it flowed. Those two handwritten words seem to turn the attempt to make Kaujak’s death into a fact on its head. The facts—“(Dead) 1956”—although they promise so much, in the end seem to disappear, or at least to disappoint. What remains is the physical trace of a writer who might have known something else, or at least have known it in a different way. And then there is what Sakiassie knows. During the interview, in my attempt to understand better what was going on, I ask for a clarification about when they realized that Kaujak was dead, when the news of her death reached their ears or eyes. In trying to explain the misunderstanding about when, exactly, the news of Kaujak’s death arrived and why Sakiassie would go to the boat and listen, my translator and friend Anna reiterated the story she had just told me: “She [Kaujak] left in August and in October they heard she had died and that’s all that was said. No mention of where her body was, how she died, nothing. They were just informed that she had passed away. That’s all the news that they got.” Her explanation, I have come to believe, points to the insufficiency of facts. For Sakiassie, Kaujak is not a fact to defend against his own madness but a “presence” in Cora Diamond’s sense. For years after he had received the news of Kaujak’s death, Sakiassie would go to meet the C. D. Howe—to listen for news of his grandmother and to see if she was on the boat. The facts weren’t enough. He wanted—hoped for—something more.

voyaging past the emotions In E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End, there is a scene in which a man whose wife (Mrs. Wilcox) has just died must come to terms with a note that arrived in the morning’s mail. The brief note, written in the dead woman’s handwriting and forwarded by the matron of the nursing home where she died, instructs her family that she should like her friend—and not her son, as was expected—to inherit her house. After some deliberation Mr. Wilcox and his son tear up the note and throw it into the fire. Forster comments, “To them Howards End was a house: they could not know that to her it had been a spirit, for which she sought a spiritual heir” (2000: 84). What interests me about this scene is the way the grieving men attend to the note that brings the voice, or the spirit, of a dead woman into the present. Forster writes, “Had they considered the note as a whole it would have driven them miserable or mad. Considered item by item, the

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emotional content was minimised, and all went forward smoothly” (2000: 84). The magic of focusing on the facts. Instead of receiving the note as the last wishes of a beloved mother and wife, the father and son methodically take the note apart, assuming, according to Forster, “the manner of the committee-room.” That is, they concluded that “the note was not signed, it was therefore not legal, it was written in illness,” “under the spell of a sudden friendship,” and contrary to her past intentions. Forster closes the scene by observing, “Charles and his father sometimes disagreed. But they always parted with an increased regard for one another, and each desired no doughtier comrade when it was necessary to voyage for a little past the emotions. So the sailors of Ulysses voyaged past the Sirens, having first stopped one another’s ears with wool” (2000: 86). To “voyage for a little past the emotions,” to “stop one another’s ears with wool,” is to turn a dead body (in this case, a note written by a dying mother and wife) into a fact or a series of facts. The violence of the committee room is its inability to recognize the presence or aliveness of the dead woman in her handwritten note. To allow Mrs. Wilcox to remain a presence would be to allow her handwritten note the status of an image, an image being that which has a hold on us even after its informational and symbolic meaning has been decoded. Barthes, as I mention in the introduction, calls this the “third meaning” of the image—that which makes an image imagistic. In the case of Forster’s novel, the handwritten note is an image that connects the son and father to the dead mother; the handwriting on the page (like the handwritten note recording Kaujak’s death) is a physical trace of a dead woman, a trace that calls into question how dead she really is. Sakiassie, unlike the father and son in Forster’s novel, is unwilling or unable to voyage past the emotions, to stop his ears with wool. Several images of his grandmother’s departure stay with him for years—decades, even—long after the C. D. Howe ceased picking up its northern passengers and the sanatorium in Hamilton was dismantled. Two of those images emerged in the course of our conversation in Sakiassie’s living room in Arctic Bay, a room with a window that gives onto a stony beach and the slate blue bay that gives the town its name. The first image: As he is unloading cargo from the ship, he is aware that his grandmother, seated in the skiff that will take her to the ship, is having her photo taken. He doesn’t speak to her or acknowledge her

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presence in any way. Years later he is at a meeting at the high school in a neighboring community, Pond Inlet, and he comes across that photograph on the wall.24 He asks for a copy. I film him holding the photograph. The second image: Sakiassie watches Kaujak’s boat as it leaves the harbor en route to the sanatorium, and he doesn’t lift his eyes from the boat until it disappears beyond Inukshuk Point. An elderly woman told me later that just before the C. D. Howe left the harbor, it would blow its horn three times. As it sailed out of sight you could hear the sound of “all these people crying from the ship.” In a certain way, these images are both images of Kaujak’s death. In the second image, as Sakiassie’s eyes trace the lines of the boat as it disappears on the horizon, we get a sense of what Michael Taussig (following Gertrude Koch) describes as “the eye grasping . . . at what the hand cannot reach” (1991: 150). The eye that follows the boat out of sight defies our usual sense of the passivity of the visual: Sakiassie cannot seem to let go of the boat that carries his grandmother away, cannot let go of his grandmother in that boat. His eyes could be understood as a kind of arm that reaches and cannot grasp the object of desire, his grandmother, the boat, as it slips out of touch—or out of sight. How can we understand the force that keeps his eyes trained on the boat? Or the force of the image that draws our inner eye to his and to the boat it clutches? A kind of sympathetic magic, perhaps: by touching, with his eyes (now our eyes), the vessel that carries his grandmother away, he holds her back, holds onto her, and by imprinting that image on his memory he has continued to hold her all these years. Frazer, in the Golden Bough, describes a “law of contact or contagion” that holds that “things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed” (Frazer 2009: 11). If the visual is as tactile as some theorists suggest, is it not possible that our visual images, our memory, work by a kind of sympathetic magic? Is it possible that the contact Frazer is describing is not always physical in the everyday sense but is sometimes visual? If so, what more is there to say about the need to stay magically connected through the grasping eye to one’s grandmother than to recount Sakiassie’s image and its retelling? So when Sakiassie would go to the beach to listen, perhaps he was not really looking for facts—he may have “known” in some sense that his grandmother was dead—but that didn’t stop him from wanting her, and wanting to feel her presence, to be in touch.

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the hold images have In 1967, in an attempt to keep Inuit in better touch with their family members, audio recordings were made of Inuit in Arctic Canada sending messages to their relatives in tuberculosis sanatoria in southern Canada. One of the recordings has been preserved in the archives of McMaster University. Many of the Inuit had a hard time finding words to speak into the recorder. But one of the speakers on the tape, Ittuq, a man from Arctic Bay, is less reticent than the others. A nurse’s measured voice provides the frame: “Message Number Three: This is Ittuq E5–213 of Arctic Bay speaking to his wife Akikiakjuq E5–213 in Mountain Sanatorium Hamilton.” We then hear Ittuq begin to speak. “This is Ittuq E5–213,” he says into the microphone before he clears his throat. His voice is humble, thick with age. As he speaks he picks up speed: “Speaking to my wife: I think of you a lot. There are times when I don’t think of you as much as I used to when you were first away. Last year just after you went away I nearly went out of my mind, but I’m now able to cope better. I get lonely for you very much.” Then firmly, almost with a hint of defiance, he says, “I miss you very much.” He pauses and adds, “I love you very much.” At this point there is a long silence interrupted only by the faint sounds of weeping. When he begins to speak again, he struggles with the words, his voice rising in pitch, as if it might split. “I worry a lot though. I don’t know what else to say at the moment so I’m just going to say bye for now.” As I listened I decided I would try to find his family, to hear more of the story that his voice suggested. It wasn’t hard. My sister-in-law in Iqaluit called someone from Pond Inlet, who called someone from Arctic Bay, and within twenty-four hours I had a phone number for Ittuq’s daughter, a thirty-five-year-old woman named Sandy. Ten months later I was staying in a tent with Ittuq’s children in a summer camp a fifteenminute drive from town. At that time of year it was all rock and sun and snow. We drank tea with pilot biscuits in the yellow light of canvas tents and ate barbecued seal on the rocks by the shore. The teenagers played golf over the hills with makeshift holes in patches of artificial grass and the kids skipped stones on the bay that the ice hadn’t yet left. I learned then that one of Ittuq and Akikiakjuq’s sons was in prison. Later that summer I asked the prison administration for permission to interview Peutagok Ittuq. Peutagok Ittuq, the son of Ittuq and Akikiaqjuq, was seven years old when his mother was taken down South to be treated for tuberculosis.

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He didn’t see her again, or hear from her, when she returned from the hospital. I met with Peutagok in the Baffin Correctional Center, in Iqaluit, where he was an inmate. I never asked him why he was there, and he didn’t tell me. The prison, located in the industrial outskirts of Iqaluit, near the airport, mechanic shops, and old military buildings, is a gray pod-like building made of corrugated metal. After giving up my ID and passing by the television monitors flickering in a darkened office and through the usual clanking doors, we were escorted to a windowless meeting room stuffed with two rectangular tables and a dry erase board. An Inuit social worker joined us. She was reassuringly round and smiling, with permed hair. Peutagok looked apprehensive, his compact frame leaning forward as he sat down at the table. I played him the recording from my computer, giving him headphones to listen. Listening to his father’s voice does something strange to time: “I go back to when I was a kid,” he tells me. When I ask him what he remembers, he tells me about the time, a year before his mother went away, when he and his parents rowed the fifteen miles from their outpost camp to meet the patrol ship the C. D. Howe in Arctic Bay. It took them two or three days. “Yeah, it was a very nice time,” he says. “Blue sky. No wind. And ice, and birds . . . That was very special, that day. I remember. And in the morning my dad was making fire, making tea, coal stove, only fire, early in the morning. Yeah . . . I remember that. That was beautiful.” He tells us that just before his mother boarded the boat, she gave him three packets of gum. He struggles to remember the brand of the gum but remembers the yellow package. Then he gets it: “Juicy Fruit!” Peutagok remembers that he wanted to keep that gum forever. “Yeah. ’Cause my mom was special to me. So much.” He was the youngest child, and as he remembers it, he was still being breast-fed when she left. So at night, when he went to bed, he would put the gum under his pillow. That way no one could take it from him. To make sense of Sakiassie’s (and Peutagok’s) memory images, and what it means to desire an image rather than a fact, I want to think Cora Diamond’s notion of the “difficulty of reality” alongside Walter Benjamin’s work on the image. Diamond begins the essay I referred to earlier with a reflection on the Ted Hughes poem “Six Young Men,” in which Hughes describes a photograph of six young men out for a “Sunday jaunt” in the English countryside posing in front of a country wall. These men—young, muscular, and very much alive—would all be dead six months later, casualties of the First World War. Yet their aliveness,

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their youth, “sears” the photograph. It is as though when we finger such a photograph, we can touch or even partake in the aliveness of its subjects. Indeed, the sun that warmed their skin also touched the lens of the camera and burned their image into the negative that turned into the positive that we now hold in our hands. The indexicality of their aliveness—the fact that the photograph directly connected in some way (physically or causally) to their bodies with their thudding hearts—disrupts our straightforward knowledge of their deaths. It is a presence that unseats our reason rather than a fact that can be filed away. (This, for Diamond, is a difficulty of reality, a moment when the facts falter and what we know is not enough.) The men are in some sense (a sense that will remain forever foreign to a logic of census takers and statisticians) both dead and alive. We know that those live bodies in the photograph are already dead, and in a flash we intuit, and are disturbed by, the way we too are already dead. In reminding us that our own bodies are made for death—and die despite the persistence of the trees and streams in front of which such photographs are taken—the image in Ted Hughes’s poem “shoulder[s] out one’s own body from its instant and heat” (Diamond 2008: 44). The six men, now dead for forty years and “rotting into soil,” are an example of a difficulty of reality for Diamond—a reality that shoulders us from the everyday, and from our own “instant and heat.” Curiously, in Cora Diamond’s essay we never actually see the photograph of the six men. Neither do we in Hughes’s poem. The materiality of the photograph is, in both cases, denied us—its indexicality only gestured to—and yet we still “see” the image; we can both picture it and feel its force. This makes me think more about the relationship of photographs to the images we hold in our mind’s eye (like the images Sakiassie and Peutagok relate) and the hold they both have over us. Both share a kind of afterlife, something like the image of the light bulb you can see imprinted on your eyelids when you close your eyes at night. There is a certain kinship between the dead woman’s handwritten note in Forster’s novel, Sakiassie’s image of the disappearing ship, the Juicy Fruit gum under a six-year-old’s pillow, and the six men in Ted Hughes’s poem. All record the vital presence of an absence in such a way that it becomes unclear in what sense the absent mother—or the deceased men—are actually present or absent, alive or dead. All four images (the handwritten note, the disappearing ship, the gum, the men before the wall) could be seen as presences that threaten to unseat our reason rather than as facts that shore it up.

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The force of such images—the hold images such as the disappearing ship and the Juicy Fruit gum have over us—is what I am trying to describe.25 Walter Benjamin has tried to account for the strange force that our images of childhood have over us. As I mentioned in the introduction, upon realizing (as an adult) that he may have to say his final goodbye to Berlin, the city of his birth, Benjamin calls up image after image of his childhood there, as if by experiencing the singular pain they produce he could inoculate himself against his homesickness and longing for his native city. Benjamin’s method in the writing of Berlin Childhood bears an uncanny resemblance to Freud’s description in “Mourning and Melancholia” of the way a mourner begins to disinvest from a loved object: So what is the work that mourning performs? I do not think I am stretching the point if I present it in the following manner: reality testing has revealed that the beloved object no longer exists, and demands that the libido as a whole sever its bonds with that object. . . . Each individual memory and expectation in which the libido was connected to the object is adjusted and hyperinvested, leading to its detachment from the libido. (Freud 2005: 204–5)

The result of Benjamin’s effort to inoculate himself against the pain of separation from Berlin is Berlin Childhood, which he warns us is neither a biography—in the sense of a linear narrative of significant events—nor a reliable account of a childhood in Berlin. Instead, these fragmentary and disorienting images—with titles such as “Tardy Arrival,” “Butterfly Hunt,” “The Fever,” and “Winter Morning”—contain, according to Benjamin, “the whole distorted world of childhood” (2006: 98). He explains that this has meant that certain biographical features, which stand out more readily in the continuity of experience than in its depths, altogether recede in the present undertaking. And with them go the physiognomies, those of my family and comrades alike. On the other hand, I have made an effort to get hold of the images in which the experience of the big city is precipitated in a child of the middle class. (2006: 37–38)

An image for Benjamin is a precipitate of an experience rather than a factual accounting of events and physiognomies. The summoning of these images, intended to inoculate him against the pain of never seeing his beloved city again, seems instead to demonstrate the ongoing force of those images in his life. For Benjamin there can be no final detachment from Berlin, no moment, as there is for Freud, when the ego is once again left “free and uninhibited” (Freud 2005: 205).

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Instead, to read Benjamin’s account of his childhood in Berlin is to fall under the spell of that childhood, a spell in which the “I” of the reminiscence is always in danger of becoming something else, or of being transported elsewhere. For Benjamin, childhood is that admirable state of being in which to know something is to become that thing—the way a child playing with a toy airplane becomes that airplane as he floats around the room with arms extended and lips purring, a child chasing a butterfly becomes butterfly-like in his “heart and soul” (2006: 50).26 To lose oneself in the color of a chocolate wrapper, in the light from a stained-glass window, in a watercolor cloud, or in the twisting streets of a picture postcard—these are the signatures of childhood for Benjamin. Such disorienting images of childhood—what Benjamin calls “precipitates” of experience—are the images that continue to resonate, to animate us, for a lifetime, without necessarily having any narrative or biographical value. Like Peutagok’s memory of the gum beneath his pillow—green, white, and yellow—or Sakiassie’s image of the boat carrying his grandmother away past the last outcrop of land, they add little to the facts of the matter. They don’t tell us what day their mothers left or where they ended up, or even how they fared while they were gone. But bound up in each of those images is a childhood disappearing, a mother vanishing. Benjamin acknowledges the undeniable hold the images of his childhood continue to have on him. He tells us, for instance, that the smell of the air in the dark loggias where he was born—shaded by blinds in the summer—was also present when he held his lover in his arms on the distant island of Capri and now “sustains the images and allegories which preside over my thinking” (2006: 39; emphasis added). So the “images” Benjamin provides in Berlin Childhood around 1900 are not merely iridescent tokens of a dissolving past, but they actually shape and condition a form of thought, and perhaps even a form of life. Benjamin’s assertion that those images of childhood (images for Benjamin include smell and sounds) still preside over his thinking brings me closer to understanding the hold such images seem to have. Because, as Peutagok tells me after recounting the story of the chewing gum, “That’s why I sometimes get criminal, ’cause it was hurt too . . . too hard for me.” Having chosen to speak in English but finding words difficult, Peutagok refers to himself in the first person—“that’s why I sometimes get criminal”—but also in the third person, as an “it”—“it was hurt too.” It seems that Peutagok is linking his early childhood experience, in which

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the terror of a disappearing mother was condensed in packets of gum he couldn’t bear to chew, to an adulthood marked by petty crimes. Something was hurt too much. Our interview, ended by a bell signaling the lunch hour for the inmates, didn’t allow time to explore this idea of the connection between crime and the “it” that was hurt. I’m not sure I would have known what to ask either. Nonetheless, Peutagok gestures to just how powerful the precipitates of our childhood experience—the images that we hold and hold us—can be. In a particularly terrifying vignette Benjamin describes his tardy arrival to school one day. While in the halls of the school he noticed a kind of secret collusion in the voices of the teachers and students behind the doors of the classrooms as he approached, a conversation that has somehow displaced even his absence. And when he entered, “No one seemed to know me, or even to see me. Just as the devil takes the shadow of Peter Schlemihl, the teacher had taken my name at the beginning of the hour” (2006: 57–58). The “I” that becomes butterfly or becomes colored light is metonymic with the “I” of reminiscence that cannot avoid becoming child again in recounting these images of childhood. The danger, then, is not in becoming other. The danger lies in having one’s very absence taken away. This reminds me of Sakiassie’s story. I wonder if, in fact, his knowing and not knowing that Kaujak had died has something to do with the way that even Kaujak’s absence has been taken from him. He is left without her body, and without even an image of her death to hold onto. So he goes to the beach, where the patients are brought from the ship after their long trip from Montreal, and he listens for his mother. What does Sakiassie, a young boy of fourteen, have to do to allow her absence, her death, to become an image? A few days after my interview with Sakiassie, I went with his daughter, Anna, to interview a man named Laisha who was on the train with Kaujak when she started her journey to the sanatorium. Laisha was also headed to the Mountain Sanatorium in Hamilton, but he was just a boy. Sakiassie did not come with us to the interview, and he had never spoken directly to Laisha about what happened to his grandmother. In those days, Anna explains to me, people didn’t ask questions. In those days, Laisha tells me, “They [the Inuit] didn’t know what anger was.” His trip to the hospital was a “sad experience.” He was put in a hospital room by himself. He did not speak any English and didn’t know where the toilets were, or even how to ask. When he fell asleep he soiled his

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pants and the nurses treated him badly when they found him in the morning, covered in feces. Laisha tells Anna what she already knows—that Kaujak died on the way to the hospital. He says also that as she was dying she began to speak in the voices of animals, and that the nurses were offended, telling her to stop. “But she is dying!” an Inuit woman on the train tried to explain to the nurses. “She is not trying to be disrespectful!” Once Kaujak was gone they laid her body on a stretcher in the corridor. Laisha remembers having to pass her body on the way to the bathroom. Later he watched from the window as her body was unloaded from the train. What is the psychic form that biopolitics takes?27 In asking this question I am interested in the way biopolitical policies, commandments, foreclosures have their own psychic life. This is in keeping with our everyday sense that it is possible for words, ideas, or even political forms to “take on a life of their own.” In this way, the psychic life of biopolitics is also a kind of “life beside itself”—that is, a life that cannot be reduced to what biopolitics “is” or “enacts” in any mechanistic/intentional sense. Psychically, biopolitics is never just itself—just as, in this book, I am arguing that life is never itself. Thus in the psychic lives of both the colonizer and the colonized the biopolitical commandment to stay alive at all costs is haunted by the desire on the part of the colonist to murder the colonized, and also by the recurring sense the colonized have that what appear to be the most benign public health programs are, in fact, genocidal. Why images? Why turn to images in an attempt to grasp the psychic life of biopolitics? For Freud, dreams think themselves in images. In any event, in this book I take Freud’s idea that it is possible, even in the waking world, to “think in pictures” quite literally.28 For Freud, “thinking in pictures” actually “stands nearer to unconscious processes than does thinking in words.” And although he calls thinking in pictures “an incomplete form of becoming conscious,” he still suggests that for “many people,” returning to such visual residues of perceptions “seems to be the favoured method” of thinking (Freud 1961 [1923]: 21).29 For Freud, becoming more “completely” conscious would entail bringing forth the image’s latent meanings through analysis. But again, why the image? Why must dreams be imagistic? As I mentioned in the introduction, Foucault suggests that for Freud, repressed desires take refuge in the image rather than in linguistic utterance “because the image is a language which expresses without formulating,

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an utterance less transparent for meaning than the word itself” (1993: 36). Thus for Freud, the relationship between an image and the repressed desire is contingent—the latent content of the dream simply finds a convenient hiding place. But it could also manifest itself in a slip of the tongue or a bout of amnesia. If, however, we propose that desires/feelings/experiences express themselves in images, not to hide themselves, but because those desires/ feelings/experiences are, in important ways, imagistic, then we are closer to the thought of the psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, whose text Foucault is introducing in “Dream, Imagination and Existence.” For Binswanger, writing in 1930, this sense that dreams were hiding something was precisely where Freud went wrong. For Binswanger, dreams themselves actually described a style of existence, or a “mode of attunement” to the world. The trick, then, was to avoid the decoding of dreams and to remain, as it were, in the image, and thus to discover not the hidden meaning of a dream, but instead an individual’s particular style of existence: “By steeping oneself in the manifest content of the dream—which, since Freud’s epoch-making postulate concerning the reconstruction of latent dream thoughts, has in modern times receded all too far into the background—one learns the proper evaluation of the primal and strict interdependence of feeling and image, of being-attuned and pictorial realization” (1993: 88). If we take Binswanger’s “strict interdependence of feeling and image, of being-attuned and pictorial realization,” literally, then a feeling is imagistic, and being attuned to the world is pictorial. I would argue, then, that psychic life can only be captured on the page imagistically, in word or visual images. When images are translated into more “complete” forms of consciousness (unraveled or unwrapped into a series of facts, say, or decoded into a list of meanings), they lose their affective hold, which is, as both Binswanger and Barthes understood, essential to what an image, or a dream, or a mode of thinking, is—not optional or supplementary and definitely not an obfuscation of their true meaning. At the risk of sounding tautological, I would even venture that this is what the psyche is: the realm of thought-images. And thus it becomes crucial for us to dissolve the difference between dreaming and what it is to be held captive by an image.30 If the Inuit disc numbers (just one instance of the Canadian state’s mode of “extract[ing] sameness even from what is unique”) trapped Inuit in what Lewis R. Gordon calls a “perverse anonymity” (2006: 16)—a situation where the necessary schism between their identity as

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an Inuit wards of the state and their mode of “being” or “being-attuned” was destroyed—the images that their sons and daughters describe above stubbornly register the uniqueness and irreducibility of that being. Still, the images in this chapter are not images that carry some kind of redemptive force. Peutogak “gets criminal,” Kaujak dies, and the state disappears her body. Sakiassie suffers. I haven’t been able to find any trace of Kaujak in the archive, although I’ll continue to look. Allowing our thought to remain embedded in the images that produce it rather than letting ourselves get deflected onto a series of facts (or statistics) that help us “voyage a little past the emotions,” means to stay with Kaujak’s death as Sakiassie does, to feel the ways we too remain connected to her, through the images her grandson gives us. Thus it is that Kaujak’s image takes hold of me, registering the knowledge that we are the kinds of beings that die, and that sometimes even at the moment of death we can be misrecognized, dismissed as an animal, or—perhaps even worse—dismissed as a fact.31

chapter 2

Cooperating

There is a genre of self-deprecating stories that Inuit tell that make people laugh until they cry. The ones I have heard range from one about an old man who spoke no English going to the NorthMart to buy BandAids for a wound and coming home and unwrapping a stethoscope, to a story about a whole community that plays volleyball without ever inflating the balls. “They think it’s normal,” the storyteller says as we are falling asleep in a tent one night. That image, of misshapen balls streaking over the nets of unsuspecting volleyball players, triggers an attack of gasping laughter. I heard another story from a teenager who was perched on some boulders, doing not much of anything, just watching people getting ready to go out hunting. “I know a guy who thought that Qallunaat never had to shit,” he said, his eyes unblinking, watching me. “What? No way!” “Really! It’s true—that was me too. I grew up with my grandma and I thought Qallunaat didn’t have to shit. Till one day, when I was, like, thirteen, I went to look. There was this Qallunaaq lady out camping with us. I followed her.” It occurs to me that it was probably those nondefecating Qallunaat who, in 1947, produced a slim volume of advice to be distributed among the Canadian Inuit. They called it The Book of Wisdom for Eskimo. With simple line drawings and short sentences, the Qallunaatwho-never-shit imparted their wisdom on subjects ranging from health, 49

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hunting, and welfare payments.1 But it was the question of Inuit filth that consumed them. To the Qallunaaq mind, “Eskimos” were an astoundingly dirty people, and little any Qallunaat said or did to try to teach the fundamentals of hygiene seemed to make any difference. It was as if Eskimos wouldn’t quite be Eskimos any more if they became clean. “Sanitation is unknown to any but a negligible few of the natives,” wrote one public health official. “They do not wash, and partly in consequence, skin diseases such as impetigo and ringworm spread quickly among them. They throw food scraps, fishbones, blood etc., on their shack floors or on the ground in their tents and deposit excreta and other sewage close to their buildings” (Canada, Department of National Health and Welfare 1960: 74).2 For the Inuit, becoming “clean,” whatever else it signified, also meant becoming white. Even today, half a century later, the history of this transition to cleanliness is narrated as the transition to whiteness. “Did you know my grandmother was a Tuniit?”3 another teenager asked me out of the blue one day. “No. What’s a Tuniit?” “She said she was a Tuniit until she put shampoo on her head. She was twelve years old.” “So what does Tuniit mean?” “A real Inuk. They were living like Inuks. They had no contact with the white people.” The first nine chapters of The Book of Wisdom deal with the relationship between dirt and sickness and how to keep bodies, air, water, and igloos clean. “Sickness and dirt are partners,” the text reads. “The small germs that cause sickness live and grow in warm, dirty, dark places. . . . In our spit there are too many to think of. . . . These germs do not like people with clean bodies, clean clothes and clean igloos. . . . Keep clean” (Bureau of Northwest Territories and Yukon Services 1947: 5).4 The Book of Wisdom became something of a curiosity for many Inuit, sometimes even serving as wallpaper to decorate their dwellings. Inuit were well aware that the recommendations contained within the book of “wisdom” were impractical. What Inuit family had the resources to produce warm wash water in an igloo in the winter (McNicoll, Tester, and Kulchyski 1999)? What they also came to understand was that government officials didn’t want dirty Eskimos spreading disease to their white neighbors to the south. It was their duty, as Canadian citizens, to cooperate.

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quvianaqtuq On October 14, 1958, Toshio Yatsushiro, an anthropologist at McGill University, received a letter from an Inuit man named Quvianaqtuq, whom he barely knew.5 At the top of Quvianaqtuq’s letter, which was written in pencil on airmail paper, is his name and the government identification number (disc number) assigned to him. Following the structure of the Inuktitut translation of the Bible, his letter is written in verses with little punctuation. At one point, as if consulting The Book of Wisdom as he writes, Quvianaqtuq assures Yatsushiro that “the white people are teaching Eskimos to be clean. Before the houses that they are now living in, they used to live in tents and rough houses that they built for themselves. People who hunted seals all the time were never too clean because they hadn’t the proper stoves to heat up water to wash clothes and inside their houses. Now they live in clean surroundings and the houses are warmer.” Yatsushiro had first met Quvianaqtuq the previous summer, when he had conducted an interview with Quvianaqtuq on the topic of the introduction of wage labor into Inuit communities. In the two photographs I have of Quvianaqtuq, taken by Yatsushiro during his research trip to Iqaluit, he is unsmiling. In one photo he sits in a tent with his family. His wife, carrying a child in an amauti (a parka for carrying children), sits beside him. Her lips are pursed and she looks anxiously at the camera. Three boys ranging from about eight to twelve years of age and wearing denim overalls sit in the foreground. In the background, pinned to one of the two-by-fours holding up the canvas tent, there is a calendar from the Hudson’s Bay Company. In another photograph Quvianaqtuq is standing with a group of people in front of the church posing for the camera. There seems to be a clown in the crowd, and most people are smiling. But, as in the other photograph, Quvianaqtuq’s brow is furrowed and his brown eyes look concerned, even anxious. In his letter, beyond simply reassuring Yatsushiro that the Eskimos were cooperating in the project to make them clean, Quvianaqtuq has something he wants to communicate. He is unhappy with the practice of sending Inuit with tuberculosis to sanatoria in southern Canada. By 1958, when Quvianaqtuq sat down to write Yatsushiro a letter, which he titled “On the Subject of Eskimos in Hospital,” the isolation of consumptives had a long history. Tuberculosis had become a public health issue in Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada

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around the turn of the twentieth century. Prior to that it had been considered a disease of individuals—and thus beyond the purview of government. Dangerous consumptives were a public health threat from which the general population had to be protected.6 Sanatoria became “places for the isolation of the dangerous yet also for their instruction; they were highly policed but aiming to produce self-policing subjects” (Bashford 2003: 133). Due to the contagiousness of the disease, patients with tuberculosis were dangerous—to themselves and to society—and they needed to be taught how to contain the risk they posed to others, if not themselves. Preventing “the spread of disease to the white population” was a key justification for the Canadian government’s involvement in the health of its indigenous people (Moore 1946: 140).7 In 1948, a CBC reporter asked Paul Martin Sr., then minister of national health and welfare, why the Canadian state should continue to provide funding for tuberculosis eradication programs (and health programs more generally) if the Indians (a term that then encompassed the Inuit) were “in the process of extinction.” Martin responded matter-of-factly that, first, the Indian population had a natural increase of 1,500 every year, and second, “we simply cannot afford to let the cesspools of disease among the Indians threaten the health of the rest of us” (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 1948). Eliminating disease in native communities involved a process of reeducation of the patient’s desires: the patient needed not only to want to get well, but also to want to be the kind of subject or self that got well. As a result, patients must painstakingly learn to become hygienic, orderly, and dutiful subjects. As an Australian public health tract admonished, “A sanatorium is not merely a hospital in the ordinary sense. . . . It is also a training school where patients are taught how they must live” (quoted in Bashford 2003: 139).8 By the time the Inuit were admitted to the sanatoria in southern Canada in the 1940s, the primary methods of treating tuberculosis were bed rest, surgical collapse of the lung, and fixation of joints.9 No longer was fresh air the preferred cure, and Inuit, who were used to spending large amounts of time outdoors, found confinement inside very difficult. By the 1950s and 1960s the advent of drug therapy for tuberculosis meant that prolonged stays in the hospital were no longer always considered biomedically necessary either—except in the case of Inuit.10 The reason for keeping Inuit in the hospital was partly logistical: it was difficult and expensive to transport Inuit back to their homes in the North.11 But even more important, Inuit were still considered “dangerous” and unhygienic

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subjects, capable of infecting their compatriots to the south. Government officials were not convinced that the Inuit would be able to comply with the requirements of home care, or, in the end, to lead sufficiently hygienic lives. Much of the time spent in sanatoria was taken up with the kind of education program that was so common for the general population at the turn of the century. Inuit were taught to spit into containers provided for them and were often confined to their beds for long periods; Inuit boys were enrolled in the Boy Scouts, while women were taught home economics and the men were set to making traditional carvings. The goal of the hospital administrators was unmistakable: to transform the Inuit wards into productive and hygienic subjects. Leaving one’s home in the Arctic for a hospital stay of uncertain length in the South was often extremely frightening.12 Robert Williamson, an anthropologist who in 1953–54 was a passenger on the C. D. Howe, the ship that took tubercular Inuit south for treatment, recalled, “The ship was deep in misery. It was terrible because it was the ship which carried the Inuit away from their homes to the sanatoria in the South. And they were herded together in the foc’sle, in the hold of the ship in three-tiered bunks, mass-fed, mass-accommodated. In the stormy seas they were sick, they were terrified, they were demoralized. They were frightened of what was happening to them, of what was likely to happen to them” (quoted in Grygier 1994: 86). Life, once they reached the sanatorium, was shocking. Many Inuit, speaking little or no English, had a difficult time expressing their most basic needs. The food was unfamiliar, and Inuit were confined to their wards and sometimes their beds for months at a time. Not surprisingly, Inuit did not always cooperate with the evacuation effort. Some Inuit families would quickly abandon their settlement when they heard that the C. D. Howe was on its way. Others, having obtained permission to return to their camps to collect their belongings after having tested positive for tuberculosis, would refuse to return to the ship for the journey south. Officials involved with the evacuations commented ruefully on the difficulty of getting Inuit to cooperate by arriving at the ship to be tested for tuberculosis. In an article grimly titled “Disease and Death in Canada’s North,” John Willis, a former medical officer in charge of the Eastern Arctic Patrol, wrote, “It is not a difficult matter to have a nurse give an injection of penicillin or a dose of diphtheria toxoid to an Eskimo, and have an X-ray technician make a film of his chest, once they are on the spot. It is the business of getting them there at the right time with the facilities they need that presents the major problem” (Willis 1963: 764). Or as another doctor, Otto Schaefer,

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noted, “The discovery of advanced tuberculosis in Northern natives meant, in most cases, parting from their lands and peoples forever to wither away in a strange environment and with a disagreeable type of food. No wonder they fled over the hills in some places when our x-ray equipment was landed” (Schaefer 1959: 249). But the anthropologist Diamond Jenness put it most baldly. He noted, “Very few tubercular Eskimos at that period left their homes willingly. . . . The situation was fraught with tragedy.” Further, “there were occasions when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer had to use his authority, and a number of families deliberately kept away from any settlement when the hospital ship was due to make its call” (Jenness 1964: 88). The government response to this lack of cooperation was a regime of stepped-up persuasion. Couldn’t the Eskimos see that the Canadian state agents—the northern service officers, the doctors, the nurses, and the social workers—cared?13 As part of the effort to convince Inuit to cooperate in their care, Leo Manning, a longtime northern resident who was much respected by the Inuit for his fluency in Inuktitut, was dispatched by the Department of Resources and Development to visit Inuit convalescing in southern hospitals (Grygier 1994: 76; Tester, McNicholl, and Irniq 2001: 128–29).14 After visiting a hospital in Quebec that had several Inuit patients, Manning wrote to his superiors, “During the course of conversation [with Inuit in the hospital,] it was impressed upon the natives that they should accept things as they are and that by doing so they would speed their own recovery” (Manning 1952; emphasis added). Despite Manning’s efforts, Inuit compliance continued to be an issue. John Willis, in his preliminary report of the 1955 Eastern Arctic Patrol, described the difficulties his medical staff had in one Baffin Island community. An Inuit woman with a three-month-old baby was found to have “cavities in her left lung,” but nothing the medical staff did or said could persuade her to board the ship. Willis wrote, “This would seem an instance where legal power to use force might be needed, but the psychological effects on the other Eskimos of the forcible removal of such cases might only delay our program as a whole and I would certainly recommend that we try health education and persuasion first” (Willis 1955). Despite the measures taken to “persuade” Inuit to cooperate with the treatment regime set out from them, Inuit continued to find the separation from their families difficult to accept. The distance—physical and psychological—was great. Letters took months, and sometimes up to a year, to arrive (Tester, McNicholl, and Irniq 2001: 132), and patients spent at least a year and sometimes several in the sanatorium.

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Getting messages from Inuit in the hospital to their families was difficult. Inuit often spent several years in southern hospitals, and those who died there were buried in unmarked graves in a nearby cemetery. Although hospital staff tried to inform the families of the deaths, there was often much confusion about the identity of the Inuit in the hospital, especially the children. Hospital administrators could not speak Inuktitut and had no clear sense of Arctic geography—the reason they had started giving out disc numbers in the first place. But there were stories of children being removed from the hospital and not being sent back to their parents, placed instead in foster homes without their parents’ permission or knowledge. There is a letter in the archives from a Mr. Cunningham, who is petitioning the Department of Northern Affairs and Natural Resources’ legal counsel to advise him on this practice.15 Cunningham writes: Several instances have come to my attention over the past few months where Eskimo children have been placed in foster homes or in residential schools without the consent or knowledge of their parents or this department. . . . I will cite two examples. A nine year old Eskimo boy on discharge from Moose Factory Hospital last year was sent to the Fort George residential school. His parents at Port Harrison had no knowledge of this arrangement and had assumed the boy was under continuing treatment. The boy was located after they had begun to make enquires about his whereabouts. Last summer, a five year old Eskimo girl was removed by a Fort Smith man from the Charles Camsell Hospital. He later reported to us that he had spoken to the child’s mother and stated that she had agreed to this arrangement. As the Department had not participated in this plan, we have no idea as to what the wishes of the mother actually were. I would like your advice on whether under existing North West Territories Ordinances this dislocating of children in the instances described can be considered legal. (Eskimo Economy and Welfare General Policy File 1956c)

The stories seem to have no end. One man I interviewed in Arctic Bay returned home to find out that his name had been given away; his parents believed he was dead and had given his soul name to another child. Another young boy returned home and realized he could no longer speak to his parents. He had forgotten how to speak Inuktitut.

the lights were so bright Muktar Akumalik is a man in his early sixties, a hunter of some renown who lives in a sparsely decorated house with windows that give onto the

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bay. He tells the story of his journey, in the late 1950s, to the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line station, where his family had arranged to meet the ship that would take his father down South to be treated for tuberculosis. At the time Muktar’s whole family was uneasy. They had started to hear stories that people weren’t coming back, weren’t returning from the sanatorium down South. And so as they traveled by dogsled team toward the DEW Line station, his father began to teach Muktar and his brother things. He tried to teach them as much as he could—about ice conditions, hunting techniques—anything he could pass on that would help them survive. When they got to the DEW Line station, Muktar and his brother tried to convince the administrators to let one of them go with their father to the hospital. Their father spoke no English, they explained. They gave the nurse all his information—his disc number, and everything else they could think of. But they were not allowed to go with him. That winter, during the dark season when the sun doesn’t rise around Arctic Bay, Muktar was traveling by dog team and saw the most wonderful northern lights, beautiful lights—blue, red, and white—lights like he had never seen before. There were so many. The lights were so bright that he could even see to travel; with the lights he could follow the tracks of the sled dogs. Muktar knew, when he saw those lights, that there would be bad news. The next day they told him that his father had passed away in the hospital in Ontario. His body stayed down South. Later they found out that he had been buried in an unmarked grave in a cemetery near the sanatorium.

a proper message To assuage the pain of separation, social workers and nurses began recording the voices of Inuit patients and family members on reel-toreel tapes. The social workers quite sincerely hoped “that the sound of a person’s voice would further bridge the distance between the patient and her family” (Tester, McNicholl, and Irniq 2001: 132). Listening to the tapes was a momentous affair. Personal recording and listening devices did not exist at the time, and Inuit in the communities could listen to the tapes only in the company of social workers and nurses on the C. D. Howe’s player.16 The archival record contains a flurry of letters back and forth about the creation and disposition of taped recordings by Inuit in the hospital

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to their family up North and vice versa. How feasible was it to play such taped recordings to Inuit in communities that could not be reached by ship and had no source of electricity?17 The reel-to-reel tape players were bulky and cost upward of three hundred dollars. Whether the recorded messages were always heard by their family members is hard to know. In one message a sanatorium patient says to her mother, “Maybe you will hear this or maybe you won’t. Anyway, do not worry about me. I do not fret at this end.” Although Inuit unquestionably longed to communicate with their relatives, and despite the fact that countless letters were sent by Inuit to the Department of Northern Affairs asking for news of particular patients and pleading with them to stop sending Inuit to the hospital, it was not always easy for hospital staff to get Inuit to comply with their tactics for keeping Inuit in touch. Included in the correspondence of R. A. J. Phillips, then executive officer in the Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources, there is a letter from a hospital administrator at the Hamilton Sanatorium concerning an Inuit patient, Mrs. A: In accordance with your letter we have had our Hospital Photographer photograph this Eskimo in four (4) different poses which we enclose herewith. We had some difficult [sic] in getting Mrs. A. to overcome her shyness enough to record messages. However, the enclosed recording tape will give you the story. We started off recording in her room where there were three other patients and it was not until we had moved her into a room by herself that she gave a proper message. (Eskimo Economy and Welfare General Policy File 1956b; emphasis added)

voices in the archive In 2008 I visited the McMaster Health Sciences Archives in Hamilton, Ontario. I had read that one of the taped messages from Inuit to their family members in the hospital had been preserved there. To date it is the only such tape I have been able to locate. (This is the tape on which I first heard Peutagok speaking to his mother in the sanatorium in Hamilton.) Although the archivist sent me a translation of the messages, I still wanted to hear the voices and see the hundreds of photographs of Inuit in the hospital that had been collected. Once I arrived at the archive, I arranged with the archivist to send the audiotape, a huge reel that looked something like a filmstrip, to the National Archives in Ottawa to be digitized.

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Entitled “Eastern Arctic Patrol 1961: Messages to Patients in Mountain San,” the tape contains messages from five different families scattered across Baffin Island to patients in the Hamilton Sanatorium in Ontario more than two thousand miles away. Each message, recorded in Inuktitut, is introduced by a nurse speaking in English. Quietly, with a voice that sounds silvery from smoke, she puts things in order, contains things. There is, to borrow a phrase from Barthes, a certain “assertion of gentleness” in her voice. Each message is numbered, and each speaker is identified by his or her Inuktitut name as well as a government-issued disc number. The intended recipient of the message is named and their disc number also given. Her Inuktitut is good enough that she doesn’t butcher the names. She is deliberately kind. At the end of the tape she says, “There are five messages only on this tape, which is brittle and inclined to break. The messages continue on tape number two, commencing with message number six. End of tape one.” Many of the Inuit being recorded had a hard time finding words to speak into the recorder. A mother says to her son, “S, your mom speaking. I’m just going to say ‘bye’ to you right now.” And then her voice breaks off. “What was it?” she says softly, as if searching for a scattered thought. Then she starts again briskly, as if there had been no problem. “I don’t know what to say. Just listen and do as you’re told. That’s all.” She ends abruptly, the same way you would end a call on a CB radio. Taima! Over and out. Betty Marwood of the Welfare Division of the Department of Northern Affairs talked to a CBC reporter about people’s reaction to the tapes: There’s various reactions. Some people are thrilled by them and some people are saddened by them. To hear a relative’s voice, ah, who they haven’t seen for a year can be very upsetting. But usually, even though they might cry over it, they still feel that, well, at least the person’s alive and talking to them, and they want to send messages back. And it’s very interesting to see them get the children talking, on the tape recorder to their mother in hospital. And we enlist the help of the father, say, to help the little child get over his mic fright and talk into the tape recorder and we’ve got some very interesting recordings this way. (Barry 1961)

Inuit on the tape repeatedly emphasize the difficulty they experience in knowing what to say. Words often seem to fail them: “I’m not quite sure of what to say, so I’ll say bye for now” or “I don’t have much to say.” What is there for a mother to say to her child in a distant sanatorium, unsure if she will live or die, that can be compressed into a threeminute recording? In one message a father says to his daughter, “This is

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your father speaking, E5–276.18 However, I don’t have much to say.” He continues to speak and finds some words—more, in fact, than many of the other speakers. “Though I’m not with you and can’t see you physically, I would like to say to you that although I don’t know how you are, I try not to worry about you too much. Just as I don’t want you to worry either while we live here on earth.” A daughter says to her mother, “I don’t know what to say, Mom, so I’m just going to say hello and bye, Mom.” A very small child says, in a frightened voice, “Goodbye.” And then, with a little coaching, he says, “Big brother, goodbye.” Inuit were also encouraged to write letters to their family members in the hospital. Some wrote to government officials petitioning them for information or a change in government policy regarding the evacuations.19 Minnie Aodla Freeman, an Inuit woman who was employed in the hospitals to translate for Inuit patients, described just how difficult it was for her to communicate the depth of Inuit despair. The urgency and emotion of the messages were often lost in the process of translation. “Altogether [the message in the letter] does not sound very important to the receiver because we translators lack many important words in English, though we know them in the Inuit language.” She gives the example of a phrase, used in a letter inquiring about a child in a southern hospital, which was translated as “I have not heard where he is. I would like to hear.” Really what should be conveyed is closer to “I would be pleased to hear as I worry about him a great deal. My mind does not rest from worry” (Freeman 1978: 54). Or perhaps, as Ittuq says, “I nearly went out of my mind.”

quvianaqtuq again It is the distress encapsulated in the phrase “My mind does not rest from worry” that Quvianaqtuq’s letter to Yatsushiro was addressing. His letter was a petition to change the practice of sending Inuit south for treatment. He makes it clear that he is grateful for the medical care the government has begun to provide. He writes, “The doctors and nurses really work hard and never seem to tire. They don’t ever give up no matter how advanced the disease is or get tired of looking after sick people. This is their work and they do it well. Many people would have been dead if they were not given treatment and operated on.” Quvianaqtuq seems quite aware that Inuit were quickly becoming the subjects of postwar health measures designed to extend Inuit lives. “No one is able to make us live forever,” he writes, “but the doctors can

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help to make us live longer by treating the disease.” But he qualifies his praise of the Qallunaaq doctors and nurses and their decision to transport tubercular Inuit to southern sanatoria with a curious statement. He says, “We do not fully understand it in our hearts why they do these things, but they do it because of their work.”20 So, despite the genuine admiration Quvianaqtuq expresses for the non-Inuit doctors and nurses, his acknowledgment of how much they care, he cannot fully reconcile himself to their way of going about things, and in particular their apparent disregard for the length of time Inuit families are separated. He notices the fact that Qallunaaq doctors and nurses who come North to care for the Inuit are often separated from their own families for years at a time. He concedes that, in this regard at least, “Sometimes we [the Inuit and the Qallunaat] do not understand each other.”21 With resignation, and a kind of pathos, Quvianaqtuq ends his petition with “I know you all have bosses and you are supposed to follow certain rules. Do so, for the good of the people and explain to us what they [the rules] mean. We will try to cooperate and some of us will write [them] down so we won’t forget.” Quvianaqtuq is acknowledging that the doctor who gives the order for evacuation is not fully responsible for his actions—that the doctor, just as much as the Inuit, are caught by what Charles Taylor has called “bureaucratic ways of proceeding.” “Within bureaucratic rule,” writes Taylor, “certain decisions are taken away from individuals who are required to follow sets of rules. The requirement that rules be followed precludes the possibility of scrapping the rules, finding alternative ways of making decisions, or taking a shortcut to a decision” (Taylor 1994: 175).22 What Quvianaqtuq understands with ethnographic clarity is that the work doctors and nurses do, the care they provide, is, in the classic Weberian sense that Taylor takes up, bureaucratic. The doctors and nurses are not acting solely on their own accord when they arrange for tubercular Inuit to be transported south, but instead answer to “bosses” and rules with a logic of their own. In a bureaucracy decisions are supposed to be based on rules rather than relationships, and decision makers are often following protocols rather than their own sense of right. Quvianaqtuq knows that the doctors and nurses care for their Inuit patients and want to prolong their lives. He also knows that the Canadian government cares for tubercular Inuit when it directs its agents to evacuate them to southern hospitals. But Quvianaqtuq is also well aware of something else—that the bureaucratic project of creating

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health and extending life has been construed as a mutual one, requiring Inuit cooperation. What does it mean, then, to cooperate with a regime of life? What is the psychic toll that such cooperation exacts?

eerkiyoot At the same moment The Book of Wisdom was being published and distributed to Quvianaqtuq’s family in the Eastern Arctic, history was being made in the Western Arctic. On September 2, 1949, an Inuit man named Eerkiyoot stood trial in a Canadian court. He was charged with aiding the “Eskimo woman Nukashook in the commission of suicide contrary to Section 269 of the Criminal Code of Canada” (Stipendiary Magistrate 1949a). It was the first case of assisted suicide to be tried in a Canadian court, and also an important milestone in the attempt to get Inuit to cooperate with a regime of life. The following day, Eerkiyoot’s friend Ishakak, who had helped Eerkiyoot put his mother to death, was also put on trial. In sentencing the two men, Judge Gibson instructed the jury, “Parliament has said that . . . to assist another person [in suicide], even under the most harrowing circumstances, is an offence, and none of you can have any other opinion on the subject” (Stipendiary Magistrate 1949a). It was not just the Inuit who were required to cooperate. The trials took place in Cambridge Bay, an outpost of the Hudson’s Bay Company, 350 miles from the hunting grounds of Eerkiyoot and Ishakak. Neither man had ever been to Cambridge Bay before in his life. Yet, from what remains of the court record, it seems that the trials, which were conducted through a court interpreter and decided by a jury, went smoothly.23 Although both men pleaded “not guilty” to a crime that was punishable by death, the facts of the case were never in question. Those present appeared “anxious to tell all the truth with respect to what he had seen and done.” There was, according to the Stipendiary Magistrate, “no holding back, no lack of frankness but perfect, cheerful honesty” (Stipendiary Magistrate 1949a). It was Eerkiyoot himself who gave the fullest description of the events of the previous year. His words can be pieced together from fragments of the court transcript and the magistrate’s notes, which have been preserved: Mother died last year in the summer. The snow was gone. There was only drift ice. At Eelaunaling. She was sick. Her lungs (indicating). She asked me to kill her. I asked Ishakak to help me. I put the rope through the roof of the

