“I think Dave at the end of the audition asked me how I imagined this woman to be, and I said that she would be a strong woman. That she wasn’t a stereotypical portrayal of an indigenous person. And that is also how I see Inuit women today. Inuit women in general are pretty strong and independent, and they know how important they are. When you’re up in the Arctic and the elements are what they are, everybody depends on everybody. And I think that’s the reason why we’re an egalitarian culture, because the elements wouldn’t allow any other way.”
– Nive Nielsen@cinemaocd: #lady silence #so we are watching episode 3 #and she like builds an igloo with like handtools and no help from anyone else #and it’s just like
#why aren’t these stupid colonizers not sitting outside taking notes of how you actually survive in this place?OH BOY, @cinemaocd, you have hit upon (one) of the Great Questions about British Arctic exploration: why, for the love of all that’s holy, did they not adapt to Inuit methods of survival? The brief answer is not that the Royal Navy was ignorant about Inuit survival skills – they’d been making explorations into the Arctic since about 1819 by the time of the Franklin Expedition – but that they considered such tactics beneath the “dignity” of the Royal Navy. So instead of taking dogs with them to pull their sledges, they forced teams of sailors to pull them – which in that environment required massive amounts of energy and calories to accomplish, something the men often did not have. Instead of learning how to hunt seal, they brought rifles to supplement their stores if necessary – but unfortunately for the Franklin Expedition, fowl and caribou almost never came as far north as they were stranded, and only visited the southern part of King William Island for a brief period during the warmest part of the year. There’s some conjecture that after the ships were abandoned the surviving men did make a trek down to the southern part of the island and probably did try to kill migrating birds to eat, but by that point it was just too late – the men were in too poor of health for the fresh meat to make much difference.
Franklin had been through hell on his overland expedition of Arctic Canada back in 1819-1822: his party had run so short on food that he’d ended up eating boot leather and moss to survive, and some other members of the expedition had resorted (although possibly unknowingly – but that’s another story) to cannibalism. So one would have thought he would have been more likely than other commanders to adapt Inuit techniques. Instead, he relied with complete confidence on the “3 to 5 years” worth of canned food and other supplies packed in the two ships. It was the best equipped expedition that the Royal Navy had ever dispatched to the Arctic, no question. The problem was that even that estimation of how long the supplies would hold out depended on them being able to get out of the Arctic in that amount of time (and this doesn’t take into consideration the controversial theories about the canned goods possibly being poisoned with lead or botulism). The expedition was cursed by a series of unusually bad winters in which the ice never melted in that part of the Arctic. But had the crews been trained in Inuit methods of survival, they might have had at least some chance of surviving longer than they did, or surviving in good enough health to allow them to reach the Hudson’s Bay Company forts on the Canadian mainland.
#The Terror#Franklin Expedition#according to Inuit testimony the last survivors #did make contact with Inuit hunting parties on the southern coast #who gave them a little seal meat #but when the leader who the Inuit named Aglooka #begged the Inuit to stay with them#the Inuit moved on #because they just couldn’t afford to take care of a large party of white men #and survive themselves #it’s such a sad part of the story #but so FASCINATING
A Force Sensitive Phasesixer 