Things that scare me.
Dec. 11th, 2009 09:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
leahbobetIt's -9 C in Toronto tonight; with the windchill, it feels like -15 C. I came home this afternoon huddled down in jeans and sweater and my big wool pea coat, scarf and hat and lined gloves, and my knees were still freezing by the time I made it the four blocks from the office home.
Those of you who caught the prior post know that Peter Watts, whom I like and respect and count as a friend, was detained, beaten, and pepper-sprayed by US border guards while trying to cross back into Canada; while coming home. When he was released from custody on the other side of the border, it was "coat-less and without a vehicle, in a winter storm."*
Let me tell you a little story about the cold.
In 1990 in Saskatchewan, a 17-year-old boy named Neil Stonechild was found frozen to death in a field outside Saskatoon. He had last been seen, handcuffed and bloodied, being packed into the back of a squad car.**
Ten years later, two more Native men were found frozen to death outside the city in a single week. A third came forward with a story of being driven around outside the city by the police and threatened. There was a public inquiry. Two police officers on the Saskatoon force were ultimately charged and lost their positions.
There's a name for this thing. It's called a starlight cruise.
I found out this story from a CBC documentary in 2003 or so.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
matociquala was over visiting. It had long, lingering landscape shots of the frozen prairies; the very epitome of winter.
I started crying and I couldn't stop.
See, here's the thing about living in a cold-weather society. You stick together, because you have to: it's you against the winter. That is, on a certain level, the basic division of life. That's where the concept of the Wendigo comes from. A wendigo is famine, starvation, greed; the insatiable need to eat until you eat the members of your own society. Wendigo are creatures of the cold, the North. They are supernatural, but a human being can become one, if they resorted to cannibalism.
A wendigo is what happens when human beings turn away from their own and throw in with winter.
These are the worst sins of a cold-weather society, the ones that are irredeemable: siding with winter. Feeding off your own. Taking another person as prey, or leaving them as prey for the winter, in jeans and a shirt with no wool coat or scarf or hat; with no lined gloves and no transit home, knowing full well what the winter does.
These are the things that scare me.
I will not be travelling to the United States for the forseeable future.
*Citation.
**Citation.
Those of you who caught the prior post know that Peter Watts, whom I like and respect and count as a friend, was detained, beaten, and pepper-sprayed by US border guards while trying to cross back into Canada; while coming home. When he was released from custody on the other side of the border, it was "coat-less and without a vehicle, in a winter storm."*
Let me tell you a little story about the cold.
In 1990 in Saskatchewan, a 17-year-old boy named Neil Stonechild was found frozen to death in a field outside Saskatoon. He had last been seen, handcuffed and bloodied, being packed into the back of a squad car.**
Ten years later, two more Native men were found frozen to death outside the city in a single week. A third came forward with a story of being driven around outside the city by the police and threatened. There was a public inquiry. Two police officers on the Saskatoon force were ultimately charged and lost their positions.
There's a name for this thing. It's called a starlight cruise.
I found out this story from a CBC documentary in 2003 or so.
matociquala was over visiting. It had long, lingering landscape shots of the frozen prairies; the very epitome of winter.I started crying and I couldn't stop.
See, here's the thing about living in a cold-weather society. You stick together, because you have to: it's you against the winter. That is, on a certain level, the basic division of life. That's where the concept of the Wendigo comes from. A wendigo is famine, starvation, greed; the insatiable need to eat until you eat the members of your own society. Wendigo are creatures of the cold, the North. They are supernatural, but a human being can become one, if they resorted to cannibalism.
A wendigo is what happens when human beings turn away from their own and throw in with winter.
These are the worst sins of a cold-weather society, the ones that are irredeemable: siding with winter. Feeding off your own. Taking another person as prey, or leaving them as prey for the winter, in jeans and a shirt with no wool coat or scarf or hat; with no lined gloves and no transit home, knowing full well what the winter does.
These are the things that scare me.
I will not be travelling to the United States for the forseeable future.
*Citation.
**Citation.
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no subject
Date: 2009-12-12 04:50 am (UTC)Your observation about human solidarity in the face of winter is a good one. The same has been true of places like Arizona, for the same reason on the opposite end of the climate scale. People who cross the border illegally from Mexico into the U.S. are at the mercy of the Sonoran Desert, which, while beautiful, has no mercy at all. Only the most appalling of the Protect-Our-Borders vigilantes will destroy the unmanned emergency aid/water stations placed there by U.S. authorities to save the lives of people trying to cross that landscape.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-12 06:35 pm (UTC)