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tent and fastened it at both ends. It hung about two feet from the floor. Ishakak was there when the rope was put up. Then she, my mother, asked me to help her put her clothes on. (Stipendiary Magistrate 1949b)

From the court transcript we get a more detailed sense of how the story was elicited in court: Q: And after her clothes were put on, what happened then? Eerkiyoot: She asked us to help her go to the rope. Q: And what did you do? Eerkiyoot: We both helped her. Q: You have told us that you and Ishakak and Nukashook were there. Was anyone else there at this time? Eerkiyoot: Nobody also there. Q: After you had helped her over to the rope what happened then? Eerkiyoot: She put the rope around her. Q: What part of her body did she put the rope around? Eerkiyoot: (Witness indicates) Right round her neck. Q: In what position was she after she had put the rope around her neck? Was she lying down, standing, sitting or what position? Eerkiyoot: She was sitting. Q: And what happened after she put the rope around her neck? Eerkiyoot: She was die [sic] quick so I told them to push her head and hurry up. Q: What did you do? Eerkiyoot: I push her head down. Q: And what did Ishakak do? Eerkiyoot: He was holding her by the shoulders. Q: What happened to Nukashook? Eerkiyoot: After he putting her head down she struggle a bit and then . . . Q: And then? Eerkiyoot: And then her breath gone. (Stipendiary Magistrate 1949b) And returning to the magistrate’s notes: After her breath was gone I went out to get Oogyook, Kohkea, and Nouys. They came to the tent. Oogyook helped put the cover round the body and

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they took her outside the tent. Ishakak was with them. The burial place was not so far from her tents as the H. B. [Hudson’s Bay] post here is from where we are. (Stipendiary Magistrate 1949b)

Concerning the lives and history of these two men and their witnesses, the court record reveals little. Under cross-examination Ishakak testified that he could write his name, spell in syllabics, and count on his fingers. He told the court that he did not often come into contact with white men, except the missionary, whose “Eskimo” (that is, his ability to speak Inuktitut) was “sometimes not very good” and whom he didn’t see very often. Kohkea, who helped Ishakak and Eerkiyoot with the burial of Nukashook, said much the same: “I don’t know my age, never went to school. Know not many white men. Ha[ve] not been at Cambridge Bay before now. No white men live near us. Saw some at Fort Ross. Have been there before—[do] not know how many times. [I know] two missionaries. Saw them at Fort Ross” (Stipendiary Magistrate 1949a).24 It seems that Ishakak’s parents died while he was young and he “lived with Eerkiyoot and always did what Eerkiyoot told him.” Whatever their relationship, we know that it was a close one: Ishakak agreed to help his friend bring about the death of his mother. There is also no doubt that Nukashook had been very ill. Ishakak relates that when he arrived at her tent with Eerkiyoot, she “had blood spitting” (Stipendiary Magistrate 1949a). In his charge to the jury A. H. Gibson noted, “Without any question the woman Nukashook wished to die. The Doctor has told you that she faced certain death, in his opinion possible within three months, almost certainly within a year[,] and that in certain circumstances she might have passed out very quickly; if she had a severe hemorrhage she might not survive” (Stipendiary Magistrate 1949b). The coroner who later examined the body testified that, in addition to suffering from bad nutrition or long illness, Nukashook showed evidence of “very advanced tuberculous disease, probably pleurisy of a tuberculous nature” (Stipendiary Magistrate 1949a). Although Canadian law made no allowances for a merciful death, the subject was on the minds of both the magistrate and the jurors. The magistrate in his instructions to the jury had this to say on the subject: It is an offence to assist in a suicide and even in a very civilized country where we perhaps long ago should have reached certainty on some of these points, even in the most extreme cases where a person faces the positive certainty of a lingering and painful death[,] the law does not permit the most skilled or the most capable physician to bring about death. (Stipendiary Magistrate 1949b)

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The extent of the knowledge Inuit had of these laws or morals was something the defense counsel tried to draw out. The elder Kokhea, who helped Eerkiyoot bury his mother, testified that although he knew of the white man’s God, “It is the Eskimo custom to help old and sick people to die when they ask help. I know since I came here [to Cambridge Bay] that this is wrong. I do not know the book on the corner of the table (the bible)” (Stipendiary Magistrate 1949a). Eerkiyoot also testified that he had never thought it wrong to help someone die before he came to Cambridge Bay for his trial. Ishakak, for his part, asks rhetorically, “When old or sick Eskimo people wish to die and ask for help, is it not the Eskimo custom to help them[?] A long time ago it was their custom. Nukashook asked for help to die many times” (Stipendiary Magistrate 1949a). Under cross-examination he added, “When they get tired of sickness that way they ask to die quick. I have heard the old people talk about this helping to die” (Stipendiary Magistrate 1949a). In his remarks to the jury, Gibson spends a great deal of time on the subject of custom, about which he is ambivalent: Now I think while the suggestion is made in the evidence that what was done may be the carrying out of an ancient custom, the evidence actually falls considerably short, that is, accurately and carefully considered it falls quite short, of establishing a custom; but it does undoubtedly suggest that something in the nature of a custom or common observance might exist there, in fact I think you would be inclined to say that unless some such practice had been known, at least talked about in the group of people living in that place—even Ishakak, although he had no original responsibility and was only a secondary person—would not have come [to Eerkiyoot’s assistance]. (Stipendiary Magistrate 1949a)

The jury in Eerkiyoot’s case was obviously moved by this discussion. After twenty-one minutes of reflection they sent two questions to the court by means of the constable. The second was “whether we should govern ourselves solely by Canadian Law or are we to take into consideration Eskimo custom?” (Stipendiary Magistrate 1949b). The very possibility that one might take Eskimo custom into consideration demonstrates the atmosphere of sympathy toward the Inuit men that the court had created. This was not a colonial power capriciously imposing its beliefs, moral standards, and laws on another people. There was hesitation in the court; there was the sense of an injustice and of a kind of failure. Gibson told the jury that Ishakak was charged with “a serious offence. It is one of the very serious offences and is punishable in certain

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instances by the resort to the most extreme penalty of the law, that is, a man may be deprived of his life” (Stipendiary Magistrate 1949b).25 In any event, Nukashook probably had no idea she was resisting the Canadian state by arranging for her own death. However, in the postwar period, when Canada was self-consciously attempting to assert its sovereignty over the Arctic and its population (Grant 1988), the question of suicide (along with other kinds of exposure to death, such as starvation) figured largely. Exposure to death was now something that the government hoped to control, thereby making Inuit worthy of Canadian citizenship. With regard to the “duty” to live or the duty not to kill oneself, Gibson notes, “There may be a different standard of observance in areas occupied by primitive people. I find it very difficult to express this, perhaps I should put it this way: We couldn’t accept for one part of the country a lower or a different view of duty than the one that was meant to apply throughout the country” (Stipendiary Magistrate 1949a).26 Gibson argues that in order to better observe the humanitarian principles central to Canada’s postwar image, the government needed to provide for a better way of life among the Inuit so that the “native” could say, “I don’t need to exercise my tribal customs upon my mother or my relatives and bring about merciful deaths; there is a place provided by the government where these people can be looked after.” The “better way of life” and “better observance of humanitarian principles” translate into the increased intervention of the Canadian state in Inuit lives. If the government could house, feed, and care for people such as Nukashook, Eerkiyoot would not have been forced to take such extreme measures. Eskimo death, especially suicide, becomes an indicator of Canada’s failure to provide. Eerkiyoot was sentenced to serve one year’s imprisonment at the guardroom of the Cambridge Bay detachment of the RCMP. The jury, however, made a strong recommendation for leniency, and Gibson told Eerkiyoot that for good behavior as a prisoner he would recommend that he be returned to his people with the RCMP winter patrol, which departed Cambridge Bay in late January or early February. On a trip to Ottawa Gibson discussed this matter with Canada’s deputy minister of justice, who agreed to Eerkiyoot’s early parole. In December of that year an article appeared in the “Northern News” section of the journal Arctic (reprinted from the Arctic Circular) concerning the death of Nukashook and Eerkiyoot’s trial. After describing Nukashook’s death in some detail the writer of the article states, “It is

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hoped the trial will have the desired effect of bringing home to the Eskimo that assisted suicides are forbidden” (Arctic 1949).27

expecting failure By helping his mother die, Eerkiyoot failed to cooperate with the duty to live. Quvianaqtuq insists that if the Qallunaat could make the rules more explicit, the Inuit would try to cooperate. The question of cooperation and of failure is complicated.28 The Arctic bureaucrats wanted to build cooperation into their policies, even though they expected failure. The 1964 “Report of Subcommittee on Eskimo Housing Programs” (see chapter 1) makes it clear that if one wanted to reduce the rate of tuberculosis in the North, one could not simply provide “frame buildings” to Inuit. Inuit needed to be educated on how to use them since “many Eskimo families lack the skill, the funds, the experience, and above all the motivation to maintain and operate their homes in a manner that is conducive to health” (Subcommittee on Eskimo Housing Programs 1964: 9; emphasis added). Inuit must be given skills, but at the same time they must also develop the desire, the motivation, to emulate Qallunaaq life. They must learn to cooperate. In 1962 Phyllis Harrison, a social worker in Iqaluit, published a fictionalized account of one Inuit family’s transition from the “stone age to the atomic age.” In Harrison’s story, which was also broadcast on CBC radio, the father, Anawakaloo, was a respected hunter, and the mother, Kelougah, was skilled at making clothing and looking after her children. But one winter Kelougah contracted tuberculosis and was sent down South for treatment. Upon her return, she was given a modernstyle house by the Canadian government. According to Harrison, [Kelougah] wanted very much to please the people who had helped her back to health and provided for her children. She loved her new house with its three rooms—all painted in bright colours. She carefully hung up parkas on hooks instead of throwing them down on a bed. She dumped garbage into the empty oil drum out in the yard instead of just throwing it out the door. Still, she never quite managed the way white women did. (Harrison 1962: 16)

Although the colonial norms of cleanliness, tidiness, and deference were taught and modeled assiduously by social workers, nurses, doctors, missionaries, and others, the Inuit (from the perspective of the colonial agents) could never quite manage to live up to the standards set by their white counterparts. That Inuit cooperate by loving what white women love—brightly painted rooms and coats hung on hooks—was essential.

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That they succeed in living up to the norm was not to be expected: Kelougah “never quite managed.” Since the “Eskimo administration,” through its focus on introducing measures to extend life, can be characterized as a biopolitical regime, this issue of the simultaneous expectation of Inuit failure raises the question of the psychic life of biopolitics. Peter Itinuar, in an interview on CBC radio, described being sent down South in 1962 as a “guinea pig” to test how Inuit children would manage when given a southern education. Like the fictionalized Kelougah, Itinuar was expected to learn to desire what the Qallunaat desired. He was placed with a family who provided all kinds of opportunities. He recalls, “I remember them telling me that anything the Eskimo or Indian can do the white man can do better, but on the other hand I remember being given lots of love and lots of understanding, lots of pushing to do this, or lots of opportunity to take things like piano, judo, whatever, you know, concurrent activities you normally would never get up north.” What happens when the technical bureaucratic rationality of biopolitics meets the psychic reality of colonialism? What happens when the state provides opportunities but expects failure?29 As Itinuar says, though the Qallunaat gave him lots of opportunities, he was to understand that anything he could do the white man could do better.

survival As the story of Eerkiyoot makes clear, Inuit are expected to cooperate not only by desiring the trappings of civilization, but also by desiring life. This became very clear to me during an interview I conducted with a policy analyst in the Nunavut government. I met Miram Nowdlak, an elegantly dressed and stately woman, in her office to speak to her about youth suicide, but she began to speak instead about her own experience of the time when Inuit were becoming wards of the Canadian state. She told me the story of her introduction to residential school. In 1955, a student residence was built in Chesterfield Inlet, and the Sisters of the Grey Nuns became resident supervisors. Each fall, planes began to land in the camps near Igloolik to take school-age children away from their families to be educated. Instruction at the school was in English, and the textbooks were written for southern Canadians (Steensel 1966: 130).30 Miriam talked about these events in a quiet and understated way. She remembered her father taking her by boat to the floatplane and then turning his back as she cried for help. She has come to think that he probably turned away so that she wouldn’t see his tears. She said,

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I can only refer to my past. I grew up in a traditional, nomadic lifestyle, and because I was the only girl in my family, I was treated special, as the only sister, only daughter. Because at that time little girls’ hair was braided and taken care of, pride in long hair in being a little girl and so on. When I went to school, when I went to residential school, all the messages that I was getting, they didn’t have to say it, they took away our traditional clothes, and they gave us clothing, not skin clothing . . . cut our hair . . . prevented us from speaking our language in school, just speak English in school and so on. To me, that was saying Inuit are no good. And that’s when I learnt that my name was Miriam.

Learning her name was Miriam was the beginning of a process of becoming someone other. Before entering school she had only Inuktitut names. Now she was far away from her parents, from the sod house where nine people had slept together on one platform, from a winter camp where she could name every occupant of every igloo. As she learned to speak English, as she was taught to read and write and count, she also learned that her Inuktitut names had no currency. On the first day at school the translator told her she was not to speak Inuktitut any more, yet the only word she knew in English was “hello.” “So I hardly said anything in school that year.” Our conversation took on the quality of a dream. She continued, I hardly have any memories of residential school. I remember I went to school and I was left-handed. Seems like I went to sleep and woke up righthanded. But I don’t remember any of it. I remember the day we were supposed to line up to have our hair cut—like, my hair was down to my thighs. And I didn’t want my hair cut so I hid under a desk. I don’t know if they ever found me. I don’t remember . . . They must have because my hair was like everybody else’s . . . I remember—when was it?—I don’t exactly remember what time of year it was but I think it was spring—anyway, we had gone for a walk and we were trying to get at the berries under the snow, frozen berries that had grown—so it must have been in springtime—that summer. I was walking home and I fell down and I didn’t want to get up. I wanted to freeze to death. Because I was so tired of—you know—just wanting to go home and not being able to. I missed my parents so much. That’s all I remember. I don’t remember what happened after that.

Miriam, as well as Kaujak in chapter 1 and Quvianaqtuq, Eerkiyoot, and Kelougah in this chapter, were all asked to cooperate in different ways with a regime of life. A regime of life, as I have been using the term, is a political system (in this case a welfare state that was expanding to include its hinterlands) in which keeping people alive has become the primary goal.

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The novelist J. M. Coetzee is a practiced observer and theoretician of the contradictions of the postcolonial, but he also understands something about what it means to be subject to a regime of life.31 In Coetzee’s novel Life and Times of Michael K, there is a scene in which a doctor in a South African rehabilitation/work camp for “subversives” confronts a patient who is refusing to eat. The patient, a man “who looked at you as if beyond the grave” and whose body was little more than a skeleton, had collapsed during physical training. With some frustration the doctor says, “If we turned you loose, if we put you out on the street in your condition, you would be dead in twenty-four hours. You can’t take care of yourself, you don’t know how. Felicity [the nurse] and I are the only people in the world who care enough to help you. Not because you are special but because it is our job. Why can’t you co-operate?” (Coetzee 1998: 145). Notice here that the doctor both requires the patient’s cooperation and laments his failure to cooperate. Some time later the laconic patient, Michael K, responds—but with an oblique question, “I ask myself: What am I to this man? I ask myself: What is it to this man if I live or die?” Coetzee’s doctor retorts, “You might as well ask why we don’t shoot the prisoners. It is the same question” (1998: 148). The colonizer’s desire that the colonized cooperate in the mutual task of survival is foregrounded in Coetzee’s novel.32 The colonized may fall ill, may die of mysterious diseases, may even be killed in the civil war taking place around them, but they should always cooperate by striving to live. This desire for cooperation turns into an obsession for the doctor in Coetzee’s novel, as it was an obsession for the generation of Arctic bureaucrats I am describing. Yet when Coetzee’s doctor, a kind man and a figure of great ambivalence, says he cares about Michael K, he insists that it is not because Michael K is special but because he is a doctor. It is not insignificant, then, that the doctor repeatedly blunders over his patient’s name, calling him “Michaels” instead of “Michael.” Because in the end it doesn’t really matter whom the patient is. It matters more that the doctor, qua doctor, can convince him of the importance of cooperation. But rather than beginning to eat again, or even just explaining why he won’t, Michael K instead questions the very ties that bind the doctor to his patient. “What is it to this man if I live or die?” he asks. “What is it to these men if I live or die?” is also the veiled question Quvianaqtuq is asking about the caring doctors and nurses in the Arctic. They take care of us in part because it is their job, and they would be rooted out if they failed to comply. Who are we (Inuit) to you

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anyway? What guarantee do we have that, in Coetzee’s doctor’s words, you won’t shoot the prisoners?33 Years later Miriam asked the same question when she looked back on her life at residential school. One of the persistent questions of this book is: What does it mean to cooperate in survival? To see life as a value in itself? Does it mean to board a ship bound for southern Ontario in search of a cure for end-stage tuberculosis, as Kaujak did? To get up out of the snow and go back to the residential school where a “rehabilitation” program was in full swing? To eat, as the doctor urged Michael K to do, so that he could resume the jumping jacks and flag salutes of his reeducation center? And what does it mean to resist such cooperation? The irony, of course, is that by the 1980s,34 after Inuit health had undergone increasing surveillance, when fewer Inuit were dying in childbirth, of starvation, and of tuberculosis, a suicide epidemic among Inuit youth erupted. On some level, Inuit youth were not willing to cooperate.35 In fact, one of the arguments of this book is that Inuit are never fully made into biopolitical subjects. They frequently fail to cooperate with the regime of life, and they live—or die—beyond its grid of intelligibility (see Dreyfus, Rabinow, and Foucault 1983: 120–21). The question that might be posed is this: are Inuit in some sense still asking why the prisoners aren’t being shot? This question of whether the RCMP would “shoot the prisoners” became material in the late 1950s, when the RCMP began to shoot and kill Inuit sled dogs running loose around Inuit communities in Northern Quebec and the Eastern Arctic. In 1959, aware that the Inuit were upset about the killing of the sled dogs, Toshio Yatsushiro, the anthropologist from McGill University to whom Quvianaqtuq wrote, added a question to his interview schedule about the shooting of the dogs. Most respondents expressed their bewilderment and horror over the shootings, as many do to this day.36 The RCMP still maintain they were responding to a very real public health threat,37 while Inuit contest both the danger the dogs posed and the motivations of the RCMP.38 In an article Yatsushiro published several years after the shootings in Iqaluit, he suggested the RCMP had been “exterminating unleashed dogs owned by Eskimos, on the grounds that such animals constitute a menace to the community, especially the white residents” (Yatsushiro 1962: 21). One man Yatsushiro interviewed in 1959, Jamesie, saw things in a darker light. Jamesie understood the ominous implications of the event and just how unbrotherly a bureaucracy can be. His vision for the future

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was particularly bleak. He says (speaking to Yatsushiro’s translator in Inuktitut), “But I also sometimes wonder when they’ve killed off all the dogs whether they [the police] will turn on us Inuit next.” The translator asks for clarification: “When they’ve killed off all the dogs . . . ?” “Yes. When they’ve killed off our dogs perhaps they, the police, will turn on us Inuit in anger. This is what concerns me greatly.” “That they’d turn on the Inuit and start killing the Inuit?” “Yes. Well, maybe not kill [the Inuit] but turn their anger at us.” And then something interesting happens. Even though Jamesie is hedging his words, (maybe they wouldn’t actually kill the Inuit), Yatsushiro’s translator chooses to use the English word “kill” to convey what Jamesie meant. In his beginner’s English the translator says to Yatsushiro that, in the future, the RCMP “maybe kill more Eskimos sometimes too.” You can almost hear Yatsushiro blanching at this thought. He asks for clarification. After trying several times to get his point across, the translator finally says, “Policemen kill Eskimos, next time.” “Eskimo . . . ,” begins Yatsushiro, sounding unsure. “Policeman kill Eskimo? Or Eskimo dogs?” “The same as Eskimo, same as dogs. Policeman kill,” explains the translator. Yatsushiro wonders if he has misunderstood the verb. “Give,” he says excitedly, “Oh! Give?” The translator is firm. “Kill.” “Oh, kill?” “Mmhm. Shoot,” says the translator. “Shoot,” repeats Yatsushiro as if he is turning the word over in his mind. “Dogs, same thing, Eskimos,” adds the translator emphatically, but Yatsushiro still wonders if he has misunderstood. “Oh, Eskimos will shoot their own dogs.” “Eskimo dogs same thing. One,” says the translator forcefully. “Same.” Repeats Yatsushiro, the realization of what the translator is saying breaking over him. “Policeman kill,” says the translator again. “Policeman kill . . . dogs,” repeats Yatsushiro. “Dogs first, next Eskimo, maybe.” “Next time Eskimos, police will shoot Eskimos?” asks Yatsushiro. “Mmhmm.”

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“Jamesie say this?” “Mmhmm.” “Mmmm.” This is a difficult idea to swallow: the colonial agents might secretly, or not so secretly, desire to kill Inuit, just as they killed their sled dogs.39 In fact, listening to the exchange between Yatsushiro and his Inuk translator it is clear how hard it was for Yatsushiro to assimilate the affective reality being conveyed.40 The idea that a standard public health measure (the euthanizing of dogs who pose health risks) might have more sinister undertones is anathema to Yatsushiro at first; he is reluctant to believe anyone could imagine such a thing. Of course, “Why we don’t shoot the prisoners” is also an unspeakable question for the doctor in Coetzee’s novel, just as the dead Eskimo is anathema for the bureaucrats considering whether to gather Inuit into settlements.41 I would argue, however, that it was a very real question for the Inuit living within the colonial regime of the 1950s and ’60s. “Dogs. Eskimos. Same thing,” says Yatsushiro’s translator. When the idea finally grabs hold of Yatsushiro—the idea that there may be something murderous in killing the Inuit dogs, their only mode of transportation, and their link to a way of life and livelihood—he grows quiet as he turns the possibility over in his mind. Jamesie goes on to describe the shooting of the dogs in the Inuit tent area as chaotic. He reminds Yatsushiro and the translator that bullets do not have minds of their own, that there was little space between the tents, and that with bullets ricocheting off the structures it would have been easy for a bullet to hit a person rather than a dog. The indifference of the bullets seems to mime the indifference of the RCMP to the safety of the Inuit in the tent area. Much, of course, is lost in translation. Jamesie initially replies in the affirmative to the translator’s questions about whether he means that the RCMP would kill the Inuit next. Then he nuances his assertion by saying that they might not kill the Inuit, but they might “turn their anger at us.” In the end it is impossible to discount Jamesie’s politeness, to discount the fact that he was talking about the RCMP, whom Inuit were instructed to think of as their “friends.” But during this conversation the sinister idea that the police might kill the Eskimo “just like the dogs” is proposed by the translator and finally agreed upon by Yatsushiro. The idea (where did it initially come from?) resonates because it forms part of the psychic life that biopolitics leads, where impersonal, seemingly rational actions such as shooting dogs perceived to be a public health hazard are also experienced as hostile, even murderous. There is something about this that eventually

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makes sense, even to Yatsushiro, a rank outsider. In an article published in the Canadian magazine Beaver in 1962, Yatsushiro emphasizes the Inuit dissatisfaction with the shooting and quotes the translator’s words, “Maybe the police will kill the Eskimo then, just like the dogs” (22).

the psychic life of biopolitics The shooting of Eskimo sled dogs was more than just the fact of its occurrence. That is, the incident had a psychic life that went beyond the obvious fact that a biopolitical state saw the dogs as a health hazard. The shooting had a psychic life all its own, one that linked indifference toward the life or death of dogs to an indifference toward humans. Jamesie had an image in his mind of the ricocheting bullets, an image that illustrated for him the (disavowed) colonial indifference to Inuit life even as the colonials were working so hard to preserve it. Inasmuch as Jamesie can’t rid himself of this image, the idea that RCMP might have secretly wanted to kill the Inuit is so unthinkable to Yatsushiro that it takes him a very long time to actually hear what Jamesie’s translator is trying to say. What becomes clear through the ethnographic and archival record is that such forms of bureaucratic care, while working to maintain the physical life of Inuit qua Canadian citizens, may also manifest a form of indifference on the part of the state—an indifference that is sometimes perceived by Inuit as murderous, even though it is always couched in terms of benevolence and care. The murderous indifference Jamesie experiences is related to the fact that Canadian state agents promote cooperation in a regime of life, but they also expect that Inuit will fail—that is, that Inuit will fail to stay alive. Thus asking why they don’t shoot the prisoners in a work camp in South Africa is like asking Yatsushiro to consider the idea that the RCMP will shoot the Inuit next. The sense in which the guards at the work camp in South Africa and the RCMP in Canada desire the death of their charges is unspeakable. It is a ridiculous question. It contravenes the biopolitical logic of care in the Canadian state. In plumbing the psychic life of biopolitics for the RCMP and other state agents (including, of course, the Subcommittee on Eskimo Housing Programs, which I addressed in chapter 1) we can only say that Canadian state agents expect Inuit death in the same way they expect Inuit not to be able to keep their houses clean, and ultimately also expect them to commit suicide. It is this psychic life of biopolitics that leads Jamesie to wonder, if only in a moment of great frustration and anger, whether the Inuit will be next.

chapter 3

Anonymous Care

I was constantly on the move when I lived in Iqaluit. The housing shortage was acute, and I had neither the money to rent one of the few privately owned apartments, nor a job through which to secure subsidized housing. On one occasion, while house-sitting for an Inuit friend who was out of town, her brother flew in the open door without knocking (doors were often unlocked in Inuit communities, and I was told that the only people who knock are the RCMP or social workers) and was startled to find me sitting alone in his sister’s kitchen drinking tea. I offered him some tea, which was awkward since people in Iqaluit usually help themselves to tea when they want it without asking. But Joannasie didn’t seem to mind and we started to talk. He asked me about my research, and after I had stuttered something about the suicide epidemic, he looked at me with steel in his eyes and said, “Qallunaat are too professional.” Then he proceeded to tell me the story of the first suicide he could remember in the community where he grew up. When Joannasie was twelve his best friend, who was a couple of years older, committed suicide. The night of his suicide, Joannasie’s friend had been charged with breaking and entering: “It was nothing. He would have stood before the judge and that’s all,” said Joannasie. But the local RCMP officer—a new guy in town who had been spending a lot of time getting to know the community, hanging out and socializing with the local Inuit—took the offense, and his duty of administering justice, very seriously. Dressed in his uniform, the officer approached the 75

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teenager’s house. He gave the boy a stern lecture with his family watching from the living room. “So my friend, eh? That night he got a high-powered rifle and blew his brains out underneath the RCMP’s window.” Joannasie watched carefully for my reaction and then added, “He took it personally, eh?” The RCMP had a specific professional mandate to fulfill in the colonial North—to enforce the law. But because they were often the only representatives of the Canadian state in the North, whenever necessary they also acted as “registrars of vital statistics, collectors of various kinds of government revenue, inspectors of fisheries, Indian agents, postmasters, and administrators of pensions, family allowances and other welfare provisions” (Rea 1968: 49). In The Book of Wisdom for Eskimo (that “civilizing” tract the Canadian government distributed to the Inuit in the 1940s instructing them on proper comportment, cleanliness, and hunting practices) there is a line drawing of an RCMP officer in uniform (see page 74). He looks to be midstride. The caption reads “R.C.M. Police, The Eskimo’s Friend” (Bureau of Northwest Territories and Yukon Services 1947: 19).1 What does it mean to be both a friend and an enforcer of the law, a friend and the executor of bureaucratic reason? In Joannasie’s mind, the fact that Qallunaat were “too professional” was at the heart of the Inuit suicide epidemic. Inuit, he went on to argue, often take personally what is intended as a professional interaction. Joannasie’s point is related to the one Quvianaqtuq made in his letter to Yatsushiro fifty years earlier and that Max Weber made at the turn of the twentieth century. It’s a simple one: in a bureaucracy, “life is focused not on persons but on impersonal rational goals” (Weber 1968: 1200). That is, a bureaucracy is indifferent to persons and the personal. The policeman talks to the young Inuk man as a police officer to a criminal, thereby administering justice and keeping the peace.2 But how does this mesh with the idea, disseminated in The Book of Wisdom, that the RCMP are the Eskimos’ friends? What is friendship if not a willingness to act in an interested way on a friend’s behalf? Acting as a “professional,” the RCMP agent that knocked on the young “criminal’s” door appeared disinterested—unbiased by personal interest, to be sure—but also perhaps “unbrotherly” in Weber’s sense. There is nothing friendly—in the sense of being motivated by personal interest—about such a bureaucratic way of proceeding. As Quvianaqtuq put it, “Sometimes we [the Inuit and the Qallunaat] do not understand each other.” In this case, the line between friend and professional describes a scene of violence, flatteringly known as justice.

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In Nunavut today, the situation is both very different and very much the same as when Joannasie’s friend committed suicide. Although the line between friend and professional still describes a scene of violence, suicide is, tragically, no longer an unusual event. As one youth put it to me, “Sometimes we hear, ‘So-and-so committed suicide or tried to commit suicide.’ I find that sometimes I try to really hear it, and understand it, but I find it’s just in one ear and out the other. Just because it’s something that happened so often.” In 2003, for the first time since the creation of the territory in 1999, the Nunavut legislature tabled the question of suicide (Nunavut Legislative Assembly 2003: 2347–77). Beyond all the statistics, the legislators agreed that every citizen of Nunavut had been affected by suicide—that is, every citizen had experienced the death of a family member or friend. The minister of health declared suicide “probably the number 1 health care crisis in Nunavut” (2351). Another member suggested, “Every single Nunavummiut has thought at one time or another that their child is possibly suicidal” (2354). To form a comprehensive strategy each and every department of the fledgling Nunavut government was expected to come up with strategies to “suicide-proof” their organization and the territory. Everyone was at risk and everyone was implicated. By 2007, when the Nunavut government (GN) came out with its suicide intervention and prevention strategy, it suggested that there should be “frequent exchange of information among all GN employees regarding suicide in Nunavut” (Government of Nunavut 2007: 16). In reading the Hansard transcripts along with the territory’s 2007 suicide intervention and prevention strategy, it becomes clear that the new territory is somehow steeped in suicide, that the desire to die and the desire to stem that desire has become part of its identity. In such a context, the claim that one has “made a difference” in the lives of Inuit youth is literally contested territory.3 The life of a suicidal Inuit youth today is vetted by agents too numerous to count. Performing “the most suicide interventions in Canada” has become a point of ambivalent pride for a counselor who prefaces her speeches with this fact. Everyone—all Inuit, that is—has become potentially suicidal and in need of counseling. As a suicide prevention pamphlet released by the Nunavut Department of Education in 2005 warns, you should trust your instincts: if you think someone is suicidal, he or she probably is. In a parallel fashion, every activity is potentially a suicide prevention strategy: soccer, hunting, day care, field trips, drum dancing, eating country food—all can be fashioned as life preserving.

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Annirusuktugut, Nunavut’s Suicide Intervention and Prevention Strategy, lists among its measures to combat suicide “math and science awareness programs” and “tobacco reduction initiatives” (Government of Nunavut 2007: 20–21). The brochures instruct readers never to leave a high-risk person alone. Signs that a person may be at high risk for suicide include coming from a broken home, drug and alcohol abuse, and physical, sexual, and verbal abuse. A pamphlet from the Northwest Territories suggests, “People who talk about suicide do it. Four out of five people who kill themselves have given out definite signals or talked to someone about it” (Tli Cho Suicide Prevention Team 2004). Of course, viewed within such a framework, most of the youth in Iqaluit are at high risk of suicide. As the member of legislature suggests, there isn’t a parent in Nunavut who hasn’t at some point suspected his or her child was suicidal. In such a context, care quickly becomes linked to surveillance. In fact, the director of a youth center admitted to me that for her, the most important suicide prevention programming would be having someone available twenty-four hours a day to whom she could hand off suicidal kids once the youth center was closed. She hated having to go home wondering what was going to happen. Ian Marsh writes in a very lucid way about the “compulsory ontology of pathology” that has governed thinking about suicide since the nineteenth century. By this Marsh means that since the nineteenth century suicide has been pathologized as mental illness (understood to have biological causes), and all other ways of thinking about suicide have come to be seen as somehow “ethically indefensible” (2013: 749).4 According to Marsh, this “compulsory ontology of pathology” has the effect of both individualizing suicide (as mental illness, suicide belongs properly to the body of the suicidal person) and removing responsibility for the act from the individual and placing it with the caretaker. In Marsh’s own experience working in the field of mental health, “Suicidal individuals themselves are positioned within this discourse of pathology as mentally unwell, and thus not fully responsible for their actions; instead, clinicians are taken to be the responsible, accountable, and possibly culpable agents in relation to their ‘suicidal patients.’ Suicide prevention training and planning comes to be largely about the identification and treatment of mental illness within ‘at risk’ populations” (2013: 749). Although the discourse in aboriginal communities focuses less on mental illness per se than on issues of trauma and abuse (Aboriginal Healing Foundation 2004; Elias et al. 2012), Marsh’s insights about the identification and treatment of “at risk” individuals

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hold true, as do his insights into the thorny question of clinician responsibility.5 Suicide prevention programs, along with their attempts to reduce the risk of self-harm, generally strive to ensure that practitioners cannot be implicated in the death of their charges. One aspect of suicide intervention that makes it so complicated is that the caregiver, whether a doctor, teacher, or school counselor, is constantly faced with the brute fact of the agency of another human being. In simple terms, “disease” is marked here primarily by the intention to carry out a particular action rather than by an organic imbalance or deviation from a norm (although both the organic imbalance and deviation from a norm may be presumed to exist). One way to manage the uncertainty of such an encounter, where health is defined negatively as the absence of an action or its desire, is to have a set of procedures ready to carry out that will in some sense absolve the practitioner of any “responsibility” for the patient’s future actions. For instance, the Northwest Territories Mental Health Act, to which Nunavut adheres, stipulates that individuals must be admitted to the hospital if they are at risk of harming themselves or others (Northwest Territories 2009). It is clear that once an individual is under constant surveillance, the risk of him or her committing suicide is radically reduced.6 Of course, the possibilities of life are also reduced. The authors of an article arguing for the necessity of a protocol for early suicide intervention in First Nations communities argue, “The development of an effective suicide risk management tool is essential not only to capture Aboriginal clients at risk before they commit suicide, but also to provide an opportunity for early intervention by supplying culturally-based support from members within their own community” (MacNeil and Guilmette 2004; emphasis added). Capturing at risk aboriginal clients may reduce the number of suicides. It is also one way to ensure that one is not held responsible for missing the warning signs. By turning people who are suffering into “clients” who become objects of suicide risk management tools, the counselor no longer has to cope with the existential anxiety that is raised by suicide and the specificity of the suffering one is witnessing. The proliferation of suicide protocols [as an important aspect of the professionalization of suicide prevention] is an example of what Charles Taylor (1994) calls the “bureaucratic ways of proceeding” that are characteristic of modern state forms (see chapter 2). These bureaucratic ways of proceeding, which lift the burden of decision or responsibility from us, are generally designed to mitigate the failure of the state or its agents and to ensure prompt and professional action.

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The Nunavut Suicide Response Protocol, written in 2001, opens with the following paragraph: In Nunavut suicide is an all too common occurrence. This protocol is going to address the devastation that results in communities, and schools in particular, when a student or staff member kills him or herself. Communities and the schools within these communities need to know what to do. There needs to be a plan to help ease the pain of those affected by the suicide and to help enable the grief to be expressed and the healing to begin. (Nunavut Department of Education 2001: 1)

I am interested here in the fact that it is only through having “a plan” that grief will be expressed and healing will begin. The protocol that schools are instructed to follow involves eight main “actions” to be taken after a suicide occurs, each divided into multiple bulleted subheadings. If a practitioner follows the protocol, there is, in a certain sense, “nothing more that could have been done.” No pointing of fingers. The actions to be taken include confirming and providing information about the suicide to the RCMP and the family, as well as setting up grieving rooms and sending condolence letters. Another crucial step is to identify “at risk” students and staff and provide a list of those persons to “H&SS personnel so that they can apply their Suicide Response Postvention protocol.” The circularity of the protocol is remarkable. That anyone could resist “capture” seems unlikely. A different kind of protocol, originally developed by the Kitikmeot Health and Social Services in 1999, establishes a procedure to follow in the event that one of its staff: 1) encounters someone with suicidal ideas; 2) witnesses or is informed of a suicide attempt; or 3) has to cope with the aftermath of a completed suicide.7 The importance of doing things within the proper time frame is emphasized: there are things to do immediately, things to do within two hours, and things to do within twenty-four hours. After a suicide attempt, for example, one must immediately contact the “on-call Social Worker and the on-call Nurse and Mental Health/Addiction Counselor” (Northwest Territories Heath and Social Services 2005: 5). Once the location of the suicide is deemed safe from firearms or other weapons, “front line staff will access the client directly/in person, for the purposes of a Mental Status Exam and Suicide Risk Assessment,” which are provided in the appendix. Within two hours, “any high risk family members and/or friends who self identify or are identified by the client or any other persons/professional in the community, must be interviewed by the Team to establish their level of risk/need at the time of the incident” (6). And within twenty-four

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hours, “the Suicide Completions and Attempts form will be completed and faxed to the Clinical Supervisor” (7). For most front-line youth workers, the fear of someone dying on their watch (or just after) is understandably terrifying. And I want to make one thing very clear: the individuals involved in suicide prevention very often do make a difference and do provide indispensable care to people who are in pain. They are generally dedicated, thoughtful, and self-reflective people—exactly the kind of people I would want to talk to in a moment of acute distress. And in fact, I count myself as having been, for a short time during fieldwork, among those who were trying to help. I spent several months volunteering on the hotline and experienced the strange terror that hearing the phone ring elicits. One night I received a call from a woman in tears about a relationship. We made a connection, and by the end of the conversation I think she felt a little better. But the discourse of suicide has a time—and we might even say a “life”—of its own. As Foucault reminded us, “Discourse is not life, its time is not your time” (1991: 71). Crucially, it is precisely the distinction between “your life” and the “discourse” on that life that threatens to disappear in contemporary suicide prevention efforts in Nunavut. That is, the suicide apparatus in Nunavut functions as a powerful discursive machine that seeks to frame what it means to be in life and in time. To care properly one must care according to the protocols—in their time. Such protocols may at times function as what Cora Diamond (2008) calls a “deflection” from the wounded body, a way of treating the body as a fact that prevents caregivers (perhaps understandably, but still unfortunately) from recognizing the ontological uncertainty of whether or not someone will actually try to kill him or herself, as well as from dealing with the specificity of the person before them. After twenty-four hours the person who attempted suicide has become yet another name on the “Suicide Completion and Attempts” form.8

expecting death The “regime of life” I have been describing vis-à-vis the tuberculosis epidemic began to attach itself, starting in the 1970s and ’80s, to this new problem of Inuit youth suicide. Today suicide is portrayed as a massive public health problem, one that, it is hoped, will be responsive to reeducation campaigns set up by the territorial government.9 This is, when one thinks about it, a startling formulation. How can I presume

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to use the word “reeducation” in conjunction with a suicide prevention campaign? Because there is something about the way experts try to get Inuit to stay alive that is reminiscent of the way experts tried to make them clean. We teach cleanliness but expect filth. We teach life as the ultimate value but expect death.10 The idea of “expecting” Inuit to commit suicide is tied up with what the minister of health, in that early discussion on suicide in the Nunavut legislature, called the normalization of suicide: “Suicide has become so normal within our culture, within our society, within our territory, we are not shocked by suicides anymore” (Nunavut Legislative Assembly 2003: 2349).11 But that’s not all it is. To expect suicide of the Inuit has everything to do with the vestiges of our colonial desires that mean we are secretly fascinated by, drawn to, Inuit filth and, in a parallel manner, Inuit death. One manifestation of what I am calling “reeducation” campaigns, beyond all the conferences and workshops that take place, appears in the prolife slogans that appear on posters around the community reminiscent of those extolling the virtues of quitting smoking and saying “no” to drugs.12 The baldness of their messages is striking: one that was distributed by the Nunavut government read, “Inuit Pride, Stay Alive, Inuit Survive.” Such posters, like the RCMP agent as well as Coetzee’s doctor (described in chapter 2), spread their message of cooperation indifferently. It matters not who you are, but that you, the reader of the poster, stay alive. I am arguing here that the indifference to the identity of the individual who must live is the implicit structure of suicide prevention in Nunavut, just as it was in the assault on tuberculosis and the imposition of the disc list system that I discussed in chapter 1. Care becomes, as Joannasie pointed out, “too professional,” or, as I would like to put it, care becomes “anonymous.” When life becomes an indifferent value it no longer matters who you are, only that you cooperate in the project of staying alive. Remember the bureaucrat who imagines having a dead “Eskimo” on his hands (chapter 1) and the way “Eskimos are also statistics” (chapter 1) but also the way that the doctor in Coetzee’s novel keeps tripping over Michael’s name (chapter 2): in Coetzee’s novel the doctor cares for his patient because he is a doctor, not because of who Michael is or what the story of his name might reveal. For the RCMP agent, of course, it mattered not who the criminal was but only that he was punished. We have to ask ourselves whether anything has changed: is there also some-

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thing punitive/punishing about making Inuit live while expecting them to die?13

Professional and Friend The shifting relationship between professional and friend, indifference and concern, the bureaucratic and the intimate, is central to an understanding of suicide prevention in Nunavut. In fact, we could say that it is this tension between professional and friend that structures suicide prevention work. The longest-standing suicide prevention initiative in Nunavut is the Kamatsiaqtut “help line” that began as an anonymous suicide hotline in 1989. Although it has shifted its mandate (and name) over the years to address other related forms of distress (coming to be officially called a crisis line and a help line), it is still known locally as the “suicide hotline,” and youth in Iqaluit are quick to rhyme off its phone number, sometimes taunting each other, “Why don’t you just call –3333?” The tension between indifference and concern, professional and friend, is central to how the hotline works. A brochure advertising the hotline informs the reader that the word “kamatsiaqtut” can be translated as “thoughtful people who care” and that the help line is designed to provide a “discreet and anonymous service” for anyone experiencing emotional distress.14 It doesn’t matter who you are (again, the volunteers are in this sense “indifferent” to your identity): you will be cared for. The hotline is generally open from 9 p.m. to midnight every night, even on Christmas. At any given time there are approximately fifty volunteers on the roster, and almost all of them are professionals, such as teachers, social workers, and nurses. At the time I was doing research, only four of the fifty were Inuit. The volunteers field calls from all of the twenty-eight communities in Nunavut, as well as from Nunavik, the Inuit settlement area of Northern Quebec. The people who call the line, save for the occasional caller from Southern Ontario, are mostly Inuit. During the time I spent volunteering on the line, I became curious about what it meant to be able to care for others, especially Inuit others, without knowing who they were—to care indiscriminately, professionally, and anonymously. To care anonymously requires being able to care intransitively, to be able to say, “I care” without specifying for whom. As one volunteer explained to me, even if you recognize the voice on the other end of the phone, you treat that person as if you didn’t; you even

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come to believe on a certain level that you don’t know that person. This also describes the scene of the RCMP officer at the teenager’s door. When the RCMP officer approached the teenager who had committed a “break and enter,” he affected what appeared to be a sudden shift—from a concerned friend to a disinterested and theoretically impersonal professional. He seemed not to know the teenager. The officer who stood at the door, calling the teenager out, was performing anonymous care. One result of this on the hotline is that the suffering of the person on the other end of the line is circumscribed by anonymous relations in such a way that no claims are made on the volunteer nor the caller after she hangs up. One of the volunteers described the caring that occurs on the hotline as more an abstract caring. It’s not the same as caring for someone I know. It’s like—if I was driving along a highway and I saw an accident, I would stop even though I don’t know the person, because as a human being I would care that there is somebody who is hurt. You get affected by some of the calls you get and you hear how hurt the person is. Sure, I don’t care about them personally, but I do care as a human being.

Or, as another volunteer responded when I asked exactly for whom she was caring when she went on the line, “You’re doing something for Nunavut. You’re doing something for your community. You’re doing something for society at large . . . And any time you do something to help someone help themselves and to make some good choices, you are doing something for the community, for society, for your families. So it’s not something that’s just a one-on-one thing—whatsoever!”15 When I asked another woman why she volunteered, she said, “For me it’s just to help in general. I’m happy to help in any way!” For many of the volunteers who reflected on their experience, there seemed to be no direct object of care, except, perhaps, for the class of anonymous individuals that comprises the category of “community,” “society,” or “the human.” One comes to experience oneself as a caring person, caring such that it matters not for whom. In this way, a call to the help line forges no lasting bonds, entails no responsibility, leaves no lasting connection between the individuals on the phone. Volunteers are charged with temporarily ameliorating the caller’s mood—making them “feel better”—and helping the caller to develop strategies to address his or her problems. But there is no long-term association, no relationship or friendship developed during the call. The volunteer is supposed to be as interested in one caller as the next but never to make a personal con-

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nection beyond the call. In fact, in anonymous forms of care, personal connections are supposed to be suppressed. That anonymity and confidentiality are social goods is a culturally and historically specific idea.16 Peter Kulchyski points to the structural impossibility of anonymity in many small Inuit communities, which allows for a different kind of social responsibility: Saving face as a cultural practice remains critical in contemporary Pangnirtung: one is not going to move on and teach in a different (better?) department leaving behind all those one has publicly “dissed.” In Pangnirtung, one has the embodied sense that one’s great great great to the nth degree grandchildren will very likely be interacting with the great great great to the nth degree grandchildren of one’s neighbor. Best to ensure, even when one has something “up” on them, that they save face. (Kulchyski 2006: 160)

As one Inuit elder put it at a conference for traditional healers that I attended, “As Inuit we hear about confidentiality. There is no such thing for Inuit. We live like a book. Our life is like an open book.” When I asked a friend in his forties why, in the end, so few Inuit youth call the hotline, he said, “I think people just need to talk to someone, but at the one-toone level. One time my cousin called me up. Had a gun in his hand. Said he’s gonna kill himself. I went over there, I confronted him, and I was there with him. Everything is so anonymous in Western society.” Still, it doesn’t surprise me that, according to the founders of Kamatsiaqtut, when the idea for an anonymous hotline was put forward, “the concepts of confidentiality and anonymity, although foreign to traditional cultural beliefs, were viewed as a bonus by the Inuit who worked with us” (Levy and Fletcher 1998: 355–56). I do think anonymity may sometimes come as a great relief when living in a small community. I also think a significant amount of social stigma can be avoided through the professional dictates of confidentiality. But the point I am making here lies elsewhere. To recognize confidentiality and anonymity as appropriate in particular contexts is different from identifying the way care has become anonymous—the way that anonymity actually comes to structure our very definition of what it is to care. In this chapter I turn to the suicide hotline, not only to understand specific ways of caring in the Canadian Arctic, but also as a concrete form (something like Foucault’s panopticon in Discipline and Punish [1977]) that illuminates a more general mode of engagement with the world—a mode I have been calling “anonymous care.” Paul Rabinow calls these concrete forms “strategic exemplars” (1989: 12). Through the strategic example of a suicide hotline a whole mode of care becomes visible.

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But let me be very clear on one point. I am not saying that anonymous care is the  only  form of care operant in Nunavut today. The number of suicide prevention programs and initiatives in Nunavut is astonishing, and this book is not an attempt to survey their methods or to adjudicate their effectiveness.17 Instead I am attempting to convey, through a series of concrete and empirical examples from the colonial and the contemporary ethnographic record, a surprisingly ubiquitous and powerful form of attending to the life and death of an other—anonymous care. A suicide hotline, because it holds the specific details of a life in abeyance, makes the texture and specificity of a particular life irrelevant, or relevant only insofar as the survival of the other is ensured. As a larger mode of relating in the world, anonymous care transforms our relationships to others and changes the ethical landscape of our social programs. Although anonymous care can reinforce an abstract sense of community, caring anonymously means that no individual bonds are established, no specific links between people strengthened. The possibility of caring anonymously can be related to the emergence of imaginary communities or “publics” in which one might say that the very category of “friend” is enlarged—through technologies such as the printing press, map making, and, later, newspapers and television—to include people one will never encounter (Anderson 1991). In the context of a suicide hotline, personal biography is relevant only insofar as it can keep someone alive. The way such biographies or lives might intersect and form a “web of human relationships” (Arendt 1958: 183) is usually irrelevant. What is fascinating about anonymous care, however, is that it becomes a privileged mode of care even in situations where one does or might have face-to-face relations with the other. Anonymous care for suicidal people becomes the prototype of modern care, perhaps its purest—most sublime—form. Anonymous care for suicidal people reaches toward the sublime in two directions. In his book On Suicide Bombing (2007), Talal Asad unpacks the relationship between horror and the sublime in an attempt to understand why people in the West express horror at suicide bombing while they remain complacent about other more extensive and more commonplace forms of killing. In a difficult but thoughtful analysis of horror, Asad observes that horror is not only linked to the dissolution of the self or the transgression of boundaries (especially those that lie between the dead and the living),18 but also to a kind of delight. This

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feeling of delight, although often difficult to acknowledge, is directly connected to an experience of the sublime. Asad draws on Edmund Burke to argue that such delight “draws us in horrified fascination to catastrophes” (2007: 73). I want to suggest that the suicide hotline enables the volunteer to experience the sublime without letting go of his or her biopolitical principles. That is, when working on a suicide hotline, as when participating in any other suicide intervention, one can listen to the grim details of a suicide plan, a plan whose goal is to bring about the dissolution of the self, and experience a kind of horror (linked to a kind of delight or “horrified fascination”) at the details of the plan, and the possibility of the dissolution of the self, while simultaneously confirming one’s own moral vigor and strength by censuring such desires. However, the exaltation of fellow feeling that one attains specifically through caring anonymously also entails a “sublimated” or secondorder version of the sublime—for there is a dissolution of the self involved for the hotline operator too. Stripped of all attributes, the person on the receiving end of the call experiences him- or herself as a member of humanity, relating, above all, to another human being. The concept of humanity involves a certain kind of sublime dissolution of self.

history of the suicide hotline The history of the suicide hotline is shot through with expressions of such exalted feeling. In 1953, when the first suicide hotline was set up in London, England, suicide was described as a “cry of distress,” and answering that cry was considered a way of bringing about a “new order of life”— and not just for the suicidal. Suicide prevention was alternately a “humanitarian effort” (1969), a “fight” (Dublin 1963), a “mission” (Soubrier 2002), a “tremendous resurgence of practical Christianity” (Fox 1962), and a social “movement” (McCord and Packwood 1973; Varah 1985). The fervor with which people involved in these early hotlines described their participation is remarkable. How the hotline itself emerged as an exalted way to care for suicidal others—a form of care that is anonymous, occurs at a distance, and requires no particular qualifications except that one is a caring human being—is the question that interests me here. In 1953, Chad Varah, an Anglican priest and counselor specializing in “sexual problems,” read that there were three suicides a day in London

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(Varah 1985: 17). Disturbed by the fact that there wasn’t an emergency telephone number for suicides—as there was for fire or police—Varah decided to initiate what he called a “999 for the suicidal.” Varah based his new service on the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan in which a stranger tends to an injured person on the roadside (Fox 1962: 1103) and hoped that he could find a phone number for the hotline that would reflect the fact that suicide was a “human emergency for thousands” (Varah 1985: 21; emphasis added).19 Varah was very clear about the objectives of the Samaritans. In spite of early research that found that 99.5 percent of Samaritan clients were not actually going to take their lives (Barraclough and Shea 1970: 870), Varah would argue vehemently that the organization’s success or failure should be measured solely by the reduction of the number of suicides— not merely the diminishing of human misery: The success or otherwise of our work is to be judged solely on whether it does or does not reduce the number of suicides in the areas in which we operate. If we are not saving lives, we are failing; and it is no good giving us pats on the back for doing something else. To decrease human misery is undoubtedly a worthy endeavour, and we may be thankful for the activities in this regard of such diverse professions as comedian, restaurateur, prostitute, hairdresser, and health visitor, but our task is to decrease human misery in those who might, unless this were achieved, be more likely to die by their own hands. (1985: 50)

The Samaritans, as an organization, were emphatically dedicated to keeping people alive. Anything else was failure. By contrast, the “worthy” endeavors of people such as prostitutes, hairdressers, and comedians, who decrease human misery, amount to a transposition of the Samaritans’ means and ends. For a Samaritan, decreasing human misery was merely a means to the end of preventing people from killing themselves. (This will become very important in the contemporary Arctic, where virtually everything seems to have become a means to the end of preventing suicide and not an end in itself.) Whether or not the Samaritans saved lives, Varah’s sense of the moral imperative of caring for the lives of the suicidal rapidly took hold around the world. In less than ten years the Samaritans had become an international organization boasting twenty-six branches.20 Even in the earliest discussions of suicide hotlines, when anonymity was still optional, the abstraction of the caller and the listener was emphasized.21 As we saw earlier, Varah underlines the fact that suicide is a “human emergency” and also describes the sympathy of the volunteers as “human

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sympathy” (1985: 24). Likewise, in 1965, in a report describing the inauguration of a new hotline in a psychiatric emergency room, the authors (two psychiatrists) reflect on the merits of the line. They note, “It has also become apparent that there are many lonely isolated human beings in the community who have used this telephone as a means of establishing contact with another human being” (Waltzer and Hankoff 1965: 314). To be recognized a priori as “human” means to lose all manner of distinctions. Thinking about the hotline in terms of one human being caring for another meant that who you were as a volunteer (even insofar as you were a doctor, a psychiatrist, a social worker, etc.) became irrelevant. One’s basic or fundamental humanity was what mattered,22 and from there it was one small step to seeing even one’s name as superfluous. A-nonymous care. In 1968, reflecting on the developments of suicidology, and in particular the growth of the Samaritans, Louis I. Dublin concluded that the lay volunteer “was probably the most important single discovery in the fifty-year history of suicide prevention. Little progress was made until he came into the picture. The lay volunteer had the time and the qualities of character to prove that he cared” (1969: 45).23 Or, as Chad Varah put it, “The person you turned to did not need to be someone with qualifications or diplomas so long as he or she cared” (1985: 37; emphasis in original). Caring turns out to be more important than any qualifications or diplomas, and caring is understood as what one human being, any human being, can (and should) do for another. This idea that the “care” of one human being for another could help prevent suicide was so convincing that it didn’t seem to matter that there was little empirical evidence of the effectiveness of the proliferating suicide hotlines. Researchers involved with the hotline movement were primed to assume that an adequate measure of the hotline’s effectiveness had simply yet to be developed.24 The question I am asking is why a hotline makes so much sense to people, especially to those on the receiving end of the line? Why is a suicide hotline such a compelling intervention for the volunteers—then as well as today? In 1965, Edwin S. Shneidman and Norman L. Farberow, two directors of the path-breaking Suicide Prevention Centre in Los Angeles, who would go on to have distinguished careers as suicidologists, published an article in the American Journal of Public Health advertising the success of their center and their methods. They conclude their article with a rousing cry to readers to join the “vocal” corps of people across America mobilizing to prevent suicide. They write:

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Justice Benjamin Cardozo, in 1923, stated: “A cry of distress is a summons to rescue.” This ringing statement can stand as the credo of an enlightened democratic society, whose keystone lies in its heightened evaluation of each human life. We believe that there is a new and vocal group in America: it includes all of us who are passionate about the need and the feasibility of effectively reducing the unnecessary present suicide rates. The place for each of us to do this is in our community. The time is now. (1965: 26; emphasis in original)

The assertions Schneidman and Farberow make in this concluding paragraph are instructive: 1) a “heightened evaluation of each human life” is posited as “keystone” of both enlightenment and democracy; 2) it follows that suicide and suicidality are seen as a cry of distress to which we cannot fail to respond without losing our moral and social standing; 3) but, in addition, working in suicide prevention (in our communities, right now) places one at the vanguard of such enlightened democratic societies. Suicide prevention is no longer (if it ever was) only about the person on the other end of the line. It is about enlightenment, democracy, and a new social order. In fact, by 1981 two community psychologists, Echterling and Wylie, would suggest that suicide prevention is actually a social movement seeking to establish a “new order of life” (Echterling and Wylie 1981: 342). The psychologists argue that, like all social movements, this one “begin[s] in a condition of unrest, with dissatisfaction with the current form of life and hopes for a new system of living” (1981: 342)—a new order of life that revolves around how we care for the other.25 In an anonymous suicide hotline the caregiver is witness to someone else’s desire for the dissolution of the self but also experiences the dissolution of one’s own self into the category of humanity. The emergence in the 1950s and 1960s of suicide hotlines as a form of care dovetailed not only with the biopolitical emphasis on preserving life itself, but also with a kind of “humanitarian reason” (Fassin 2012). Through the exalted feeling that a notion of humanity encouraged, such care became sublime. Answering the “cry of distress” at a certain remove—over the telephone—where caller and called can remain anonymous, enables discrete individuals to be easily rendered abstract at the same time as it heightens the sense that one is working for a higher good, something beyond one’s own self-interest or community. It is not simply the value of human life that Schneidman and Farberow are celebrating but its “heightened evaluation,” and suicide prevention is a work to be done “passionately” and with a kind of urgency. “The time is now.”26

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The “time” of suicide prevention is still now; it’s still urgent. In an article describing the crisis line, the founders of Nunauvut’s Kamatsiaqtut hotline argued, “The foremost responsibility of any society is to nurture and protect its citizens[,] especially its children. In the Canadian North today, one of the most serious threats to the health and wellbeing of its citizens, especially its young people, is suicide” (Levy and Fletcher 1998: 353). And, like earlier advocates of hotlines, they also emphasize that it is almost impossible to assess the effectiveness of their work. Yet, in spite of the lack of evidence, they also argue, “We see the creation and continuing existence of the line as a symbol that the community can and will take charge of its own problems and solutions, and that the community is sending out a signal to those most in need of its service that it does care” (365). As the volunteers at Kamatsiaqtut explained to me, although many nights can go by without a phone call of any sort, there is always the possibility and hope of making a connection, helping someone in pain. And when I pressed a volunteer about the distance anonymity creates, he insisted, “But you still are a voice. And you still are an individual that they are actually talking to.” When the encounter happens, when you make a connection, the reasons you are doing it, the success rate of the program cease to matter quite so much. As one volunteer put it, if you think about call volume, the sense that you are doing something important disappears. The positive effect of all those nights waiting for the phone to ring is not something that can be measured. The number of calls the hotline receives becomes irrelevant because “every single life is worth saving. Absolutely.” And you never know how good you are or whether you will save anybody’s life, but the fact is that the opportunity is there. We will probably never know. But I’ve been at meetings and people have thanked us for being on the line and said how much we have helped them over the years. You don’t know what good this line is doing because you can’t measure it. You’re not building a building; you can’t literally see what you’re doing.

Another longtime volunteer added, “The line itself is a drop in the bucket. It is a drop though. And every drop counts.” Here again, empirical measures of the effectiveness of the help line are downplayed: “You never know . . . whether you will save anybody’s life, but the fact is the opportunity is there.” A recent study on caller characteristics and call content of the Nunavut Kamatsiaqtut help line from 1991 to 2001 concludes that younger callers (those most at risk

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for suicide) tend to use the line only to make prank calls (Tan et al. 2012). The majority of the users were adult females calling to discuss relationships and issues of loneliness or boredom. Hotlines make sense, despite a lack of evidence of their effectiveness in preventing suicide, because their goal—to save any life whatsoever, not particular lives of particular people—has become a kind of unquestioned “secular sacred” (see Murray 2006). The anonymity of such hotlines ensures that the moral value of saving the life of a stranger is not tainted by any kind of self-interest or social obligation.

of conferences and cruise ships When the Kamatsiaqtut help line hosted the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention’s Annual Meeting in 2005, people from all over Canada converged on Iqaluit. Preparations for the conference were feverish. The high school was shut down for two days. Inuit elders, youth, and social workers from all over Nunavut were flown in. Several smaller preconferences were organized to take place just before the main event. Government departments and NGOs began to compete for bodies to participate in their suicide prevention projects and workshops. Bobby was invited to participate in three separate workshops held over the same time period. He chose a workshop taking place in a neighboring community so that he would be paid a per diem for his efforts. As the time for the main conference drew nearer, a Nunavut Department of Health employee, a Qallunaaq only peripherally involved in the preparations, remarked to me sheepishly, “I’m not trying to make light of it, but it feels like a suicide cruise ship, just cruising through town.” Her image of a suicide cruise ship, unsettling to government employees as well as to anyone I have described it to, is nonetheless resonant. It resonates with my friend Miali’s statement that she would never volunteer for Nunavut’s hotline. For her, the hotline is a Qallunaaq “social club.” One of the volunteers on the hotline said something very similar. She was reflecting on the way many newcomers to Iqaluit, people “right off the boat,” would sign up to volunteer for the hotline. “I think they come to the community and . . . they want to volunteer, and probably [some people] from the help line are the very first people to get to them. If they’d met somebody from the yoga club they’d probably be in yoga, but we got to them first.” And the people who work on the line do form an extended social network. They have dinner at each other’s houses. They see each other at the Elks’ meetings, at school, at the hockey arena.

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One volunteer said thoughtfully, “I guess I do believe, also, that you’re caring for yourself when you are doing this type of thing because you are feeding your own soul because you’re doing something that, if you believe in it, . . . you feel is worthwhile. And that’s good for you. I mean, you’re making new friends, you’re making new contacts, you’re feeling that you’re making a contribution to your community.” The contrast between the intense sociality of the people on the line and the anonymity that is maintained toward the callers is striking. The image of a suicide cruise ship also calls forth images of the doctors on board the C. D. Howe in the 1950s and ’60s, heading north to treat the “Eskimos” for tuberculosis. In fact, the chief medical officer on the 1955 Eastern Arctic Patrol, in a note to his superior, writes that although on the whole he is satisfied with his medical party, “there is a tendency for some of them to forget that they are not on a cruise to Hawaii, feeling that they should be given shore leave at every port” (Willis 1955). Another doctor, traveling north on one of the last voyages of the C. D. Howe to treat tubercular Inuit, reported to a journalist en route that so far he had seen two whales, two polar bears, and a narwhal and got pictures of it all. “The vastness of it all,” he said, made “this trip, the ride itself, worth somewhere between $4000 and $8000” (Arctic Hospital Ship 1968).

expecting suicide The fervor of people within the contemporary suicide apparatus can also be experienced as alienating to youth who are identified by that very apparatus as “at risk.”27 Take Monica, a fourteen-year-old girl whose mother is an Inuk and father is a Qallunaaq. Her best friend committed suicide a few months ago, shortly after they had separated for the night. When they were kids they spent every minute together. Monica dreams about Annie a lot. In one dream Annie is sitting in a chair at a restaurant, not making eye contact with Monica, who is sitting across from her. Finally she looks at her and says, “Trade spots?” At the moment Monica lives at her cousin’s place. It’s in “White Row,” a series of identical row houses with white plastic siding. In the front of the house is a bedroom window where the light is always on. You can see people inside playing cards, smoking at the window, talking. Every now and then a figure approaches the window from outside, talks to the people inside a moment, pockets a baggie, and walks away. Inside, Monica’s grandfather sleeps on the couch in the living room. He eats only country food and speaks only Inuktitut. She speaks only

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English. She tells me she wants to do more “Inuit” things. Her grandfather has a drinking problem, but he usually just falls asleep after drinking; he doesn’t get violent. He likes having the dealer live there because he helps out with the bills and keeps him supplied with pot. The dealer, a good friend of Monica’s, tells her that when he gets his own apartment she can live with him. He is a gregarious guy, always saying that he has quit dealing for good. For now Monica has her own room with a bed and a dresser. She usually goes to bed around 1 a.m. If she eats, she cooks the food herself. Her mother comes by occasionally, but they argue a lot. Friday night she came by drunk and they got into an argument about whether Monica’s sister should have dropped out of school. Then her mother tells her that she wants to “rat” on the drug dealers in the other room. She picks up the phone to call the RCMP. Monica tries to stop her. “No, don’t rat him out. You fuckin’ bitch.” They struggle, and Monica’s mother throws the phone at Monica’s head, causing a small torrent of blood. Later the others tell her they could hear the phone hitting her head from the other room. Monica cries, not from the pain but from the fact her mother hit her. She punches her mother on the shoulder. “I never wanted to hit my mom,” she tells me later. Monica dials her father’s pager. He’s out at the Legion, drinking. When the phone rings again, it’s his girlfriend calling back. “What do you want?” When her father finally comes to pick her up, Monica screams at him, “You care more about your fucking bitch girlfriend than me.” Her father is silent. He drives really fast and it scares her. “Do you want to kill us?” Her father doesn’t answer. He drops her off at his apartment and goes back to the Legion. Hours later Monica hears her father and his girlfriend come in, but she pretends to be asleep so she doesn’t have to argue. She tells me, “It’s not that I’m suicidal, but sometimes I don’t want to live any more.” What does it mean to Monica to be “suicidal”? In Iqaluit, suicide has become one of those teenage behaviors, like smoking, having sex, and taking drugs, that are discussed in health education classes, high school assemblies, and public service announcements on television. It is not unusual to see an antismoking poster depicting a woman with a severely deformed face and blackened gums beside one that says, “Stay Alive. Suicide is not the Inuit Way. Survive your problems.” The implication is that real Inuit don’t commit suicide, just as another poster suggests that

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Inuit men who care about their babies don’t let their wives smoke. Staying alive is the take-home message. Once I asked Monica how she felt about her smoking habit. Her answer was quick and assured. “It’s no good, it’s very bad for you . . . but it’s addictive.” There was no apology in her voice. The fact that it was addictive, a fact often emphasized to scare youth from taking up smoking, had convinced her that there wasn’t anything to be done about it. Inuit youth get the message that they shouldn’t smoke, but also the message that it’s so addictive that it’s almost impossible to stop. Something similar happens with respect to suicide. There is a sense of inevitability about Inuit suicide. Inuit youth feel it, and sometimes they resist, asking for their pain to be recognized in a different register. Sometimes, tragically, they play along.28 The anticipation of Inuit suicide—coupled with its prohibition—is evident in the remarks of a filmmaker in the Canadian Arctic town of Igloolik: “According to Igloolik’s yearly suicide rate there are at least five or six young people walking around town today who will probably be dead by next Christmas. This is a horrible thought. We don’t know who they are. . . . Our goal is to keep some of them—hopefully all of them—alive at this time next year” (Cousineau 1999). The goal is to keep Inuit alive, but the truth of the yearly suicide rates makes their death inevitable. Inuit are tentatively imagined as the walking dead, and yet even that thought is proscribed: It is a “horrible thought.” That suicide causes no surprise is significant. It does not mean there is an absence of pain, almost unbearable pain. Suicide is at once prohibited and awaited. Suicide, as a counterfactual—something that hasn’t but might happen—evokes ambivalence. Future suicides are imagined and the thoughts then suppressed. Suicide, too awful to think about, is a possibility that is articulated and then denied. Statistics play an important role in making suicide real.29 The statistics about Inuit suicide are cited endlessly. The possibility that any Inuit youth will commit suicide is tabulated, that person’s death thereby measured. However, as S. Lochlann Jain points out in the context of cancer prognosis, the you who either will or will not die and the you who has a 5 percent chance of survival are not seamlessly aligned. She describes the experience of living this misalignment phenomenologically as “living in prognosis” (Jain 2007: 78). All young Inuit live in prognosis, all live the misalignment between statistical probabilities of their death and the existential fact of their life or death.

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When Monica says, “It’s not that I’m suicidal, but sometimes I don’t want to live anymore,” we have to remember that she has lived her whole life within a postcolonial state that simultaneously bans and anticipates her death, a state that wants her death—if she is going to die—so that it can tabulate rates and predict future deaths. How does such an anticipation of death (on the part of the state and its agents) enter youthful imaginaries? The colonial commandment not to commit suicide effects an uncanny doubling in which the postcolonial state both does and does not want Inuit youth dead, just as the RCMP’s public health efforts to kill dogs are reinterpreted as having murderous designs (see chapter 2). My friend, who sometimes wants to die, is holding at bay that whole suicidal apparatus by saying, in effect, “Although I want to die, I am not suicidal. I do not belong to your calculations. I want at least to own my own death, and my pain.” She is trying to escape her life lived in prognosis, in which her death is never a surprise to anyone, least of all herself. As Michel Foucault suggests, within a biopolitical regime death itself “is outside the power relationship. Death is beyond the reach of power, and power has a grip on it only in general, overall or statistical terms. Power has no control over death, but it can control mortality” (2003: 248). There is definitely a sense in which the bureaucrats “have” the dead Eskimo in statistical terms—whether in the context of tuberculosis or suicide—and their power is a power over death rates, as Foucault suggests. But to leave the analysis there renders us deaf to the overtones of the bureaucrats’ voice, the way that “having” speaks of something beyond a diffuse regulatory power of which bureaucrats are merely mouthpieces. It speaks to the way that, as Frantz Fanon (1967) suggested, colonialism works on and through the psyche, in the way the colonial imagination infuses everyday relationships.30 It speaks to what I have been calling the “psychic life” of biopolitics. To better hear these overtones, we have to ask what happens when attention to the welfare of populations is combined with a colonial imagination and desire.31 What happens when staying alive (the secular sacred) and being a good, deserving Inuk become one? What happens when staying alive becomes not only a normative injunction but also, like every other colonial norm, one that you, as an Inuk, can only ever be expected to imperfectly live up to? Do we, in our policies, programs, and exhortations, ask Inuit to live while also expecting them to die? In the case of Inuit suicide, coming to terms with the ambivalent command “Do not kill yourself, but, of course, you will” requires that biopolitics and colonial psychology be thought together.

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In my conversation with Monica she distinguishes between being suicidal—a closely regulated behavior—and not wanting to live anymore. One of the things teenagers recognize is that confessing to being suicidal in Iqaluit has a long series of entailments, including trips to the hospital (and possibly even being sent down South for psychiatric evaluation), visits with the school counselor, and persistent questions from friends and family. It is clear that youth sometimes talk about suicide precisely in order garner some of that attention. Counselors warn of kids who just want a “trip out” of the community and so play up their suicide ideation. And the youth know all the signs of suicidality and can list them off verbatim. One youth, hoping for a reaction, told me that he had just “cleaned up his whole bedroom, thrown out a whole lot of clothes.” Without suggesting that it should be otherwise, I simply want to point out the intense and often anonymous policing of the suicidal body. Monica’s distinction between being suicidal and not wanting to live is a subtle one, but it is one that removes her, if only temporarily, from the suicide apparatus and allows her to acknowledge the ways in which her young life is marked by pain, anger, and injustice. It’s just that I don’t want to live anymore. I agree that, ultimately, to prevent the possibility of suicide, many Inuit youth should never be left alone. But living, as opposed to staying alive, seems to require both pain and the taking of risks. It seems to require risking the possibility that one will not stay alive. In my experience with Inuit youth, suicidality has much to do with excess and repetition, and the crisis it represents usually occurs after the procedures and protocols have long since been followed, once the nurses and doctors have already been seen. How to proceed is terrifyingly uncertain. That is, even when in desperation I insisted my young friends visit a doctor, to relieve me of some of the responsibility I felt, things didn’t always go the way I anticipated.

state of being By way of conclusion I want to recount the evening I spent with my friend Bobby. I was talking to him on the phone and he said, “If I tell you something, will you promise not to tell the others?” “Yeah, what?” “I just tried to commit suicide.” “What do you mean? Why?” He then tells me more specifically that he tried to hang himself. Twice. The rope broke both times. He is telling me that he won’t go to the

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training the next day because of the marks around his neck. His back and arm are bruised from falling. His left side is numb and he can’t see properly out of his left eye. “Can I call an ambulance?” “No. I don’t want to go there. They’re going to know what I did.” “I’m coming to get you.” “Okay.” When I get there he is waiting for me at the door. I don’t even have to honk. I try to hug him when I see him, but it’s awkward. We don’t usually hug. Without saying much, we drive around. We go to Apex, then toward the dump, but it’s too dark, so we go out Federal Road, around the Road to Nowhere. I ask, “What were you thinking?” “I wasn’t thinking. I wasn’t thinking anything.” At some point his mood starts to shift and he starts talking about girls, some of whom I know and some I don’t. His voice is shiny, almost metallic; it matches the warehouses and barking dogs we are driving by. He keeps talking about girls, about the size of their boobs and the ways he flirts with them. I am disgusted and yet I let him go on talking. This is somehow about desire after all. Then I change the subject. The next day, as we walked together to a friend’s house for caribou stew, he told me about the dreams he was having of the angel of death. The angel of death appeared in his dreams every night telling him that he, Bobby, was next. As he spoke I looked up at the fingernail moon and the stars. “Every time I closed my eyes I could see him. Whether it was just because my head was playing mind tricks or whatever, I realized that if I died I wouldn’t have anything. I wouldn’t even have family, I wouldn’t have my deceased family. I wouldn’t have anything. Nothing. Except death. That’s the only thing I would have. And that’s where he came from. Because I didn’t think I would have anything if I died.” We were taking the shortcut to Tundra Valley through the cemetery. The white crosses looked bluish in the night. As we walked up the hill from the cemetery he told me that this was his favorite place to come and sit and think. He pointed out a huge swath of northern lights that looked like a snowmobile trail. At that moment a small plane banked before going in for a landing at the airstrip. It caught us in its lights. We stopped, unable to see anything except the plane heading toward us. At what seemed like the last minute, it banked left against the cliff. It was very cold—minus fifty with the wind chill—and Bobby told me he could feel his nose and ears getting frostbitten.

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“It don’t matter. It happens all the time. I just feel a little tingling.” “Don’t they swell up?” “Sometimes, but it’s okay.” So we kept walking, the granular snow blowing like sand, creating eddies of snow. We didn’t say anything. Later he drew the angel of death on a small piece of paper. A man with no feet, carrying a scythe and wearing a hooded dress. “It wasn’t just a voice in my head. It was someone telling me something. You know what I mean? Maybe that sounds crazy.” Later that evening I convinced him to go to the emergency room with me. A small television hung from the ceiling, its volume muted. Faces of Michael Jackson were spinning past, black hair against a pasty whiteness of skin. Beside me was his sister, thirteen, a headband pulling her hair back tightly. Beside her was her brother. She had pleaded with him not to leave her, not to commit suicide, and had insisted on coming to the hospital with us. Behind a counter two male staff in scrubs were standing hunched over a computer, talking in the languid cadence that marks an after-hours shift—waiting only for the time to pass between emergencies. Even as they talked, however, they were observing us with their blank glances, deftly preserving the required sense of distance and disinterest while simultaneously consuming our pain, assessing, cataloging, and ranking it. But for all the distress collected in our bodies—the one asking to die, his younger sister pulling him back, and me, wanting a reprieve from responsibility—we were not an emergency. Months later, looking back on that time, Bobby would say, “Everything was going wrong with me. Everything. I wanted to die. I told everybody, ‘I don’t care, I wanna die, I wanna die, I wanna die, I wanna die.’ ” “And do you think you really did?” “I think I really did. I think I really, really wanted to die.” Bobby knew what to tell the doctor. He knew that if he said he wanted to kill himself—if he told them about the angel of death—that he would end up confined to a hospital bed. He had been admitted to the hospital before and had already regaled me with the story of how he had overpowered a guard to get some drugs from a hospital medicine cabinet. His stomach had to be pumped after he ingested a fistful of the pills he found there—but only after another fight with the guards who had been called in for reinforcement. The bravado of the story seemed to erase any shame. He didn’t want to spend the night in the hospital again, so he had to pull himself together, make a lighthearted joke to the doctor, focus on

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his lack of sleep (if only he could get enough, things would be okay), on his girlfriend leaving him (it really made him feel like shit), on the predictability of his emotional turmoil. Of course, anyone would feel like that in your shoes. What about some pills to help you sleep? Yeah. That sounds good. How many do I take? Two tonight, and I’ll give you enough for three more nights. That should do the trick. Come back if you’re still feeling bad. Yeah. Okay. Before I knew it we were walking back down the hill that we had climbed expectantly, just an hour before, six pills in a package tucked into Bobby’s inner pocket. I think about how after a suicide people say things like, “Oh, I wish we had known. I wish he had said something.” But usually it isn’t that he never said anything but that he was always saying it, and that the saying turned into a drone, which had no meaning except exhaustion, which became the background of life. It’s not that we never knew, it’s that we always knew, and so it didn’t seem important. There we were. The irrepressible Bobby, alternately dreaming and then nightmaring. The absurdly hopeful fieldworker, who could no longer say why she was there. A young girl, who was supposed to be at school the next morning, going with her brother to the hospital. After accompanying Bobby to the hospital, I still could not be certain he wouldn’t commit suicide. In the place of hope there was something else. We had spent ourselves, and in that there was a solidarity. A going and a coming that had not had any describable effect. But each of us knew the other was willing somehow, and that we could be together in the face of another night, with thin northern lights and dry powdered snow, dogs barking and snowmobiles revving. Late at night, without any emergency except as a state of being.32

chapter 4

Life-of-the-Name

Sila, my young friend who is also known as Nasuk, told me the story of the night her brother died. She has been marked by this death, a death she narrowly escaped, and one she turns over and over in her memory. I had nowhere to go so I went [to find] my brother. They were drinking at this place. And I was just watching them drinking. I was waiting for my brother to go home so I can walk with him or whatever. Get a ride or something. And when the bottle was gone, my brother didn’t look very drunk, but when he stood up, he almost fell. That’s when we all realized how drunk he was.

One of the kids who had been drinking had his parents’ four-wheeler, and so a bunch of the kids piled on. Sila’s brother got onto the side. Sila wanted to get on too, but she had a crush on one of the boys and felt shy around him, so she decided to wait for the next ride. She tells me about that moment: So I said, “I’ll wait. I’ll wait until the second trip.” Simon [the driver] was supposed to drop off my brother [Isaac] at home, and then drop off [the others] and come back . . . My brother didn’t have a helmet on. He was just laughing and saying, “Ajaii”—like, being scared. He said, “Go slow!” And Simon was like, “Don’t worry, I’m going to go slow.” And me and Kakkik watched them drive off, and as soon as they drove off it started raining, like lightly, and then it started to get heavier and heavier. I asked Kakkik to borrow five bucks [for a cab]—but I think there was no more cabs on the road. We waited for like an hour. And Kakkik was joking around saying, “They crashed,” and we just giggle a bit, and then Kakkik said, “Fuck this. I’m walking home!” 103

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In fact, Kakkik was right. They had crashed. Issac had been flung from the vehicle onto some boulders. He died that night. Sila tells me that her mother had been walking on the road early that morning to go berry picking. She had seen an angel hovering over the road right at the spot where the accident happened. At the time of the crash Sila’s best friend, Jesse, was pregnant. When the baby was born Jesse named him Isaac so that the atiq (name-soul or “life-of-the-name”) would enter the newborn child. Sila went to visit the baby and his mother in the hospital. When she saw him, she realized that the right side of his face was paralyzed, just as her brother’s right side had been “wrecked” the night she visited him in the morgue. Even more incredible, Sila tells me that Isaac “always done what he always wanted to do and said whatever he was thinking. Every time someone would take a picture of him he would put up his middle finger. And you know when newborns move their hands? When we went to visit him [the baby] in the hospital, he put up his middle finger. For a couple of seconds!” The way that the life of Issac’s name enters the life of Jesse’s newborn baby gestures to a way of approaching life and death that cannot be encompassed by the regime of life I’ve been documenting in this book. For the Canadian state agents who hoped to reduce tuberculosis rates in the Canadian Arctic, the specter of having a “dead Eskimo” on their hands was anathema. It was such an anathema, as I argued in chapter 1, that once Kaujak had died, she no longer mattered to the state; the state no longer cared one way or the other about what happened to her. What could possibly happen to a dead Eskimo? In a similar fashion, for the suicide apparatus that exists in Nunavut (and anywhere else suicide has become a “problem”), life becomes the secular sacred and suicide prevention becomes a sublime form of care. And, although Inuit are expected to fail, they must demonstrate their cooperation with the regime of life that cares for suicidal Inuit. In this chapter I want to follow the way that the “dead Eskimo” of postwar Canadian policy is folded back into daily life such that survival and the possibility of community entail a sustained relationship with the death of a specific, and named, other. The “dead Eskimo” is ultimately a biopolitical fiction—but one that has had very real effects on the lives of Inuit, such as Kaujak, but also on my friends Monica and Bobby (described in chapter 3), who suffer under a regime of life that expects their death. Tracing the way the name binds the living and the dead in Inuit communities allows us to imagine both the force of the

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name—its imagistic qualities—and the particular violence of anonymous care in Inuit communities. I hope to describe a way of approaching life, one shared by Monica and Bobby, Sila, and Jesse, that both challenges the biopolitical insistence on the discreteness of life and death that is entailed by the everyday politicization of life itself and calls into question the biopolitical indifference to who it is that lives or dies, thus allowing us to formulate a robust image of how life, death, and language are connected.

atiq Sila also told me the story of her Inuktitut name-soul, her atiq, Nasuk. Although kids at school usually call her Sila, there are many people in Iqaluit and Pangnirtung who call her Nasuk. The story of her Inuktitut name, like the story of her brother’s death, marks the ways death and the dead matter to her: My mom was pregnant with me, and this old guy died—his name was Nasuk. And my mom had a dream. She saw him and he was asking her to amaq him, like put her on his back like a baby. My mom was like, “Holy cow, you’re too heavy!” Sila’s mother knew she had to call her baby Nasuk, and that only then, since his atiq would come to be in the young girl’s body, would she be able to amaq him as he requested.

The Inuit sense in which a self is always also someone else—a young girl but also an old man—is reinforced by the “skewing” of kinship terms that follows the namesake relationship: anyone who was related to the original Nasuk will address Sila using the kinship terms that applied to him. As Hugh Brody put it, “No child is only a child. . . . If I give my grandfather’s atiq to my baby daughter, she is my grandfather. I will call her ataatassiaq, grandfather. She is entitled to call me grandson” (Brody 1987: 139). One day I heard a friend calming her baby by saying, “Anaanakulu, anaanakulu” (My dear mother, my dear mother). She explains to me that her son was named after her mother, who died suddenly and alone in an Ottawa hospital during a routine medical procedure. And although she continues to mourn for her mother, she watches for signs of her presence, her atiq, in her son. She tells me about how the baby often wakes early, before the others, and keeps her father (the baby’s grandfather) company as he prepares for a hunting trip, just as the baby’s namesake would have done. She also tells me about the way her father cried when he held her son for the first time. Now he refers to the baby boy simply as nuliara (my wife).1

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Stories about one’s Inuktitut names are often told in the form of a riddle, sometimes even a dream-riddle: there is a kind of wonder, a powerful undecidability about the way the stories are told. That is, one is forever engaged in interpreting the sense of the name one is called and the way it links one to others. Thus, what precisely it means to be called Nasuk, or Isaac, or annanakulu is always in question. Look at the way he raises his finger. Look at the way he follows his “husband” with his eyes. He’s just like Isaac. Or, He’s nothing like Isaac. Her eyebrows are so thick but her namesake’s were so thin. Her namesake always hated her eyebrows. It is not so much that one is fixed by the name as that one is surprised by it. When my friend Davidee was in his early twenties, his best friend Judah died in a shooting accident. Davidee, now a forty-year-old man, tells me his dream. He and Judah go to visit an old woman. The old woman is Judah’s grandmother, but she isn’t the one Judah had when he was alive. Strangely, though, Judah doesn’t seem to notice that this woman isn’t his grandmother. The day after the dream, Davidee visits the house of an old woman, whose grandson is also there. Davidee and the little boy immediately hit it off, and the boy asks Davidee if he will teach him to use a bow and arrow. Then someone says to Davidee, by way of explanation, “He is named after Judah. Take a look at the back of his head.” Davidee examines the back of the little boy’s head and finds a scar-like congenital bald spot in the place where the bullet that killed his friend entered his head. The riddle is revealed if not resolved. Just as in the dream Davidee had the previous night, Davidee and “Judah” are visiting Judah’s grandmother. But it isn’t the grandmother Judah had when he was alive. It’s the grandmother of the child who was given his name. The anthropologist Barbara Bodenhorn refers to this density of relations as “the who of the name” (2006: 140).

who or what Recall J. M. Coetzee’s novel Life and Times of Michael K, in which the protagonist, a simple and loyal man named Michael K, is picked up by the police and taken to a work camp. At the camp Michael K stops eating. The frustrated camp doctor pleads with him to eat. Coetzee’s doctor insists that he cares about Michael K but not because Michael K is special but because doctors care for their patients regardless of who they are. As if to emphasize this point, the doctor

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repeatedly calls him Michaels instead of Michael. Instead of responding directly to the doctor who pleads with him to eat, Michael K asks himself, “What am I to this man? What is it to this man if I live or die?” Michael K’s question returns us to an important problematic: how to reconcile the sociality of anonymous care I have been tracing through this book (in which it doesn’t ultimately matter who lives or dies, only that everyone complies with the injunction to keep living as long as possible) with the sociality of Inuit communities in which one’s very life depends on being given the name of someone who has recently died. That is, Isaac, Nasuk, Judah, and my friend’s baby (whose grandfather calls him “nuliara,” or my wife) are all enfolded, for better or worse, into a social life that extends forward and backward in time, linking all those with the same name in an ever-expanding nexus of relations.2 Death—rather than simply a failure of medical bureaucracy, a failure of protocols, a failure to care enough—asserts itself also as the possibility of new life. Death becomes not the rupture of a being-in-common but its tragic possibility. And survival becomes not so much about cooperating in a world of anonymous care as it is about being marked by the death of an Other. At the very least we can see that Michael K’s question, “What am I to this man,” strikes at the heart of anonymous care— that, in a certain sense, anonymous care is concerned more with what a human being is than who.3

linguistic life For generations Inuit have stressed the connection between their name and their “life.”4 “I was held up solely by names,” Manilaq, an Inuit woman, told the explorer Knud Rasmussen in the 1930s: “It is because of names that we breathe, it is also because of them that we can walk on our legs” (Rasmussen 1931). Seventy years later an Inuit elder explains to a class of Inuit college students, “Aupilaarjuk is my name and I try to use it to keep me alive. . . . It is my name. It keeps me alive” (Saladin d’Anglure 2001: 19). For older Inuit like Aupilaarjuk, the relationship between life and the name is quite literal. Those elders still remember stories of babies born in times of starvation or extreme hardship who, nameless, were left outside to die.5 In the 1990s Martha Tunnuq told the following story: My mother had many pregnancies, and she had to do it. My brother Inuksaq and I do have brothers and sisters that were left to die this way. My father

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did not have proper hunting equipment. My grandfather and one of my uncles lived with my parents. I remember this happening when I was a child; they would be left outside to freeze to death—they did not kill them themselves. They would go outside and deliver the baby and leave it; it would cry for a while, and then stop. (Bennett and Rowley 2004: 375)

“This was done with love,” Tunnuq explains at the end of her story. And it was done for survival, because there was not enough food to go around, and babies “cannot survive on their own when they are so young” (Bennett and Rowley 2004: 375). Although incidents of infanticide were rare, their sensational quality means that the ethnographic record documents them in some detail. The Oblate Father Rogatien Papion, who ran a small mission at Ikpik (Thom Bay), published his own account, “The Importance of the Name in Inuit Tradition,” in the Oblate journal Eskimo.6 There he tells the story of a couple of “pagan Eskimos” who are expecting a baby. When they return from their spring fishing trip, the Oblate asks the father if his wife had had a boy or a girl. Papion describes the conversation: He seemed embarrassed and at first changed the subject of the conversation. As I insisted, he replied. “Yes, my wife had a baby but it died.” As I asked for an explanation, he answered, a little impatiently: “We were to go down to the sea. Two children to carry, plus elderly parents to help, it was a bit much. Besides the baby had a hare lip and then it was another little girl; we left her behind as we went.” . . . As I was attempting to make the young father understand that it would probably not have been too difficult to find help, he answered, by way of an unimpeachable argument: “Besides, we had not given her a name!” (Papion 1990)7

It is a story darkly told. The Inuit are portrayed as both murderous and transfixed by their beliefs about life and names. I doubt this was the case. In my experience these questions of life, death, and names are approached with a kind of awe. Cognizant of the power of the name, Inuit of generations past—as do Inuit today—made terrifying decisions, just as we all do. What such stories might also teach us is that whether one is named by the state (as in the disc numbers I described in the previous chapter) or named by the missionaries (as Miriam was) or named by one’s parents (as my friend Ittuq was), a form of life becomes possible. It is not being recognized at all, the absence of a name, that makes life—of any kind—impossible. Thus even a name in which we do not feel “ourselves” provides us with a possibility of living and, what’s more, a possibility of life beyond our physical death.8

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This is, of course, contested territory. In her book Twice Dead (2002), Margaret Lock chronicles the way brain death, as assessed by a doctor in accordance with contemporary biomedical protocols, came to be accepted, at least in North America, as the official moment of death. What Lock’s research makes clear is that death is accepted, at least in theory, as a resolutely biological concept for many North Americans. Inuit naming practices, on the other hand, displace the primacy of the biological in contemporary definitions of life and death. They allow us to consider the ways that the life of any name exceeds the life of the body. I am arguing that the Inuit concept of the name “amplifies” (Kohn 2013) a phenomenon that has a broader purchase in the world. I want to say that the name can reveal something to us about what it is to be humanly alive.9 The philosopher Judith Butler argues in a parallel fashion that there is “a certain kind of surviving [that] takes place in language” (Butler 1997a: 4). Butler, emphasizing the alienation of the name, suggests that naming is “an act that precedes my will, an act that brings me into a linguistic world in which I might then begin to exercise agency at all. . . . This is what I have been called. Because I have been called something, I have been entered into linguistic life, refer to myself through the language given by the Other” (1997a: 38). Although such “linguistic life” does not guarantee physical survival—as Butler notices, language does not sustain the body by “feeding it in a literal way”—yet there can actually be no physical survival, no feeding of the body, without that prior linguistic life, without being given a name.10 So for the Inuit, as for Butler, who is putting the claim in general terms, to survive one must be given a name. Butler’s formulation—in which one has been “entered into linguistic life”—becomes quite literal among the Inuit. Children are named just before or right after birth. Sometimes, as with Sila’s mother, dreams are the conduit for the desires of the dead to be made known. In other cases children are simply named after the last person to die in the community. In all cases, the name Inuit children are given, their atiq, links them fundamentally to an inscrutable Other, in whose language, bodily and verbal, they find ways to speak. Butler’s formulation—“Because I have been called something, I have been entered into linguistic life”—also invites us to imagine what would happen were “I” not to be named. What would have happened if, like Martha Tunnuq’s siblings or the child of Papion’s friends, I had been called nothing? We are all haunted by this possibility. We are, as Inuit know, profoundly and primordially vulnerable to the Other.

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As Butler intimates, the linking of names and life that I am describing is not unique to Inuit communities (nor was Butler the first to write about it). Ernst Cassirer, a German philosopher interested in the relationship between mythical (understood as forms of feeling and imagination) and logical (scientific) modes of thought, was also impressed by the significance of the name in mythical thinking: “Quite generally, in fact, the being and life of a person is so intimately connected with his name that, as long as the name is preserved and spoken, its bearer is still felt to be present and directly active. The dead may, at any moment, be literally ‘invoked,’ the moment those who survive him speak his name” (Cassirer 1946: 52). I am intrigued by what Cassirer might have meant by the phrase “literally ‘invoked.’ ” To be literal about something is to mean it actually and not figuratively. But to put quotation marks around the concept of invocation is to distance oneself from it—as if to mean it figuratively and not literally. Thus the literalness of invocation—in its religious sense of calling the spirits near—is both offered and retracted. It’s not easy to write about spirits and be taken seriously, but it’s also difficult to be certain about what one writes. Suzanne Langer, Cassirer’s translator (and an important philosopher in her own right), expands on what Cassirer means by the name: “It can be invoked at will, anywhere and at any time, by a mere act of speech; merely knowing a word gives a person the power of using it; thus it is invisibly ‘had,’ carried about by its possessors” (1949: 390). In chapter 1 I wrote at length about the way a “dead Eskimo” might be “had” by the Canadian state. For Langer the Other is “had” (again the quotation marks) by carrying around his or her name and invoking it at will. What if, beyond being “had” as bureaucratic subjects, we secular North Americans also literally “invoke” our loved ones, call them near, give them life, in the same way a religious person might invoke a spirit? Another Coetzee novel, Slow Man (2005), tells the story of Paul Rayment, an aging and solitary man who loses his leg in a bicycle accident. When Paul awakes from surgery, he is asked to fill out a form concerning his insurance policy and next of kin. Coetzee writes: Insurance is no problem. He is insured to the hilt, there is a card in his wallet to prove it, he is nothing if not prudent (but where is his wallet, where are his clothes?). Family is a less straightforward matter. Who are his family? What is the right answer? He has a sister. She passed on twelve years ago, but she still lives in him or with him, just as he has a mother who, at the times when she is not in or with him, awaits the angels’ clarion from her plot in the cemetery in Ballarat. A father too, doing his waiting farther away, in the cemetery

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in Pau, from where he rarely pays visits. Are they his family, the three of them? Those into whose lives you are born do not pass away, he would like to inform whoever composed the question. You bear them with you, as you hope to be borne by those who come after you. But there is no space on the form for extended answers. (2005: 8)

Paul Rayment bears his ancestors with him in the way Cassirer understood primitive people to “have” or be in possession of the names of the people they love. Bureaucratic forms, which tend to adhere strictly to the logic of either/or (either someone is alive or dead, either someone counts as family or not), leave no room for describing the ongoing life of the dead. One needs to use quotation marks to talk about such things. But Coetzee challenges this way of thinking. You bear those into whose lives you are born with you, “as you hope to be borne by those who come after you.” Paul Rayment’s sister “still lives in him or with him.” In fact, to be borne along by our family members after we die seems to me what Cassirer intends by the phrase “literally ‘invoked.’ ” There is something literal and not-so-literal about it. They are literally there, living in him and with him, and literally dead too. Here I turn to another scene to try to draw out the relationship between invocation (condensed in a name) and life. In an entirely different register, but one that also illuminates the connection between language and life, Veena Das recounts a short story by Saadat Hasan Manto. In the violence that surrounded the Partition of India, a young woman was raped and nearly killed. In the narratives surrounding the Partition, stories were often told of a woman returning home after such experience and being asked, “Why are you here—it would have been better if you were dead” (Das 1997: 77). But instead of rejecting her to maintain the purity and honor of the family, the father in Manto’s short story sees his daughter—broken, maimed, semiconscious—and calls out to her. Das comments, In the speech of the father, at least, the daughter is alive, and though she may find an existence only in his utterance, he creates a home for her mutilated and violated self. . . . In Manto, the sentence, “my daughter is alive,” is like Wittgenstein’s, “I am in pain.” Although it has the formal appearance of an indicative statement, it is to beseech the daughter to find a way to live in the speech of the father. (Das 1997: 77–78)

In Manto’s story it is a kinship term itself, “my daughter,” that serves as a name. In a moment of crisis, a moment of death, his words, “My daughter is alive,” are an invocation: dead or alive, his daughter has a place in his speech. He calls her near; she is borne along. He has her.

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an ethnographic elsewhere My method in these pages, as I mentioned, is not that of a logician but of a collector. I have collected a series of images that share a certain family resemblance, images of naming that speak to another way of thinking about life. Given the peripatetic nature of these reflections, it will not come as a surprise that my interest in the possibility that it makes sense to speak of something like linguistic life—as well as my sense that we often underestimate the importance of the way physical life and some kind of life in language are connected—originated in a context very different from the Canadian Arctic. In the late 1990s I conducted fieldwork on the exhumation of clandestine cemeteries in Guatemala. Until now I have been primarily describing one aspect of linguistic life: the realization that without being called into linguistic life the body remains but a concatenation of flesh and tendon. But, to render another aspect of the concept visible, we need to ask whether linguistic life is really dependent upon a body at all. What happens when there is no body, or the body is absent, dead, or disappeared? I began to ask this question during fieldwork in Guatemala, where I was working on the exhumations of clandestine cemeteries with the Archbishop’s Human Rights Office. Indeed, anyone familiar with recent history in Latin America will recognize the particular political salience names have had in the struggle to recuperate the past. The Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina and FAMDEGUA (an association of family members of the disappeared) in Guatemala are famous for demanding information on the fate of their children—demanding that the authorities produce bodies or documents to correspond to the names on their placards. They march through the central squares in their towns and cities holding placards aloft, demanding recognition and asserting the aliveness of their children, long since “disappeared” by the state. The mothers are declaring that although their children may be dead, although the bodies of their children may have long since disappeared, they are still alive. This possibility that the children may be both dead and alive describes the terror of their situation. The figure of the desaparecido, a term coined in Argentina but which has gained a kind of common currency throughout Latin America, captures something of the terror that stole over the world in that place and that time. As a term, “desaparecido” is contradictory: one could say that it names the refusal of a name. As someone who survived disap-

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pearance in Argentina reported, “The first thing they told me was to forget who I was, that as of that moment I would be known only by a number, and that the outside world stopped there” (Feitlowitz 1998: 51). Marguerite Feitlowitz, in her book on the language of terror in Argentina, notes, “The concept of individuals made to vanish originated with the Nazis” and that “in Argentina the model sequence was disappearance, torture, death” (1998: 51). Often the bodies of the dead would never resurface, and officials would disavow any knowledge of the deceased, hence the sense that individuals had “disappeared” from the face of the earth. So the term “desaparecido” serves to identify certain subjects as both troubling and nonexistent in the eyes of the state. Sometimes it was not just individuals but whole communities who were “disappeared,” as was the case in 440 villages in Guatemala. But whatever the form it takes, disappearance is always an act of the state against its citizens and can be seen as an attempt to cut the body loose from its proper name and resignify it as belonging to a category of nonentities. In the face of political disappearance, there is a very real sense that the disappeared are kept “alive” by anyone who speaks their names. Returning to Butler’s provocative text, she contends, “If we accept the notion that the linguistic constitution of the subject can take place without that subject’s knowing, as when one is constituted out of earshot, as, say, the referent of a third-person discourse, then interpellation can function without the ‘turning around,’ without anyone ever saying, ‘Here I am’ ’ (1997a: 33). Butler is actually interested here in describing the violence of naming and interpellating. But the mothers who chant the names of their children in public places in Argentina or Guatemala are “literally ‘invoking’ ” their children, to use Cassirer’s formulation. So are the Inuit families who call their children by the name of someone recently dead. These are above all acts of love.

becoming annie Anne Meetijuk Hanson, former commissioner of Nunavut (2005– 2010), writes about the influence of the missionaries on the Inuit practice of naming: Traditionally it was up to elders to name babies after relatives or favorite people, and many given names had long been used—names like Aniqmiuq, Annogakuluuk, Annogaq, Arnaquq, Kimalu, Aitii, Maatu, Quvianatukuluk, Makivik, Yutai, Aiuula, Suu, Yugayugausiq, Arnaguatsaaq, Angusimaajuq,

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Qiilabaq, Nuiijaut, Ikilluaq, and thousands more. When the missionaries came, some could not pronounce these ancient names properly. They gave our people names from the Bible—Joanasie, from John, Jamiesie (James), Olutie (Ruth), Miali (Mary), Salamonie (Solomon), Noah, Jonah, Ipeelie (Abel), Ilisapi (Elizabeth), and so on. Among ourselves, we always used our ancient names. So when I was baptized, I became Annie, but to my parents and elders, I was Lutaaq, Pilitaq, Palluq, or Inusiq. (Hanson 1999)

The idea of “becoming Annie” yet remaining Lutaaq, Pilitaq, Palluq, and Inusiq is an intimation of the way naming and community are linked, the way names inaugurate a social existence and create an us into which a child is born and reborn. The missionaries who could not pronounce Inuit names are excluded from that intimate world of Inuit names, and there is a space “among ourselves” where life continues, differently. The first task of a missionary arriving to “pagan” Inuit territory was to collect the names of the people there, “not so much for ethnographic purposes as for staking out the people on their lists as potential converts.” This was their standard method of “laying claim to potential followers” (Williamson 1988: 253). It was also another way of “having” or possessing the Inuit. The bestowal of Christian baptismal names further cemented the fact of their possession by the missionaries, the Christian name symbolizing a “saved” life. Inuit sometimes added these names to their own repertoire, passing them along as they would an Inuktitut name (Guemple 1965; Alia 2007). But when I asked Olutie, my language tutor, about her Inuktitut names, she said, My mother used to be very—how do you call it—“sensitive”? At that time the Anglican preacher started preaching that the Inuit tradition is the wrong way. He said naming a person after someone who died before—it’s wrong. [E]ven though the preacher used to name people from old stories from the Bible. It’s the same thing—naming from there! He didn’t realize that. But according to my mum, the preacher said it was wrong to name people after dead relatives. Because it’s wrong. In my family I was the only one who doesn’t have Inuktitut name. Probably that particular year he was preaching and she got scared. So she chose not to name me after her late aunt, or something like that.

“It’s the same thing,” Olutie says of the missionaries’ ways of naming, but “he didn’t realize that.” In the end, for Olutie, it’s the priest who misrecognizes the pagan implications of his own Christian practices. Olutie raises the question of whether our naming practices are really so different after all.

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The renaming of Inuit children was ramped up after World War II, when government policy shifted and more children began attending the Anglican, Catholic, and state-sponsored schools in places like Inuvik, Chesterfield Inlet, and Churchill.11 Recall Miriam Nowdlak’s story from chapter 2. When she went away to residential school she was forbidden to speak Inuktitut. She told me, “That’s when I learnt that my name was Miriam.” From then on her memory is spotty. Things occurred as if in a dream. Her long hair is cut. She goes for a walk. She lies down in the snow and doesn’t want to get up. Both Anne Meetijuk Hanson and Miriam Nowdlak recount the moment of being given a Qallunaaq name as a rupture. Becoming Annie at a baptism and learning one’s name was Miriam at a residential school represent critical events in the two women’s lives—critical events understood as ones that transform existing lifeworlds in a way that seems “almost hostile to the continuity of time” (Das 1996: 5–6). The names are both their pass into another world and mark the impossibility of ever returning fully to the first. For Miriam, receiving a new name is marked by a rupture in her memory. She can no longer remember having her hair cut or what happened after lying down in the snow. These are, again, the traces of the psychic life of biopolitics.

assimilation In Canada there have been no state sponsored “disappearances” in precisely the sense that they occurred in Latin America. But, as Peter Kulchyski and others argue, the Canadian attempt to assimilate its native peoples was neither innocent nor nonviolent. The Indian Act of 1876 “gave the State the power to define who a Native person was” (Kulchyski 1993: 24).12 Indians who were understood to be wards of the state could become citizens “through a process described in the Indian Act as ‘enfranchisement’: the formal recognition of the assimilation of individual Native people. Each year the Indian Affairs Branch reported on the number of Indians who had been enfranchised and took this number as an indicator of its success in solving the ‘Native problem’ ” (Kulchyski 1993: 25).13 Assimilation—also known as “enfranchisement”—is a different kind of disappearance from that of Guatemala or Argentina, where large numbers of people were murdered. Yet the assimilation of the Canadian native peoples—in which the renaming of Inuit discussed above plays a significant and particularly symbolic role—is also a form of disappearance.

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In 1947, Diamond Jenness, a prolific public anthropologist and advocate of Canada’s policy of assimilation, spoke before a parliamentary joint committee established to examine, and potentially revise, the Indian Act. His words are curious: “Some four years ago I drew up a condensed plan for liquidating our whole Indian reserve system within a definite time-limit, which I fixed, somewhat arbitrarily, at twenty-five years” (Government of Canada 1947: 310).14 The plan was essentially a blueprint for the enfranchisement and racial assimilation of Canada’s indigenous populations.15 The joint committee received Jenness’s testimony, and his plan, with great enthusiasm. But, as Peter Kulchyski (1993: 29) has pointed out, Jenness’s language in the presentation of his plan was hardly neutral. One wonders why he would choose to speak of “liquidating” the Indian reserve system just as the extent and details of the Nazi concentration camps were becoming widely known. But any suspicion that it was just an unfortunate—but ultimately innocuous—word choice on Jenness’s part is belied by the rest of his testimony. “Instead of proposing merely temporary or palliative measures,” argued Jenness, “it attacks the Indian problem right at its roots and sets a definite term for its complete and final solution” (Government of Canada 1947: 310; emphasis added). Trained as an anthropologist, Jenness had already written several books on the Inuit when, in 1926, he succeeded Edward Sapir as the chief of the Division of Anthropology at the National Museum of Canada in Ottawa (Collins et al. 1970: 77). As a museum anthropologist, he conducted a substantial amount of research on the native peoples of Canada—including what he described to the committee as “their history, their manners, their religion, and so on” (Government of Canada 1947: 306). Shortly after the Second World War broke out, Jenness joined the Department of National Defense. It is crucial to remember that Jenness was appalled by the living conditions of the native Canadians he had studied, and he was widely considered to be an expert in their ways of life and a tireless advocate on their behalf. In his testimony before the joint committee, he was advocating for radical change in government attitudes and policies regarding its native peoples based on his experience growing up among the Maori in New Zealand (Government of Canada 1947: 306)—where, he argued during his testimony, there is “no discrimination whatsoever” (314). Nonetheless, if we take the assertions of Jenness’s friendship with the Inuit at face value (see, e.g., Collins and Taylor 1970), perhaps it makes sense to think of his language as a kind of Freudian “slip of the tongue,”

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a moment in which his word choice, although bizarrely inappropriate (he was actually arguing to shut down the reservation system in Canada, not to inaugurate new camps) in fact speaks volumes. An instance, that is, of what I am calling the psychic life of biopolitics. Unlike the Nazi plan to exterminate those considered in some way subhuman, Jenness’s final solution instead aimed at racial “absorption.” Jenness argued that Canada’s native peoples have become “degraded” and that they have developed “warped mentalities” from being confined to reservations (Government of Canada 1947: 307). Comparing the native peoples of Canada to those “concentration camp victims, slave labourers and others” who were then stranded in displaced persons camps in Eastern Europe, Jenness argued that “through being segregated in these special camps . . . these displaced persons developed warped mentalities. They lost their initiative and enterprise, they began to complain of their rights, to demand everything and give nothing, to disclaim any responsibility for their future welfare, and altogether prove most difficult to handle” (Government of Canada 1947: 307). The objective of Jenness’s plan to deal with the native Canadians who had similarly become “most difficult to handle”16 was “to abolish, gradually but rapidly, the separate political and social status of the Indians (and Eskimos); to enfranchise them and merge them into the rest of the population on equal footing” (Government of Canada 1947: 310). Many of his suggestions concerning the implementation of this plan for racial assimilation deal with education. He recommends scholarships “for Indian children to attend technical schools and colleges remote from their homes” (310) as well as “intensive classes for children in ordinary school subjects” and special courses for adults in “motor mechanics” and “mineral prospecting,” among other subjects (311). But, again, Jenness reiterates in closing that the plan’s main “merit” is this: “It does attack the Indian problem at its root; it sets a definite term for its solution and for a solution that will be final and definite” (311; emphasis added). Not extermination, but education. Although the racial aspect of Jenness’s plan is not entirely legible at first (initially he speaks of social and political status, and not race), it becomes quite clear in the question and answer period that follows his testimony.17 The first committee member to pose a question asks, “In proposing to the committee that you appear here I had one or two other things in mind. I would like to ask you this question: As regards blood lines, is the Eskimo of the same racial origin as the Indian?” (Government of Canada 1947: 312).

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Judging from the first question, bloodlines were already very much “in mind” as Jenness gave his testimony. According to the Indian Act of the time, which the committee was charged with revising, a status Indian was a man of full Indian blood; no “half-breeds” were to receive Indian status. Indian women who married white men would “cease to be Indian.”18 Jenness responds to the question about the racial origins of the Eskimos in a vague way by explaining, “The Eskimo is really the same blood line as the Indian,” adding that they are “mixed peoples” coming from “the east” (Government of Canada 1947: 312). A long discussion then ensues about whether it would be possible to differentiate Indians from whites if Jenness’s proposed plan was put into action. “How far out would you call a person an Indian in the blood line?” (312) asks one committee member. Jenness responds by giving the negative example of the Six Nations reserve at Caughnawaga, whose residents should apparently not be considered Indian at all: “The so-called Indians of Caughnawaga have no more Indian blood in them than have some of the people in the villages down the St. Lawrence between here and Montreal” (312).19 So-called Indians, mixed races, and final solutions. The discursive layers and recombinations are stunning. But the conversation goes on. To draw out Jenness’s comparison with the Maori case and its relevance to the question of racial assimilation, another committee member asks, “To what extent have the Maoris been absorbed by the general white population through the mixing of blood streams and so forth?” (Government of Canada 1947: 314). “Quite a good deal,” responds Jenness. The committee member presses the issue: “The situation is that the Maoris are being rapidly absorbed into the general stream of life, and in a reasonably short space of time there will be no such thing as a Maori?” (emphasis added). To which Jenness responds, “Exactly.” To summarize: Jenness’s final solution for the Indians and Eskimos of Canada, his way of “liquidating” the Indian problem, is to create a plan that will ensure that in a “definite and not too remote” future there will be “no such thing” as an Indian or Eskimo, just as there will soon be “no such thing as a Maori.” What gets revealed in Jenness’s testimony to the joint committee through his use of Nazi phrases and even his categorical sentiments (his “slips of the tongue”) is the unspeakable connection between racial assimilation and genocide.20 Except this time, in 1947, the disappear-

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ance of a people is being proposed from the vantage point of friendship. This is crucial. The joint committee wants to do the right thing toward its native peoples.21 Jenness also emphasizes this point: “Canada’s intentions towards her Indians were good. She was quite sincere when she established the reserve system to train them for citizenship” (Government of Canada 1947: 307). That is, Canada’s intentions in setting up the reserve system as a kind of reeducation center were good. And, of course, the same could be said of Jenness—his intentions were nothing if not good. Jenness was horrified by the prejudice shown to native veterans who could find no respect on returning home after defending Canada at the front, disgusted by the plight of native women with no employment opportunities beyond prostitution (308), incensed by the fact that once-proud chiefs were forced to walk behind the white man like his dog (307). Jenness was widely respected as a progressive social reformer (Collins et al. 1970; Helmer 1983). By suggesting that we consider the phrases “liquidating our whole Indian reserve system” and finding a “complete and final solution” to the Indian problem as slips of the tongue, I am not attempting to diminish their importance. Quite the contrary. Freud suggests, “Even apparently simple slips of the tongue could be traced to interference by a half-suppressed idea that lies outside the intended context” (1960: 83). The intended context of Jenness’s speech before the joint committee was the supposedly progressive ideal of the racial assimilation of Canada’s native people. Jenness’s “slips of the tongue” reveal the half-suppressed idea that racial assimilation (an apparently “progressive” biopolitical ideal) is inextricably linked to extermination (the Nazi ideal). My claim, of course, is that Jenness’s “slips of the tongue” are not born of individual psychopathology but instead are internal to the logic of biopolitics, which rests on the suppressed idea of an inferior population.22 But it is also an unspeakable logic—one that only finds its way into language and thought in such roundabout ways as slips of the tongue, counterfactual musings, or niggling questions. Once again, we are led to ask with Michael K and Jamesie, “Why don’t they just shoot the prisoners?” Jenness has made it painfully clear that his objective is to reeducate the natives so they can be integrated into the stream of Canadian life (just as Michael K is languishing in his own reeducation camp in an unnamed country until he can be admitted to the stream of life that biopolitics addresses). We could also ask what it means to be a friend of the Inuit (as Jenness said he was, and the RCMP claimed to be) but also look forward to a time when there will

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be “no such thing” as an Eskimo? What does it mean to talk of a “general stream of life,” as one of the joint committee members did, when only those who have lost their distinctive “racial stock” can belong to it? If the biopolitical state, apart from its tireless efforts to keep its population alive, is also a killing machine, we need to recognize that there are different ways to kill: the Nazi concentration camps were only one form such killing could take. As Foucault (2003) has pointed out, the binary logic of a biopolitical state means that you are either part of the great stream of life or outside of it. Friends will try to make you part of it, while enemies will push you out. Or something like that. Because all of a sudden it’s not so clear who your friends really are. Twenty years after Jenness spoke before that joint committee, he published a report on the administration of Inuit peoples within Canada. Still convinced that assimilation was the best policy regarding native peoples and believing that the Arctic was for all intents and purposes a wasteland, he proposed it would be in everyone’s best interests for the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic to be relocated to the suburbs of southern Canada.23 Why, he asks, should we confine our Eskimos to the Arctic? If nature now denies them a livelihood in their ancient homeland, why should they not migrate elsewhere. . . . They are citizens of Canada, and Canada is wide. Within its confines they may disappear as a separate people, as several tribes have disappeared before them: but surely it is preferable that they should succumb struggling for a better life in southern Canada than rotting away on government doles.24 (1964: 174–75)

Jenness wrote these words the same year that the Subcommittee on Eskimo Housing Programs suggested, “Surely, in any case, it is more desirable to have a live and slightly disturbed Eskimo than a dead one” (see chapter 1). But in Jenness’s rendition of the conundrum there is no way out. The subcommittee was arguing for better housing for the Inuit in the North. For Jenness, caring for the Inuit entailed eradicating the Inuit way of life by removing Inuit from their homelands and encouraging them to assimilate into suburban life. At the time, assimilation was seen as the progressive response to the “Indian problem”; it was a way of ensuring Inuit full citizenship (Cairns 2000: 56). Jenness cared about the Inuit: he didn’t want them to become dependent on welfare and thus demoralized, and he wanted them to be as resourceful as their ancestors. However, his way of caring ignored who they were or wanted to become. The “who of the name” had been “disappeared.” Michael K’s question, which seems so ridiculous to his doctor—“Why don’t they just shoot

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the prisoners?”—has a harrowing precision here. Why don’t they just shoot the prisoners? To recognize how apt this question has become is also to recognize the psychic life of biopolitics. John Amagoalik, a central force behind the Nunavut land claim, describes his childhood experience of hearing his homeland described as a “wasteland where nobody lives.” This bothered him even when he was a young boy: “I was annoyed that these guys thought of us as nobodies or that we somehow did not qualify as human beings.” He adds, “Just as disturbing to me was to listen to conversations between non-Inuit as they discussed the future of the Arctic and the Inuit. There was always agreement between them that Inuit could not survive as a people. . . . What disturbed me even more was the fact that they were so casual when they were talking about the death of Inuit culture” (Amagoalik 2000: 138). Amagoalik is describing a kind of disappearance—the disappearance of a colonized people into the natural background of the colonized territory. Frantz Fanon reminds us that such erasures are actually the signature of colonialism. It must in any case be remembered that a colonized people is not only simply a dominated people. Under the German occupation the French remained men; under the French occupation the Germans remained men. In Algeria there is not simply the domination but the decision to the letter not to occupy anything more than the sum total of the land. The Algerians, the veiled women, the palm trees and the camels make up the landscape, the natural background to the human presence of the French. (Fanon 1966: 204; emphasis in original)

The Inuit, like the Algerians, disappear into what Amagoalik calls a “wasteland of nobodies.” What is so painful for Amagoalik is the indifference with which his people are erased.

mournful life In the face of such disappearances, whether in Guatemala, Argentina, or Nunavut, names become a powerful site of resistance. In shouting the names of the disappeared on the streets of Guatemala City, or continuing to use the names of Inuit ancestors, the communities targeted by the disappearances assert the continuation of the name and the life that is borne along. Through this collection of images it’s possible to see that the life-ofthe-name (in which the dead are not forgotten but live on in the speech

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of others) reveals itself both in the highly charged political context of Guatemala, in the context of Inuit naming practices, in situations of violence such as the Partition of India, but also in the lives of people such as Coetzee’s Paul Rayment. Philosophers such as Ernst Cassirer (and later Judith Butler) struggle with where the quotation marks should go, struggle with just how literally they intend to suggest the link between language and life actually is. In thinking through these disparate instances, I have found it helpful to think about this life-of-the-name (or “linguistic life,” in Butler’s terms) as related in important ways to what Freud calls prolonged mourning or melancholia. To put it simply, the invocation of a name is, in Freud’s terms, a libidinal attachment. Such libidinal attachments are what keep the other alive. For Freud, the work of mourning is the work of progressively withdrawing the libido from a loved object that has disappeared. “I do not think I am stretching a point,” Freud writes, “if I present it in the following manner: reality-testing has revealed that the beloved object no longer exists, and demands that the libido as a whole sever its bonds with that object” (2005: 204). Freud goes on to present the reader with a prescription for how to go about severing all ties from the loved object: “Each individual memory and expectation in which the libido was connected to the object is adjusted and hyper-invested, leading to its detachment from the libido. . . . In fact, the ego is left free and uninhibited once again after the mourning-work is completed” (2005: 205).25 This is Freud at his steeliest, countenancing no lingering attachments to the lost object of desire and above all no deviation from reality: the mourner will become free and uninhibited once again when he acknowledges the reality of reality. The facts of the matter must be paramount. Of course, for Kaujak’s son Sakiassie, even once he knows his mother is dead, he still waits and listens for something, some image of her death that he can hold on to. He listens for her, for some image of her that will connect her to him. In the course of time Freud actually changes his mind about whether it is possible to ever complete the work of mourning (Butler 2004: 20–21; Clewell 2004). So although in Mourning and Melancholia (written in 1915 and published two years later) he suggested that the inability to fully decathect the libido from a lost loved object is pathological and leads to melancholia, in The Ego and the Id (1962; originally published in 1923), he suggests that incorporation—the refusal to let go of the image of the lost object—may actually be essential to the work of mourning and to the constitution of the ego.

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Central to both versions of his theory, however, is the notion that there are affective bonds that persist after “reality-testing” has demonstrated that the loved object no longer exists. Admitting that the work of mourning takes a “great expenditure of time and investment of energy,” Freud notes that during the period of separation that constitutes the work of mourning, “the lost object persists in the psyche” (1957: 205). At one point Freud calls the persistence of the lost object in the psyche “hallucinatory” (204), emphasizing the object’s status in the psyche as an image.26 As when the infant learns to cope with the absence of the mother by forming an image-object of the mother within the psyche,27 so the mourner clings to the image of the dead. In short, the object of these affective bonds, the severing of which is the work of mourning, is the image of the other, an image that has a certain reality in and of itself, independent of the physical presence and/or existence of the loved object. We are now in a position to understand that the image, while intrinsically related to the loved object, still resides somehow “within” the mourner.28 The mourner “has” the image. Freud’s first version of successful mourning suggests that such images of the other should be discarded, all bonds to them severed, and this second version suggests that they should be incorporated. Both acknowledge the persistence of the image beyond the physical persistence of the person to which the image responds. They differ only as to how to relate to it.

names as images In thinking the life-of-the-name as a kind of melancholia or prolonged mourning I am suggesting that the name functions as an image of the beloved object that is, as Coetzee suggests, borne along. The idea that a name (or a word) can function more as an image than, say, as an abstraction, is something that Suzanne Langer, in her exegesis of Cassirer’s philosophy, tries to make clear. Langer, who explicitly links Freud’s work to Cassirer’s, draws the obvious parallel between imagistic dream-work and mythical thinking. She suggests that in both dream and myth, images are “charged with meanings, but the meanings remain implicit, so that the emotions they command seem to be centered on the image rather than on anything it merely conveys” (1949: 395–96). Langer continues, “In the image, which may be a vision, a gesture, a soundform (musical image) or a word as readily as an external object, many meanings may be concentrated, many ideas telescoped and interfused, and incompatible emotions simultaneously expressed” (396).

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In line with Walter Benjamin, Langer’s definition of an image as including visions, gestures, sound-forms, and words, as well as encompassing potentially contradictory meanings and emotions, provides a useful way of thinking of the name-as-image.29 In the case of the Inuit atiq or life-of-the-name, it is impossible to distinguish precisely between, for example, the first Isaac who died in a snowmobile accident, and the second Isaac who was born with the scars of the first. The name as an image is not, as some philosophers would have it, a rigid designator, picking out a single individual, but rather it is a complex and even contradictory image of the way the two Isaac’s lives are inseparably connected. In thinking the life-of-the-name as melancholic life, I read Freud’s earlier text on mourning as suggesting that the rational and reality-based way to proceed would be to sever all ties to the name as image and emerge “free and uninhibited.” Thus melancholia or prolonged mourning, like the naming that occurs in the streets of Guatemala City or the homes of Inuit in Nunavut, is a refusal to cease invoking, hailing, imagining, naming the loved object—whether or not the original body is manifest. It calls into question whether the facts of the matter, that which reality-testing can verify, are ever all there is to human life. (The second Isaac both is and is not the first Isaac. The claim to reality of the second Isaac versus the reality of the first is ultimately undecidable.) The life-ofthe name provides a way of imagining life—perhaps we could call it mournful life—that refuses to ignore the dead (or our desire for the dead), and that takes very seriously the way we bear the dead along but also calls into question what it is possible to know for sure. As Cassirer understood, such a way of approaching life is neither Christian nor logical. As Paul Rayment of Coetzee’s novel comes to understand, it also sits uneasily with the bureaucratic way of formulating kinship. The life-of-the-name fits neither with the indivisible self of Christianity (Mauss 1985 [1938]) nor with the vitality of the biological body with which biopolitics and its attendant disciplines are concerned. But the life-of-the-name, drawing together the living and the dead, may gesture to a way of approaching life that is closer to the way we actually live, and it may in fact be the foundation of a more honest politics. As Freud said after living through the First World War, it may be that our denial of death and especially the ways we are dependent on death and the dead are ways of living “psychologically beyond our means” (Freud 2005: 193).

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deathly survival What might it mean to live psychologically within one’s means? Perhaps it is instructive to consider the nuances in the meaning of the Inuktitut word for survival. Annaktujuniq literally means the state of one who escapes from sickness, hunger, or danger. But the word’s root, annaktuq, is also used to describe an animal or quarry that gets away, escapes a death. Survival is etymologically linked to escape from death. The intimacy of the other death, the death that one somehow escapes, is crucial to Inuit lifeworlds—the other death imagined as one’s own, but a death that one has, for the time being, escaped. In such a world there is no Eskimo “dead or alive” to be “had” by a colonial agent (see chapter 1). Instead, survival depends on an intimate and often painful relationship to the death of another. As Bobby said to me, “That’s why we have namesakes. I was named after my grandpa, Salamonie. He died, so I was born—it’s my turn.” Bobby needs the dead to be dead so he can have his turn. Love, desire, and the dead are connected in a constellation that is anything but innocent. The foremost concern of Coetzee’s doctor was that Michael K survive. But it is a survival for survival’s sake, one that does not admit the possibility that making live can itself be a form of killing. Of course they wouldn’t shoot the prisoners: surviving had become a goal in itself, and one the inmates should cooperate with. Survival for the camp doctor was an anonymous and clean affair. It mattered not who the inmates are, beyond being a member of the class of prisoners that should be kept alive. For Sila, Isaac, and Daniel, as well as to the elders Manilaq and Aupilaarjuk, life is related to the name. To be alive one must be called, must have acceded to the name. Recall that after the child has been given a name, family members and friends will address the child with the kinship terms (and with the degree of intimacy) previously reserved for the deceased. Recall also that a child without a name has no chance of survival. Names link the living and the dead in an imagistic way; the relationship between two people with the same name is complex and even contradictory (one is both oneself and another), and how the name lives in someone is never a thing of certainty but always a matter of discovery.30 For many Inuit, then, “life” as an abstraction has little value, yet specific relationships to others, both dead and alive, matter profoundly. Biopolitical models of care (that is, care that focuses on the bare life of a population), such as anonymous hotlines aimed at preserving the life

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of the Inuit population, ignore the pull of these personal ties and, in this manner, they fail to acknowledge that, for Inuit at least, death has not yet become anonymous nor a biological fact. In order to understand their daily struggle with life and death we need to reimagine the political as something beyond biopolitics and beyond the ethics of professionalized caring. This calls for a vision of community in which the question of “What is it to this man if I live or die?” is not equivalent to “Why don’t they shoot the prisoners?”—a vision that threads life and death together into a politics that refuses to be constrained by the hegemony or abstraction of “life.” Inuit naming practices challenge us to try to imagine a kind of survival that becomes less about an individual body, hungry, destitute, lacking in all relation—thinking here about Michael K and the “dead” Eskimo and Martha Tunnuq’s siblings—and more about bodies existing in a circulation of names. Because if I survive by being called into community by another, then the guarantee of my existence must reside with another. And if my name will outlast my physical body and will come to rest in another body, how essential is my (proper) body to my life? (In what sense is it even possible to talk about my life?) In this way we can begin to imagine life unmoored from the physical presence of a particular body, as future children are named in dreams, and remembered after death.

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I was calling Bobby but Sila answered instead. Her voice was low and flat. “What’s up?” I asked, trying to be upbeat. “I’m bored.1 I’ve been trying to have a shower for a while now.” The dullness of her voice is a concrete wall, gray and impenetrable. There’s nothing to do. Can’t get out of bed. Can’t take a shower. Can’t quit smoking. Can’t leave Bobby. Can’t go to school. Bored, bored, bored. Months later, the wail of her voice will assail me over and over as I try to get her to leave her bedroom. Leave me alone. I want to die. But for now, I have no answer to her boredom, just as later I will have no answer for her desire to die. It seems implacable, her exhaustion with the real. It transmutes into a desire for the hyperreal (the film Jackass, watched over and over) or the surreal (of a mellow high, where apartment mirrors and orange peels fascinate), or a desire for another life—escape. “Iqaluit is boring,” Bobby explains to me. “Why?” I ask. It’s a naïve question. “There’s nothing to do.” “What do you mean?” “There’s no roads, you can’t go anywhere. You’re trapped here.” In fact, Bobby was constantly reminding me of the one-way ticket to Ottawa his father had promised him. All he had to do was go to the First Air ticket counter and pick it up. He was perpetually about to leave this place. 129

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A lack of escape, as in the bad weather that keeps you inside your igloo or sod house, or the perpetually delayed flight out. Witnessing this kind of boredom—the boredom that comes from being trapped in an alienating situation one can’t seem to escape—is unnerving. A volunteer at the help line put it this way: I think you feel least effective when the call comes in and you allow the person to talk, and you sense right from the beginning that there’s not a thing you can do for the person. There’s no words that you’re going to tell them, there’s no questions you can ask them to lead them down to a understanding that there may be a way around whatever they are facing in life, there may be an answer, and regardless of what scenario you put in front of their path, that some people cannot escape what they’re focused on.

“Trying to be bored” is how the Inuit youth put it. “You’re just trying to be bored,” they chide each other. Are the legions of bored Inuit youth really avoiding escape, or are all escape routes foreclosed? Might the real problem not be that boredom bends toward death? That none of us can escape? So I can understand how the volunteer felt. That day, when I called Bobby and Sila answered, I wanted Sila to take a shower. The possibility of her taking a shower mattered to me. I wanted her to cooperate, to see things my way. The possibility of desire—of the all-too-human desire to move, to escape the present into a future that is alive—needed somehow to be reiterated there, in the path between the bed and the shower. I desperately wanted her to want what I wanted—a future. The scandal of boredom is that there’s nothing we can do to make the other person want what we want and we can’t make them cooperate, can’t get them to move. The day after the phone call I had coffee with Sila and Bobby at Bobby’s house. He told me I would recognize the house by the blue car piled with snow in the driveway. A small dog began to bark as I climbed the stairs. I could hear rustling—boots and coats and things being pushed out of the way. Bobby was making a bacon sandwich so Sila got up from her crocheting to make me coffee. She told me that when she was bored as a kid her mother would tell her to clean up her room or to crochet something. She could never understand how anybody could just sit there and do crochet, but here she was. She also told me that while she was in the shower the day before she had an idea for the video we were making. She got out her journal to read it to me. She explained: It will be filmed at the high school. You see all kinds of faces passing by and everybody’s moving quickly and smiling. There would be more and more faces and then they would fade away until one person was standing alone.

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The voiceover will say: So many people, so many thoughts. You see everyone smiling. What are they thinking? Are they really happy inside, Even though they’re smiling and laughing On the outside?

There are so many different ways to cooperate. One is to smile and laugh when you’re really so, so bored.

driving around Walter Benjamin notices that we no longer permit ourselves to be bored, that, in our infatuation with information (the ever-new piece of news), we try always to be interested in something, to strive for something. “If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away (1968a: 91). In the same essay Benjamin remarks on the way death has vacated our homes and we no longer experience death. “There used to be no house, hardly a room, in which someone had not once died. . . . Today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death, dry dwellers of eternity, and when their end approaches they are stowed away in sanatoria or hospitals by their heirs” (94). Isn’t our fear of boredom related to our fear of death? Months later I pull on my rubber boots, leaving my parka still hanging on a hook. It is only a few meters to my friend’s house. I will run. It’s a clear night. It will be warm once I get inside. I’ll just be a minute. I step outside into the crystalline cold. The snow on the road squeaks underfoot until I hit the unshoveled drifts in front of Eva’s house. I chart my way to the front steps, trying to avoid sinking so deep that the snow gets into my boots. Out of the corner of my eye I see a van slowing down and a face pressing against the window, peering into the darkness. I ignore the van and the face and move more swiftly toward Eva’s house, but I hear my name. I become strangely disoriented. I don’t recognize the voice, or the van. It’s dark. My body is still moving toward Eva’s. My name comes again, this time more insistent. I shoot a furtive glance at the van. My instincts, honed from years of living in cities, tell me not to make eye contact with male strangers, especially at night. But who is

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a stranger in Iqaluit? I am frozen in place now, my trajectory interrupted. The window rolls down further and I hear laughter and a female voice singing out, “Leeesaaa!” Relief spreads. As I hurry to the van, the back door slides open and someone barks, “Get in!” I climb in unceremoniously, squeezing between familiar teenage bodies. “Where’d you get this?” I ask, hoping, as I hear the words leave my mouth, that I don’t sound too suspicious. The van is not new; it has the lived-in feel of a family van, with lumpy seats and dice hanging from the rearview mirror. Smoke hangs in the air. Bobby is driving, Ilisapi is sitting in the passenger seat, and Sila and a guy I don’t know are sitting beside me. “I rented it.” “Oh yeah? How much?” “A hundred and fifty dollars for the night.” The pulsing rhythms of Dr. Dre make conversation unnecessary, and no one takes much notice of me or explains what we are doing. We are together. We are in a van. We are driving around. These things are obvious. Someone passes me a joint. I decline, feeling disoriented. “You don’t smoke?” one of them asks. “She does,” another responds reassuringly. We are barreling through the night along Federal Road, which leads away from downtown, past the scrap heaps of metal, the rectangular warehouses, Baffin Building Supplies, the Sikitu snowmobile shop, toward the prisons, one for adults and one for youth. We turn off toward the Arctic College residence, an old American army barracks built in 1962 to house the troops deployed to defend against an attack from Russia. As we slide to a stop a head pops up from one of the benches behind me. I startle. “Pauloosie! I didn’t know you were there.” Everyone laughs. “You didn’t hear him snoring?” Pauloosie runs into the residence, looking for another body to fill our van. In a few minutes he returns alone. We wait. Finally we leave without her. That’s it. We head back toward town, around Ring Road, and out toward Apex, picking up speed as we hurtle along the one open stretch of road in Iqaluit. They are stoned. Driving around. Around and around and around we go. There is nowhere to go in Iqaluit, the kids complain.

time management It has now been half a century since Inuit families were brought from their dispersed camps on the land to settlements clustered around

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administrative centers. Is it possible that, as others have suggested, territory is a minor trophy of colonialism—when compared to the domination of time?2 However we feel about the answer to this question, there remains a curious affinity between clock time and what I have been calling anonymous care. Clock time homogenizes and empties time of its subjective and emotional qualities, just as anonymous care is indifferent to who precisely is being cared for, thus in some sense standardizing what it means to care. In the scene from E. M. Forster’s novel that I discussed in chapter 1, a man whose wife has just died receives a note that his wife wrote in the hours before her death stating that she would like her house to be left to a friend and not, as was expected, to her husband or son. The man and his son go to great lengths to rationalize their disregard for her last wishes. Assuming what Forster calls the “manner of a committee-room,” they manage, methodically and almost impersonally, to discredit her wish to bequeath her house to a friend. As the father and son get close to resolving the matter, Forster writes, “The clock struck ten with a rich and confident note. Other clocks confirmed it, and the discussion moved towards its close” (2000: 84). With the striking clocks, Forster links mastery over the emotions to the mastery of time. The striking clock, responsible for the rational ordering of time, pays tribute to the father and son’s ability to ignore who wrote the note and focus instead on the lack of precedence for its contents. During the colonial period Inuit were charged with adopting the way of life of a people—the Qallunaat—for whom time was an extractable resource and for whom a life could be invested wisely or foolishly. Christie and Halpern describe settlement time as “mathematically based, mechanically, electronically or geophysically regulated” (1990: 741).3 Clock and calendar time reify minutes or seconds of time into “slots into which we ‘drop’ activities” or into “commodities which we can ‘save,’ ‘spend’ or ‘waste’ ” (742; see also Stern 2003). Inuit who came to live and work in Iqaluit in the 1950s (first on a temporary basis and then permanently) resisted the dramatic reordering of time that a welfare bureaucracy demanded (Tester 2006). In Inuit camps, “men routinely hunt seals for 20, 30, or more hours at a time; women prepare food for their families when they get hungry, and everyone sleeps when they are tired” (Goehring and Stager 1991: 667). In the settlement Inuit were expected to work regular hours according to a weekly schedule. It was no longer appropriate to go hunting “when the conditions were right.” As one Inuit man described the period:

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Well, the houses started coming slowly. Right away, everybody didn’t get a house. There was no problem with water or anything. It’s the change; the way we lived and the way you people live. That’s the problem. I’d call that a problem right there. People could not just do it right away. Why should I go to work? Why should I get up at eight o’clock every morning to go to work? I want to get up when I feel like it. (Quoted in Tester 2006: 237)

Inuit who were sent to residential and day schools were forced into a new way of being in time. Describing the pain of being taken from her parents’ camp on the land near Igloolik to a residential school, one woman recalled, “We were so controlled. Every minute of the day. We had to line up for this and line up for that. And we couldn’t do this or that.” Forty years later I am at a party at a nurse’s house with no Inuit present. A psychiatric intern from Toronto who had flown in to do consultations in several Baffin communities hears about my research and comes over to tell me she’s convinced that much of the suicide problem would disappear if only parents would make sure their children and teenagers went to bed by nine p.m. Inuit time management is a source of consternation for many in the caring professions. Caring, as it becomes an operationalizable concept—something that can be measured and evaluated, fed through a system of best practices and evidence-based science—simultaneously becomes invested in a certain way of being in time. Caring now occurs on shifts, with most shifts between 9 and 5. It is no longer professional to care after hours. Implicit in the system of care is that the object of care must learn to mime the caregiver’s attitudes to time and to care. If you—the patient, the distressed, the sick—care enough you will seek out psychologists, social workers, and counselors for your family, and you will be on time to your appointments and not stay overlong. The psychiatrist was correct when she pointed out that many Inuit children and teenagers don’t have regular bedtimes. In the springtime young people, responding to the endless daylight, often stay up into the early hours of the morning and then sleep in past the start of school. I celebrated one seven-year-old’s birthday at eleven o’clock at night, when the sun was still slanting across the bay, the wind had died down, and the teenagers had finally finished playing a game of golf across the soggy tundra. We played circle games with dice, ate barbecued seal meat cooked over an open fire, and had juggling contests. The children played with the toy trucks and cars scattered outside our tent until three or four in the morning. A few months after the party at the nurse’s house I receive an email with the subject line “Being Inuk is . . . ” The email contains thirty sen-

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tences with this introductory phrase, one of which reads, “Being Inuk is . . . playing basketball at the outdoor courts at the Youth Dome till 3 a.m.” Clearly not everyone shares the psychiatrist’s sense of the temporality of care.4

a beautiful day One day, while on a camping trip, I went caribou hunting with two teenagers, Joetanie and Eli. For several hours we hiked through a series of valleys carved by a sharply twisting river and flanked by tall gray cliffs. We saw many animals, but they all disappeared as soon as we spotted them: four caribou vanished over the crest of a hill, a hare behind a crop of boulders, a wolf evaporated into the valley walls, and a falcon swooped overhead and was gone. Even though the animals disappeared, the day was still kajjarnaqtuq, an experience that creates longing in the future. So instead of feeling frustrated we talked about the meanings of animals disappearing and the likelihood that there was an angakkuq, or shaman, living in the area. Perhaps it was Ili’s grandfather, whose body was buried in a rocky grave not far from where we were. Then I asked a banal question about whether Inuit eat wolf. “Real Eskimo do. But I don’t,” Ili responded. Then, as if to clarify, he added, “I’m not Eskimo, I’m an Inuk.” “There are probably still Eskimo around here somewhere,” Joetanie added, spreading his arms to the valleys and hills around us. “Do you really think so?” I asked. “Definitely.” According to Ili’s classification, “Eskimo” are the people who lived before the arrival of the Qallunaat to Inuit lands. Inuit are modern-day, town-dwelling, school-going, hip-hop-listening descendants of those Eskimo, the ones who successfully negotiated land claims agreements with the Canadian government. We talked for a little while about the possibility that some Inuit families had never been “found” by the eager ambassadors of Canada’s welfare state—the RCMP, the fur trader, and the missionary—and still lived nomadically in the traditional way. Or, as Joetanie put it, maybe there were people who were still living in the “Stone Age.” This reminds me of another story I was told about an ancient camp outside Pangnirtung: “There was a camp that was found outside Pang,” a young woman tells me. “Because it was really old, they brought the

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stuff here to the museum. After that you could hear stories—from a lot of people—saying there’s Tuniits5 coming to Iqaluit to get their stuff back. People say they’ve seen them from a helicopter.” From the glass and metal of a helicopter, people look down on the treeless tundra, rock and lakes and caribou, and see the forms of an ancient people making off with their belongings that had been, in an act of violence, displayed in the local museum. But that’s another story. After we had walked deeper into the valley, Joetanie announced quietly, “I want to be lost.” “You mean so we could camp here tonight?” I asked, puzzled. “No. Forever.” The longing to be lost, forever, in a geographical space where the “Eskimo” past is written physically on the land—by the graves sheltering in rocky gullies, by the ancient lichen-covered meat caches and by the abandoned tent rings—expresses both a longing to belong to a different time, but also, I will argue, a longing to belong differently to time, to have the possibility of building a different relationship to what is, what has been, and what may be.6 So I find my way into the question of “another time” that disrupts the sense of homogenous empty time that can be minutely managed— through the Inuktitut concept of kajjarniq—longing. Longing in this sense is not something that overcomes someone in a fit of melancholy but something that is actively cultivated, produced for the future. An understanding of kajjarniq reveals a whole temporal structure, one that puts past and future into dialogue, and one that binds a community. Longing for traditional activities—hunting, fishing, camping—is what one does to become an Inuk (Stevenson 2006). The cultivation of longing was apparent at a “healing camp” I attended, which was designed to give single mothers a chance to take their families camping. There was very little scheduled, and activities arose spontaneously; at high tide some decided to go fishing, others went hunting, and the children played games on the rocks behind the camp or shyly shadowed an adult. One night in my tent while preparing for sleep with my friend and her two young boys, my friend commented, “It is good for them [my boys] to be here. They will learn to long for it when they are older.” I was struck by her words “learn to long.” Here was a mother selfconsciously trying to instill longing in her sons by exposing them to traditional Inuit activities.

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As with many Inuktitut concepts, kajjarnaqtuq has many valences beyond the most literal (see also Graburn and Stern [1999] on the concept of beauty in Inuktitut). When my Inuktitut teacher emerged from a lunch at the hospital cafeteria to a brilliantly sunny afternoon with views down Frobisher Bay, she raised her head as she said, “Kajjarnaqtuq,” which she translated for me as “Like paradise!” Longing seems to be embedded in the beauty or the correctness of the moment. A beautiful moment is also always a potentially longed-for moment. Trying to reconcile these uses of kajjarnaqtuq I later consulted Jaypeetee Arnakak, a friend and policy analyst for Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated (NTI), for his thoughts on the concept of longing in Inuktitut. He told me that when he complained about the hassle of getting ready to go camping on the land, his mother would say, “Imaittuq kajjaqattalaaraviuk,” “So that you will long for this.” He continued with a gloss of the word: “The term kajjaq (in kajjarniq) implies being fully present in the now because one is enjoying oneself, and making a memory to be enjoyed and reflected upon later . . . It’s very hard to describe, but it’s a time and place where everything feels right. It’s a state of being, conducive to mental/physical well-being.” The idea of a time and place where everything feels right is closely linked to the Inuktitut concept of beauty. “Beauty is ‘rightness’ in appearance, performance, taste, and sensual experience” (Graburn and Stern 1999).7 In fact, losing track of time, becoming lost in time, thinking without a watch is an integral part of kajjarniq. As Arnakak described it, When a dog is really intent on gnawing on a bone and is oblivious to everything else, we call that kajjaqtuq. When it just inhales its food with gusto, we call that kajjaqtuq (kajjaq- and -tuq). This is the “being fully present,” or “in it” (as in “into it”), of the term kajjaq. We could say that the dog is immersed in his experience. I don’t think kajjarniq is an incidental concept, but a profound reshaping of that which makes us so utterly human: desire.

Such desire is often more important than making sure one gets enough sleep to carry out one’s office job the next morning. As I pointed out above, in the summer, when the sun hardly sets, Inuit stay awake until late into the night, sometimes sleeping very little at all. At two in the morning the Ring Road is humming with teenagers walking in threes and fours and groups in cars driving around. Existing in a time out of time. The existential psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger tried to show how mental “pathologies” could be rethought as different styles of existence.

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Are we ready to think about other ways of being in time without immediately pathologizing them? As I’ve been intimating, I think this requires different ways of being toward death.

dreaming I went to visit Sila again five years after I had completed my dissertation fieldwork. The house where Sila lives with her parents is a boxy wooden structure, stained brown, with a row of bedrooms along a hall and in the living room a small picture window that looks onto the tidal flats of Frobisher Bay. The window usually has a curtain drawn across it. On the walls of the living room are photographs of all the children, including Isaac, who died in the four-wheeler accident. Below the house, on a jumble of boulders, her mother and an older woman were sitting, making a fire for tea and eating pitsi (dried fish). Every now and then they would brush away the mosquitoes massing around their heads. The receding tide had left wasted rocks and seaweed scattered across the grayish mud flats. Farther out there were people looking for clams, heads bent, white plastic bags flapping in one hand and a spoon in the other. Sila looked as she usually did, her hair pulled tightly against her forehead, her eyes darkened by eyeliner, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Beautiful. The only thing that was different was the pair of rubber boots she was wearing. She loaned me another pair that I pulled up over my maternity pants. Walking out onto the mud flats, now veined by shining saltwater rivulets, she began to tell me more about the dreams she had spoken of the day before. “Usually,” she began, “when I have a dream about somebody passing away, usually it’s later, or—less than a week later—somebody always passes away. And when I get up . . . I wake up friggin’ cranky and just knowing that somebody I know is going to pass away but I don’t know who.” Such dreams—unbidden and unwelcome—portend a death. But there are other dreams too. She tells me a dream in which she and a dead friend meet to smoke a final joint. In turn, that dream reminded her of another, one in which that same friend, looking at her from the porch of the NorthMart, tries to speak, tries to say something to her, but is unable to.8 And so, one dream summoning another, we walked out into the bay, sitting for a while on a stranded boulder and then getting up quickly to move closer to the shore when the incoming tide started rushing past our feet. Some of the dreams she told were properly hers, in the sense

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that she was the dreamer. Others were dreams her best friend told her before she committed suicide and still others were dreams her own mother had told her, dreams her mother had dreamed when she was pregnant with her—and feeling suicidal. Suicide encircled the stories: her mother’s suicidal dreams, her friend’s dreams of suicide before she took her life, her own dreams of meeting a boyfriend who had committed suicide, and a final story about her namesake who had committed suicide. Listening to the succession of dreams—pressing outward like the pulsing of blood from an arterial wound—I was caught in a stream of stories about death and the dead. Yet, strangely, the dreams were told in such a way that I came to think they were also about life and the living. I want to say that through dreams she described a life in which she is encircled by death and the dead but is also doggedly alive. Is it possible that all stories, like dreams, are alive in the sense that narrative makes a life for the author, even if the story itself describes the way death circumambulates that life? Of the dream where Linda and Sila meet again to have a final smoke, Sila says, We always used to hang around and say whoever passes away first, we’re going to go and have our last drink or smoke in one of our dreams. So I had a dream—it was me and Linda and her two kids’ dad. He was driving and we were in between [the] high school and Brown Building, just parked there, and we had a nice view of the town. And we started smoking. And she looked at the joint and was like, “See . . . I told you I was going to come back and we were going to smoke!”

So promises made in life are kept in dreams. And who does the dream belong to really? Sila or Linda? The dead return, as they promise they would, and a friendship, begun in life, is enjoyed in death. “We had a nice view of the town,” Sila tells me. Such dreams are not simply the subjective fabulations of the dreamer but are of another time, a discrepant temporality in which the dead and the living can meet again. The languorous pleasure of this dream—two friends smoking a last joint and the promise of a friendship in death—is disrupted by the next dream she tells: But the last dream I had about Linda was . . . It was wintertime and I went [to] NorthMart and I was walking all alone. I couldn’t find any of my friends, and I saw her and she had all her winter stuff on and we were just at the porch. We were waiting for a cab but there was nothing coming. So I just started going home. It was like we wanted to say hi to each other but . . . we couldn’t . . . I don’t know.

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Her voice, low and flat, trails off. “Like she was trying to say hi but you just couldn’t?” I ask. “It was—I knew it was her, but it wasn’t her.” I have known Sila at times when it was hard for her to get out of bed. The pitch of her voice could descend so low that it would seem to be dropping into her body. At those times the force or desire needed to send a voice beyond its body seemed unavailable, and I would have the corresponding desire to shake her, to shake something out of her. To loosen something. This was different. She told me some beautiful, some sad, and some terrifying dreams. But as she told the dreams her voice had its own force. It lifted away from her body. She was telling me something—the filaments of a story reached outward. I wonder, then, if we don’t lend enough importance to the grammar of a life. Do we at least begin to create a world for ourselves through simply stating that something, anything, is?9 Listening to the tape I made of our conversation later, however, I realized that there were moments when her voice did lose its force again. It happened in the interstices of the stories, between one dream and the next. “I don’t know . . . ,” she would say, and her voice, low and flat, would trail off as if each dream were a proposition that she would lose faith in once it had been stated. What if that isn’t the way it is? What if I haven’t managed to communicate how it is? What if this isn’t a livable world?10 These dreams, I realized, were more than curiosities, more than a cathartic retelling of past events. Each seemed to encapsulate, or at least gesture toward, a whole epistemology: How do we know and what do we know about the dead? About ourselves? What is the time and place of the dead? What, then, is the sense of the word “know” in Sila’s assertion that “I knew it was her, but it wasn’t her?” What does it mean to know it was Linda, but also to be able to state with conviction that “it wasn’t her.” What is this sense, familiar to dreamers, that the rules of everyday life, especially the rule of noncontradiction, no longer apply? The simultaneity of dreams seems to compress something that is and then later isn’t into something that is and isn’t at the same time. Sila described this compression of time in the following way: “Because you know how you think very fast when you’re dreaming? Like you could say a whole story in ten seconds or something?” So for a period of Sila’s life, Linda was alive, was herself, and then after she committed suicide she wasn’t alive, wasn’t herself. But in the dream she seems to be both at the same time—available and unavaila-

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ble, herself and not herself, wanting to speak but not able to. The way Sila puts this is “I knew it was her, but it wasn’t her.”11 What relation does this doubled knowing (when something is and isn’t at the same time) bear to her words, her negation spoken just prior, I don’t know. I don’t know. Three words scattered throughout a conversation, three words spoken in tones that suggest that the speaker wasn’t fully there, was moving elsewhere, an elsewhere that called her conviction about what she was saying into question. As Binswanger says (and in saying he makes dreaming a mode of existence rather than a play of shadows), “To dream means: I don’t know what is happening to me” (1993: 102).

why two clocks? Perhaps it’s my own dreamlike association, but I keep thinking of an image of two alarm clocks that I first came across while I was writing my dissertation. In a government publication ominously entitled “Eskimo Mortality and Housing,” there is a photo of a young woman in a tent sitting on a sleeping platform with her legs stretched out and her baby asleep beside her. Everything is neat and tidy and in its place. The woman is smiling. The caption below the photo reads, “A clean tent interior, Lake Harbour, July, 1955. Why two clocks? Note the stone seal oil ‘lamp’ and the wooden frame above it on which pots and the kettle are suspended” (Canada, Department of National Health and Welfare 1960: 44). Sure enough, when you look closely you can see on the counter beside the sleeping platform two almost identical round-faced alarm clocks with bells on top.12 Why two clocks? The question is both derisive—these Inuit have no indoor plumbing and only one bed for a family, but two alarm clocks—and bewildered. The excess, in a document designed to demonstrate the dire inadequacies of government housing for Inuit, is curious but also almost galling. Do Inuit really need such luxuries? One alarm clock would be enough to produce the regulated life that the colonial bureaucrats were trying to inspire and researchers such as Toshio Yatsushiro were trying to measure. One alarm clock is enough to train and discipline a whole family to wake at the same time each morning, each season, no matter where the sun is in the sky.13 The image of two alarm clocks recurs in the archival record (and figures in the photo on page 128, at the beginning of this chapter). Phyllis Harrison, the social worker in Iqaluit who published a piece in 1962 on what she called the Inuit transition from the “stone age to the atomic age” (see chapter 2) was also unsettled by two alarm clocks she notices

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in the home of an Inuit family. For Harrison the clocks were a sign that Inuit, trying to fit in with non-Inuit norms of cleanliness and time management, sometimes overdid it. Writing about Anawakaloo, a woman who had been given subsidized housing by the government, Harrison writes, “And time! At camp, there’d been nothing to divide time except night and day, hunger or the urge to sleep. Now two shiny clocks ticked busily—a sign of her over-anxiousness, not to forget when it was time for school—or Anawakaloo to go to work” (Harrison 1962: 16). One clock, one temporality, is surely enough. Two alarm clocks are slightly scandalous. The clocks are uncanny in the way that twins are uncanny for Freud. When there are two clocks, the clocks cease to be simply a functional tool, useful for producing disciplined subjects. Amos Oz has said that when he was a child he dreamed of becoming not a writer but a book (Oz 2005). Perhaps now we dream not of living orderly lives but of becoming clocks. We wear clocks, as watches, on our bodies like a second skin. It becomes hard to say whether the clock becomes like us, with its “hands” and its “face,” or we become like the clock, experiencing our bodies as biological clocks. What is certain is that the clock becomes such a familiar tool that we can only represent it to ourselves, only truly notice its presence in a moment of shock—as when there are two clocks instead of one. We have returned here to the question of the everyday and the way the old problem of animism continues to haunt it (see especially Freud 1919). Much of our everyday life depends on shouldering out the possibility that life is anything but a biologically locatable process.14 The shoring up of the everyday occurs when we designate certain things as real but not alive, and others as alive but not real. My son Benjamin, after a long train ride through Italy, saw a clock in a railway station and was entranced by the way the second hand spun around and around the face of the clock. “Look!” he cried out. “Is the watch alive?” “No, no, it’s not alive,” I reassure him. “But is it real?” “Yes, it’s real.” “Well, if it’s real then it’s alive.” The logic of a child, which in many ways surpasses our adult modes of thought. I was reminded of the fact that European railway clocks were the instrument of so much of what Arendt called the “banality of evil.” Real and alive perhaps. In 1955, the same year the picture of the two clocks was taken, John Willis, the medical director for the Eastern Arctic Patrol, returned south

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with his own image of two clocks, this time a “photograph in prose” (Cadava 1997: xx) rather than an actual photograph. He wrote: I have been amazed at the variety of utensils, clothing, tins, bottles, and gimcracks to be found in their tents, extra to the obviously necessary items such as the stove, the cooking pots, the rifles, the meat lying in a heap in a corner, and the bed boards. It would seem that the Eskimo buys items (presumably from the Hudson’s Bay Company) which he could well do without, putting his credit into better food, for instance. One tent had two perfectly good alarm clocks ticking side by side and set within a minute of each other, and yet I am sure that twenty minutes meant nothing to the owner. One tent had two sewing machines, both in working order. Another tent had three shelves built of wood, at least four feet long, filled by rows of at least a hundred miscellaneous small bottles neatly arranged. What they contained I do not know. With the seal oil cooking lamp burning in the foreground the scene reminded me of the votive offerings on the altar of a heathen temple. (Willis 1955)

Again, amid the other apparently useless items, the doubled clocks. This time they are ticking side by side and are juxtaposed to the collection of small bottles neatly arranged on a shelf, bottles that conjure for Willis votive offerings at a heathen temple. What Willis intuits is that the clocks, like the bottles, are not being used for their Christian, or at least their Protestant, purpose: to help produce disciplined bodies able to contribute to the accumulation of capital. Instead their very “clockiness”—the beauty of their faces and hands rather than their function— seems to be celebrated, and in this way, like the bottles seen through the haze of an oil lamp, they seem to pay homage to a different god. Willis’s dismissive comment that “twenty minutes meant nothing to the owner” of the two clocks in turn reminds me of a story an Inuit teenager told me about what happened when one of the last camp leaders died. The man had been born and lived most of his life on the land, resisting the pull of settlement life. Sometime after his death his family returned to his camp to visit. “When they entered the house the clock started—like the arms or whatever you call them . . . the hands—started going crazy.” She was trying to tell me that the house was haunted, that something untoward was happening out there at the camp. But what does a haunted clock signify, and why is their crazy spinning so spooky? Clocks, according to my son, are alive and real, but the question here is which god do they obey? Are they instruments of colonial discipline, offerings to a heathen god, or something else altogether? An Inuit teenager once told me about something that happened when he was staying with his great-uncle, an elderly man, in a small community on Baffin Island. He woke up one night to hear a Teletubby toy

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talking. At first it was saying things in its regular voice, “You know, ‘Babacababa,’ ” he said, imitating the high pitch of the toy, “and then it would start speaking different words with a deep voice. My great uncle, he just let it be. It didn’t bother him because he’s a Christian and he knows it wouldn’t harm him or anything.” He continued: The next morning when we woke up we see him holding the Teletubby and he told us all to come out and they were making a fire out there. And we were wondering why he was holding the Teletubby and making a fire out there. We were walking down the stairs and all of a sudden—like he’s holding on the top of the Teletubby’s head—and out of nowhere it just starts speaking. I don’t remember what it said. And so my great uncle, he threw it into the fire, and you could see really dark, black soap, going anywhere, all over the place, and then it just went into the ground and disappeared. And the next night we were killing Elmo. Yeah, so we were beating up the rest of the dolls.

Conversion to Christianity is here glossed as not letting the spirits of childhood bother you anymore.15 But conversion is not something that is ever complete. This becomes apparent in the realm of toys—those objects that animate our childhood and are simultaneously real and not real, alive and inert, fact and fiction. Teletubbies that talk in deep voices are exorcised, the deep black soap of their insides disappearing into the ground. So rather than decisively unpacking what it might mean for an Inuit woman to have two clocks, I want to question my own (and Willis’s) sense of the strangeness or uncanniness of having two clocks. I want to suggest that part of this has to do with the doubling of a timepiece when time is something that we think of—at least in the workaday world that the Inuit colonial administration was trying to impose—as importantly singular. So we have the doubling of something that usually exists by itself (one clock at the side of a bed, as a token of the category clock, as a token of time passing) here appearing in a pair, disrupting our sense that we know what a clock is for, that we know what a clock, or time, is. Maybe dream time is contradictory, and in that sense also doubled. Sila tells me another dream. This time it is one that her mother had when she was pregnant with Sila. The dream concerns three friends of her mother’s who had recently died. One had died by suicide and another had become “lost,” presumably on the tundra or ice (I didn’t ask). Sila couldn’t remember how the third had died. The dead friends were menacing her mother, threatening to follow her when she tried to leave them and go “home” to return to the living. Sila explains:

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’Cause it wasn’t very nice where she was. It was like scary, creepy or something. She [her mother] was saying, “Eeee, I wanna go home now!” and those three dead people were saying “Malijangajarit, I’m going to follow you. Seriously, I’m going to follow you!” And she was like, “No I’m going home! You guys can’t come!” Because she knew they were dead, but . . . when you dream about somebody who’s dead, you just can’t say, “Hey, you’re dead.” You just think about it.

In telling me her mother’s dream, Sila describes the strangeness of knowing something that can’t be expressed in the time of a dream. The interesting question, of course, is why you can’t say, “Hey you’re dead!” to someone in a dream. In part, I think it’s a question of the dead being both dead and not dead, much in the way Linda was Linda and not Linda in Sila’s earlier dream. That is, the dead may be dead in waking life but not dead in the dream. And the dreamer may know these two things simultaneously. And so although Linda may have a singular aspect, she is two things at once—dead and alive. Here things get complicated: discrete forms of knowledge and agency are hard for me to disentangle, though perhaps that is precisely the point of dreaming. For the sake of clarity (however ill-advised when dealing with dreams), let me outline how this particular dream of the three dead friends worked. First, when Sila’s mother told an elder that she had dreamed about her dead friends, the elder immediately knew that her mother had been thinking about suicide. The dream revealed to the elder her unexpressed thoughts. Still, this is not a simple case of a decoded metaphor that would run something like this: dreaming of dead people = having thoughts of suicide in waking life. Instead, having a dream about dead people when you are suicidal does not explain away, and thus derealize, the dead as latent desires or fears that belong properly to the world of the living. Rather, the dead in dreams act on the dreamer, and following the dead of dreams to the places they call the dreamer to go would mean almost certain death. As Sila explains, “In your dreams, when you feel like committing suicide or something, then you see dead people trying to get you . . . to go to a certain spot or area. Then you go on that spot or something, then you die.” This complicates what Sila means when she says of her mother’s dream, “She knew they were dead, but . . . when you dream about somebody who’s dead, you just can’t say, ‘Hey, you’re dead.’ You just think about it.” You can’t say it in part because the dead are alive to the dreamer and can still exert their power over the dreamer’s very life. They are alive

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in some sense, or at least their power over the dreamer is very much alive. It’s not that you know that the dead are dead and thus that they’re false or merely the melancholic fabulations of a dreamer. Not being able to say, “Hey, you’re dead,” seems less about being under the thrall of a dream, and thus unable to speak the truth of the situation, than it is about experiencing a moment when two temporalities—that of the dream and that of waking life—are superimposed, twinned, as the two clocks are. As is often the case for the anthropologist, it’s about being caught in one time but aware of the truths of another. You can’t say, “Hey, you’re dead,” because the person both is and isn’t dead—and you are responsible (in the sense of mortally affected by) the truths of both temporalities. Sila tells me about a dream her friend Linda had before she committed suicide: She had a dream that she killed herself. And I was at the hospital, crying and looking for her, to see which room she was in, and she was like, “I’m right here! Hello, Sila! I’m right here. Why can’t you see me?” She said I was still crying and she was waving [her hand] in my face. “Hello, I’m right here, Sila.” But I can’t . . . then she realized . . . After that [dream] she killed herself . . . I don’t know.

Once again, Sila’s “I don’t know” at the end of the retelling of a dream marks her ambivalence about what it means to know something and the way that ambivalence marks the contours of her subjectivity. For some, the webs of phatic interjections in a conversation are a constant reaffirmation of hope (Anyway, wow! Can you believe it!), while for others they seem to call on the listener to accede to a kind of agreement (You see what I mean! Amazing, isn’t it?). For Sila, however, the words that fill in when no others surface are “I don’t know.” Linda, in a dream she has before she dies, realizes that she is dead and can’t talk to Sila anymore when in fact she isn’t yet dead, but she will be soon. Her dream doubles one Sila will have later, when she can’t express her knowledge that her friend is now dead since she is alive in the dream.

the time of suicide The question of the clocks need not be resolved. Have Inuit been fully transformed into successful bureaucratic subjects: Have they learned to think like a clock? Have any of us? Why two clocks? There are other ways of being in time, other ways of looking at life in time that point to

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other possible worlds, times, and selves. I recognize that such a project risks being trapped by the paradigm in anthropology of reading the Other as a corrective to the self. However, in the Canadian colonial/ postcolonial moment, these modes of being are constantly encountering one another, constantly grappling with the difference of the other, and so I think there is more at stake. The location of such an Inuit temporality is complex: historically it is located in the memories of a presettlement past, and geographically it is found out on the land away from town,16 but existentially it is carried in the bodies and dreams of Inuit as they live out their lives in what Weber pessimistically called the iron cage of modernity. And Weber’s pessimism may still be called for. If in this modern way of reckoning time one must always have a future in order to vouchsafe the present, then to be without a bright future is also to be denied a present.17 In an age that is obsessed with controlling the future as a way of having the present, Inuit suicide may be seen as a response to a future devoid of surprise, a response that instead pays attention to the poverty and pain of the “now.” The pain, of course, is the shadow of this chapter, a constitutive absence. It is the pain of living in the future’s wreckage. Whatever else it may be, suicide is also a leap into another way of being in time, one that questions whether there is always a brighter future around the corner. I want to say that suicide answers in one temporality a question that cannot be posed in another: what if the future cannot redeem the present? If Inuit still manage to periodically lose themselves in time—on the basketball court, out on the land—and if the bureaucratic rationality always works to “find” lost Eskimo souls, what does this say about the colonial context in Canada, when the process of Inuit assimilation to southern Canadian norms is still being carried out? At what cost do Inuit youth belong, as they do, to Canadian bureaucratic society (cf. Povinelli 2002)?18 With what words do we describe the pain of also belonging to another time—that of the unfound Eskimos, that of driving around and around, or that of the dream world? How do we pose the question of suicide alongside the question of time?19 Perhaps Inuit suicide is not so much a question of life versus death as an answer in one temporality (the time of spinning clocks, driving around and getting lost) to a question that cannot be formulated by another (bureaucratic time). The clock has no time for suicide, except, perhaps, as the ultimate sin in a secular world, and so it ticks inexorably on.

chapter 6

Song

It’s 2 p.m. on a Monday. The afternoon sun is pale yellow, an egg yolk hanging in the sky. The cold makes everything still even though the town is still moving, motors running, people still working. The smoke comes out of chimneys in straight lines, just like the drawings we used to make as kids. Funny thing is, the houses are boxy like that too. I stamp my feet to keep the blood moving. Where are they? I am standing on the hill by the high school, waiting. To my right is the jumble of buildings that are known as “downtown”: the territorial legislature, the post office, the Kamotiq, where you can get nachos on Thursday nights and where men come to sell Inuit soapstone carvings. I can see the beach where the snowmobiles set out across the sea ice, navigating a path through the choppy ice by the shore to the smooth sea ice further out. To my left I can look down Frobisher Bay to the island where the dog teams are left in summer. Finally I see three figures round the corner by the igloo-shaped building known as the Dome. I try to make out who they are: a royal blue jacket, probably Pauloosie’s, a black Tommy Hilfiger jacket belonging to Sila, and Bobby’s gold and blue jacket. I watch them as they pick their way across the playground and begin to make their way up the hill. They walk in step, a phalanx. I wave but they don’t see me. Or they do and they’re too cool to wave back. Sila was supposed to go back to school today after weeks of cutting class. At least she is out of the house and moving. Moving is important. 149

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I hadn’t met Pauloosie before then, and by that time the charges against him had been dropped.1 The first time I heard his name was in the first few days after he had been charged with arson leading to death. Everyone kept saying to me, “C’mon, Lis, you know who he is. He works at the Dome.” And I would say, “I’m not sure. Show me his picture. Maybe I do.” They showed me a photo of a bunch of teenagers in a circle, with a girl in the middle, bound to a chair and gagged. The photo unnerved me, but they were impatient: “It was just a game we were playing. One of those get-to-know-you games.” One of the figures in the circle, wearing baggy blue jeans and a yellow hooded sweatshirt, had his face scratched out. “That’s him.” Any time Pauloosie’s image appeared it had been either scratched out with a knife or blacked out with a marker. “There aren’t no more pictures of him at the Dome,” I was told. But it wasn’t as if anyone would forget him. The rumors had already begun their diaphanous journeys. I heard them in the airport, from civil servants on their way South for Christmas: “I hear he had a list of names and addresses. It’s chilling.” Once, as I was sitting and chatting in the reception booth near the front door of the Dome, a teenager came in and, without looking at us, made his way to the back of the building: “Fucking Pauloosie, eh?” he muttered. It was the topic you were talking about even if you were talking about something else. The local newspaper was caught up by the emotion. It described Pauloosie’s first appearance in court in minute detail, remarking on the way the crowd screamed insults and pounded on the doors when he appeared. The police pleaded with community members to come forward and tell them what they had seen. Only five days later the charges against Pauloosie were stayed. Even though the charges had been stayed, the rumors hadn’t. Many people still thought Pauloosie was guilty. Bobby, talking about it afterward, referred to Iqaluit as a “fairytale city.” Everybody—not everybody, but a lot of people in this town—they run themselves on rumors. Sometimes all they have to believe is rumors. And that’s all they want to believe. They don’t want to believe what really happened. And it’s destroying this place. It’s destroying a lot of people. Pauloosie, he tried to commit suicide because all these people were saying, “You should die. You did this, you’re the one that did this. We know you’re guilty.” Just based on all the rumors everyone said about him. Now everybody hates him. He actually tried to commit suicide on Thursday. Now he’s in Toronto for treatment. •

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“What’s up?” I call out as they get closer, trying to sound as nonchalant as possible. “I should be asking you that,” says Sila breathlessly as she scrambles up the hill. I smile. I must look awkward standing there in my brother’s huge goose-down parka, tripod in hand, watching them. We were supposed to meet at the coffee shop, but I got impatient and came looking for them. “Let’s go for coffee,” Bobby suggests. “Or how about doing the filming now and then having coffee afterward?” I am impatient, worried we would miss our chance to film the high school students pouring out of their classes into the hallway. Sila, Bobby, Pauloosie and I were working together on a short film for a suicide prevention campaign. We had been talking about filming at the high school for a long time. But they will not be swayed. We pick up coffee first and then head over to the school. Pauloosie comes along to help. Although Pauloosie isn’t technically part of the video project, he has been depressed and has nowhere else to go. At this point people stare when he goes out. People come after him with baseball bats. I can’t help wondering what he’s thinking, how he’s feeling. Wondering what exactly happened that night. When we get to the high school I go right to the common area and start setting up the camera. I don’t want to waste any more time. Bobby, Pauloosie, and Sila go to check in with the principal. Pauloosie wanders out to help me a few minutes later. He stands by the camera. There are a couple of kids I recognize hanging out in the hallway. Probably on a bathroom pass. “Hey, Lisa, what’s up? What are you filming?” “You!” They laugh and I go about setting up the camera. One kid wanders over, and I hear him talking in low tones to Pauloosie. Then I hear Pauloosie say, “Thanks for the warning.” I didn’t hear what they said, but I was reminded of how quickly information travels. Brief encounters, whispers. The youth have networks I can hardly fathom. The vice principal rushes out of his office. “I’d like to see all those with the video project in my office,” he says sternly, but he does a double take when he sees me standing there. We all file into his office and sit down around his desk. He remains standing partway between the door and the desk. “I’m afraid something came up since I last talked to you,” he says. “Something that’s new to me.” As if for backup he calls the principal into the office. “Joe here has just informed me that anything that happens in

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the school has to pass by the District Education Authority office. It’s for the security of the school. All of us have to have a criminal record check before we come in here. The DEA is meeting tomorrow. I didn’t know that when I talked to you yesterday.” The real issue, of course, was Pauloosie’s presence in the school. I try to sound calm. “As you know, we’re making a video for suicide prevention. We are creating a series of ninety-second commercials. One of the members developed a script that was set in the school. Bobby called to set this up yesterday.” The next thing you know we are walking down the stairs behind the school. I am fuming. I knew this would happen, but I don’t want to say anything. We sit down on the steps for a moment. Bobby says, “These are the steps I used to walk up every day to come to high school. I hated every part of this shitty town then.” “And now?” “Still do.” “Didn’t you have a feeling that was gonna happen?” I ask. “What?” “That they were gonna kick us out.” “No.” “I did.” I have the sense that things are closing in. I see how reputations are made and start to pen you in until you would do anything to get out. Bobby starts talking again about the one-way ticket to Ottawa his father has promised him. “You know what I like? Sittin’ here drinking a cup of coffee and people look at me, like, ‘What are you doing here? Why are you here?’ ” “I’m going to put that in the video man. If they don’t let us film I’m gonna put that in the video.” We go to the Caribrew Café for another cup of coffee and to warm up. The men at the table next to us give me a hard look. They’re assessing the situation, trying to figure out why I would be having coffee with Pauloosie. We’re very quiet. “Why’s everyone so quiet?” Bobby asks. “’Cause we’re depressed,” I say. Bobby opens up the diary of a friend and begins to read us parts that he liked. It is poetry about life, about emotions, about overcoming. It is raw and searching, unedited. The ideas are sharp. He reads a section about being aware of snakes in sheep’s clothing. He reads for a while, little snippets. Then he looks at his cup.

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“Damn, no more coffee.” “Where we gonna go?” asks Sila. “My house and get some food,” says Bobby. We part. I watch them as they disappear behind the Kamotiq. From then on Pauloosie became a regular member of our group. It wasn’t always easy. He often spent the time during our meetings drawing—image after image of hunters, kayaks, harpoons. The others tell me, almost reverentially, that Pauloosie is a real Inuk. One hundred percent. That there aren’t many of those around any more and people like that are different. They have special powers. Like his drawing. Like knowing when things are going to happen. Pauloosie himself tells me that he’s half shaman, from his grandfather, but that his abilities come to him only when he is angry. Then he can feel his powers surge up in him. For our video project we decided to create two-minute clips of each person talking about what life is. For Sila this is easy. She writes, “Life is like a puzzle. You’ve just got to find the right pieces, and it doesn’t take overnight.” Pauloosie sits sullenly then begins drawing again. Bobby asks him, “Pauloosie, what about you?” The room is silent, expectant. Pauloosie looks unhappy, brooding. “What do you love to do?” I ask gently, afraid of the pressure we are putting him under to respond, the possibility of failure. “Drawing.” “And how does it make you feel?” He doesn’t answer. The silence continues too long. I jump in. “Peaceful, contented? You feel good when you’re doing it?” More silence. Finally he says, “Surprised. Drawing is like life. The surprises never end.” A few weeks later, in August, some of the kids in our group are invited to participate in a camping trip for “at risk” youth. The extended family we will camp with will get paid to take us along, and the youth and I will sleep in a separate tent. We all meet in a little room at the youth center and the man in charge of the program, Joey, comes to tell us what equipment we will need to bring: the usual stuff, rain boots, warm clothes, and some food. And then he mentions float suits, the orange survival jumpsuits that people, usually tourists, wear when they go boating on Arctic waters. The idea is that the suits would help you to float and protect you from hypothermia, at least initially, if your boat were to capsize. The room becomes quiet at the mention of float suits. I am immediately tense, protective, realizing that there’s no way most of the kids in the room will be able to borrow, let alone buy, a float suit. Pauloosie mutters under his breath what everyone is thinking. “Don’t need no fucking float suits.”

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“What?” asks the trip organizer. “What did you say?” “I said, we don’t need no fucking float suits,” he says, this time loud enough to be heard. I cannot reproduce the conversation that ensued. Joey, an Inuit man who had long worked in programs for social justice and healing, heatedly defended the necessity of float suits. Pauloosie eventually stormed out of the room muttering, “I’m going to kill you.” Joey followed him, yelling, “What did you say? What did you say?” Things became increasingly difficult after that. Pauloosie’s muttered threat—considering everything that had happened—had a powerful effect. There was talk of a restraining order, or perhaps worse. When Joey called me later I tried to explain the depth of Pauloosie’s fear of losing face in front of his friends, in front of me, and the fact that he had no way to acquire a float suit. Joey felt I was minimizing the fact that Pauloosie had threatened to kill him. He accused me, his voice rising, of “playing Russian roulette” with the lives of the youth and said he would withdraw the funding for the camping trip and make public what I was “up to.” Russian roulette. The looks that I had been receiving for months as I worked with the youth seemed condensed in those words. I suddenly felt unsure of the ground from which, minutes before, I had so vehemently argued, and I felt strongly the liminality of my own position; I was an outsider, an anthropologist, associating with a young man suspected of arson. I felt myself becoming criminal. Guilt travels—perhaps especially when that guilt is presumed. Like an infection, it seems to spread between bodies. Of course the stakes were particularly high. People were worried about their own physical safety and the safety of others. Would the “criminal,” then at large, strike again? I was accused of not protecting the youth I was working with from a criminal and of not taking the crime seriously. And the fact remained: I didn’t know whether Pauloosie was guilty or innocent. Companionship in such moments remakes the world. First Sila’s mother, Annie, came and sat beside me on the couch where I was staying. She had gone to Pauloosie’s arraignment when it seemed probable that he was guilty of the arson. She went so that he would not feel alone in the courtroom. She sat beside me and told me that after her own son had been charged with a crime, people had said the most terrible things to her. She told me that when they are insulted, Inuit are taught to say, “Is that it? Is that all you can say? Say more. Come on, what else? What other terrible things can you say? I want to hear more!”

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Later Jaypeetee came to see me. We stood outside, kicking the dust in a little patch of sun, and talked about nothing in particular. And then my brother called. Though he was a schoolteacher and a friend of the vice principal who kicked us out of the school for associating with Pauloosie, he still called me, even if he probably would have done things differently. We eventually did go camping. From the outset the trip was tense. I think the family that had agreed to take us along was still ambivalent about the decision. One of the youth bumped into the elder in charge of the trip while he was shopping for provisions at the NorthMart and asked if he could “follow,” come along. He told me with a sense of disgust (which seemed to veil a kind of shame) that the elder had waited too long to say yes. “But he did eventually say yes?” I prodded. The youth looked at me as if I were stupid. The elder had made things clear. We traveled by motorboat four or five hours down the bay to an old summer campsite on an island across from a waterfall and a beautiful crooked valley. The youth, though constantly analyzing their daily interactions with the family to assess whether they were welcome, were happy to be camping. Three or four boats went out every day to hunt beluga whales, and eventually one was caught. We all watched as its enormous white body was heaved up onto a rocky shelf and lay glistening in the summer sun. We went clam digging when the tide was low and the seawater pooled on the rock ledges, and we hiked for hours in the valley looking for caribou. At one point Pauloosie, who had borrowed a guitar, sat in the sun with his back to the bay and the snow-streaked mountains behind, and he began to sing. Mostly he sang silly ballads that would recount the events of the day. The songs would move easily between Inuktitut and English. One made fun of my hunting abilities. Li-ii-ii–sa Stevenson, Who’s the only blond one here, Who went out camping with us. She tried to catch a rabbit With her only bobby pin. When she got pretty pissed off She tried to use her laces. When the laces couldn’t work, She tried to use a small rock! •

•

•

Pauloosie’s anger (which he had identified as the conduit to his shamanistic powers) could be both impenetrable and terrifying. One Friday

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night, about a month after the camping trip, we both ended up at the curling rink to see a local band. The rink was not maintained during the summer, so rows of tables draped with white tablecloths had been set up and beer was being served from kegs and wine in plastic cups. That night a Qallunaaq band was playing and it was mostly a Qallunaaq crowd who had come to listen. I realized later that Pauloosie, Bobby, and Maatu only came because they had come to find me. Pauloosie had been drinking, and he was becoming very protective of me. “If I see even a scratch on you, I am going to go after the guy that did it. Even one little scratch.” His body shifts slightly and he sits taller. He’s remembering the night of the arrest, but he doesn’t have to tell me that. Bobby slides in beside me, saying, “What’s up? What are you guys talking about?” But he takes one look at Pauloosie’s face and says, “Oh no. Pauloosie, I told you, never again. Don’t touch that subject. Don’t go there. C’mon drink up. Do you want to get thrown out of here too?” A few weeks later we go to the bar together to celebrate the release of our video. Pauloosie starts talking again about the night he was charged. Bobby tells him to stop, that he wants to have fun for a change, but Pauloosie quietly continues. He tells me how he was crying when the police picked him up. The cops taunted him, saying, “Why are you crying? Are you crying because you did it?” Later that night Pauloosie calls me. He’s still drinking, but he’s not slurring his speech and everything he says makes perfect sense. He’s been at the Legion. People in town are asking him if he did it. He feels like everyone is looking at him as if he did it. He tells me that he wants to blow his brains out in front of the RCMP just to show them what they’ve done to his life. “My mother looks at me like I’m white.” His voice is suffused with anger. He hangs up. I call back. He says, “Bye,” and hangs up again. I call Sila’s pager. I call Bobby. No answer.

song What has become important to me, in reflecting on that time, is not what I should have done and how I should have acted, but rather the brief moments when I witnessed and experienced forms of recognition

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that did not depend on knowing the “truth” about—or fixing the identity of—another person. This is what I want to call a kind of “song.” By song I am referring most obviously to Pauloosie’s song sung on the camping trip, but also to the image of throat singing in the prologue of this book. In one sense katajjait (throat songs) are not well understood even by the women who perform them (and these days they are performed all over the world, including at the Olympic Games in Vancouver and at the World Conference on Women in Beijing). Between cry and language (Saladin d’Anglure 1978), many katajjait have no discernible words, just the breath—rhythmic, guttural, staccato—being passed from one body to another. Some have titles, such as “Kitturiat” (Mosquitos) or “Qimmiruluapik” (The last little puppy). Some people say that the sounds voiced in katajjait were words used by the remote ancestors of modern-day Inuit, and that what the words mean is forever lost.2 Others say that katajjait can only be understood by the dead or their ambassadors—the northern lights, for example, which make their presence felt by whispering or whistling, or the tunnituarruit, the flying heads without bodies (Saladin d’Anglure 1978). But perhaps less obviously, when I write about song I am also thinking about the companionship offered by Annie, Jaypeetee, and my brother at a moment of disorientation, about Annie going to Pauloosie’s arraignment, about the visit by a friend in a dream to smoke a last joint, and about a son listening for the sounds of a mother’s death. These are also examples of the way a particular kind of attention, figured by song, can make space for the existence of another, and thus in a certain sense call that other into being. Singing is not just about mouthing the words to a well-known song. In its simplest sense, I take song as an invocation that depends less on words per se and more on voice as a kind of gesture.3 My thinking about song is a continuation of my thinking about the life-of-the-name that I described in chapter 4. There I was interested in a way of thinking life that is not reducible to “life itself”—the survival of anonymous others. Understanding the role of the name (atiq) in Inuit communities provides a way of thinking life that I called “mournful” because the dead are always “still there.” Mournful life implicates us in something beyond the anonymous care, that is, for multiple reasons, the mainstay of welfare bureaucracies. The atiq relationship also highlights the way that death and life are interwoven so that to survive is always to bear a relationship with death. I am also interested in what the atiq reveals about being human more generally, that our physical life depends at least in part on our linguistic life—that is, that we must be called in

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order to be, that every human is vulnerable to not being called, that there is a very real sense in which our “life” and our name are connected, that there are important ways we are kept alive through the invocation of our names. In describing the life-of-the-name I focused on the calling of a name, a particular name. In this chapter I want to attend also to those moments when it matters less what is being said (a name, proper or otherwise) than that something is being said, or, more precisely, that someone, an Other—a fleshy material being—is speaking or even singing. I am interested in thinking even more generally about ways of addressing or invoking others. Here I am less concerned with naming per se than with calling out to another; less concerned with what is said and more with the fact that something is said, that a gesture is made or a song sung. I am also interested in the difference it makes when what is said is said with something we might want to call love, but at the very least something we would want to differentiate from hate. I think first of the grunting sound Inuit adults make to children—and sometimes to anthropologists—as an expression of profound and playful love. Someone might grunt “Ajunnni!” meaning, “You’re so capable!” something like saying, “Oh, you’re so smart I could just eat you up!” Other times phrases are repeated over and over in a tender, loving voice. An adult will have a special way of talking and a particular string of words for a specific child. The word Inuit use for these is expressions is “aqaq.” Jean Briggs translates it as “to speak, sing, or chant tenderly to a small child, using repetitive phrases or tunes which create and express an affectionate bond between an adult or adolescent and a small child or baby” (1998: 231). I remember being aqaq-ed like this on a hunting trip with a friend. I was cocooned inside my down and Gore-Tex sleeping bag next to my friend on a plywood sleeping platform, which had been piled with skins and blankets to insulate us from the cold. Her brother and his wife were lying on the other side of her. “Hmmmm,” she grunted. She did it again. Then she laughed. “Do you know what that means?” The moon was shining directly through the small window above our heads and there had been silence for a few minutes as we drifted in and out of sleep. I did and I didn’t.

a detour through hate But to get to the possibility of describing a loving address, I need to take a detour through hate. In fact, it was Judith Butler’s Excitable Speech, a

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book about hate speech, that first inspired my own ideas about care, life, and even love.4 In what follows, however, I will argue that although Butler’s ideas on linguistic life take us a great distance toward understanding “song” as a creative force, her attention to hateful speech (at the expense of other ways of speaking) occludes a very important aspect of song. That is, Butler’s discussion of hate speech rides on the concept of interpellation and its power to injure (inasmuch as it also confers a kind of social recognition). Thus, in Butler’s theory of interpellation (as well as in that of Althusser [1971], from whom she draws), interpellation is always tinged with aggression; it is always experienced as alienating. I am wondering whether it is possible that, in our necessary attempts to identify and root out injustice, we have bracketed—or outright ignored—more generous forms of address, ways of calling or gesturing to the other that are not injurious. As we shall see, any theory that cannot account for a gesture of generosity can only take us so far in understanding what I mean by “song” as a way of animating the other. Butler’s discussion of hate speech in Excitable Speech hinges on the concept of interpellation. To be interpellated is, in its most basic sense, to be named. It is through being named, she argues, “that a certain social existence of the body first becomes possible” (1997a: 5). So for Butler, to call someone a name, whether a proper name or a racist slur, is a way of interpellating someone into a particular social existence, a particular subject position. When Pauloosie was brought up on charges of arson, he was very dramatically interpellated into the subject position of arsonist—a designation it was very difficult for him to shake off. What the concept of interpellation draws our attention to (that the term “naming” does not) is the fact that names never merely describe or index a reality, but they also inaugurate that reality, or bring it into being. As Butler puts it, “The mark interpellation makes is not descriptive, but inaugurative. It seeks to introduce a reality rather than report on an existing one” (33). If names, coming from outside, have the power to inaugurate our social existence in this way, then we are especially “vulnerable” to language (and especially to hateful forms of speech). We are vulnerable precisely because we are, according to Butler, “interpellated kinds of beings, dependent on the Other in order to be” (26). In other words, as we saw in chapter 4, we owe our lives to the call of the other, the initial name we received at birth, the one that ensures any social existence at all. Because we humans are fundamentally social beings, there is no way to “be” without being interpellated.5 In fact, at one point Butler suggests

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that interpellation actually “animates the subject into existence” (25). The phrase directs our attention to the power of interpellation to animate—to the fact that interpellation is inescapably connected to the possibility of being alive. Butler uses the term “subject” to describe what it is that is animated into existence. Though “subject” and “individual” are often treated as interchangeable, Butler takes pains to distinguish one from the other. She writes, “The subject, rather than be identified strictly with the individual, ought to be designated as a linguistic category, a place-holder, a structure in formation. Individuals come to occupy the site of the subject (the subject simultaneously emerges as a ‘site’), and they enjoy intelligibility only to the extent that they are, as it were, first established in language” (Butler 1997b: 10–11). To summarize: interpellation confers intelligibility on the individual through the provision of a subject position to inhabit. Although Butler would argue that the individual as such does not precede interpellation, there remains the sense that at certain moments interpellation transforms a uniquely embodied individual into a socially intelligible subject. Such intelligibility, as Butler so compellingly shows, is often experienced as alienating. The history of the colonization of indigenous peoples could be written as the process of becoming intelligible through inhabiting the “subject position” of a “problem” (see especially Dyck 1991). In an introduction to a series of articles on mental health in indigenous communities, Audra Simpson challenges us to think again about what it might mean for Native Americans to be continually interpellated in this way. Simpson calls our attention to “the experience of being defined as some thing, ‘a problem,’ that needed to be dealt with” and “the experience of being defined solely in those terms” (2008a: 376). Simpson, echoing W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk, is asking us to imagine how it feels to be interpellated as a problem. She notes that in the case of the slave being transformed from property to problem, “all the feelings, the sentience, and the emotion behind this transformation [were] obscured to the (white) eye. It is a transformation that requires narration so that those who have power to define the market of sympathy may understand, fully, what this feels like” (376). To interpellate, then, is to put someone in his or her place by conferring a social identity, a subject position, and thus intelligibility. In describing what it means to insult someone, Pierre Bourdieu gives a sense of the logic of this process. Bourdieu suggests that an insult “indi-

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cates to someone that he possesses such and such property, and indicates to him at the time that he must conduct himself in accordance with the social essence which is thereby assigned to him” (1991: 106). So to interpellate is to assign a social essence, to see someone as a problem, as a criminal, as a drunk, or as a king, and by so seeing, to fix a social identity. Butler’s work is thus about insult in its most general sense, insult as the attempt, through interpellation, to bring the individual in line with a particular subject position. The very terms Butler uses to describe interpellation are the terms one would use to describe a trap or a snare: one is always being fixed in place or caught in the act. She says, for instance, “A name tends to fix, to freeze, to delimit, to render substantial” (1997a: 35), but also, “interpellation’s purpose is to indicate and establish a subject in subjection, to produce its social contours in space and time” (34). And when Butler retells Althusser’s story of the policeman who hails someone on a crowded sidewalk, causing the person to turn guiltily around, she adds, “The passerby turns precisely to acquire a certain identity, one purchased, as it were, with the price of guilt” (35). The interpellated subject colludes with the policeman in seeing herself as guilty, as a problem. Crucially, for the argument I am making in this book, listening can also be a form of interpellation.6 That is, there are modes of listening, just like modes of speech, that can fix someone, an individual, in a particular subject position. That is, there is a certain mode of listening reserved for listening to children, to criminals, to drunks, to kings. What can the child say that is not childish, the criminal say that is not itself criminal, the drunk say that is not drunken, the king say that is not kingly?7 In his short story “A King Listens,” Italo Calvino provides a compelling example of the way one may be interpellated without anyone uttering or writing a word. In the story, Calvino introduces the reader to an anxiety-ridden king who feels so sure that his kingdom is about to be besieged by traitors that he never leaves his throne, even to sleep. The king trusts no one, and the voices of his advisors, enunciating the details of the daily reports, come to sound like “cold enamel” to his ears (Calvino 1986: 57). The king listens to every sound—every tap of a hammer, every throttle of an engine—as if it bore a secret message that needed to be decoded. From each “shard of sound” he gathers “signals, information, clues,” as if everyone “wanted only to transmit precise, unequivocal messages” (51). But then, rising out of the everyday din of

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the palace comes the sound of a woman singing, a woman who does not even seem to know she is being listened to, and, unlike the voices of his advisors and subjects, the woman’s voice asks nothing of, hopes to transmit nothing to, the king. “What attracts you,” writes Calvino (using the second person to narrate both the internal voice of the king, but also the reader’s internal voice), “is the pleasure this voice puts into existing: into existing as voice” (54).8 The king imagines singing a response to the woman’s song, but the voice in his head admonishes him, “It would be all very well for you to sing: no one would hear you, they would not hear you, your song, your voice. They would be listening to the king, in the way a king must be listened to, receiving what comes from above and has no meaning beyond the unchanging relationship between him who is above and those who are below” (58). To listen to someone as king is to interpellate without ever speaking a word. Ways of listening, Calvino shows us, can be as fixative as ways of speaking: the voice being listened to is permitted no meaning beyond the static relationship of king to his subjects. “They would not hear you, your song, your voice,” warns the king’s internal voice. What, then, does it mean to speak to, or listen to, someone as a king? Here I want to trace the influence of the little word “as” in the preceding passages. In an essay entitled “Companionable Thinking,” Cavell (2008) tells us that the idea of soul-blindness (an inability to see the other as human) is related to Wittgenstein’s concept of “seeing something as something” or “seeing aspects” of something.9 Wittgenstein’s most famous example of what it means to “see something as something” is a picture that when looked at one way is a duck and when looked at another way is a rabbit.10 We could, of course, describe interpellation in just these terms. Imagine Althusser’s policeman after a tough day at the bureau looking out onto the crowded sidewalk and seeing a sea of potential criminals—seeing the crowd as criminal. On a better day, he might look out and see a sea of honorable citizens going about their daily lives. Can we imagine listening or speaking to someone without fixing her identity in advance? For Cora Diamond, with whom Cavell is thinking “companionably,” there is another way to think about the beings with whom we share the world—as beings who “may be sought as company” (quoted in Cavell 2008: 104). The distinction between seeking someone and seeing someone as something seems crucial to me, even if she is seen as human. And here I want to say something that may sound contradictory, though I don’t think it is: seeking someone as company, or recog-

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nizing that they might be sought as company, is not the same as seeing them, speaking to them, or listening to them as king, drunk, or criminal. In the first place, it is not intelligibility that is sought through company, but it is a certain kind of presence.11 Think of the raven that was there behind the house. It might have been the dead uncle and it might not have been, but it was certainly still there. Remember Annie sitting on the couch with me, Jaypeetee kicking sand, my brother on the end of the telephone, and Pauloosie singing. Following Diamond I would say that my world was restored because Annie, Jaypeetee, and my brother, each in their own way, sought me as company, sought my presence, reminded me that they were there, companions in the face of my own inadequacies. Annie also did that for Pauloosie at the moment in which everyone else saw him as arsonist. She kept him company. This is what I want to call song—seeking someone, calling someone, singing to someone, and perhaps, yes, even interpellating someone (if we can dissociate the term from its roots in hating)—as company, as a presence. Seeing a human before you (instead of seeing someone as human) means recognizing their potential as company, recognizing them as lovable kinds of beings, capable of showing up regardless of any subject positions they may have been asked to occupy. Although it may be obvious by this point, I want to emphasize that there is no love lost between the policeman and the guilty subject in that paradigmatic Althusserian instance of interpellation. But the significance of the fact that it is that instance—an instance of discipline, order, and the assignation of guilt—that is taken as the paradigmatic figure of the interpellative scene should not be overlooked. Even when Butler links hate speech to that initial address from an other that inaugurates our life in language, she highlights the injury involved: “After all,” she writes, “to be named by another is traumatic, it is an act that precedes my will, an act that brings me into a linguistic world in which I might then begin to exercise agency at all” (1997a: 38). There is, in the end, an important affinity in Butler between hate speech and the speech of the m/other that made room for us in the world. Both are traumatic. Both fix us in place. The intelligibility a mother affords is alienating in the same way (though perhaps not to the same extent) that a racist slur is. So although I recognize the inescapable force of interpellation as Butler formulates it, I wonder if there is also a way of being called into being that avoids (or at least minimizes) the tyranny of preexisting “subject”

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positions into which individuals are interpellated.12 I wonder if we can avoid soul-blindness, if not categorically, which I doubt is possible, then at least sporadically, here and there when we seek the company of others. My question has become what would happen if we were to take an instance of loving rather than hating as the paradigmatic instance of interpellation? What happens when the “call” that is at the heart of any notion of interpellation has more to do with a recognition of the other’s presence than with the stabilizing of the other’s identity? What happens when the call really isn’t a matter of fixing the other in his or her place but making room for that other within language (Das 2007, chapter 3)? What happens when intelligibility as such is no longer the highest stake in a discussion of interpellation?13 The philosopher Adriana Cavarero has been searching for a register to describe such altruistic forms of recognition. In Relating Narratives she underlines the significance of what she calls the “universal” desire to hear someone else tell your story. She notes that since we cannot tell the story of our own birth, the “meaning of identity [is] always entrusted to others’ telling of one’s own life-story” (Cavarero 2000: 20). One needs the other to tell one’s own life story. Although it might seem that a life story could serve simply as a more involved form of interpellation, Cavarero insists that it is not what the story says that is important, but that a story can be told that matters. That is, it is not that the other is narrated but that the other is narratable that makes a difference. Her definition of narration thus goes beyond the way we use it in everyday speech. “[Narration] ‘reveals the meaning without committing the error of defining it.’ Unlike philosophy, which for millennia has persisted in capturing the universal in the trap of definition, narration reveals the finite in its fragile uniqueness, and sings its glory” (3). Cavarero’s intuition that narration can “sing” the glory of the individual in its uniqueness is not an attempt to underline the old idea that the individual is ineffable in its singularity in contrast to the intelligibility of the general. Instead song—in its most basic sense as a bodying forth of sound—is related to the concept of the image that I have been developing throughout the book. That is, song, like the image, “expresses without formulating” (Foucault 1993: 36) and thus “reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it” (Cavarero 2000: 3). For Cavarero, the problem of seeing someone as something is the problem of asking what (in philosophical terms) rather than who (in narrative terms) that person is. For Cavarero, who someone is, the unrepeatable identity of someone, cannot be accessed through philosophy (or through interpellation as insult) but only through the possibility of narration.14

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It is not surprising, then, that in Cavarero’s subsequent book, For More Than One Voice, she turns more directly to song and the voice and suggests that “the act of speaking is relational: what it communicates first and foremost, beyond the specific content that the words communicate, is the acoustic, empirical relationality of singular voices” (Cavarero 2005: 13). Reading her corpus backward, we can say that what matters in the narrative of a life is less what is being said than the fact that a singular, empirical voice is addressing my life story to me. Whereas Cavarero focuses on the political possibilities of a recognition of the presence of the unique existent, Butler’s book Excitable Speech could be read as a catalog of ways we can treat the other as if there were no material “who” involved, no “acoustic, empirical relationality of singular voices.” Butler’s correction to Althusser’s notion of interpellation is again telling in this respect: she points out that the person that the policeman hails on the street does not need to turn around but can be interpellated as a guilty subject behind her back. “But if we accept the notion that the linguistic constitution of the subject can take place without that subject’s knowing, as when one is constituted out of earshot, as, say, the referent of a third-person discourse, then interpellation can function without the ‘turning around,’ without anyone ever saying, ‘Here I am’ ” (1997a: 33). Clearly, we are adept at insulting, hating, and generally being violent toward the other when the other is not present. We only need to think of the rumors that led to Pauloosie’s suicide attempt. In those cases the “individual” literally disappears from the scene of the crime. Her presence is no longer necessary or significant to the way she is framed. Here I am less concerned with naming per se than with calling out to another; less concerned with what is said than that something is said, that a gesture is made or a song sung.15 So, setting insults aside for a moment, thinking about what I am calling “song” seems essential if we are to be faithful to a whole range of human encounters that are also occurring in situations marked by hate and violence. Song, as I intend the term, draws attention to forms of address that seek the company of an other rather than those that attempt to identify, situate, or render an other intelligible. Is it really possible to dissociate interpellation, or at least the call that gives interpellation its force, from the formation of a particular identity? And if so, do not the various identities and social realities that we have been previously been interpellated into condition the possibility of that call? What I am arguing here is that there are moments when

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identity as such is less important than being whatever it is, and everything it is, that you are. These may be momentary flashes, like Kathleen Stewart’s fleeting “still lifes” that disrupt projects “we call things like the self, agency, home, a life” (2007: 19). But such moments matter. As Inuit naming practices make so clear, it may be that such moments actually allow the other to come into being in the first place—that is, if the gesture of allowing a child to live can be parsed from the hopes and expectations of what the child will be.16 Often it is as an intrusion into our everyday interpellative practices that such forms of song become manifest. In such moments we recognize the uniqueness/specificity of the being in front of us (that he or she could not be otherwise), and a specific (and necessarily reductive) identity is not what, at that moment, is demanded. Thinking the call as an intrusion allows it to belong to a moment outside the solidification of positions and identities.17 So, for instance, I am sitting outside my tent on that camping trip with the youth, organizing some food supplies, when someone I don’t know very well yet, someone I have never spoken with directly, passes by. She doesn’t ask me what I am doing, which she can see without asking, or why I am there, or how I came to be there. Instead she says, without looking over, “Lisaangai.” I am, I exist, I am recognized. I find a home in her language. Suffused with pleasure, I go about my task. At the end of Calvino’s short story, the king finally leaves his throne, and with it the torturous anxiety he has endured for so long. He begins to listen “to the echoes and the rustlings with no further need to separate them and decipher them, as if they made up a piece of music” (Calvino 1986: 63). The demand for intelligibility, the demand that one “separate” and “decipher” the echoes and rustlings of the palace, has finally been abandoned. The king begins to listen to the world as he would listen to music.18 Interpellation as insult focuses on the transmission of “information” about the individual’s identity in the hope of making the person intelligible. It is more concerned with what the other is than who she is. In contrast, when narration—or, better, the storyteller—sings, there is a kind of “bodying forth of words.”19 With storytelling, intelligibility (understood as something being understandable in itself) takes second place to another way of knowing things, a mode of knowing that is more closely linked to musicality and to presence. This chapter has been an attempt to describe some of those moments when the fact that speech is always also a mode—a particular melody, a

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strain of music, a rhythm—matters. Thus it mattered less what Annie and Jaypeetee were saying than that they were there, at my side, saying it. That the address of the other is carried by a particular melody, a strain of music, or a rhythm is significant for understanding how to think more robustly about interpellation, but also about how anthropological narration might conceivably sing. I want to end this chapter with some companionable thinking of my own. Lawrence Cohen’s “Song for Pushkin” is a characteristically suggestive rethinking of what a queer ethical life might look like. It is also a song—an elegy, perhaps—for Pushkin Chandra, who was murdered with his lover in his parents’ barsati (in-law apartment) in New Delhi in 2004. The aftermath of the murder was marked by a series of accusations (of Chandra’s criminality as a trafficker of homosex) and counteraccusations (of widespread prejudice and discrimination against homosexuals), but Cohen suggests that his own intervention seeks neither to “secure nor redeem Chandra’s damaged person” (2007: 115) but instead may be thought of as a song. “If it is an account told as a song, it is a song in the sense of the Sanskrit gita and how I would render it, as the recognition of an ethical universe one is asked to call into being. I sing in the face of Pushkin’s death. Ethics as a performative practice is offered here as a kind of mourning” (103). Cohen sings in the face of Pushkin’s death. The ethics he invokes has little to do with the mode of denunciation—Chandra was this or that— but are figured instead as “performance” and as “mourning.” On one level Cohen (like Cavarero, Calvino, and Benjamin) opens the possibility of listening differently, of letting go of our desire to listen to others (in this case to Chandra) as criminal or as victim of discrimination. In a (seemingly unrelated) article on dementia Cohen advocates for a kind of listening based on the concept of Socratic irony, in which a voice means “neither what it appears to say . . . nor the contrary to what it appears to say, but rather and simply [means] something else” (Cohen 2003: 123). Cohen’s “something else” has something, perhaps, to do with the handprints of the potter that cling to the clay vessel in Benjamin’s essay, or the way words body forth bearing more than their meaning. Something to do with the way words have a hold on us.

nine years later Nine years later I am talking to Sila on the phone from Montreal. In the intervening time another man had been convicted of the crime. Sila tells

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me that Pauloosie is a father now. She tells me that she and Jesse recently saw him walking by White Row (the infamous bank of row houses that were intended to be temporary housing but were never torn down) with his baby in an amauti, a “woman’s” parka with a deep carrying hood for a child. “Jesse just looked at me and said, ‘Family Man!’ ” And then they laughed and laughed. A few short weeks after our conversation, a boy dies under suspicious circumstances. Pauloosie is once again the primary suspect in the rumor mill. No charges are laid. I can’t sing. I can’t even carry a tune. But if I could I would sing for Pauloosie.

Epilogue Writing on Styrofoam

One night in Iqaluit, in the fall of 2003, Monica, Jesse, and I were hanging out at the place I was house-sitting. We were in the living room, that standard Iqaluit living room with a tightly stuffed blue couch and matching armchair, a glass coffee table, and a television. Government housing. We were talking about one thing and then another, arranging ourselves on the couch, on the floor, moving back and forth to the kitchen to bring out plates of food. Monica, still besieged by the death of her best friend, tells me a dream she had just after her uncle died. She dreamed about seeing him in the NorthMart, the local store where he had worked on and off before his suicide. In her dream she keeps looking toward a bookshelf that obscures the steady stream of customers coming in the front door of the store. She tells us, “For some reason I kept looking towards that way. You know, you can’t really see people coming . . . So I was walking and I kept looking there. And I saw my uncle passing by. He was just looking at me, we didn’t smile or anything. We looked at each other till we couldn’t show.” Till we couldn’t show. The dreamer, like the dreamed, disappears from sight, soundlessly, without remainder. Nothing shows. As if in response to the soundlessness of that dream, Jesse tells a dream she had about her aunt, Sabrina, who died of cancer. In the dream the phone is ringing and Jesse picks it up. It’s her aunt trying to locate someone called Olutie. “Where’s Olutie?” asks her aunt peremptorily. 171

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“Who’s this?” Jesse asks, ignoring her aunt’s question. But the aunt yells into the phone, “Where the fuck is Olutie?” “Is this Sabrina?” asks Jesse, recognizing her aunt’s voice. “Hey, Sabrina!” “Fuck, I gotta go,” says her aunt and hangs up quickly. A little later in our conversation Monica tells me the dream I first recounted in chapter 3, the dream in which her best friend, who committed suicide, appears. The dream doesn’t make sense to her, but she tells it to me anyway. A bunch of people are sitting in a restaurant, and her friend is there too, but she won’t look at her, won’t make eye contact. Then, as if out of nowhere, her dead friend looks at her and says, “Trade spots?” So yeah, we just traded spots. And then this other dream just showed up that we were outside—it was just me—outside of Convenience crying, and I knew that she passed away. And I was like, “This doesn’t make sense.” Or something. And . . . I don’t know. I was writing or drawing stuff on Styrofoam. ‘Cause there was lots of Styrofoam outside.

In dreams of the dead, voices can seem muffled, muted, as if the volume has been turned down, sonority denied. Instead of speaking, my friend writes on Styrofoam. Lots and lots of Styrofoam. •

•

•

Michel Foucault, in his introduction to Binswanger’s Dream and Existence, suggested that suicide is itself a form of imagination. “To commit suicide,” he wrote, “is the ultimate mode of imagining; to try to characterize suicide in the realistic terms of suppression is to doom oneself to misunderstanding it” (Foucault 1993: 69).1 There is a certain kind of terror here.2 The terror of suggesting that suicide is linked to imagination—and not its impoverishment—is the terror of being complicit in an act (suicide) that condenses so much suffering. There is the terror of being on the wrong side of the (bio)politics of life, on the wrong side of the endless new beginnings that neoliberalism promises. There is the terror of being accused of not caring (enough).3 I don’t know what suicide always is. I sense it sometimes erupts out of intolerable pain, sometimes out of a feeling of pointlessness, and sometimes from impulsive anger. What else? One thing I have learned is that suicide is sometimes invested with the desire to live differently—to live “mythically,” in Maurice Leenhardt’s terms—to transcend the grinding psychic pain that accompanies colonization and to “rediscover the

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original moment in which I make myself world” (Foucault 1993: 69).4 As Leenhardt puts it, in describing a form of life among the Kanak people of Melanesia, “Only through this mythic reality does it become possible to understand the absence of a notion of death as an annihilation of being, which is at the base of our classic notion of death. Only through this mythic reality does it become possible to give up the pairs of opposites which are the bases of our understanding: life, death; animate, inanimate; yes, no” (1979: 41). We might also need to give up the opposition between suicide and imagination—especially when we come to feel the way the dead inhabit the worlds of modern Inuit youth. Not everyone has acceded to the rationality of bureaucratized, professional, and anonymous care, in which death is equated with bureaucratic failure. There are still the angels in town waiting for the dead, messages to the dead written on piles of Styrofoam, and Tuniit streaking across the tundra, hoping not to be caught. Although we want to see the suicidal desires of modern Inuit youth as banal and thus pitiable (or even execrable), the desire of a teenager, thwarted in love, to haunt her lover forever by committing suicide is also “mythic” in Leenhardt’s sense or a “mode of imagining” in Foucault’s sense. It points to the desire to belong differently to the world. The regime of life among the Canadian Inuit that I have been tracking throughout this book, beginning with the tuberculosis epidemic and concluding amid a suicide epidemic, engenders very specific ways of listening, of speaking, and of knowing—ways that can, as I have shown, attempt to fix the other in place. These forms of care are sometimes experienced as murderous. In this book I have been asking what it might mean to listen to Kaujak making animal sounds as she lies dying, without asking either for her to make sense or disregarding her noises as non-sense. What might it mean to listen to her son, Sakiassie, without insisting that the only important fact is that Kaujak is now dead? How can we acknowledge the raven as being there and yet not resolve whether it was the dead uncle or not? What might it mean to listen to a suicidal young person without insisting that he or she cooperate by desiring life? I have been trying also to describe a way of listening that refuses to fix the other in place, thus allowing for new and unexpected correspondences to arise in each encounter. This is a kind of listening that does not conform to the binaries of sense/nonsense, rationality/irrationality but allows the other to be herself and not herself simultaneously. This is what Sila says of her friend who appears to her in a dream: “It

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was her but it wasn’t her.” This brings me to the relationship of the image and imagination to an ethics of suicide. If we do call each other into being—as Sila is called by her dead friend to have a smoke, or as Sakiassie calls for his mother by listening for her name—it matters little whether the other is physically dead or alive. Images (reckoned as visual, sonic, or linguistic) are what keep us alive. Life is beside itself. Recognizing that suicide is not always a failure of imagination does not lead us to nihilism or to stop caring for those who are suffering profoundly. It allows us to listen differently to the lives and imaginations of the people who matter to us. Acknowledging the way our lives are not our own, the way we are called and call others, opens the space for the ethics of care I have been tracing in this book, an ethics that pertains as much to death by suicide as to death by tuberculosis, as well as to life in their shadows. If life is beside itself, there is no pinning it down. We are left to work out new ways to love, new ways to imagine the other that take this observation, that life is beside itself, seriously. Therein lies the ethical work of caring for ourselves and for others as imaginative beings, a task whose outlines cannot be traced in advance.

Notes

introduction 1. The names of all individuals in this book have been changed, unless they explicitly gave me permission to use their names, in which case their first and last names are used. 2. Bob Williamson has also noticed the way that “the normal conversation of Inuit often indicates a pervasive uncertainty about life” (1988: 247). Williamson is suggesting there is an uncertainty about how long life will last, but I am interested in a related uncertainty about in what sense other people, animals, or objects are alive or dead. 3. This raises the question of whether the uncertainty I am interested in is epistemological (having to do with how and whether we can know things) or ontological (having to do with inherent undecidability about what the world is or will be). One thing to keep in mind is that my interest in language does not mean that I am always talking about epistemological uncertainty. In that respect, my work rests on the shoulders of many classic anthropologists and philosophers who were interested in the ontological relationship between language and myth (cf. Cassirer 1946; Leenhardt 1979) rather than solely in the epistemological relationship between language and doubt. The uncertainty that I encountered in Inuit communities often had to do with what the world is and will be more than doubt about how we can know what the world is or will be. For many Inuit, neither beings in the world (such as the raven) nor the world itself is understood to be self-identical or consistently itself. Such ontological uncertainties do not necessarily demand to be resolved, nor do they produce the kinds of skepticism we are so familiar with. 4. Such a periodization is difficult to make with any precision. It depends on what we mean by “epidemic” and what the stakes are in such a designation. Frank Tester suggests that the Inuit tuberculosis epidemic occurred between 175

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1945 and the early 1960s. He adds that no Inuit family was left untouched (2002: 201). As Grygier notes, the first time authoritative estimates of tuberculosis mortality rates became available was 1945. At that time the death rate was 314 per 100,000 compared with 53 per 100,000 for the rest of Canada (Grygier 1994: 64). By 1966 the Medical Services Branch of Health and Welfare Canada reported that the Inuit tuberculosis mortality rate had reached zero. It fluctuated over the next few years between 3 and 10 per 100,000 (Grygier 1994: 140). 5. This periodization is also difficult to determine. David Long dates the rise of suicide as a “major social problem” in Inuit communities to the 1970s. He notes that in 1971 “the suicide rate among the Inuit was close to the national average of 10/100,000” (1995: 59–60), whereas “by 1978 the Inuit suicide rate had risen to over 85/100,000” (1995: 59). According to Jack Hicks, “The rate of death by suicide by Nunavut Inuit more than tripled during the 20 years beginning in 1983, and is currently ~120 per 100,000” (Hicks, Bjerregaard, and Berman 2007). See also Hicks (2007: 31) for a graphic representation of rise in suicide rates among the Eastern Arctic Inuit. 6. In her book The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice (2008), Annemarie Mol distinguishes between the messy practice of care that occurs in hospitals, clinics, and doctors’ offices and the logic of choice that is gaining traction in health care policy and product marketing. Mol’s book goes a great distance toward nuancing the concept of care. However in Mol’s account doctors and nurses, who are embedded in the everyday logic of care, seem to straightforwardly desire what is best for their patients; they only need to figure out what that is. Care, for Mol, is thus born of uncomplicated “good” intentions, even if such doctors and nurses do not always know in advance what is good for their patients. Because of this association of care with good intentions, care becomes tied to certain forms of vitalism. Within the logic of care for Mol, no one really wants to die, and no one really wants others to die. As a result, stasis and decline, as well as any depressive affect, are to be avoided and overcome. (This is despite the fact that Mol repeatedly insists that the only certainty is that we will all die. There is, however, a difference between asserting that fact and living it.) For Mol, for example, the logic of care encourages people to “try and try again. There is no need for the excessive optimism that will inevitably end in disappointment, but neither is there an excuse for fatalism. Give up dreams of perfection or control, but keep on trying. But who is addressed; who should keep on trying; who should act? The answer is: everyone and everything” (2008: 107). In contrast to Mol, who emphasizes the active, future-oriented aspect of care, Bob Desjarlais (n.d.), in his unpublished manuscript “Subject to Death,” argues persuasively that Yolmo practices of unmaking—in which the dead are literally undone in the days and weeks after death—should be counted as forms of care. Desjarlais documents the stillness—the “quiet withness”—that some forms of care seek to cultivate. He also shows that the recuperation of a certain rhythmicity (rather than effort) may be a way of caring for oneself and others in the aftermath of death. Desjarlais’s argument is related to a point made by Nancy Scheper-Hughes in Death without Weeping (1993). Given the pervasive poverty of the shantytown

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in Brazil in which she worked, Scheper-Hughes argues that allowing certain babies to die was actually a form of care. While Death without Weeping is a powerful critique of the forms of structural violence that permitted such poverty and practices to exist, and Scheper-Hughes would not describe similar actions taken in Western hospitals as “care,” her argument nonetheless effectively decouples care and the unceasing effort to keep someone alive. Similarly, Clara Han, writing about the process of neoliberalization in Chile and the confounding dynamics of debt and credit in a poor urban neighborhood in Santiago, borrows the term “active awaiting” from Stanley Cavell to describe the caring that occurs between family, friends, and neighbors (2012: 31). Han seems to be pushing us to think beyond the active/passive dichotomy and to rethink care in terms of “a patience for the possible, which draws on the hope that relations could change with time” (2012: 31). Care thus consists not in actively changing or tinkering with a situation, but in allowing situations—and people’s lives—to unfold. Mol’s logic of care is of course preferable to the logic of choice as she describes it. I do, however, think that the nomenclature is unfortunate. It is clear that bodies and people come to “matter” in the logic of choice, and thus to my mind it counts as a form of care. It is also clear that desires are rarely uncomplicated, and we may wish for someone’s death as we simultaneously take care of her everyday needs. At base (and I think Mol would probably agree) it is more a matter of revitalizing subaltern (and never innocent) forms of care than of choosing between care and its absence. 7. Care, especially when examined at the level of institutions and states, has often been conceptualized in anthropology as a process of exclusion—that is, in terms of the way it comes to be withheld from particular individuals and groups (see especially Biehl 2005; Briggs and Briggs 2003; Han 2012; Scheper-Hughes 1992). In the context of the care provided by modern Western nation-states and NGOs, many anthropologists have turned to Foucault’s notion of “biopolitics,” or the politics of caring for “life itself” at the level of the population, to understand the complex ways such exclusions operate (see, e.g., Redfield 2005; Fassin 2005; Ticktin 2011). For example, recent scholarship on humanitarianism has done a remarkable job of revealing what Miriam Ticktin calls the “casualties of care,” the unintended negative consequences of the provision of humanitarian aid. In the anthropological literature on humanitarianism, care is often linked to a feeling or sentiment (often related to compassion) that provokes individuals and collectivities to act impulsively and in ways that ultimately shore up the status quo. Care thus becomes linked to what Ticktin (following Ferguson) calls an “antipolitics” (a mode of governance that privileges those exceptional cases that succeed in evoking our compassion) rather than a mode of governance that focuses on securing long-term political “rights” to health, safety, and security. Ticktin argues, “We all must think beyond care, beyond help, to forge a shared engagement. Migrants and others are leading the way on this, claiming their rights based on residence, including the right to labor where one lives” (2011: 224). These arguments, important as they are as critiques of the practice of humanitarianism as it increasingly becomes a mode of governance (Fassin 2012), tend,

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for strategic purposes, to rely on a series of cascading (and sometimes implicit) binary oppositions that are drawn into the care-versus-politics split. A preliminary list of these oppositions would include: irrational/rational, impulsive/strategic, exclusive/inclusive, passive/active, feminine/masculine. In each opposition one term is critiqued and the other privileged. So care becomes linked to the emotions, impulsivity, and exclusion in ways that end up delegitimizing care and the terms associated with it. But there are other currents in the literature on care. Erica Bornstein (2012), for one, counters this impulse to dismiss the irrationality and impulsivity of some forms of care. Bornstein questions whether we should discount tout court instances of care that do not have long-term political effects. Drawing on the Hindu notion of dan she recuperates the act of spontaneous and impulsive giving that eschews any instrumental relationship between the giver and the recipient. In taking such gifts as legitimate forms of care, Bornstein works with a logic of both/and rather than either/or: care can be both impulsive and strategic, exclusive and inclusive. Felicity Aulino (2012) approaches these structuring oppositions from another direction. In a fascinating study of forms of elder care in Thailand, Aulino describes the incursion of what Fassin calls “humanitarian reason” into Thailand. For example, the director of one NGO argues that Thai people actually need to be taught to embody the “spirit” of volunteerism, which involves learning to associate the correct (sincere) emotion with the act of caring for strangers. For many Thai people, as Aulino points out, caring is actually a ritualized practice rather than an act that results from a certain kind of “sincere” feeling. Caring is about “taking care of” another, no matter how you feel about that person. In an exquisite description of the everyday rituals performed by two sisters taking care of the bodily needs of their comatose mother, Aulino effectively delinks care from its association with the “maudlin” emotion of compassion to which it is often linked—as well as from its eschatological promise: caring for the bodily needs of an elderly person is often exhausting, sometimes repulsive, seemingly endless work. Cristiana Giordano, in her work on immigration, psychiatry, and the socalled “victims of human trafficking” in Italy, powerfully evokes the way legal, psychiatric, and religious institutions in Italy attempt to care for women seeking asylum by rearticulating the women’s experiences in their own terms as experiences of victimhood. Yet for Giordano, the answer is not to refigure the experience of the women as completely other—that is, to represent their experiences as completely incommensurable with Italian forms of state care based on the category of the victim. Giordano’s work ultimately understands care not as a process of commensuration, nor its impossibility, but as an ongoing act of translation that always leaves a stubborn remainder. Using as an example a woman recording a legal complaint against her exploiters and traffickers, Giordano writes, “The stories that converge in the denuncia are the result of several regimes of truth intersecting with each other, that produce a testimony that, while not entirely truthful, is nevertheless not a lie either” (2014: 160). Care here does not rely on a dichotomy between righteous feelings and political efficacy but is instead embodied in the act of translation.

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Angela Garcia (2010) also provides a powerful critique of the way “care” is often purged of ambivalence (and associated primarily with morally sanctioned life-sustaining actions). Among heroin users in the Española Valley, procuring drugs for another addict can be a way to care for someone and reaffirm the bonds of family or friendship. In describing the relationship between a mother and daughter who are both addicted to heroin, Garcia writes, “The circulation of heroin became the substance through which care was performed and through which affective ties between Eugenia and Bernadette were reaffirmed” (2010: 128). Thus, for Garcia, care is not a life-affirming gesture reserved only for humanitarians toward the destitute, the healthy toward the sick, those who supposedly “have” a life toward those who don’t. Rather, care is threaded through the very practices (such as doing heroin) that may ultimately kill you. With this, another set of dualisms is effectively undone. 8. I find it helpful, in the midst of the proliferation of scholarship on biopolitics, to return to Foucault’s statement, “The mechanisms introduced by biopolitics include forecasts, statistical estimates, and overall measures. And their purpose is not to modify a given individual as such, or to modify a given individual insofar as he is an individual, but, essentially, to intervene at the level at which these general phenomena are determined, to intervene at the level of their generality” (2003: 246). What is interesting to me is what it means to “modify” an individual insofar as she is a member of a population, that is, to attend to the other as a member of a series. 9. Patrick Wolfe (2006) makes the argument that settler colonialism in the United States was genocidal (see also Cattelino 2010). As he puts it, “Land is life—or, at least, land is necessary for life” (Wolfe 2006: 387). Therefore (and I concur with Wolfe here), the wholesale appropriation of native lands is a form of genocide, and the logic of elimination that structured the dispossession of those lands still structures settler society today. Although it makes sense to designate Canada a settler-colonial state with respect to the native population in southern Canada, and although many of its settler-colonial policies and attitudes carried over to the northern administration, it seems important to point out that the early colonization of Canada’s Arctic was not primarily focused on the appropriation of land “as life” or on “settling” the land (Abele 2009: 20–21; Bovey 1967; Grant 1988: 5; Mitchell 1996: 50; Paine 1977: 7; Zaslow 1971: 251–52). The colonization of the Canadian Arctic was more intermittent than in the South and generally occurred much later. However, by the seventeenth century, traders were coming and going from the Arctic (Williamson 1974; cf. Crowe 1991), and, although some established trading posts at various locations, they never intended to “settle” the land the way they did in southern Canada. Because it was most efficient and economical, Inuit were often encouraged to continue living on the land according to their custom (Abele 2009; Williamson 1974). In fact, in the early stages of colonization, Inuit lands were not perceived as particularly valuable. So in 1874, when a U.S. miner made a request for land that would have impeded Canadian expansion northward, the Canadian response was telling; officials dragged their feet. In 1879, Edward Blake, a Liberal politician, reported to the Colonial Office that “the object in annexing these unexplored territories to Canada is, I apprehend, to prevent the United

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States from claiming them, and not from their likelihood of their ever proving of any value to Canada” (Zaslow 1971: 252). Nonetheless, in an interesting reversal of the tactics used in southern Canada, Canadian state agents used Inuit presence on the land as evidence of Canadian sovereignty over the Arctic (Grant 1988; see also Tester and Kulchyski 1994). The provision of medical services to those Arctic “citizens” was then seen as one way of securing contested claims to sovereignty. In 1964, Jenness noted that, “today,” neither discovery nor propinquity nor proclamation could confer sovereignty; instead, “to receive international recognition possession, possession demands the acceptance of two responsibilities, continuing interest in the territory, and a concern for the welfare of its inhabitants” (1964: 17; emphasis added). Dr. Helen MacMurchy made this claim forcefully in 1930 in a letter to the prime minister of Canada: “The Canadian Eskimo are perishing off the face of the earth. We have the power and the knowledge needed to save them and a plan for this is now before the Department of the Interior. If we fail them the result will be that the Eskimo will be exterminated and that at no distant rate. If we lose the Eskimo, we lose the Arctic” (Tester and McNicoll 2006: 91). So, although I agree with Wolfe’s observation that settler colonialism is “inherently eliminatory” and often, but not always, genocidal, I think the historical contingencies of the Arctic complicate the question of colonial genocide. Arctic administrators sought to keep Inuit alive (if just barely) to demonstrate sovereignty with respect to other states. Instead of being physically eliminated from their land (cf. Wolfe 2006) or unsettling Canadian claims to sovereignty through their status as a distinct people (cf. Rifkin 2009), Inuit bodies were reinscribed as Canadian to support Canada’s international claim to sovereignty over the Arctic. When annexing land becomes less about securing the life of the settlers per se and more about the life of the nation, it makes sense that a biopolitical regime, rather than a genocidal one, ensues. The question asked in this book is: What difference does it make that, as Robert Paine points out, “white behaviour towards Inuit may be . . . characterized as solicitous rather than exploitative, as liberal rather than repressive” (1977: 3)? How can we talk of biopolitics (as it was taken up by the Canada’s welfare state) and murder in the same breath? Life Beside Itself is one attempt to provide an opening to that question. 10. Negotiations for the creation of the new territory had begun more than twenty years before that, at a time when intense oil and gas exploration in the North, along with federal government’s proposal to adopt a national policy of assimilation of indigenous peoples, had made Inuit realize how little control they had over their land and their destinies (Marecic 1999: 282). Although it is often referred to as an Inuit territory, Nunavut actually has a public government: Inuit representatives in the land-claim negotiations, recognizing that Inuit would make up the large majority of voters in the territory for many years to come (currently they comprise 85 percent of the population), opted to negotiate for a public government in the new territory instead of fighting (a potentially losing battle) for a stricter form of aboriginal governance. In the Canadian context, due to repeated attempts to address the question of Quebec’s unique status within the country, the possibility of incommensurable cultures, knowledges, or political systems is a highly charged issue. Multiculturalism in Canada holds that

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ethnic difference should be understood within a horizon of common citizenship (Taylor 1994; Paine 1999). This leads to some uneasy contradictions. For example, Inuit arguments for self-government within the territory of Nunavut were initially based on the notion of an ethnic or Inuit form of government (Morin 2001: 10). After the federal government interrupted the negotiations, judging the demands to be too radical, Inuit leaders came back to the table with a proposal for a nonethnic and public government in Nunavut within redrawn territorial boundaries that would ensure an Inuit majority for years to come (Morin 2001). In this way the Inuit ensured that their version of self-government would be palatable to a federal government concerned about the political implications of a separate form of government in Nunavut (Hicks and White 2000). In fact, one of the contradictions of the current political moment in Nunavut is the unusually large role the federal government plays in daily life (White 2009; Abele 2009). The Nunavut government itself still depends almost entirely on the federal government for its finances. This is partly because Nunavut’s private sector is so weak, but also because the economic boost that mining provides goes almost entirely to the land-claims organization. “Simply put, the federal government remains a powerful player in Nunavut” (White 2009: 59). In terms of the provision of health services, for example, the federal government provides funding for identified health problems such as suicide, even though the Government of Nunavut (GN) is ultimately responsible for health in the territory (Kral 2012). Yet even as the federal government continues to loom large in the lives of Inuit, the land-claims organization, Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated (NTI), also plays a significant role in governance, performing, for example, many social welfare functions as well as providing programs to promote Inuit culture and to foster economic development. Thus NTI “could in important ways be characterized as an Inuit government” (White 2009: 60). 11. Although contemporary Nunavut is a public and not an ethnically based government, the land-claims agreement did recognize the need to “encourage Government to design and implement social and cultural development policies and programs appropriate to Inuit” (Canada 1993: Section 32.3.3). Thus the establishment of Nunavut was seen as “a unique opportunity to address questions of our cultural survival with a renewed vigour and imagination” and an opportunity “to participate in the creation of a public government that truly reflects Inuit values, and that is genuinely responsive to Inuit needs” (Nunavut Social Development Council 1998: 5). The new political entity, the “Inuit of Nunavut,” needed a concept through which to imagine their distinctiveness from other ethnic and political groups within Canada. Thus in 1998 the term Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (IQ) was coined to encompass “all aspects of traditional Inuit culture including values, world-view, language, social organization, knowledge, life skills, perceptions and expectations” (Nunavut Social Development Council 2000: 79), and in 2002 the term was redefined to make it more forward looking, as “the Inuit way of doing things: the past, present and future knowledge, experience and values of Inuit society (Henderson 2007: 191).) In an editorial to the regional newspaper, Jaypeetee Arnakak, who has worked to formalize the principles of IQ, wrote, “Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit. To me these words have almost the same ring as ‘Next year in Jerusalem’ does to Zionists:

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like Judaism, the IQ concept is a binding force for a people; unlike Judaism, though, IQ was never written down” (Arnakak 2000). IQ has become the new way of imagining what it is that makes the Inuit a distinct political entity. Thus, in some sense, the question of Inuit “difference” in governance was transferred from the idea of ethnicity to the realm of “Inuit traditional knowledge.” In February of 2001 the Nunavut government created an IQ task force to determine the best way to incorporate Inuit traditional knowledge into its programs, policies, and services, and to make government offices more conducive to the Inuit lifestyle. Since then, IQ has become a buzzword throughout Nunavut as Inuit strive to create a distinctly Inuit form of governance. Speaking of the need to preserve and use Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit in the government despite the challenges it presents, one young Inuk wrote, “Call me a visionary but I thought that’s what Nunavut was all about!” (Inutiq 2001). As a model of governance, Nunavut has “fired the hopes of aboriginal people around the world, from the Maori of New Zealand to the Mohawks of New York” (Baltimore Sun, March 31, 1999). Some have even argued that the Government of Nunavut, as a public government committed to adopting Inuit forms of governance, stretches and radicalizes the very concept of “representative government” (Timpson 2006). Will it succeed? Does Nunavut really represent an alternative modernity with possibilities for reimagining social, temporal, and spatial forms of identity and difference? Early on Charles Marecic argued pessimistically that, “in its efforts to accommodate the ‘Canadian system’ by adopting a public government model for Nunavut, the Inuit may have in fact authorized their own cultural assimilation” (1999: 276). While acceding to certain political norms in no way entails cultural assimilation, the possibility of creating such a specifically Inuit form of government, rather than being enshrined in law, now depends on two agreements signed by NTI and the Government of Nunavut, the Clyde River Protocol, signed in 1999, and Iqqanaijaqatigiit, signed in 2004. As one keen observer of the process, Graham White wonders, “Just how deeply any governance system resting upon a large Euro-Canadian bureaucracy can accommodate itself to a set of values so fundamentally contradictory to Weberian bureaucratic norms remains an open question” (White 2009: 78). In 2003 I asked Andrew Tagak, the Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit coordinator for the Nunavut Department of Health, what he thought about the challenges of integrating IQ into Nunavut’s bureaucratic structures. “The critics out there say it’s hard or even impossible to translate Inuit types of knowledge into a modern workplace,” I said. “How do you feel about that?” His answer was very subtle. “We’re having trouble with that one . . . Take the word for working together. Now if I was going to translate that I would have to tell a story first. Because I don’t think there’s any word for that in English. I mean one word . . . Now that’s why we’re having trouble translating or writing down what Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit means.” Tagak went on to describe his own process of turning Inuit aphorisms and beliefs into government policy with an example. “Inuit say that if the ice is forming in the fall, don’t walk on it until it is safe to do so. Now a policy maker could maybe turn that into a policy. When you create a policy, check it out, try it out, make sure it doesn’t hurt anyone—then implement it. That’s what we call integrating Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit into the new system.”

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Yet despite the inherent challenges that arise in the implementation of IQ, and in the absence of a wholly Inuit government, IQ has become the signature of the Nunavut government, encapsulating what makes the government specifically Inuit. The mandate to codify and operationalize IQ within Nunavut’s government agencies is only one highly visible attempt to make collective and thus standardize Inuit knowledge and memory across a range of communities. If Nunavut is to live up to the aspirations of its founders, building a government that incorporates Inuit knowledge and values—Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit—is crucial (Henderson 2007; White 2009). 12. The cause of the tuberculosis epidemic among the Inuit is contested. At the time of the epidemic, theories of racial vulnerability and a lack of resistance circulated, but Lewis and Wherrett’s report on the 1946 x-ray survey of the Eastern Arctic rejected both theories and pointed instead to massive infection as the cause of the epidemic. According to the authors, the fact that 4.7 percent of the people surveyed showed calcification without the presence of active tuberculosis was “ample evidence to show that the Eskimo shows a marked resistance to tuberculosis” (Lewis and Wherrett 1947: 358). Many social and environmental factors have been offered as explanations for the rapid spread of the disease. Some authors note that the cold Arctic environment makes Inuit vulnerable to respiratory disease (Grygier 1994: 55). Others point to crowded living conditions with poor ventilation (Lewis and Wherrett 1947: 358; Jenness 1962: 86; Moore 1964: 1195, 1202; Canada, Royal Commission on Health Services, and Wherrett 1965: 57; Grzybowski, Styblo, and Dorken 1976: S8; Grygier 1994: 55). In addition, it is clear that a lack of medical services in the North allowed the disease to run rampant for a number of years before any biomedical initiative to halt it was adopted (Wherrett 1977; Grygier 1994). In this book I am clearly not arguing against medical intervention tout court. I am, however, arguing that the mode of medical intervention undertaken during the Inuit tuberculosis epidemic caused a great deal of unnecessary suffering and revealed a fundamental disregard for the Inuit people. 13. Throughout this book I follow popular usage in using “Qallunaaq” to refer to a singular “white” person, “Qallunaat” to refer to “white” people in general, and “Qallunaaq” as an adjective in English (e.g., “a Qallunaaq woman” for “a ‘white’ woman”). Sometimes the term is also used to refer more generally to non-Inuit. 14. See, for example, M. G. Stevenson (1996); Edmonton Journal (2007); MacNeil and Guilmette (2004: 344); Kral et al. (2011); Kral (2013). 15. For important work on the suicide epidemic among Inuit in Nunavut and Nunavik, see Kirmayer, Malus, and Boothroyd (1996); Kirmayer, Boothroyd, and Hodgins (1998); Kirmayer, Fletcher, and Boothroyd (1998); Hicks (2007; 2009); Kral et al. (2011); Kral (2012; 2013). 16. The statistical picture of the territory can be discouraging. According to Statistics Canada, living conditions among the Canadian Inuit remain below Canadian averages. Thirty-nine percent of Inuit children in Nunavut between six and fourteen years old reported having experienced hunger, and 59 percent of those experienced it every few months or more frequently (Statistics Canada 2006). The life expectancy in Nunavut is 71.6 years, versus the national average

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of 81.1 years (Statistics Canada 2013), and in 2009 the infant mortality rate was 12.1 per 1,000, compared to just 5 per 1,000 nationally (Statistics Canada 2013). Homelessness is widespread in Nunavut, though its visibility is obscured by the necessity of moving out of subzero temperatures into packed apartments: “Fifteen  people in a house is homelessness,” Edward Picco, then minister of homelessness for Nunavut, said in 1999 (Ejesiak 2004). 17. Obviously a regime of life is closely related to what Foucault calls biopolitics. I also want to emphasize the ways regime resonates with regimen to highlight the fact that a regime of life can be imposed from the outside—which I argue is what happened with the Inuit in Canada. Unlike Collier and Lakoff, who use the term “regimes of living” (2005), I am not as much interested in the question of how to live according to a conception of the good, but rather in the imposition of life as a secular sacred in the colonial context. 18. Walter Benjamin makes clear that words can themselves form images and draw to them all the sensations corresponding to the word. For example, Benjamin writes, “The air in which this butterfly once hovered is today wholly imbued with a word—one that has not reached my ears or crossed my lips for decades. This word has retained that unfathomable reserve which childhood names possess for the adult. Long-kept silence, long concealment, has transfigured them. Thus, through air teeming with butterflies vibrates the word ‘Brauhausberg,’ which is to say, ‘Brewery Hill’ ” (2006: 52). 19. Benjamin writes, “Several times in my inner life, I had already experienced the process of inoculation as something salutary. In this situation, too, I resolved to follow suit, and I deliberately called to mind those images which, in exile, are most apt to awaken homesickness: images of childhood. My assumption was that the feeling of longing would no more gain mastery over my spirit than a vaccine does over a healthy body” (2006: 37). 20. Thus in chapter 5 I describe the way a friend who was recounting her dreams to me punctuated her narrative with three words, I don’t know, those words said in a low and elsewhere voice that expressed so much more than the words themselves. The quality of her voice functions as an image for me. Through my reading of Freud, Benjamin, and Foucault, I have come to think of images—precipitates of experience that express without formulating—as not just inhering in ink on paper or in celluloid, but also as existing in our mind’s eye, in our conversations, and even in our prose. Thus it becomes possible to talk about a “snapshot in prose” or even a “sound image.” And I realized that, despite our articulated fear, anthropology (perhaps more than other disciplines) traffics in images. Think of the way experience is precipitated in maps for Stefania Pandolfo (1997), dreams for Eduardo Kohn (2013), sketches for Michael Taussig (2011), peaches for Nadia Seremetakis (1994), the virgin on the microscope for Elizabeth Roberts (2012), and insects for Hugh Raffles (2010). 21. Barthes says of this obtuse meaning that it remains in the field of the signifier rather than the signified. “I do not know what its signified is, at least I am unable to give it a name” (1977: 53). 22. Although clearly most images can also be read discursively—they have what Barthes calls informational and symbolic meaning—Barthes emphasizes that what is imagistic about the image is that which resists formulation in lan-

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guage. As he puts it, “The filmic is that in the film which cannot be described, the representation which cannot be represented. The filmic begins only where language and metalanguage end” (Barthes 1977: 64). 23. For other examples of anthropology that does not cleave to disciplinary distinctions, see Robert Desjarlais’s Sensory Biographies (2003), Veena Das’s Life and Words (2007), and Michael Taussig’s I Swear I Saw This (2011). 24. See Angela Garcia’s book The Pastoral Clinic (2010).

1. facts and images 1. Arctic Bay, known in Inuktitut as Ikpiarjuk, is located on the northern part of the Borden Peninsula on Baffin Island, Nunavut. 2. Anna Qaunaq contacted me because she had heard about my work collecting the photographs and audiotapes of sanatorium patients and their families that are held in the archives of Hamilton Health Sciences and McMaster University’s Faculty of Health Sciences in Ontario. 3. Years later he found that photograph on the wall of the high school in Pond Inlet and he asked for a copy. 4. In 1964 the Department of National Health and Welfare published a report stating, “Tuberculosis has always posed a particularly serious problem amongst Indians, so serious that, at one time, this one disease threatened the continued existence of the race. Consequently, the control and treatment of this disease has been a major concern” (Albrecht 1965: 154). See also Moore 1961 and Innis, Wherrett, and Moore 1945 on tuberculosis as the “scourge of the north.” 5. Until November 1945, responsibility for the health, education, and welfare of native peoples belonged to the Medical Services of the Indian Affairs Bureau of the Department of Mines and Resources. It then shifted to Indian Health Services of the Department of National Health and Welfare (DNHW). Soon after, regional offices were created for the Eastern Arctic, Central Arctic, and Western Arctic in Ottawa, Winnipeg, and Edmonton, respectively (Grzybowski, Styblo, and Dorken 1976). P. E. Moore, who had been the superintendent of medical services, became director of this newly formed department, Indian Health Services. 6. Looking back on tuberculosis control protocol for native peoples during World War II, Moore says that with the shortage in personnel, “a policy of isolating as many cases as possible, whether or not under adequate treatment, was adopted” (Moore 1961). Many argued, as Ferguson did in 1950, that “segregation of patients for treatment in sanatoria, not only for restoration of function, but for closure and cure if possible, has proved to be the method most effective in eliminating infection in the general public” (Ferguson 1950: 132). However, with greater hindsight Corinne Hodgson (1982: 508) argued that “institutionalization was not, as it is often assumed, the only option available to the Canadian government after the introduction of effective chemotherapy and vaccines in the 1950s.” Hodgson (1982) also contrasts Canada’s approach to the way World Health Organization programs in Africa at the time focused on domiciliary treatment and training indigenous health care workers. Even at the time,

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officials in the Northwest Territories were wary of how evacuation would impact traditional lifestyles of Inuit (Nixon 1988). Many northern administrators did, in fact, support increasing subsidies to mission hospitals closer to Inuit settlements instead of evacuating Inuit (Wherrett 1945; Nixon 1988). 7. See especially Grygier 1994; Nixon 1988; Tester, McNicholl, and Irniq 2001; and Wenzel 1981 on the disjuncture this caused Inuit. In Canada patients were generally kept in sanatoria for between six months and two years, but, as Wherrett (1977) observes, Inuit were kept longer than most. Their entire treatment was carried out in institutions, including care that would ordinarily have become domiciliary care because it was not deemed practical in the Arctic. In the 1950s the average length of stay for Inuit in hospital was twenty-eight months (Grygier 1994:83). One tuberculosis patient, James Tegeapak from Cambridge Bay, stayed in Charles Camsell Hospital from 1952 until October 17, 1963, a total of eleven years (Charles Camsell History Committee 1985: 106). 8. It is hard to know exactly how many Inuit died in southern hospitals. Based on the examination of death certificates, 258 Inuit died of tuberculosis from 1950 to 1960. Most of these deaths probably occurred in hospital given that the majority of Inuit deaths outside of hospital would not have been attended by a physician (Grygier 1994: 84–85). The population of Inuit in Canada at the time was between 9,000 and 11,000 (Wherrett 1969: 8). In the late 1980s and early 1990s there was a concerted effort by Inuit family members to discover what happened to their relatives who disappeared in Southern hospitals (Ottawa Citizen 1988; Inuktitut 1990: 30–35; Grygier 1994). 9. Staples et al. (1993) suggest that the Canadian government’s resolution to control tuberculosis in native communities was caused in part by its self-consciousness in the face of the international community’s awareness of the appalling living conditions and tuberculosis epidemics among Inuit through reports from American and British officers who had been stationed in the Canadian Arctic during the war. 10. In this context we quickly see the salience of Allan Sekula’s observation that in systems of surveillance, “the individual only existed as an individual by being identified. Individuality as such had no meaning” (Sekula 1986: 34). 11. As we know, the objectification of bodies, which occurs in part through their serialization, contributes to biomedicine’s unparalleled power to cure and simultaneously could be called its greatest aporia (see Kleinman 1995; Gordon 1988). We also know that statistics and statistical analysis are not “bad” in some straightforward way. In fact, when so much of the suffering in contemporary native communities is “ordinary, chronic, and cruddy, rather than catastrophic, crisis-laden, and sublime” (Povinelli 2011: 3), statistics can turn uneventful suffering into an event by aggregating suffering in ways that make it visible. What I am drawing attention to here are the devastating effects of the way Inuit actually became statistics in the minds of the colonial state agents (and later to contemporary Canadian society). 12. In the introduction to a 1976 article, Grzybowski, Styblo, and Dorken call the anti-tuberculosis program of the 1950s and 1960s in the Northwest Territories a “story of success.” By 1961, P. E. Moore, director of Indian Health Services, was convinced that the government had done such a good job of con-

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trolling tuberculosis in native communities that tuberculosis was “no longer captain” of those communities. In 1969, 1970, and 1971, there was not a single death from tuberculosis recorded among the Inuit (Wherrett 1977: 118). 13. It became difficult to think, in any meaningful way, about who the Inuit were. In fact, the disc list system is one of the most telling examples of what I will describe in chapter 3 as the “anonymous care” of the Canadian state. 14. Adriana Cavarero contends that philosophy, like the discourse of rights (or, in this case, a bureaucratic system) asks what the human is. Biography, an alternate way of conceiving the self in politics, asks who an individual is. For Cavarero, one becomes an individual by being caught up by the stories of others. That is, the self is constitutively exposed to the other, and political life is not a given but a recurring gift of narration (Cavarero 2000). 15. As Phillips (1967: 161–76) explains, in 1953 the Canadian government was at a crossroads: should it create a “special area” in the north with its own laws, administration, and criminal code, or should the North (and its inhabitants, the Inuit), be considered Canadians? In 1953 Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent defended a bill in the House of Commons that would create the Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources and place the North squarely in the context of the Canadian nation-state. 16. From before the Second World War until the early 1960s, the minimal health care that Inuit received was provided largely by religious groups, primarily the Anglican and Catholic churches. From 1922 to 1969 the Eastern Arctic Patrol brought supplies and a traveling medical team to its ports of call (Tester 2002: 201). As Prime Minister St. Laurent recognized in Parliament in 1953, “Apparently we have administered these vast territories of the North in an almost continuing state of absence of mind” (Phillips 1967: 161). 17. What it felt like to be treated as an experiment was the subject of a recent film, The Experimental Eskimos (Greenwald 2009), which documents how, in the early 1960s, three Inuit boys were separated from their families and sent south to receive a southern education as an experiment in social engineering. 18. For Diamond (2008), then, treating wounded bodies as facts is a way of being deflected from what is here, confronting you. 19. In November of 2011 Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK), an organization created in 1971 to lobby for Inuit rights, held a conference entitled “From Eskimo to Inuit in 40 Years.” In ITK’s words, “Inuit is the contemporary term for Eskimo.” While Canada officially adopted the term “Inuit” in 1978 in response to aboriginal rights–based activism (Collignon 2006: 5), the reference to the past “40 years” seems to indicate that ITK views becoming recognized as Inuit as a process—the process of gaining recognition as an aboriginal people with a right to self-determination. In this book I retain the term “Eskimo” when quoting from historical sources, but also when, in the context of a historical discussion, I am trying to capture something of the alienation of colonialism. For instance, when some Arctic bureaucrats wonder whether it would be preferable to have a “disturbed Eskimo” rather than a “dead one,” I retain the word “Eskimo” to highlight the multiple ways in which colonial agents interpellate Inuit into an alien identity. In such cases replacing the word “Eskimo” with “Inuit” would seem to efface some of the violence of colonialism.

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20. The 1964 Report of the Subcommittee on Eskimo Housing suggested that the fears of damaging Inuit character were unfounded and that “the modern Eskimo abandons the uncomfortable aspects of his former life with alacrity, if he is given the opportunity to do so.” To bolster their claims they describe the common features of traditional Eskimo housing as “lack of privacy for copulation and defecation, a shared family bed, absence of furniture, shortage of storage space, cramped, cold, poorly-lit and badly ventilated quarters” (Subcommittee on Eskimo Housing Program 1964: 8). In reality there was a great deal of ambivalence among Arctic administrators in the post–World War II era about moving Inuit into settlements. They foresaw the end of a way of life and the beginning of Inuit dependency on the Canadian state. But that generation of bureaucrats often emphasized the costs of doing otherwise. On the attempt to bring Inuit into fixed settlements, see especially Tester 2006 and Thomas and Thompson 1972. The latter states, “The [Eskimo] housing program initiated by the Canadian government is of particular interest since it is one of the most ambitious programs of its kind undertaken by any government. It can be looked upon as part of a massive effort to acculturate a people who have lived by entirely different values, into the mainstream of Canadian society” (1972: 9). 21. This is a clear example of what Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has called the “politicization of bare life” (1998: 4), which has come to characterize modern Western democracies. 22. I am playing with two meanings of propriety: (1) “Conformity to accepted standards of behavior or morals, esp. with regard to good manners or polite usage”; and (2) “The fact of belonging or relating specially to a particular thing or person; right of possession or use; ownership, proprietorship” (OED Online, s.v. “propriety”). 23. But how do we adequately come to terms with the pull of such a counterfactual on the imagination? How, further, is this disavowed colonial desire to “have” a dead Inuk experienced by Inuit themselves? This, again, is the question of the psychic life of biopolitics. 24. Pond Inlet is a two-day snowmobile trip from Arctic Bay. 25. This is not to say that we always think/picture well or think/picture justly, but rather that to feel as if we have understood something, often a picture or an image, is what we crave. It is certainly possible to be trapped by a certain picture of the world, our relationships, or ourselves. Thus I would argue that the Canadian state agents are “trapped” by a certain way of imagining life—and, by extension, death—and cannot admit that their images of the extermination of the Inuit people are also connected to desire. This is not to say that images are in some naïve way “good” while “facts” are bad, only that much goes on at the level of the image that we are not well trained to notice or assimilate. 26. For example, Benjamin writes, “The child who stands behind the doorway curtain himself becomes something white that flutters, a ghost. The dining table under which he has crawled turns him into the wooden idol of the temple; its carved legs are four pillars. And behind a door, he is himself the door, is decked out in it like a weighty mask and, as sorcerer, will cast a spell on all who enter unawares” (Benjamin 2006: 99).

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27. In Judith Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power, she asks, “What is the psychic form that power takes?” (1997b: 2). With the phrase “psychic life of biopolitics,” I am asking—in a parallel but more specific sense—about the psychic form that biopolitics takes. For Butler, the psyche is a result of a prohibition. That is, power makes itself felt in the psyche through a prohibition that represses a subject’s desire. The psyche does not preexist that repression; for Butler, the interiority that we know as the psyche comes into being through prohibition. In other words, the division between what is allowed and what is prohibited produces the distinction between the exteriority and interiority of the subject. Although Butler is concerned with the question of power and how the psyche takes form, I am interested in describing the specific ways biopolitics, as a particular instantiation of power, lives in the psyche. The difference, in part, is one between philosophy and ethnography. 28. Wittgenstein was another philosopher who believed that thinking and verbalizing are not necessarily linked and that “to think, to understand, was first and foremost to picture” (Monk 2012). As Wittgenstein put it, “If Freud’s theory on the interpretation of dreams has anything in it, it shows how complicated is the way the human mind represents the facts in pictures. So complicated, so irregular is the way they are represented that we can barely call it representation any longer” (quoted in Monk 2012). 29. See especially Temple Grandin (2006), Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism. 30. Or, to go further, as Stefania Pandolfo does in “Ramz: The Passion of Ilyas” (n.d.), we could explore the fundamental relationship between Being and the image, the way that images, in their density of feeling, may even take us beyond our individual subjectivity to a space where something fundamental about existence is exposed. In this way, the images of the psyche, while revealing a personal style of existence, in Binswanger’s (1993) sense always also involve a relationship to nonexistence, to death. By connecting us to the world, such images can also connect us to the matter of the world, to the matter that we will again become. 31. I use “we” here in order to contest the facile move to an understanding and feeling for the other, in this case Kaujak, that Elizabeth Povinelli (2011) names “liberal empathy.” Povinelli critiques liberal empathy for presuming the separation of the bodily substance of self and other. Thus the suffering of the other belongs to the body of that other, and thus to feel that other’s pain is to be quite sure that that pain is not mine.

2. cooperating 1. “The first part of this book,” they wrote, “is about how to be healthy and happy. When we have good food, warm clothes, good kind friends and no sickness we are happy. . . . The second part contains advice about how to be prosperous, how the King is helping Eskimo children, how to make your rifles and boats last a long time, how to save the food animals from becoming scarce, and how to plan for times of scarcity” (Bureau of Northwest Territories and Yukon Services 1947: 1). The Book of Wisdom explained that the king had “made a

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law that all mothers of children will get help in seeing that these children grow up to be strong and healthy” and went on to explain how to prepare Pablum with dry milk (1947: 28). 2. To take just a couple of examples of this attitude: In 1921 Vilhjalmur Stefansson argued that the Arctic landscape was still viewed by most as “a lifeless waste of eternal silence” inhabited only by a few “Eskimos, the filthiest and most benighted people on earth, pushed there by more powerful nations farther south, and eking out a miserable existence amidst hardship” (Stefansson 1921: 7). In his report on the 1955 Eastern Arctic Patrol, John Willis wrote to his superior in the Indian Health Services, “I have been delighted by the hospitality, the cheerfulness, the honesty, the passive stoicism, the native intelligence and common sense of the Eskimos I have seen so far. That they were for the most part dirty and smelled there can be no doubt, but I have smelled worse smells in China. After ten minutes in an Eskimo atmosphere one’s olfactory sense becomes dull anyway” (Willis 1955). The idea that Inuit didn’t mind filth perhaps accounts for the fact that the Inuit were provided with filthy quarters on the C. D. Howe. Leah Idlout d’Agencourt describes the dirtiness of the bunks that were provided for Inuit for tuberculosis treatment, the sheets that smelled like they had never been washed, and the infestation of body lice that resulted from not having the means to bathe for months (d’Argencourt 1977). 3. Graburn notes, “The Eskimos identify all ‘prehistoric peoples’ as Tunit and identify archaeologists as ‘Tunit hunters’ ”(Graburn 1969: 31). Or, as Hawkes writes, “Tunnit (Tornit, Baffin island), according to tradition, were a gigantic race formerly inhabiting the northeastern coast of Labrador, Hudson strait, and southern Baffin island. Ruins of old stone houses and graves, which are ascribed to them by the present Eskimo, are found throughout this entire section, penetrating only slightly, however, into Ungava bay” (Hawkes 1916: 143). 4. See Lucinda Ramberg’s (2009) essay “Magical Hair as Dirt” for a description of the way the Indian government distributed packets of shampoo to the devotees of a South Indian goddess in order to reform the sexuality of the women. 5. Yatsushiro, a Japanese American who grew up in Hawaii, was first exposed to anthropology as an internee at Poston, an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. His first job after graduating from Cornell (where he completed a dissertation with Alexander Leighton on social organization and governance in Poston) was at McGill, where he turned his attention to the Inuit. His research technically focused on the transition to wage employment, but more broadly its subject was the “governing of men” in the Canadian context. Nelson Graburn and I visited Yatsushiro in his apartment in Hawaii in 2004, when he was ninety-four years of age. Yatsushiro had asked Graburn if he would become responsible for his Arctic materials, which included boxes of correspondence, field notes, photographs, films, and other materials related to his research in the Canadian Arctic. Quvianaqtuq’s letter was among this material. 6. For example, a 1911 publication of the Australian government warned, “Every consumptive [is] a source of danger” (Bashford 2003: 137).

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7. Percy Moore was “director of the Indian and Northern Health Service programs of the federal Department of Health and Welfare from their inception in 1946 to his retirement in 1965” (Nixon 1989: 166). One of his foremost concerns was the treatment of tuberculosis in the native populations under his care. The notion that uncontrolled tuberculosis in native communities was a “menace” to the white population can also be found in Stewart (1936), which suggests, “Such tuberculosis-soaked groups as the Indians, mingling with the general population in the western provinces, constitute a very great menace to the health and life of people in general” (1936: 675). 8. “The aim of open-air treatment in sanatoria was to reform consumptives into responsible, self-governing, non-infective (‘safe’), and hygienic citizens” (Bashford 2003: 135). This entailed a complete overhaul of the patient’s sense of self. “The ideal sanatorium’s disciplinary regime aimed radically to reform the tuberculous person, who not infrequently voluntarily submitted themselves, their selves, for re-making” (139). In the tuberculosis sanatoria of the turn of the century, every minute of the patient’s day was regulated. One patient in an Australian sanatorium wrote, “I am in a Reformatory . . . hedged with bye-laws, where the days are cut into lengths for rest and exercise, with intervals for temperature taking and meals. The Doctor’s word is law” (quoted in Bashford 2003: 141). Patients were expected to comply with the strict regimen of rest, eating, and exercise. The same Australian patient wrote, “Before meals we lie on lounges silent for one hour. . . . After meals we lie again on lounges, like gorged boa-constrictors, for half an hour, and then, if ordered, walk out at a snail’s pace. When I first saw the patients creeping about, I pitied the poor feeble creatures, but found that it was regulation pace, and I was frequently pulled up for my jaunty tread” (quoted in Bashford 2003: 141). The salutary effects of fresh air were also emphasized, and in the early sanatoria, individual chalets were built so that patients could sleep out of doors with the air circulating freely around them as they slept. 9. As Dr. William Barclay pointed out, such methods were carried out despite a lack of scientific evidence of their efficacy (Grygier 1994: 109). 10. Streptomycin and para-aminosalicylic acid salts (PAS) became widely available by 1948, and isoniazid (INH) followed in 1952. Used in combination, these drugs made the effective treatment and prevention of tuberculosis possible, and they were available at no cost to patients (Grzybowski and Allen 1999). With the introduction of drug therapy for tuberculosis treatment, institutionalization was no longer the only option for care in the 1950s. For example, the World Health Organization had instituted programs in Africa that focused on domiciliary treatment and training indigenous health care workers (Hodgson 1982). 11. In an address to the Anglican Synod at Inuvik, W. L. Falconer, a doctor and a regional superintendent for the Indian and Northern Health Services, gave the rationale for the evacuations: “It has been stated that the Natives, and particularly the Eskimo, should remain in the North for treatment, where he would be near his home and relatives for treatment. The Department policy is that many should be evacuated to a central sanatorium such as the Camsell. . . . As a tax supported service, one central hospital is less costly in Edmonton than

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a number of small units in the North or even one single unit in the North. The cost of transportation of supplies for a patient in hospital for a year, is more than the transportation cost of evacuating the patient to Edmonton” (cited in Staples et al. 1993: 6). 12. During this period patients were generally kept in Canadian sanatoria between six months and two years, but, as Wherrett (1977) observes, Inuit were generally kept longer than non-Inuit. Their entire treatment was carried out in the institutions, including that which would otherwise become domiciliary care because it was not deemed practical in the Arctic. At the end of 1953, 2,627 aboriginal people and 348 Inuit were accommodated in sanatoria (Grzybowski and Allen 1999). The average length of stay for Inuit in southern sanatoria between 1953 and 1964 was twenty-eight months (Nixon 1988: 67). 13. The sanatorium was viewed by health and government officials as an opportunity to “educate and civilize” indigenous peoples (Staples et al. 1993). 14. Manning joined the Arctic Division of the Department of Resources and Development (which was responsible for Inuit administration from 1950 to 1953) in 1952 as a translator and interpreter specifically to help with translation on the Eastern Arctic Patrol (Grygier 1994: 32). 15. The departments of the Canadian Government responsible for the care of the Inuit were renamed and reorganized several times. In 1950 the Northern Affairs Program of the Department of Resources and Development took charge (Bonesteel 2008), but after 1953 Inuit administration came under the jurisdiction of the department of Northern Affairs and National Resources. From 1945 to 1955 Inuit health fell under the Indian Health Services of the Department of National Health and Welfare. In 1955 the IHS was renamed the Indian and Northern Health Services (Grygier 1994). 16. In 1957, R. A. J Phillips, director of the Arctic Division of Canada’s Department of Northern Affairs, responding to the accusations that his department was insensitive to the plight of Inuit hospitalized in the South with tuberculosis, stated, “Our present means of keeping relatives in touch with patients is by letters, tape recordings and by photographs.” Earlier he had declared, “We would like to get tapes and messages into every settlement and area from which Eskimo patients come.” Phillips was not satisfied with the idea that only people in the larger Inuit settlements visited by the C. D. Howe would be able to receive messages (Eskimo Economy and Welfare 1957). 17. The medical superintendent of Moose Factory Hospital protested that the RCMP patrolled these places about once a year, but certainly they would not take along a tape recorder, and if they did there would be no electrical supply with which to use it (Eskimo Economy and Welfare 1956a). 18. The e-number has been changed. 19. See Tester (2002: 202); Tester, McNicoll, and Irniq (2001); and Grygier (1994: 129) for information on these letters. 20. Tester, McNicoll, and Irniq (2001: 137) also question whether the mass evacuations of Inuit were necessary after the use of streptomycin and isoniazid were introduced in 1952, reducing the need for bed rest and surgery. 21. Quvianaqtuq’s argument resonates with Mariella Pandolfi’s contention that the attention medical practitioners in humanitarian interventions place

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upon “microlevel practices” often “eclipses a more critical view of humanitarian intervention’s broad effects and engenders the tendency to sympathize with an uncritical view of humanitarian intervention” (Pandolfi 2008: 160). 22. I am particularly interested here in the relationship between bureaucracy and indifference. In Economy and Society Max Weber writes at length about bureaucracy, characterizing it (in ideal typical terms) as rule-bound, hierarchical, and operating according to norms of rational law. Indifference is produced because bureaucracies must operate according to abstractions and thus “without regard for persons” (1968: 975). For Hannah Arendt, bureaucracy as a “rule by nobody” (1970: 38) creates indifference by distancing the bureaucrats from the people they are making decisions about (see especially Arendt 1964). Recent work in anthropology has attempted to complicate Weber’s ideal type of bureaucracy and show the ways it fails to describe the complexity of empirical reality. Michael Herzfeld (1992), for example, also argues that bureaucracies facilitate the production of indifference—but not tout court. Instead Herzfeld argues that bureaucracies reserve their indifference for those who are considered social outsiders. Others have argued that bureaucracies marshal their own kind of magic and thus are not as disenchanted as they might appear (Das 2004; Taussig 1997), or that bureaucracies work and fail to work in unexpected and sometimes arbitrary ways (Scherz 2011; Gupta 2012; Fassin 2012). Some have claimed that bureaucracy’s “rationality” or “transparency” is more ideological than heuristic (e.g., Heyman 1995; Ballestero 2012). Along these lines, Kregg Hetherington (2011) shows the way bureaucratic documents for the “guerilla auditors” with whom he worked in Paraguay never function as transparent sources of information, but rather as material means of accessing power. Hoag (2011) makes the interesting point that this move—to look at bureaucracies at the level of quotidian practice—resonates with Donna Haraway’s (1998) charge that we should attend to the connections and openings that “situated knowledges” provide and resist the temptation of adopting a “view from nowhere.” I agree with these anthropologists of bureaucracy that things are always messier, more complicated, and more interesting “on the ground” and that bureaucracy cannot be reduced to its ideal type. I am also sympathetic to Haraway’s charge that we need to continually deconstruct the view from nowhere as the most faithful representation of the world at large. However, in this book I want to argue that there is a difference between reducing something (in this case bureaucracy) to its ideal type and recognizing the efficacy of its form (Kohn 2013), which in this case involves the reproduction and circulation of a view from nowhere. In this chapter I want to recognize the efficacy of the bureaucratic form and the way that form works on people, such as the Inuit, who form part of a bureaucratic state, in this case Canada. That the form of bureaucracy, which turns life into an indifferent value, has an effect on the psychic lives of colonized people is something that I hope will become clear throughout the book. 23. The court transcripts of the trial have been lost, but the notes of the magistrate, A. H. Gibson, remain, as do fragments of the transcript that were reproduced in the magistrate’s address to the jury.

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24. The magistrate switches from first-person reported speech to the second person in his notes. The corrections are mine. 25. However contradictory it may seem, it is not surprising that the penalty for assisting suicide in Canada was initially death. It is clear that it is not so much death that is the problem, but who or what is able to expose an individual to death. 26. Gibson makes the connection between suicide and sovereignty clear later in his speech: As to what has been said about Eskimo custom another thing possibly should be mentioned. Without any doubt if the Government, which has the direction of affairs in the country where these people live, is minded to initiate a better way of life, a better observance of humanitarian practices, if in particular they are determined or wish to visit extreme penalties or any penalties on the people, it may be, and perhaps you may feel quite definitely that it is, the duty of the Government to establish an alternative so that the native may say “I don’t need to exercise my tribal customs upon my mother or my relatives and bring about merciful deaths; there is a place provided by the Government where these people can be looked after.” (Stipendiary Magistrate of the Northwest Territories 1949b)

27. See also Brody (1975: 26–29) and van den Steenhoven (1962: 123–25). 28. In thinking through this issue, Felicity Aulino reminded me of the lines of the Somali poet Ali Dhux, cited in critiques of humanitarianism: “A man tries hard to help you find your lost camels. / He works more tirelessly than even you / But in truth he does not want you to find them, ever” (quoted in Maren 1997: 116). 29. In a research report for the Prevention Research Center and School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley, Pamela Stern describes the surprising relationship between alcohol and the administration of Canada’s northern territories. She notes that by the 1960s, “While alcohol was clearly understood by [northern administrators] as dangerous for Indians and often for Inuit, they also regarded alcohol as an essential ingredient for the establishment of civilization in the North and as a perk necessary to attract qualified nonNative professionals to work in the North” (Stern n.d.: 9). So in order to be civilized, natives needed to be able to drink, yet it was very difficult to imagine them drinking responsibly. Were they also bound to fail at drinking? Stern goes on to note, “Anthropologists John and Irma Honigmann,” who wrote several reports for the Department of Northern Affairs and Natural Resource Development in the 1960s, “appear to have regarded drinking as simply one more cultural citizenship practice, like voting or serving on the community council, for which Inuit required tutelage” (Stern n.d.: 13). 30. Residential schools, initiated by the Department of Northern Affairs on behalf of the federal government, were set up in Chesterfield Inlet (1955), Yellowknife (1958), Inuvik, (1959), and Churchill (1964). Until the “hostel” was set up in Iqaluit, children of high school age from communities around Iqaluit were sent to the Chesterfield Inlet school (King 1999: 10). 31. As I noted in the introduction, I use the term “postcolonial” to emphasize the way our contemporary worlds are haunted by the colonial in ways we do

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not fully understand (cf. Good et al. 2008). By invoking Coetzee’s work I am implicitly accepting the idea that it very often makes sense to speak of “the postcolonial” in the singular, thus gesturing to the traction of the analytic “postcolonial” in a variety of historical contexts. I am not, however, suggesting that the South African and Canadian experiences are identical, or that their differences are insignificant, but rather that something critical about the force of anonymity, the act of transposing the individual and the population, holds in situations where medical bureaucracy and colonialism intersect. See Good et al. (2008: 13–14) for a discussion of the way scholars engage the question of diversity with regard to the colonial project. See also Stoler (2001) for an extensive discussion on the possibility of comparative work in (post-)colonial contexts, including North America, and especially for her discussion of how to think about the commensurability of analytic categories in comparative postcolonial histories. 32. When I have spoken to audiences about the question of desire, people often think I must be talking narrowly about sexual desire. I find this surprising, but perhaps I shouldn’t given Foucault’s message that the “truth” of any individual is traced to her sexual desire. In fact, I am talking about desire in a much more general sense, as the force that moves us beyond ourselves—at least beyond our present state of being. So, for example, Freud’s death drive is also a kind of desire. Speaking, emitting words into the world, also involves a kind of desire. I suppose that using the term “desire” has the beneficial effect of muddying the waters; the terrain of conflicting desires that are more obvious in the realm of sexual desire comes to be associated with other kinds of desires, including the desire to have a “dead Eskimo,” to cite just one example. When Foucault speaks of the “binary structure” that runs through modern society, he is saying that the modern biopolitical state is inherently, even structurally, racist. That is, in one reading of Foucault’s 1976 lectures to the Collège de France (Stoler 1995), he is saying that the sovereign right to kill reemerges in modern society through the “tactic” of racism, a form of binary thinking that separates society (understood to be structured by biopolitics) into those who deserve to live (and to have that life protected, extended, and amplified) and those who deserve to die. Racism is “primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die” (Foucault 2003: 254). More importantly, it establishes a positive relation between the right to kill and the assurance of life. It posits that “ ‘the more you kill, the more deaths you will cause’ or ‘The very fact that you let more die will allow you to live more’ ” (Foucault 2003: 255). This binarism, suggested Foucault, is intrinsic rather than extrinsic to biopolitics. In fact, it solves its essential paradox: how can the biopolitical state, ostensibly committed to the protection and production of life, kill with such abandon? He writes, “[Wars] are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purposes of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. . . . At stake is the biological existence of a population” (1990: 137).

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So while the explicit desire of the biopolitical state is to preserve the life of its citizens (its body politic), it is haunted by the other side of its binary logic— that there are some who don’t deserve to be part of the citizenry. I say “haunted” because the vitalist, life-affirming logic of biopolitics that makes its way into policies, reports, and laws has its own psychic life, a life that reveals this binarism without the slightest need for scholarly analysis. That is, the sovereign desire to kill shows up even where it is most repressed. (Agamben’s move was to show that that binary logic describes the state of exception where all of us live, not just those of us excluded from life-sustaining measures through racism. See Agamben 1998.) But, as many scholars have pointed out, how likely we are to be killed or allowed to die in a biopolitical regime follows familiar and tragic sociopolitical divisions. Both seem to me important observations. Agamben was pointing to the fundamental arbitrariness of the binarism, other scholars to its sociopolitical history and reality. When we refuse to pigeonhole Freud into the “hydraulic theory of sexual drives,” we can see that he actually allows us another set of tools to imaginatively access the complexity of biopolitical desire. After witnessing the First World War, Freud asserted that “we are once again living psychologically beyond our means,” and by this he means that we refuse to recognize our murderous desires or the fact that we too will someday die (Freud 2005: 193). This is precisely what Agamben understood years later: when society is construed as that which must be defended from biological others—others who could contaminate the body politic—the line dividing those who must live and those who must die could shift at any moment. And thus the contingent “truth” of modern Western society, born out of a certain kind of repression, is that it is a killing machine. The psychic life biopolitics can reveal this to us. 33. Hannah Arendt’s way of describing this dilemma was that “contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings—the kind that are put in concentration camps by foes and in internment camps by their friends” (Arendt 1978). 34. Hicks dates the transition from the “historical pattern of suicide by Inuit” (that is, enacted primarily by older men) to the “present day pattern of suicide by Inuit” (predominantly undertaken by youth) as beginning in the 1980s in the Canadian Eastern Arctic (2007: 31). 35. See Lee and Kleinman (2003) for an important discussion of suicide as resistance in China. See Niezen (2009) for a discussion of suicide clusters as collective resistance to healing. 36. What the RCMP intended by shooting the dogs and what kind of threat the dogs actually posed is now very much in contention. The question for many Inuit is whether the dog shootings were part of an organized campaign to bring Inuit into fixed settlements and to end their way of life, which centered on hunting and trapping. In testimony before the Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development in 2005, Inuit elders observed that at that time the dogs were their “sole means of transport,” and without them, “hunters had no choice but to abandon their fishnets, their traplines” (Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development 2005: 2). After that, “people became dependent on government, so they were waiting for welfare cheques

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to come in. Before that time, at least they could go out on the land—go hunting and fishing, go to the tree line to pick up their wood, and so forth” (3). In 2006 the RCMP published a final report on the subject in which they maintained that allegations of mass slaughter of Inuit dogs carried out by the government or the RCMP were misleading. Instead they claimed that the RCMP did shoot dogs at times, but it was for health and safety reasons, to control canine diseases, to abide by dog ordinances, and at the request of dog owners (Royal Canadian Mounted Police 2006). The RCMP has responded to the contention that it conducted an organized slaughter of Inuit sled dogs in many ways, perhaps the most interesting being the protestation that retired RCMP attest they had amicable relationships with the Inuit, so why would they ever do such a thing? See especially “Interim Report—RCMP Review of Allegations Concerning Inuit Sled Dogs” (Royal Canadian Mounted Police 2005: 16). One of the reasons that Inuit and the RCMP may have such different understandings of the events is that Inuit are responding in part to an unstated/unspeakable colonial desire and not always to explicit policy. See my discussion here concerning Jamesie’s response to Yatsushiro’s questions. For a discussion of the position of the dog in Inuit society, see Laugrand and Oosten (2002). For a nuanced and thoughtful discussion of the shootings, see the work of Francis Lévesque (2010). 37. In testimony before the Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development, an RCMP representative asserted: There is other historical data indicating that an epidemic in 1959–1960 wiped out 90% of the dogs in the southern portion of Baffin Island. Approximately 200 dogs died within a month and half at Frobisher Bay. Dogs belonging to the RCMP were so emaciated and rundown that six that did not die were humanely destroyed. These are statistical facts. What doesn’t come through is the very real threat of aggression on the part of diseased animals and the danger the community was therefore exposed to. (Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development 2005: 8)

What is particularly interesting is the way that the right to use force is grounded in the protection of the health of citizens. 38. See especially Taylor (2007) and Younger-Lewis (2005). 39. Jamesie imaginatively understands what cannot be spoken within the biopolitical regime in the Canadian North. However, he is not the only Inuit that sensed an unspoken, and perhaps unspeakable, colonial desire to be rid of the natives. George Koneak, an elder from Northern Quebec, testified before the Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development, “To try to diminish our numbers as Inuit, our dogs were being killed” (Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development 2005: 2). In a documentary produced by Makivik Corporation, Echo of the Last Howl, one elder suggests, “It seems they just wanted to wipe out the Inuit by getting rid of their livelihood” (Grenier and Fradette 2004). 40. As Catherine Mills points out, such affective knowledge is not always easy to put into words. She writes, “Focus on affectivity suggests that ethicality cannot and indeed should not be constrained by the limits of discursive intelligibility” (Mills 2005: 208).

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41. See Good et al. (2008: 14–17) for a discussion of the unsayable in relation to subjectivity.

3. anonymous care 1. The text facing the image reads, “The King is helping all the children in his lands. He is giving aid to the Eskimo children also and has instructed His servants the Police to proceed in this way. . . . The Police will then arrange that every child will receive help from the trader when it is needed” (Bureau of Northwest Territories and Yukon Services 1947: 19). 2. Charles Taylor suggests that this professionalization is a signature of Western modernity: “The individual has been taken out of a rich community life and now enters into a series of mobile, changing, revocable associations, often designed merely for highly specific ends. We end up relating to each other through a series of partial roles” (1989: 502). In Joannasie’s account, the RCMP officer was trained to interact with those in his jurisdiction according to their “partial roles” as miscreants and lawbreakers and not as brothers, sons, fathers, hunters, or part of extended family lineages that would outlive the individual concerned. 3. For example, in 1999, the year that Nunavut became a territory, the mayor of a small settlement published a statement in a Nunavut newspaper chiding a media organization for taking too much credit for reducing the number of suicides. As a corrective, she sent a message of support to those who work on the front lines (and, pointedly, not to those in the media): “My message to those unselfish caregivers is that, though you may not get media attention . . . you are the true champion of life and teacher to many of us, your services are the contributing factors to many of the lives that you have helped to spare” (Panimera 1999). In Nunavut determining who the true champion of life is has become contested territory. 4. This phrase actually comes from Kay Redfield Jamison, whom Marsh cites at length. Jamison argues passionately that “ignoring the biological and psychopathological causes and treatments of suicidal behavior is clinically and ethically indefensible” (cited in Marsh 2013: 749). 5. Lisa Wexler and Joseph Gone suggest that the idea that “suicide expresses underlying psychological problems” is an unexamined (and ultimately misguided) normative assumption that underpins most suicide prevention interventions in indigenous communities. By contrast, indigenous communities often see suicide as expressing “historical, cultural, community and family disruption” (Wexler and Gone 2012: 800). In Nunavut specifically, Michael Kral describes the contemporary “polarization between psychiatric and indigenous/community methods of healing and intervention” (2012: 308). Although this schism clearly exists, the way the notion of pathology gets taken up in Nunavut (partly because of the lack of infrastructure for mental health services [Hood et al. 1991; Hood et al. 1993; Kassam 2006]) is often through a bureaucratization of responses to suicide—there should be a protocol in place to follow—rather than through intensive psychiatric treatment of suicidal patients. 6. Lisa Wexler and Joseph Gone comment, “Although taking away suicidal people’s (and their families’) civil rights might provide immediate safety, it can also be seen as an extension of cultural subjugation and colonial intrusion.

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Moreover, this standard practice also runs counter to the working assumptions that many AI/AN communities have about the social underpinnings of suicide and can further alienate the person who is suicidal from the social and cultural context in which effective assistance is most likely to emerge” (2012: 804). 7. The Kitikmeot is an administrative region of Nunavut. 8. See chapter 1 for a discussion of Cora Diamond’s (2008) chapter “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy.” 9. In using the term “reeducation” I am thinking again of Coetzee’s (1998) Life and Times of Michael K, which I discuss more fully in chapter 2. 10. These are hard words to write, but I think they need to be written. Lisa Wexler and Joseph Gone make the point that even the assumption that suicidal thoughts or acts should be immediately addressed by professional mental health services has a particular cultural history not necessarily shared by native communities. “Suicide in indigenous communities is frequently identified as the terminal outcome of historical oppression, current injustice, and ongoing social suffering” (2012: 801), forces that individual counseling may not be able to address adequately. 11. This is not to say that when a suicide occurs it is not incredibly painful and unexpected. It is just that it also becomes “yet another suicide.” 12. It is not surprising, then, that a proposed suicide intervention and prevention strategy for Nunavut listed the Ministerial Youth Advisory Tobacco Team (MYATT) as one of the government’s existing “measures to combat suicide, directly and indirectly” (Government of Nunavut 2007: 20). 13. One must remember here that within a biopolitical regime, the sovereign relationship to life and death shifts. It becomes the power to “make” live and “let” die rather than take life and let live (Foucault 2003: 241). 14. Kamatsiaqtut literally means “those who take good care of you,” care used here to suggest the preservation of something (Nelson Graburn, personal communication). 15. This ever-widening circle of care is also witnessed in the Kamatsiaqtut’s recent (and subtle) name change. Kamatsiaqtut is no longer a crisis line but a help line. Therefore, according to a program brochure, it is “for everyone, not only those in crisis. If you find yourself needing someone to talk to, whether you’re lonely, whether you’re hurting or whether you’re in distress, or you need someone to share good news with, please give us a call.” 16. See Peter Kulchyski (2006) for a searing critique on the use of anonymity to avoid responsibility in non-Inuit communities. 17. To get a sense of these programs and initiatives, see especially Ajunnginiq Center 2006; Alianait Inuit-Specific Mental Wellness Task Group 2007; Bobet 2009; Chachamovich and Tomlinson 2010;  National Inuit Youth Council 2004; Government of Nunavut 2007; Health Canada 2008; Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami n.d.; Tagalik and Joyce 2006. 18. Cavell says that horror “is the title I am giving to the perception of the precariousness of human identity, to the perception that it may be lost or invaded, that we may be, or may become, something other than we are, or take ourselves for; that our origins as human beings need accounting for, and are unaccountable” (Cavell 1979: 418–19).

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19. At that time telephones worked through a system of exchanges that have now been changed to numerical area codes. Knowing that the exchange for his area was “Mansion House,” Varah requested the number “MAN 9000” to evoke the sense of human emergency that suicide presented. To deal with the volume of calls received, Varah soon began to recruit volunteers to help him answer the phone. The recruitment and training of volunteers marked the beginning of what Varah would later call “a lay movement for befriending the suicidal” (Varah 1985: 24). Calling his fledgling organization “The Samaritans,” Varah said, “A Samaritan, having no professional skill to offer, can only offer himself; and this is what the majority of the clients want more than anything else; someone who will feel a deep concern for them and be their special friend on a human level (which is not possible for the psychiatrist or parson and would not be desirable if it were possible)” (quoted in Dublin 1963: 182). 20. Following the establishment of the Samaritans in Britain, there was a similar florescence of suicide hotlines in the United States. Between 1960 and 1971 the number of twenty-four-hour suicide hotlines shot up from 4 to 253 (France 1975; McCord and Packwood 1973). In Canada the first recorded hotline was “Telecare National” in Sudbury, Ontario, which opened in 1964 (Twine and Barraclough 1998: 345). The emergence of the hotline in Britain and North America coincided with a moment of great upheaval in mental health services. The normalization (anti-psychiatry) movement of the 1960s helped to shift services away from institutions toward “community development, deinstitutionalization, and self-help” (Twine and Barraclough 1998). 21. Anonymity, one of the hallmarks of contemporary hotlines, was actually considered optional in many of those early hotlines. When the Samaritans first began accepting calls in Britain, their duties included taking the caller to the hospital if he or she wished, and even doing home visits after the crisis had passed. But it quickly became apparent that a significant number of the callers to the hotlines were refusing to provide identifying details (Litman et al. 1965; Tabachnick and Klugman 1965; Waltzer and Hankoff 1965: 312). Scholars became interested in what the difference might be between “no-name” callers and the others (Tabachnick and Klugman 1965; Wilkins 1969; Nelson et al. 1975), but research on this point proved inconclusive. Over time anonymity came to be seen not as something to be investigated but as a defining feature of a crisis line. In a 1973 survey of crisis centers across the United States, two scholars from the University of Iowa cite caller anonymity as one of the explanations for the popularity and “phenomenal growth” of hotlines (McCord and Packwood 1973: 723; cf. Hornblow 1986). Then, in a 1976 survey of Canadian Crisis Centres, anonymity was cited as one of the “principles” of a crisis center, along with “confidentiality and client (or caller) initiative” (Twine and Barraclough 1998: 344). As many observers point out, it is the telephone that makes it possible for the person seeking help to choose between anonymous or confidential care. Of course, confidentiality raises many ethical issues about how to intervene in the situation where there is a lethal suicide plan (Twine and Barraclough 1998: 348). By 1998, Twine and Barraclough even refer to anonymity as an “entrenched” principle in crisis-line work (348) and suggest, revising history

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somewhat, that the anonymity of the telephone was one of the contributing factors in the emergence of the telephone hotline in the 1960s (344). 22. By definition, if one simply needs to establish contact with another human being, it doesn’t matter who that human being is, or what credentials he or she possesses. 23. Dublin, who was vice president and statistician of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, spent many years researching and studying suicide. Some of his books include To Be or Not to Be: A Study of Suicide, published in 1933, and Suicide: A Sociological and Statistical Study, published in 1963. These remarks were presented at the first annual conference of the American Association of Suicidology in Chicago in 1958 (Shneidman 1969). 24. Rosenbaum and Calhoun, for example, describe the emergence of the crisis hotline in glowing terms as “a major therapeutic force,” albeit one whose “value and effectiveness have never been empirically demonstrated” (1977: 325). They claim, however, that a hotline’s unique aspects (especially the anonymity it provides for client and therapist, as well as its ability to bridge distances [328]) allow them to defend it “theoretically and practically” if not empirically. “In the absence of any hard evidence to the contrary,” they write, “most people [including the authors] are content to assume that it offers an effective service” (337). For Rosenbaum and Calhoun the volume of calls and the enthusiasm people express make it clear that the hotlines are performing an important service. On this lack of empirical evidence for the effectiveness of hotlines, see also Hornblow 1986; Stein and Lambert 1984; and Lester 1997. 25. The argument they want to make really centers on how to evaluate a crisis center’s effectiveness. If crisis centers are seen as a social movement, then “evaluation cannot be limited, in the case of crisis centers, to the crisis intervention process or to a description of the programs’ structures, policies, and services” (Echterling and Wylie 1981: 346). Instead, the historical and social dimensions of a line need to be considered as well. 26. The religious undertones of suicide prevention work are obvious. Chad Varah suggests that the care provided by the Samaritans “is not merely a method of making those receiving it less likely to kill themselves, but also a philosophy and a way of life. Some volunteers have gone so far as to say that ‘Samaritanism’ is their religion, but it isn’t necessary to go so far in order to be deeply influenced in one’s living away from our Centers by the concept” (1985: 34). It is a contentious idea even today, and one that is not often explicitly stated, but within the hotline movement, caring—being able to care, being willing to care, demonstrating that one cares (for other human beings)—becomes almost more important than the effectiveness or the results of that care. Even Varah, who insists that the sole purpose of a hotline is to save lives, admits, “Amongst the lives we have saved from being wasted are our own” (1985: 60). 27. Lisa Wexler would argue that this alienation is a mark of the ongoing colonialism in indigenous communities: “In subtle, yet ubiquitous ways Native People are forced into Western paradigms. This subtlety renders modern colonization invisible or ambiguous” (Wexler 2006: 2945). 28. Joseph Gone describes a “cottage industry devoted to the surveillance and management of the ‘mental health’ problems of Native Americans” that

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“proliferates in the United States and Canada without abatement” (2008: 310). He further pushes us to ask whether contemporary mental health services are actually forms of Western cultural proselytization and describes a very conscious refusal by some Native Americans to use such services or adopt their discourses. He quotes a very revealing dialogue: Interviewer: Under what circumstances would you take your grandkids, say, into Behavioral Health or Mental Health at [the Indian Health Service clinic]? Native Respondent: I would say that’s kind of like taboo. You know, we don’t do that. We never did do that. . . . I guess it’s like a war, but they’re not using bullets anymore. . . . [Sigh] Like ethnic cleansing, I guess you could say. They want to wipe us out. Wipe the Indian reservations out so they could join the melting pot of the modern White society. And therefore the Indian problem will be gone forever. . . . But they’re using a more shrewder way than the old style of bullets. (310)

29. See Kaufert and O’Neil (1990) for a discussion of the way statistics make the risk involved in Inuit childbirth so real that evacuation to southern hospitals was the only “reasonable” option for Inuit women. 30. There is certainly a way in which biopolitics is experienced as murder. Is there a sense in which the colonial agent and the postcolonial bureaucrat also want a dead Eskimo or an Eskimo dead? 31. Audra Simpson describes settler colonial desire in terms of “shadow logics.” Thus the shadow logic of the claiming and owning of native land is “ ‘white settlers’ desires to become Indian (even where they were revolted by Indians)” (2008b: 253). The expectation that Inuit will continue to commit suicide could also be called the shadow logic of suicide prevention efforts. 32. See Elizabeth Povinelli’s concept of the “quasi-event”—an event that “never quite achieve[s] the status of having taken place” (2011: 13). When an ethical response can only be figured as a response to an event or a crisis, suffering that is “ordinary, chronic, and cruddy rather than catastrophic, crisis-laden, and sublime” (2011: 3) does not warrant an ethical response.

4. life-of-the-name 1. It is not that the existence of namesakes eradicates the pain of death. Students participating in the Inuit Studies program at the Nunavut Arctic College in Iqaluit had this to say about the subject: During the time we were interviewing the elders about shamanism and name-giving, many people passed away. It has been a sad few weeks for the families of Tikisaq, Suvinai, Joanasie, Tommy, Carlie, Ellie, Nutaulaaq, little Leah, Pitsiulaaq and Fred Coman. Although we have buried their bodies they will still be with us through the lives of the newborn babies who will carry their names. The families of those who have recently passed away will rejoice at having their loved ones again amongst them. This is the Inuit life cycle. Indeed, the sun will come back and give birth to new life. (Saladin d’Anglure 2001: 206)

2. There are interesting parallels between diverse forms of spirit possession and Inuit naming practices. For example, spirit possession also disrupts the notion of a sovereign and singular self, thus allowing the self and life to be

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understood as “beside itself.” Spirit possession also “thickens interpersonal ties” (Boddy 1994: 423). For a fascinating discussion on the way anthropologists have moved from instrumentalizing and rationalizing spirit possession to a recognition of its powers at certain places and times, see Janice Boddy’s (1994) review article. 3. See Arendt (1958); Cavarero (2000); and Fassin (2010). 4. See also Balicki (1970); Guemple (1965); Nuttall (1992); and Williamson (1988). 5. This sense that we depend on others for our very lives is perhaps most difficult to fathom in highly developed Western countries such as Canada and the United States. In “Assisted Existence: An Ethnography of Being in Ecuador,” Elizabeth Roberts (2013) compellingly demonstrates the way people undergoing IVF treatment in Ecuador understand their lives (and, in fact, their very existence) as “assisted”—that is, dependent on the affective, financial, and technological interventions of family, friends, and medical professionals. In such a context, she argues, the notion of “assisted” reproduction does not cause undue cultural dissonance. However, in the context of Northern California, where Roberts has also done research, much work (in Obeyesekere’s [1990] sense of the “work of culture”) is done to square the notion of “assisted” reproduction with dominant discourses of individual autonomy and independence. In a striking move, Roberts connects the very possibility of a sense of individual autonomy with the comparatively more reliable and robust infrastructure in the United States. We can disavow the way we depend on others when the ways we are always already assisted by the supports of society are so seamless and dependable as to become invisible. This is not the case in what Ecuadorians call “nuestra realidad,” and so Roberts claims, “Life in less resourced places might have a lot to teach about how reality is made”—that is, life in less resourced places might be able to teach us that our being is always assisted. 6. The question of Inuit infanticide plays an important role in the literature on human demography (Damas 1994). However, there is a great deal of disagreement among ethnographers about how widespread the practice actually was (although most concede it did occur) and what can account for its prevalence (Damas 1994; Graburn 1994; Remie 1985). For the purposes of my argument, I am not as interested in how often infanticide occurred as in the relationship between infanticide and naming practices. Papion’s story, which appeared in the journal Eskimo (published by the Oblates with the intention of raising money in North America and Europe for their missions (Remie and Oosten 2002), is echoed in the ethnographic literature, which suggests that infants who could not be cared for, who were going to be “left behind” or “exposed to the elements,” were not given a name. More specifically, Jenness suggests that names were not given until two or three days after birth, when the family felt more certain that the child would survive and had decided not to let it die of exposure (Jenness 1922: 167). Weyer is less certain about the relationship between naming and infanticide but concedes, “The natural assumption however, is that the characteristic naming custom contributes a restraining influence against the killing of children, through fear of the ghost” (Weyer 1932: 133).

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Balicki, writing in 1970, is more categorical: “Naming had a restrictive influence on infanticide. . . . It was essential that infanticide take place prior to naming, since killing a named child might offend the spirit of the reincarnated person, and so the naming of unborn children in hopes of easing childbirth did restrain mothers from practicing infanticide” (Balicki 1970: 148–49). Guemple (1965), Burch (1994), and Alia (1994) agree. As Guemple puts it, “Names are given at birth and are conferred only if the child is born alive, gives promise of living, and is not to be killed” (1965: 324). The missionary Turquetil added, “For the Eskimo [the name] means everything. If the infant dies before it is given a name, there is no mourning” (Turquetil 1968: 43). 7. In this story Papion is struggling to explain the way names and survival are linked. The story underlines how the possibility (although not the assurance) of physical survival depends upon being given a name—being called into community. Without a name there was no chance of bodily survival. And although, as a Christian, Papion wants to distance himself from both infanticide and abortion, there are numerous other ways that “civilized” peoples refuse to name, to recognize others, and subsequently deny them entry into the human community. As Nancy Scheper-Hughes writes in her book on life in a shantytown in Brazil, “Human existence always presupposes the presence of another. That I have been ‘thrown’ into human existence at all presupposes a given moral relationship to an original (m)other and she to me” (1993: 23). One figure of what I am describing as the “call into language” may be the way a (m)other recognizes her child. For the Inuit, as for the women in Brazil that Scheper-Hughes wrote about, a baby is called into community. Such a “call” can occur before birth or even after death—or it can be withheld, as it sometimes was in the shantytown in Brazil where “angel babies” were considered predestined to die. 8. The way the name exceeds death is particularly apparent in the story of Iqallijuq as recounted by Bernard Saladin d’Anglure (1977). 9. There has been a move in medical anthropology, especially in its intersections with science studies and the important Latourian work on materialities, to privilege ontology over epistemology as a way to talk about the stakes of anthropology. And although I am interested in this move, especially in its recognition of the “thereness” of things that matter, I am hesitant about the ways that materiality comes to stand in for ontology tout court and bodies come to “speak” in ways not so different from the ways we used to speak for them. That is, there seems to be a ventriloquism effect in which our modes of speech are simply displaced onto the body (or matter, for that matter). Another way of putting this is that we rewrite our old versions of social constructivism with an eye to the possibility that things are co-constructors. “Ontology” then becomes the word to describe those mutually constructed, fleshy worlds. (I am also struck by the resoundingly Christian aspect of this move, as it echoes God taking the form of flesh as Jesus Christ.) Consequently, “ontology” comes to stand in for culture at a moment when the term that defined our discipline has become so overdetermined that we no longer know what to make of it: instead of talking about different cultures we talk about different ontologies. This has the intended effect of allowing anthropologists to make matter (and bodies) their subject matter, but I think it has the unintended effect of displacing the question of

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“being” or of a “thereness,” or a real that somehow exceeds these various ontologies. Perhaps it is simply a question of scale—the new ontologies allowing us to look more carefully at what makes up our specific worlds—yet I would argue that by abrogating the word “ontology” for those specific worlds, it forecloses an anthropological approach to ontology in that other sense. I consider my own work ontological in that other sense, in that I am interested in what it means for us to call another into being, and in ways of being that aren’t only fleshy. I think that this is not only “ontological” in the sense of co-constructing a particular world, but also in a broader sense, as it describes the prior conditions of possibility of human life. The uncertainty that I deal with in this book is also ontological in that it is existential. It is not about how we know what we know, but uncertainty about what the world is. 10. Elizabeth Roberts (2013) puts this another way when she argues that assisted life is the only kind there is. 11. The first residential schools for aboriginal children in Canada opened their doors in the 1870s. Duncan Campbell Scott, who spoke in 1920 on behalf the bill that would make school attendance compulsory for Indian children aged seven through fifteen, made the goal of such education very clear: “Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department, that is the whole object of this Bill” (cited in Watson 2013: 5). For the Inuit, the systematic imposition of these “reeducation” projects began somewhat later. The first federal “hostel” for Inuit children was opened in Chesterfield Inlet in 1951 (King 2006), and by 1955 a new educational policy advocated bringing Inuit children from scattered settlements into centralized schools (Rea 1968). The twinned goals of education and assimilation created a situation beset with everyday violence (see Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004). In 1998, shortly after the signing the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement, the largest class action suit in Canadian history, the Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper formally apologized on the behalf of the Canadian government for the harm the residential schools had caused its aboriginal communities as well as the policy that led to their creation. One of the conditions of the Settlement Agreement was the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools (Niezen 2013; Gadoua 2010). 12. In the twentieth century the status of Inuit within Canada was a very contested subject. Were they citizens of Canada or “wards of the state,” the official status of non-enfranchised First Nations (Bonesteel et al. 2008: v–vi)? Tester, however, notes, “By the early 1960s, following a period of conflicting directions in the development of Inuit policy, the direction had been set: ‘to give Eskimos the same rights, privileges, opportunities and responsibilities as all other Canadians—in short, to enable them to follow the natural life of Canada’ ” (Tester 1994: 170). 13. According to Cairns, “Frustration over the small numbers voluntarily seeking enfranchisement led to an amendment in 1920 that allowed compulsory enfranchisement. The provision was deleted in 1922 and reinstated in 1933, and remained in the Act in 1951. It does not appear to have ever been used” (2000: 49).

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14. The committee had been sitting for a year by the time Jenness testified and had already heard testimony from Indian Affairs administrators, doctors, educators, and the RCMP (Kulchyski 1993: 28). 15. In this case enfranchisement meant to become a citizen of Canada and cease to be Indian (or Eskimo); see Lawrence 2003. Kulchyski notes that after the Enfranchisement Act of 1869, “each year the Indian Affairs Branch reported on the number of Indians who had been enfranchised and took this number as an indicator of its success in solving the ‘Native problem’” (1993: 25). John L. Tobias (1983) suggests that since 1815 Canada’s goal has consistently been to eradicate Indian identity and culture through education or the “civilizing” process. 16. Kulchyski notes that in the post-1940 period, “It became harder for the government to ignore the increasing public attention given to this western-educated Native leadership, which was able to articulate the demands of Native people in a way the non-native public could understand” (1993: 25). 17. In Canada’s settler-colonial history, the connection to precolonial cultural practices often became a proxy for race (Lawrence 2003: 10; Simpson 2008b). 18. An Act to Amend and Consolidate the Laws Respecting Indians, S.C. 1876, c. 18, § 3.3 c, e. 19. With the passing of the Gradual Enfranchisement Act in Canada 1869, the only people eligible to be considered Indian were those who had at least one-quarter Indian blood (Lawrence 2003: 9). The Indian Act, created in 1876, set tighter controls: “No half-breed of a family (except the widow of an Indian, or a half-breed who has already been admitted into a treaty), shall . . . be accounted an Indian, or entitled to be admitted into any Indian treaty” (An Act to Amend and Consolidate the Laws Respecting Indians, S.C. 1876, c. 18, § 3e). See Audra Simpson (2008b) on the history of the racialization of indigenous identity in the United States and in Canada and the way it plays out in contemporary disputes over indigenous sovereignty. 20. In a curious inversion of Nazi racial politics, there is no such thing as racial purity, but instead a general stream of life that you are either part of or segregated from. 21. After one joint committee member gave a short speech criticizing Canada’s segregation and mistreatment of native peoples, the chairman said crisply, “I think it is only fair to say that the people of Canada through the government, are most anxious to do something in connection with this matter. That is why this committee has been formed” (Government of Canada 1947: 313). 22. “Once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of the State” (Foucault 2003: 256). See also Stoler (1995). 23. “To be sure,” Jenness notes, “the government has diligently searched for alternative or supplementary bases in the Arctic; but it has failed to find them in that region. To the best of our knowledge, the far north contains very little of value to us except minerals” (1964: 176). 24. Jenness continues his proposal: We should bring them in family groups, settle them in small colonies, and watch over them as zealously as a sergeant watches over the “other ranks” who have been committed to his charge. The colonies should be neither too large nor too small; not so large that the colonists can live their own lives with little reference to their white neigh-

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bours. . . . It should be located on the outskirts of a city rather than within it, so that the colonists will have more privacy and freedom of movement; but, what is more important it should be close to places of education, employment, and entertainment, so that the Eskimos will be forced to merge with the general population, the children with white children in the schools and playgrounds, the adults with white adults who have many of the same interests as themselves and are carrying out similar tasks. (Jenness 1964: 176)

25. The article reads as an ode to the strength and willpower of the modern individual. Reality will be respected, ties to the mourned object will be severed, and the ego will be, as he puts it, “free and uninhibited” (Freud 2005: 205) 26. This image of the absent other shares important similarities with the dream-image. Just as in the formation of dreams, thoughts and emotions are transformed into images through what Freud calls condensation and displacement (2010: 296). 27. According to D. W. Winnicott, the child learns to “bring people alive in the inner psychic reality apart from the reassurance of seeing, feeling, smelling” (1971: 29). 28. That is, if the image of the loved object persists after the loved object passes away, then the image of the other must have an independent existence. 29. In fact, Langer suggests, “Names are the very essence of mythic symbols; nothing on earth is a more concentrated point of sheer meaning than the little, transient, invisible breath that constitutes a spoken word. Physically it is almost nothing. Yet it carries more definite and momentous import than any permanent holy object” (1949: 390). 30. It is important to note that the critique of anonymous care in this book is not a critique of the literal failure to use someone’s proper name. A loving address can occur without using a proper name, and a proper name can be used on a list of people slated for “disappearance.” When names are used in an attempt to irrevocably fix the person addressed in his or her place, as in the case of hate speech or disappearance, for example, names actually function according to the pernicious fantasy of sovereign or divine power (see Butler 1997a). Because Inuit have such a complex relationship to names and naming, I have figured (or imagined) the alternative to anonymous care as the proper name in the Inuit context. What the Inuit practice of naming helps us to imagine is what Barbara Bodenhorn (2006) has called “the who of the name.” The “who” for Bodenhorn has to do with the embeddedness of the person who has been given a name in an ever-extending network of relations spawned by the name itself. Hannah Arendt (1958) called this ever-extending network the “web” of human relationships in which the human being as a “who” (a unique presence in the world) and not a “what” (a description of qualities) is irrevocably caught. This “who” of the name is what disappears in biopolitical versions of care, as well as state-sponsored disappearances and hate speech. It reemerges in every song (see chapter 6), if we understand song as way of interpellating the other without fixing her, or him, in place.

5. why two clocks? 1. Margaret Visser tells us that the word “bored,” which first appeared in English in 1766, literally meant “attacked as with a drill to the head” (Visser

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2002: 140). Inuit youth usually use the English word, but if they want to say “bored” in Inuktitut they would use kipingujunga. Alex Spalding and Thomas Kusugaq’s Inuktitut dictionary defines kipingujuq (adj.) as “he is lonesome; bored; frustrated” and kipingunaktuq as “that which causes loneliness or boredom: bad weather, alienating situation” (Spalding and Kusugaq 1998). 2. Christie and Halpern suggest, “By means of linear temporal reckoning we coordinate the pasts of other peoples into our own, we chronologically absorb them as we spatially absorb them through territorial conquest” (1990: 742). 3. See Walter Benjamin’s notion of “homogenous empty time” (1968a: 261). 4. Jaypeetee Arnakak, responding to a conversation we had had about the machinery of care in Iqaluit, said, “What I really want to do is celebrate the organic development of lives lived (my children’s lives), not the number of times that that life has had to access social programs over the course of existing.” 5. The speaker added an English plural to the Inuktitut word. 6. It is also evidence of the way nostalgia can be an active refusal of the “disempowering conditions of postcolonial life” (Battaglia 1995: 77). Through nostalgia the past and the present coexist. 7. Longing, of course, is closely related to nostalgia, the bête noire of pragmatic, forward-thinking subjects of modernity. Nostalgia is understood to imply a distaste for the present, an attitude that Baudelaire famously decried. The criticism of nostalgia (as a cultural form or analytic tool) is that it has no future (Hutcheon 1988; Robertson 1992). Nostalgia, it is said, binds us to the past in unproductive ways. Such alliances (of a self to a vanished past) ultimately betray a decline and decay that ought not to be made public—if one wishes to be productive and, above all, upwardly mobile. Today it is only those left behind by the present who can afford to be nostalgic, because they have nothing left to lose. Currently there is also an attempt to recuperate nostalgia, to bear witness to its possibilities, its spaces of production (Battaglia 1995; Stewart 1998; Strathern 1995). To this end, Marilyn Strathern distinguishes between two types of nostalgia, synthetic and substantive. Synthetic nostalgia imagines an irrevocable break between the past and the present and thus longs for the lost Eden. Substantive nostalgia, on the other hand, always has an effect on the living: it makes explicit “an attachment to a past that is and can only be realized in the present. The act of origin does not, as it were, exist until the [nostalgic] act is done” (Strathern 1995: 111–12). Strathern uses kinship as the prime example of substantive nostalgia. “Substantive nostalgia would come from thinking that kinship is the constitution of the past in the present, the enacting of obligations because a prior relationship exists, belonging to a family because of one’s name, being a child because one’s parents had children” (112; italics in original). Such nostalgic forms depend upon a relationship between past and present that is continually reenacted rather than a representational break with the past, thus contributing “to the making of persons in the present world” (113). The practices of naming I discuss in chapter 4 could be read in this sense as practices of nostalgia—a way of acknowledging the constitutive nature of the past in the present and of the present burden to reinstantiate the past. 8. Since John Borneman’s pivotal essay (2001) that argued that care (not kinship) should “ground” the human in anthropological analysis, care has become

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a central analytic for ethnographers. In that essay Borneman was interested less in forms of state care than in the way individuals persistently care for—in the sense of taking care of—those who are not necessarily linked by blood or marriage. Janelle Taylor (2008) makes a related argument about the salience of care in the context of dementia: perhaps it is not our cognitive abilities that make us persons (and thus ground our humanity) but instead the way we are caught up in networks of care. For Taylor, to care for someone is to recognize that someone as a person—and when dementia is involved, that means being willing to find sense in apparently nonsensical speech. In his response to Taylor’s piece, Lawrence Cohen (2008) points both to the beauty of her argument and to the way that people with no one to care for them (i.e., no one to recognize them as making a certain kind of nonnormative sense) may still be left out of the “personhood” game. He argues for a more radical kind of care—a form of listening, which he calls “ironic,” that does not require speech to conform to the binary of sense/nonsense or, in this case, knowing /not knowing. My argument in this chapter leans heavily on Cohen’s argument about ironic listening, and the possibility that we may care for the dead and they for us. 9. Foucault, in one of his early publications, says something similar: “More positively, an act of signification, even the most thwarted, the most elementary, the most bound-up in some perceptual content, opens onto a new horizon” (Foucault 1993: 40). 10. As Foucault notices, “When someone speaks, we understand what he says not only by a meaningful grasp of the words he uses and the sentence structures he puts into play, but we also let ourselves be guided by the vocal melody, which now modulates and trembles, now assumes the hardness and glow by which we recognize anger” (1993: 38–39). 11. As Stefania Pandolfo reminds us, for Aby Warburg the healing power of images resides in their ability to be both flesh and spirit, trace/writing and live presence, future and past. This is dramatized [for Warburg] in a segment of the [Hopi] serpent ritual, when live snakes captured in the desert are thrown into a sand drawing of the snake-lightening symbol; the drawing is obliterated and the snake is covered with sand, the sand of the image, in a spiral movement from image to living creature and from living creature to image, whereby the image is “vitalized,” and the living reptile is turned into an emblem staging an exchange of life and death, presence and absence, proximity and infinite distance, future and remote past. (Pandolfo n.d.)

12. For an excellent discussion of the shifting government policies regarding Inuit housing, as well as the relationship between clock time and rigid-frame houses, see Tester’s (2006) “Iglu to Iglurjuaq.” 13. Nelson Graburn (1982) describes the way the introduction of television also worked to unify settlement time. 14. For Freud, being fully modern means recognizing that experiences that evoke the uncanny, such as moments when inanimate objects appear animate, are simply archaic residues of our premodern ways of thinking. Overcoming these modes of thought “is purely an affair of ‘reality testing,’ a question of the

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material reality of the phenomena” (1955: 248). Avery Gordon asks what Freud might have learned from experiences of the uncanny if he had refused to explain them away (Gordon 1997: 50–58). I am asking a similar question in this chapter. 15. On South Baffin Island that conversion began in the late nineteenth century and continues today. As the connections between shamanism and contemporary Pentecostal movements in Nunavut reveal, conversion is rarely about leaving a world completely behind (Fletcher and Kirmayer 1997; Laugrand and Oosten 2007, 2010). 16. Cathrine Degnen makes a similar point about the contemporary healing properties of country life for the Innu of Sheshatshiu: “Community life and country life are not polar opposites but, rather, compose complementary parts of contemporary life in Sheshatshiu. People live in both settings and move between them, but when they talk about being in the country, they speak of a wholly distinct time and space from that of the community” (2001: 373). 17. I have tried to think about the way our Western concept of “life” sustains and is sustained by a particular way of thinking about the future, one that is not the only way Inuit have at their disposal for being in time. What I take for granted here is that Weber’s description of the spirit of capitalism and the way it invests our desires still resonates today, and, more importantly, still provides an apt description of some of the central modalities of being within the Canadian welfare state. If life itself has become a “resource” in the bureaucratic rationality of the welfare state, then we have a duty to protect it and make something of it—just as Weber describes the imperative that Puritans be conscientious stewards of their money by increasing its value. Inuit, as with other bureaucratic subjects, do not always fully assume these attitudes toward life. 18. Miriam Ticktin writes convincingly in Casualties of Care about the unintended consequences of “regimes of care” that are “grounded in a moral imperative to relieve suffering” (2011: 3). Ticktin describes the way these regimes of care (which include humanitarianism, certain movements for human rights, and the network against violence against women) shift the object of care from the citizen to the patient. In the case of immigration in France this effectively means that only those immigrants whose very lives are in danger are deserving of care. As Ticktin remarks, “While biology provides hope for a better life, this politics of care refuses inclusion or recognition under conditions of equality, which in this case would mean recognizing that all people can be self-enterprising subjects, able to engage and fashion themselves and actualize their aspirations and desires. Recognition is given instead to subjects of regimes of care as victims, as nonmoderns” (217). Ticktin goes on to observe, “Once one is affirmed as part of humanity and protected by a regime of care, one loses one’s political and social rights” (219). The solution for Ticktin is to strive for political rather than biological forms of recognition. She writes, “And although they may be liberated from a certain form of suffering . . . they are not liberated into full citizenship” (218). The question for indigenous communities is always how “liberating” citizenship and political recognition really is. As Glen Coulthard reminds us, in Frantz Fanon’s reading of Hegel’s masterslave dialectic, recognition from the “master” does not actually liberate but only

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allows the colonized to become an “emancipated slave” (Turner 1996: 146, cited in Coulthard 2007: 449). That is, liberal forms of recognition, premised on the recognition between wildly unequal parties, do not significantly transform the colonial relationship between indigenous peoples and the state or colonial power (Coulthard 2007: 438). Coulthard notes that although Fanon advocated a form of violence to break from the systematic oppression that characterizes colonialism, it’s not clear that it actually worked in the Algerian case (455). Coulthard, writing about the self-determination of indigenous people in Canada, advocates instead a form of self-recognition—finding liberation in a turning away from the colonial state and society “with the understanding that our cultures have much to teach the Western world about the establishment of relationships within and between peoples and the natural world that are profoundly non-imperialist” (456). This seems to be what James Clifford is marking when he writes of indigènitude as “a vision of liberation and cultural difference that challenges, or at least redirects, the modernizing agendas of nation-states and transnational capitalism” (2013: 16). Elizabeth Povinelli’s Economies of Abandonment (2011) deftly connects these questions of the recognition of indigenous peoples to the question of care and underlines Coulthard’s point that liberal politics of recognition do not suffice. At first glance it might seem that the book could be read as a primer of the “casualties of care” that Ticktin documents. After describing the lethal forms of abandonment indigenous communities have faced under the Howard government in Australia, Povinelli asks, “What does care consist of such that when a form of creating harm for others is thought of and experienced as a form of caring for others?” (58). But, in fact, such care—the care that Povinelli sees as creating harm—is precisely a state-sponsored (nonhumanitarian) form of care that in a certain sense recognizes indigenous subjects as political subjects, or citizens, of the Australian state. Although Povinelli would agree with the way late liberalism posits others as belonging to another time, or tense (nonmodern as opposed to modern, belonging to a genealogical society rather than being an autological subject), she has written extensively on the “cunning of recognition”—the way that the subjects of the very political recognition Ticktin calls for “are called to present difference in a form that feels like difference but does not permit any real difference to confront a normative world” (2011: 31). In a related move Povinelli demonstrates that neoliberal politics are such that having political recognition as a citizen (the right to claim rights) does not preclude being killed, in some cases slowly by withholding of the means to live, and in other cases more dramatically by state-sanctioned terror, detention, or execution. As Povinelli boldly puts it, “In neoliberalism to care for others is to refuse to preserve life if it lies outside market value” (159). In a sense Povinelli demonstrates the dangers of pinning our hopes on political recognition when those politics cannot but operate within a neoliberal horizon. While she also resoundingly critiques liberal empathy—the kind of affect that fuels humanitarian gestures of exception—Povinelli simultaneously expands our conception of what care might consist of. The question for Povinelli, then, becomes how to draw attention to, theorize, and care for the persistence of alternative social worlds within the present,

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worlds that operate without rights or recognition within the normative order. Thus the terrain of action shifts from politics to ethics. She writes, “Perhaps the arts of care should be oriented to the potentiality within the actual, to removing the actual hindrances that impede groups’ striving—whether they are striving to change their world through a social project or to remain as they are within a world changing around them. The arts of care would then focus on the differential distribution of the ‘ease of coping.’ Caring would sink into the recesses of the everyday, the ordinary and the mundane” (160). 19. Could suicide, like certain episodes of madness, “be understood as the painful and unspeakable knot connecting discrepant and juxtaposed registers” (Pandolfo 2000: 118)?

6. song 1. Names and identifying details have been changed in this chapter. 2. See Margaret Uyauperk Aniksak on the words used in throat singing (quoted in Bennett and Rowley 2004: 108). 3. Voice as a gesture does not always override or annul silence. 4. When I began to think seriously about our life in language—linguistic life, as Butler calls it—it was that book that helped me to make sense of the way the dead and the absent remain alive to us. Her work also helped me to think rigorously about the violence of civil war in Guatemala, where I did some early fieldwork (see chapter 4). 5. It seems fair to say, then, that this is Butler’s version of what it means to be a human being—to be dependent on interpellation in order to be. 6. Although Butler catalogs a variety of ways one can be interpellated without actually being verbally hailed—including by bureaucratic forms, the census, adoption papers, and employment applications (1997a: 34)—she doesn’t talk explicitly about listening as a form of interpellation. 7. Importantly, interpellation—and here again I diverge from Butler—does not only concern what may be said or written. It also concerns what may and may not be said and how what is said may be heard. Having one’s identity “fixed” can render one literally speechless. 8. By using the second person throughout the story, Calvino suggests that the king is not unique but is in some sense a figure for the sovereign subject of modern life. 9. This essay was written as a response to Cora Diamond’s (2008) “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy.” 10. After introducing us to Wittgenstein’s idea of seeing aspects, Cavell wonders whether it makes sense to “speak of seeing others or ourselves as human (as opposed to what?). If it does, then it makes sense to suppose that we may fail to see ourselves and others so” (2008: 93). I take Cavell as asking whether the duck/rabbit paradox applies to the way we “see” or “listen” to our fellow human beings. If so, does it make sense to call the failure to see the human as human as a kind of soul-blindness? And precisely because Butler is not talking about souls but about subjects, my question is whether we could extend the notion of soul-blindness to the forms of (hateful) interpellation that Butler so

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meticulously documents? Are we blinded (or deafened) in important ways by seeing someone as something, or listening to someone as something, as in the case of Calvino’s king? If, as Butler suggests, we are truly “interpellated kinds of beings” (an argument I accept), and this is what it means to be human, would it not be important to make a distinction between different forms of interpellation—some that serve to fix the subject in its place and others that are a kind of call to potential companions—rather than risk universalizing the condition of soul-blindness? 11. Barthes’s description of an image’s “third” meaning resonates with this sense that when we see the human before us, intelligibility—what a human is— is not what is at stake. The third meaning for Barthes is what remains after the informational and the symbolic meanings of the image have been exhausted. “Is that all?” he asks when describing the informational and symbolic registers of a particular image. Can that really be all there is to say? Barthes’s third meaning refers to whatever it is about the image that holds you—that makes you look and then look back again. The third meaning is that which holds your gaze but has no clear signified and therefore cannot be translated easily into words or text. In a footnote Barthes relates this third meaning to the third of the classical five senses, which is hearing. “This is a happy coincidence,” he remarks, “since what is here in question is indeed listening” (1977: 53). 12. Of course, as anthropologists we are often interested less in the animation of “subjects” per se and more in the lives, loves, and animated talk of specific individuals. 13. Butler’s formulation of interpellation, tied up as it is with questions of intelligibility, is not capacious enough to accommodate the acts of song that I am gesturing toward. As I said, finding life in the words of another, or coming to live in the words of another, is an idea I find extremely provocative. In fact, my own notion of being alive (even when physically dead) was for a long time dependent on this Butlerian idea of interpellation. But although her thinking can arguably be extended in that direction, Butler is not really talking about individuals coming to live in the language of empirical others, and even less is she talking about the possibility of recognizing that a fellow human has a soul. Instead she is talking about individuals coming to find intelligibility or animation in a particular subject position. 14. Since for Cavarero we are “narratable” selves with a unique life history that can only be told or witnessed by another, Cavarero (like Butler) sees us as ontologically dependent on the Other. See also Butler: “One comes to ‘exist’ by virtue of this fundamental dependency on the address of the Other” (1997a: 5). But, unlike Butler, Cavarero is centrally concerned with what she calls an altruistic gesture—that of narrating the other’s story. For Cavarero, the unique individual is not the atomized individual of modern political doctrines. Instead, the individual is unique “not because she is free from any other; on the contrary, the relation with the other is necessary for her very self-designation as unique” (2000: 89). The individual, for Cavarero, is “constitutively in relation with others” (Kottman 2000: x). 15. Adriana Cavarero writes, “The act of speaking is relational: what it communicates first and foremost, beyond the specific content that the words

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communicate, is the acoustic, empirical, material relationality of singular voices” (2005: 13). 16. The importance and possibility of such gestures, as Julia Kristeva makes clear, is particularly evident when dealing with exceptional children—children with intellectual or physical challenges that place them outside “desirable” categories and identities. Motherhood (as a structural and not a biological possibility) can represent the possibility of loving, of being surprised by, whatever being arrives. Kristeva wonders, given the reality of prenatal testing and selection, whether it is “still possible to leave room for the flash of a surprise or for the grace of a beginning” (Kristeva 2001: 45). Kristeva’s hope is that this technological vitalism does not completely erase the possibility in the contemporary world of a call that allows the other to be—whatever it is that he or she is or will be, without fixing that identity in advance. Such gestures are also crucial, however, in situations of precariousness where the security of labor and life are called into question. Anne Allison describes the precariousness that characterizes Japan after the Great East Japan Earthquake as an opportunity for us to “open up the social networks of social connection to make the lives of those who have nobody else to give them recognition (no family, no company, no town) grievable upon death (2013: 20). A question that still confronts us is how such gestures work in the “technologically produced border zone[s] between life and death” (Kaufman 2003: 2249) that have sprung up in modern hospitals around the use of ventilators and other forms of technology to keep comatose people alive. 17. What I am trying to say resonates, I think, with what Giorgio Agamben says in The Coming Community about “whatever being.” Whatever being, for Agamben, is “being such that it always matters” (1993: 1) This “whatever being” has nothing to do with “belonging to this or that set, to this or that class (the reds, the French, the Muslims)—and it is reclaimed not for another class nor for the simple generic absence of any belonging, but for its being-such, for belonging itself” (1993: 1). He continues, “Love is never directed toward this or that property of the loved one (being blond, being small, being tender, being lame), but neither does it neglect the properties in favor of an insipid generality (universal love): The lover wants the loved one with all of its predicates, its being such as it is” (1993: 2). Such a belonging—a belonging that focuses on the attachment rather than on fixing the identity of the being that is attached—is what I am gesturing to in this chapter. 18. On the refusal of the demand for intelligibility I draw inspiration from Walter Benjamin, who, in his essay on the “task” of the translator, makes the surprising suggestion that the information a translator manages to communicate is actually “inessential” to the task of the translator. “For what does a literary work ‘say’? What does it communicate? It ‘tells’ very little to those who understand it. Its essential quality is not statement or the imparting of information. Yet any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information—hence, something inessential” (Benjamin 1968b: 69). Benjamin makes a related observation about storytelling. He notes that the sharing of “information” (which by definition should seem “understandable in

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itself”) is actually “incompatible with the spirit of storytelling” (1968a: 89). Storytelling, for Benjamin, “does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report. It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller in order to bring it out of him again. Thus traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel” (91–92). I would like to borrow from Benjamin his intuition that in certain situations (translation of literary works and storytelling being only two of them), the imparting of information is not what is most essential. Instead of focusing on the ability of a translation to transmit facts or information from one language to another, Benjamin insists that translation is a “mode.” He means, I think, that translation is a way of approaching things, of seeing things, even of hearing things, and that what is most important to the translator should not be the information being presented, but how—in what form or mode—it is presented. Interestingly, one of the definitions of “mode” given by the Oxford English Dictionary is “a melody, a strain of music, a rhythm.” 19. Veena Das suggests, “Wittgenstein creates language as the bodying forth of words” (1996: 70).

epilogue 1. Cf. Ronald Niezen (2009) on suicide as a mode of belonging and Garcia (2010) on suicide as a form of life. 2. For Lawrence Cohen, in describing the way bodies are given over—committed—for organ transplantation, terror is “a form of argument or representation that insists that there is a form of commitment—of the giving over of bodies—that operates against the protections of normative institutions and that draws all other modes of commitment to itself. Terror stands as a universal threat against the state as universal order” (Cohen n.d.). When suicide can be registered only as degradation of life as the highest good, then all thought that thinks it otherwise is rendered as terror. Suicide can no longer be differentiated from waste, from hatred of self and other, from senseless violence. 3. The Case of Ellen West by Ludwig Binswanger is exemplary in this respect. In his description of the case, Binswanger suggests, “From the standpoint of existential analysis the suicide of Ellen West was an ‘arbitrary act’ as well as a ‘necessary event’ ” (1958: 295). The furor that this case provoked after its publication in English was remarkable. As Naamah Akavia points out, descriptions of the case tended to be “charged with emotion to a degree that is extraordinary compared with other academic texts” (2008: 121) On the one hand, Binswanger was accused of having instrumentalized and objectified West (Laing 1982) in order to further the claims of existential psychiatry (Lester 1971: 251; Minuchin 1984: 196). On the other hand, Ellen West’s suicide was reinterpreted in a variety ways: as “psychic homicide” on the part of her husband and analyst (Lester 1971), as the result of an eating disorder (see especially Jackson et al. 1990), and as the consequence of patriarchal oppression (Chernin 1981; Bordo 1993). I am not interested here in adjudicating between these different claims or deciding the “true” cause of West’s suicide, but instead I want to note the taboo surrounding thinking the relationship between imagination and suicide. Foucault’s

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comments on the relationship between suicide and imagination above, derived in part from his reading of Binswanger’s case, were written before Binswanger’s infamous case was translated into English and became the subject of so much attention. Foucault wrote, “Life has become possible for her only in the form of a flight toward that distant and lofty space of light, and the earth, in its dark closeness, holds only the imminence of death” (1993: 62–63). Even Binswanger says, “Love knows no answer to the question of whether Ellen West’s suicide had to take place of fateful necessity or whether she had the possibility of escaping it” (1958: 293). But until we can see the way suicide can be linked to freedom and imagination we will be left repeating the old dogmas. 4. Foucault writes, “Suicide is not a way of cancelling the world or myself, or the two together, but a way of rediscovering the original moment in which I make myself world, in which space is still no more than directedness of existence, and time the movement of its history” (1993: 69). Also, “The imaginary is not a mode of unreality, but indeed a mode of actuality, a way of approaching presence obliquely to bring out its primordial dimensions” (1993: 70).

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Illustrations

Introduction. Kavavaow Mannomee, Untitled (Raven Smoking), 2007, colored pencil and ink, 20 × 26 inches. Reproduced with the permission of Dorset Fine Arts. 1. Joanasie Aningmiuq, Hamilton Sanatorium, circa 1955. The Archives of Hamilton Health Sciences and the Faculty of Health Sciences, McMaster University. 2. Inuit children reenacting the shooting of the dogs. Right: Iqaluraq Quaraq. Photo by Toshio Yatsushiro, 1959. 3. “R.C.M. Police, The Eskimo’s Friend.” Reproduced with permission from The Book of Wisdom for Eskimo, sketches by Betty Kosior, translated by Samuel G. Ford, issued by the Bureau of Northwest Territories and Yukon Affairs, Land, Parks and Forests Branch, Dept. of Mines and Resources, Canada (1947) and held in the W. D. Jordan Special Collections and Music Library, Queen’s University at Kingston, Ontario. 4. Women wearing amautiit. Frobisher Bay, 1958. Photo by Toshio Yatsushiro, 1958. 5. Tent scenes in Frobisher Bay, 1958. Left to right: Annie Pudloo, Jamesie Pudloo, Tye Sagiaktuk, Lucy Mingeriak, and Ineak Sakeeta. Photo by Toshio Yatsushiro, 1958. 6. Father and son, Frobisher Bay, 1958. Photo by Toshio Yatsushiro, 1958. Epilogue. Double exposure with ship, Frobisher Bay, 1958. Photo by Toshio Yatsushiro.

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Agamben, Giorgio, 188n21, 196n32, 214n17 Akavia, Naamah, 215n3 Alia, Valerie, 204n6 Allison, Anne, 214n16 Althusser, Louis, 159, 161–63, 165 Amagoalik, John, 121 angakkuq (shaman), 135. See also shamanism animality and seriality, 28 animism, 142, 209–10n14 annaktujuniq (escape from sickness/hunger/ danger), 125 anonymous care, 75–100; anonymity/ confidentiality as social goods, 85; death, expecting, 81–83; disc list system as, 187n13; importance of, 5–6, 15; as murderous, 6, 173; overview of, 7; perverse anonymity, 45–46; privileging of, 86; and professionalization, 75–76, 79, 82, 198nn1,2; RCMP’s role in, 75–76, 84, 198nn1,2; saving face via, 85; and the sublime, 86–87; suicide, expected/anticipated, 82, 93–97, 201–2n28, 202n31; suicide hotline, history of, 86–92, 200– 201nn19,20,21,22,24; suicide hotline as, 7, 81 (see also Kamatsiaqtut help line); suicide-prevention conferences, 92–93; and use of proper names, 207n30

anthropology: and the anthropologist as collector, 15; blurring disciplinary distinctions in, 185n23; fieldwork in, 2, 16–17; images vs. text in, 11, 14, 184n20; mode of listening in, 2; ontology vs. epistemology in, 204–5n9; paying attention to uncertainty in, 1–2; repetition’s importance in, 14 aqaq (speak, sing, or chant tenderly to a child), 158 Arctic Bay/Ikpiarjuk (Baffin Island, Nunavut), 21, 185n1 Arendt, Hannah, 142, 193n22, 196n33, 207n30 Arnakak, Jaypeetee, 137, 155, 181–82n11, 208n4 Asad, Talal, 86–87 assimilation, 31, 115–21, 205nn12,13, 206–7nn14,15,19,21,23,24 assisted life/reproduction, 203n5, 205n10 atiq (name-soul; namesake), 104–6, 124, 157–58, 202n1 Aulino, Felicity, 178n7 Balicki, Asen, 204n6 Barclay, William, 191n9 Barraclough, Nada, 200–201n21 Barry, Keith, 28, 58 Barthes, Roland, 12, 36, 45, 58, 184– 85nn21,22, 213n11 Bashford, Alison, 52, 190n6, 191n8

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Battaglia, Debbora, 208n6 Baudelaire, Charles, 208n7 beauty, 137 Benjamin, Walter: on the aura of works of art, 27; Berlin Childhood around 1900, 11, 41–43, 184nn18,19, 188n26; on boredom, 131; on death, 131; on homogenous empty time, 15; on images, 39, 41, 124; on seriality and uniformity, 27; on storytelling, 14, 214–15n18; on translation, 214–15n18 Betancourt-Serrano, Alex, 32 Binswanger, Ludwig, 45, 137, 141, 189n30; The Case of Ellen West, 215–16n3 biopolitics. See also psychic life of biopolitics: binarism of, 195–96n32; and colonialism, 7, 96, 202n30; and death/ mortality, 96; definition of, 3, 177n7, 179n8; indifference of, 4, 6–7, 31, 72–73, 82–83, 105, 121; as a logic of care, 3–4, 7, 33, 177n7; politicization of bare life, 188n21; and racism, 119–20, 206n22; and the regime of life (making live/letting die), 96, 184n17, 199n13 Blake, Edward, 179–80n9 Bodenhorn, Barbara, 106, 207n30 The Book of Wisdom for Eskimo, 49–50, 74, 76, 189–90n1 boredom, 129–32, 207–8n1 Borneman, John, 208–9n8 Bornstein, Erica, 178n7 Bourdieu, Pierre, 160–61 Briggs, Jean, 158 Brody, Hugh, 105 Brown, Wendy, 5 Burch, Ernest S., 204n6 bureaucracy, 60–61, 76, 79, 193n22, 195n31 bureaucratic care, 3–4, 73 Burke, Edmund, 87 Butler, Judith, 189n27, 212– 13nn4,5,7,10,13; Excitable Speech, 109–10, 113, 158–61, 163, 165, 212n6, 213n13 Cairns, Alan C., 205n13 Calhoun, J. F., 201n24 Calvino, Italo, vii; “A King Listens,” 161–62, 166, 212n8, 213n10 Canadian state: multiculturalism in, 180–81n10; perceived by Inuit as indifferent/uncaring, 4, 73; settlercolonial policies of, 179–80n9 (see also colonialism)

capitalism, 143, 210n17 Cardozo, Benjamin, 90 care. See also anonymous care: biopolitics as a logic of, 3–4, 7, 33, 177n7; casualties of, 177n7; colonial forms of, 3–4, 7, 177–78n7; of dementia patients, 209n8; ethics of, 174; ethnographic focus on, 208–9n8; giving as, 178n7; of heroin addicts, 179n7; ironic listening as, 209n8; and mournful life, 18, 157; as object, 3–10, 176–77n6; vs. politics, 177–78n7; and recognition of indigenous peoples, 210–11n18; regimes of, 210–11n18; temporality of, 134–35, 208n4; as translation, 178n7; and vitalism, 176–77n6 The Case of Ellen West (Binswanger), 215–16n3 Cassirer, Ernst, 110–11, 113, 122–24 Cavarero, Adriana, 164–65, 187n14, 213–14nn14,15 Cavell, Stanley, 162, 177n6, 199n18, 212n10 C. D. Howe (patrol ship), 23–25, 28–29, 37, 53, 93, 190n2 Chandra, Pushkin, 167 Christianity, conversion to, 144, 210n15 Christie, Laird, 133, 208n2 citizenship, rhetoric of, 30 Clifford, James, 211n18 Coetzee, J. M., 195n31; Life and Times of Michael K, 69–70, 72, 82, 106–7, 120–21, 125; Slow Man, 110–11, 122–24 Cohen, Lawrence, 209n8, 215n2; “Song for Pushkin,” 167 Collier, Stephen J., 184n17 colonialism: and biopolitics, 7, 96, 202n30; and bureaucracy, 195n31; erasures of colonized people, 121 (see also assimilation); as genocidal, 179–80n9; and governmentality, 5; indigenous alienation due to, 201n27; and Inuit identity, 187n19; legacy of, 4–5, 194–95n31; murderousness of, 4, 6, 44, 71–73, 96, 202n30; psychic impact on the Inuit, 4; and recognition, 210– 11n18; settlement time under, 133–34, 144, 147, 209n13; settler desire, 96, 202n31; welfare, 4 company, seeking someone as, 162–65 contact/contagion, law of, 37 cooperation, 49–73, 61–66; in education at residential schools, 67–68, 194n30; in

Index evacuation to/care at sanatoria, 51–56, 59–61; and expecting failure, 66–67, 194n29; in hygiene/health, 50, 53, 190n2; Inuit institutionalized for tuberculosis, 6; overview of, 6; and recordings of Inuit messages to relatives in sanatoria, 56–59, 192nn16,17; in survival/desiring life, 67–70 Coulthard, Glen, 210–11n18 Cousineau, Marie-Helene, 95 Cry the Beloved Eskimo (D. Marsh), 24–25 Cunningham, Mr., 55 dan (giving), 178n7 d’Argencourt, Leah Idlout, 23–24, 190n2 Das, Veena, 111, 215n19 death. See also suicide: and boredom, 131; as bureaucratic failure, 173; conceptions of, 109, 125–26; dreams about, 138–41, 144–46, 171–72; Freud, 124, 195n32; namesakes as escape from, 125–26 Degnen, Cathrine, 210n16 Desjarlais, Bob, 176n6 Dhux, Ali, 194n28 Diamond, Cora, 31, 35, 39–40, 81, 162–63, 187n18 Didion, Joan, 13, 32 difficulty of reality, 39–40 the disappeared (desaparecido), 112–13, 115, 121, 207n30. See also assimilation disc list system, 26–29, 45–46, 187n13 Dorken, Elaine, 186n12 dreams: about death, 138–41, 144–46, 171–72; Binswanger on, 45; Freud on, 12, 44–45, 189n28, 207n26; images in, 123; as a mode of existence, 140–41; time in, 144–45 Dublin, Louis I., 89, 201n23 Du Bois, W. E. B., 160 duck/rabbit paradox, 162, 212–13n10 Echterling, Lennis, 90, 201n25 enfranchisement. See assimilation epistemology vs. ontology, 204–5n9 euthanasia. See suicide, assisted Excitable Speech (Butler), 109–10, 113, 158–61, 163, 165, 212n6, 213n14 The Experimental Eskimos (Greenwald), 187n17 facts and images, 21–46. See also images; of death, 21–23; disc list system, 26–29,

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45–46, 187n13; and emotions, 35–37; facts as calming, 32; and identifying Inuit tuberculosis patients, 23–26, 28–29, 186n8; images’ hold over us, 38–46, 188nn25,26; and information vs. storytelling, 14; Inuit as laboratory experiment, 31, 187n17; Inuit as statistics, 26–30, 186n11, 187n13; reactions to Inuit population dynamics, 30–31, 187nn15,16; thinking in pictures, 44–45, 189n28; wounded bodies as facts vs. presences, 31–35, 187n18, 188nn20,23 Falconer, W. L., 191–92n11 Fanon, Frantz, 96, 121, 210–11n18 Farberow, Norman L., 89–90 Fassin, Didier, 178n7 Feitlowitz, Marguerite, 113 Ferguson, R. G., 177n7, 185n6 Forster, E. M.: Howards End, 35–36, 40, 133 Foucault, Michel: on biopolitics, 96, 120, 177n7, 179n8, 184n17, 206n22; on death, 96; on discourse vs. life, 81; on Freud’s view of dreams, 44–45; on governmentality, 5; on images, 12; on racism, 195n32, 206n22; on signification, 209nn9,10; on suicide, 172, 215–16nn3,4; on truth as sexual desire, 195n32 Frazer, James George, 37 Freeman, Minnie Aodla, 59 Freud, Sigmund: on death, 124, 195n32; on desires, 195–96n32; on dreams, 12, 44–45, 189n28, 207n26; on the ego, 41; on images vs. facts, 12, 44, 189n28; on libidinal attachments, 122; on mourning, 41, 122–24, 207nn25,28; on primitive desires, 14; on reality testing, 209–10n14; on thinking in pictures, 44–45; on the uncanny, 209–10n14 Garcia, Angela, 179n7 Gibson, A. H., 61, 63–65, 193n23, 194nn24,26 Giordano, Cristiana, 178n7 GN. See Government of Nunavut Goehring, Brian, 133 Gone, Joseph, 198–99nn5,6,10, 201–2n28 Good, Byron J., 5 Good Samaritan, 88. See also Samaritans Gordon, Avery, 210n14 Gordon, Lewis R., 45–46 governmentality, 5

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Government of Nunavut (GN): creation of, 180–81nn10,11; influence of, 182n11; Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (IQ) in, 181–83n11; responsibilities of, 181n10; suicide intervention/prevention by, 77–78 Graburn, Nelson, 190nn3,5, 209n13 Greenwald, Barry: The Experimental Eskimos, 187n17 Grygier, Pat Sandiford, 176n4 Grzybowski, Stefan, 186n12 Guatemala, 112–13 Guemple, D. L., 204n6 Halpern, Joel M., 133, 208n2 Han, Clara, 177n6 Hankoff, Leon D., 89 Hanson, Anne Meetijuk, 113–15 Haraway, Donna, 193n22 Harmon, J. D., 28–29 Harper, Steven, 205n11 Harrison, Phyllis, 66–67, 141–42 hate speech, 158–59, 163, 207n30 Hawkes, Ernest William, 190n3 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 210–11n18 Herzfeld, Michael, 193n22 Hetherington, Kregg, 193n22 Hicks, Jack, 7, 176n5, 196n34 Hoag, Colin, 193n22 Hodgson, Corinne, 185–86n6 Honigmann, John and Irma, 194n29 horror and the sublime, 86–87, 199n18 housing in settlements, 32–33, 66, 132–33, 141–42, 171, 188n20 Howards End (Forster), 35–36, 40, 133 Hughes, Ted: “Six Young Men,” 39–40 humanitarianism: casualties of care linked to, 177n7; critiques of, 194n28; governance via, 177–78n7; humanitarian intervention, 192–93n21; humanitarian reason, 90, 178n7 images. See also facts and images: Barthes on, 12, 36, 213n11; as ethnographic method, 10–18, 184– 85nn18,19,20,21,22; as expressive/ suggestive, 12–13; healing power of, 209n11; and imagination, 174; third meaning of, 213n11 indifference: of biopolitics, 4, 6–7, 31, 72–73, 82–83, 105, 121; of bureaucracy, 76, 193n22 the individual: autonomy of, 203n5; individuality, 186n10, 187n14; vs. the

subject, 160, 163–64, 207n25, 213nn12,13,15 (see also interpellation) infanticide, 108, 203–4nn6,7 infant mortality rate, 33, 184n16 insults, 160–61, 166 intelligibility, demand for, 166, 214–15n18 interpellation, 159–67, 212–13nn5,6,7,10, 213n13 Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (IQ), 181–83n11 Iqaluit (Nunavut, Canada), 4, 92–94 Irniq, Peter, 192n20 ironic listening, 167, 209n8 isoniazid (INH), 191n10 Itinuar, Peter, 67 Jain, S. Lochlann, 95 Jamison, Kay Redfield, 198n4 Jenness, Diamond, 54, 116–20, 180n9, 203n6, 206–7nn14,16,23,24 kajjarnaqtuq (an experience that creates longing in the future), 137 kajjarniq (longing), 136–37 Kamatsiaqtut help line, 83–87, 91–92, 199nn14,15 katajjait (throat songs), 157 Kaufert, Patricia A., 202n29 “A King Listens” (Calvino), 161–62, 166, 212n7, 213n9 kipingujunga (bored), 208n1 Kitikmeot (Nunavut, Canada), 199n7 Kitikmeot Health and Social Services, 80–81 Kohn, Eduardo, 184n20 Koneak, George, 197n39 Kral, Michael, 198n5 Kristeva, Julia, 214n16 Kublu, Sulaa, 25 Kulchyski, Peter, 85, 115–16, 206nn15,16 Kusugaq, Thomas, 208n1 Lakoff, Andrew, 184n17 Langer, Suzanne, 110, 123–24, 207n29 language and myth, 175n3 Leenhardt, Maurice, 172–73 Leighton, Alexander, 190n5 Lewis, H. W., 183n12 liberal empathy, 189n31 life: assisted life/reproduction, 203n5, 205n10; life beside itself, 1, 10, 16, 18, 44, 174, 202–3n2; life itself, 3, 8, 33, 90, 105, 177n7, 210n17; regime of, 8, 96, 104, 173, 184n17, 199n13; and time, 210n17; value if, 7–8, 10, 215n2

Index Life and Times of Michael K (Coetzee), 69–70, 72, 82, 106–7, 120–21, 125 linguistic life. See under names living in prognosis, 95 Lock, Margaret, 109 Long, David, 176n5 longing, 208n7. See also kajjarnaqtuq; kajjarniq MacKinnon, A. J., 26–27 MacMurchy, Helen, 180n9 Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Argentina), 112 Manning, Leo, 54, 192n14 Manto, Saadat Hasan, 111 Maori people, 116, 118 Marecic, Charles J., 182n11 Marsh, Donald: Cry the Beloved Eskimo, 24–25 Marsh, Ian, 78–79, 198n4 Martin, Paul, Sr., 52 Marwood, Betty, 58 McLean, Stuart, 15 McNicoll, Paule, 192n20 Mills, Catherine, 197n40 modernity, 147 Mol, Annemarie, 176n6 Moore, P. E., 23, 30, 185nn5,6, 186–87n12, 191n7 Moose Factory Hospital, 192n17 motherhood, 214n16 Mountain Sanatorium (Hamilton, Ontario), 21, 43, 58 mournful/melancholic life, 15–16, 121–24, 157. See also life beside itself mourning, 41, 122–24, 207nn25,28 myth, 123, 175n3, 207n29 mythic reality, 172–73 names, 103–26; and anonymous care, 207n30; and assimilation, 115–21; atiq (name-soul; namesake), 104–6, 124, 157–58, 202n1; baptismal, 114–15; and deathly survival, 125–26; of the desaparecido (disappeared), 112–13; as images, 123–24, 207n29; and infanticide, 108, 203–4nn6,7; as interpellation, 159 (see also interpellation); invocation of, 110–11, 113, 121–22; in Latin America, 112; and life/linguistic life, 104–5, 107–13, 121–22, 157–58, 204nn7,8, 212n4; life-of-the-name, 121–24; missionaries’ influence on Inuit naming, 113–15; and mournful/ melancholic life, 15–16, 121–24, 157;

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nostalgic aspect of naming, 208n7; overview of, 15, 126; and spirit possession, 202–3n2; who/what of, 106–7, 207n30 narration, 164–65, 213n14 Nazis, 116–17, 206n20 neoliberalism, 172, 210–11n18 normalization (anti-psychiatry) movement, 200n20 Northwest Territories Mental Health Act, 79 nostalgia, 208nn6,7 Nunavut (Canada). See also Government of Nunavut: communities in, 4; creation of, 4, 180–81nn10,11; homelessness in, 184n16; infant mortality in, 184n16; living conditions/life expectancy in, 183–84n16; Pentecostal movements in, 210n15; as political entity, 181–83n11; population of, 4; suicide rate in, 7, 176n5 (see also suicide) Nunavut Suicide Response Protocol, 80 Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated (NTI), 181n10 Okpik, Abe, 27–28 O’Neil, John D., 202n29 ontology vs. epistemology, 204–5n9 Oz, Amos, 142 Paine, Robert, 30, 180n9 Pandolfi, Mariella, 192–93n21 Pandolfo, Stefania, 8, 184n20, 189n30, 209n11, 212n19 Papion, Rogatien, 108–9, 203n6, 204n7 para-aminosalicylic acid salts (PAS), 191n10 Pearson, Lester B., 28 Phillips, R. A. J., 26, 30–31, 57, 187n15, 192n16 Picco, Edward, 184n16 police. See RCMP “postcolonial,” use of term, 4–5, 194–95n31 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 186n11, 189n31, 202n32, 211–12n18 professionalization, 75–76, 79, 82, 198nn1,2 propriety, 188n22 psychic life of biopolitics, 67, 72, 96, 115, 117, 121, 188n23; association of Inuit with animality, 28; as imagistic, 44–45, 189n30; indifference, 7, 73 (see also anonymous care); as life beside itself, 44; as murderous, 6, 17–18, 120, 202n30; and the psychic form of power, 189n27; in sled dog shootings, 73

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Qallunaaq, use of term, 183n13 quasi-events, 202n32 Quebec’s unique status, 180n10 Rabinow, Paul, 85 racism, 119–20, 195n32, 206nn20,22 Raffles, Hugh, 184n20 Ramberg, Lucinda, 190n4 Rasmussen, Knud, 107 raven, 1–2, 3, 10 RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police): as friends and professional law enforcers, 76, 84, 198nn1,2; role in anonymous care, 75–76, 84, 198nn1,2; sled dog shootings, 70–73, 196– 97nn36,37,39 reality, difficulty of, 39–40 residential schools. See also assimilation: Chesterfield Inlet residential school, 67, 194n30, 205n11; education at, 67–68, 134, 194n30, 205n11 Roberts, Barry, 26 Roberts, Elizabeth F. S., 184n20, 203n5, 205n10 Rosenbaum, A., 201n24 Royal Canadian Mounted Police. See RCMP Samaritans, 88–89, 200nn19,20,21, 201n26 Schaefer, Otto, 24, 53–54 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 176–77n6, 204n7 Scott, Duncan Campbell, 205n11 Sekula, Allan, 186n10 Seremetakis, Nadia, 184n20 seriality, 27–29; serialization of bodies, 29, 186n11 settler society, 179n9. See also colonialism shadow logic, 202n31 shamanism, 153, 155, 210n15. See also angakkuq Sheshatshiu, 210n16 Shneidman, Edwin S., 89–90 Simpson, Audra, 160, 202n31 Sisters of the Grey Nuns, 67 “Six Young Men” (Hughes), 39–40 sled dogs, RCMP’s shooting of, 70–73, 196–97nn36,37,39 Slow Man (Coetzee), 110–11, 122–24 Smith, Derek, 27, 29 song, 156–68; aqaq (speak, sing, or chant tenderly to a child), 158; and hate speech, 158–59, 163, 207n30; katajjait (throat songs), 157; loving address in, 158; names in, 207n30; as narration, 164; overview of, 16; Pauloosie’s, 155,

157; recognition/seeking company as, 156–57, 163, 165–67; voice as gesture, 157, 212n3, 214n16 “Song for Pushkin” (Cohen), 167 soul-blindness, 162, 164, 212–13n10 Spalding, Alex, 208n1 spirit possession, 202–3n2 Stager, John K., 133 Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development, 196– 97nn36,37,39 statistics, 26–30, 33, 95, 186n11, 202n29 Stefansson, Vilhjalmur, 190n2 Stern, Pamela, 194n29 Stevenson, Alex, 28 Stewart, David A., 191n7 Stewart, Kathleen, 166 St. Laurent, Louis, 187nn15,16 storytelling, 14, 214–15n18. See also narration strategic exemplars, 85 Strathern, Marilyn, 208n7 Streptomycin, 191n10 Styblo, Karel, 186n12 Subcommittee on Eskimo Housing Programs, 32, 66, 120, 188n20 suicide, 212n19; assisted, 61–66, 193n23, 194nn24,25,26; at-risk persons, 78–79; clinician responsibility for, 78–79; compulsory ontology of pathology, 78, 198n4; courses in prevention, 9–10; discourse of, 17, 78, 80; dreams about, 139, 146; epidemic of (1980s to present), 3, 7–8, 70, 76–77, 176n5, 196n34; ethics of, 174; as expected/anticipated, 82, 93–97, 201–2n28, 202n31; horror at suicide bombings, 86–87; and imagination, 172–74, 215–16nn3,4; intervention/prevention strategies, 9–10, 77–81, 92–93, 198nn3,5, 199n12 (see also suicide hotlines); and life’s value, 7–8, 10, 215n2; in London, 87–88; as mental illness, 78, 198nn4,5, 199n10; as mythic, 172–73; normalization of, 82, 199n11; vs. not wanting to live, 97; prevention video project, 151–53, 156; protocols for, 79–81; RCMP’s role in, 75–76, 84; reeducation campaigns regarding, 81–82; and sovereignty, 65, 194n26; statistics about, 95; studies of, 89, 201n23; suicide apparatus, defined, 8; surveillance of at-risk persons, 79, 198–99n6; youth group’s video on, 16–17; youths’ familiarity with, 8–9

Index suicide hotlines: anonymity of, 88–89, 92–93, 200–201nn21,22; British suicide hotlines, 87–88, 200nn19,20,21; cry of distress answered via, 87, 89–90; effectiveness of, 89, 91–92, 201nn24,25; history of, 86–92, 200– 201nn19,20,21,22,24; Kamatsiaqtut help line, 83–87, 91–92, 199nn14,15; religious undertones of, 201n26; as a social movement, 90, 201nn25,26; volunteers’ fervor as alienating, 93, 201n27; United States suicide hotlines, 200nn20,21; volunteers’ qualifications, 89; volunteers’ social network, 92–93 Tagak, Andrew, 182n11 Taussig, Michael, 11, 37, 184n20 Taylor, Charles, 60, 79, 198n2 Taylor, Janelle, 209n8 Taylor, Lucien, 11 terror, 172, 215n2 Tester, Frank, 175–76n4, 192n20, 205n12 Thomas, D. K., 188n20 Thompson, C. T., 188n20 Ticktin, Miriam, 177n7, 210–11n18 time, 16, 132–38, 144–47, 208n2; clock/ calendar time, 133–34; and discrepant temporalities, 139–40, 211n18; doubling of, 144; future and present, 147, 210n17; and names, 107; and suicide, 146–47; timeframes, 80 Tobias, John L., 206n15 translation, 214–15n18 Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools, 205n11 tuberculosis: Canada’s resolution to control, 30, 52, 186n9; deaths/burials of patients, 25, 55–56, 186n8; domiciliary and drug treatments for, 52, 185–86n6, 191n10, 192n20; epidemic of (1940s– early 1960s), 3, 6–7, 22, 175–76n4, 183n12; identifying Inuit patients, 23–26, 28–29, 55, 186n8; indifferent care of patients, 7; patients perceived as dangerous, 51–53, 190n6, 191n7;

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success of anti-tuberculosis program, 186–87n12 tuberculosis sanatoria: children dislocated following treatment at, 55; educating/ civilizing indigenous peoples at, 192n13; evacuation of patients to, 5–6, 17, 23–25, 185–86n6, 191–92n11, 192n20 (see also C. D. Howe); length of treatment in, 24, 52–54, 187n7, 192n12; methods of treatment in, 52, 191nn8,9; number of patients in, 26, 192n12; recordings of Inuit messages to relatives in, 37, 56–59, 192nn16,17 Tunit, 50, 190n3 Turquetil, Arsene, 204n6 Twine, Neville, 200–201n21 uncertainty, 1–2, 10, 15, 18, 79, 175n2,3 Varah, Chad, 87–89, 200n19, 201n26 Visser, Margaret, 207–8n1 vitalism, 176–77n6, 214n16 Waltzer, Herbert, 89 Warburg, Aby, 209n11 Weber, Max, 6, 60, 76, 147, 182n11, 193n22, 210n17 welfare state, 28, 133, 210n17 West, Ellen, 215–16n3 Wexler, Lisa, 198–99nn5,6,10, 201n27 Weyer, Edward Moffat, Jr., 203n6 whatever being, 214n17 Wherrett, G. J., 183n12, 186n7, 192n12 White, Graham, 181n10, 182n11 Williamson, Robert, 27, 53, 114, 175n2 Willis, John, 53–54, 93, 142–43, 190n2 Winnicott, D. W., 207n27 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 111, 162, 189n28, 215n19 Wolfe, Patrick, 179–80n9 World Health Organization, 185–86n6, 191n10 Wylie, Mary Lou, 90, 201n25 Yatsushiro, Toshio, 51, 70–73, 76, 141, 190n5