Finding the Arctic by Matthew Sturm

Author:Matthew Sturm
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781602231641
Publisher: University of Alaska Press

This positive side of religion in the North was on display in Deline. Traditional Chief Charlie Neyelle took Glen and me on a tour of the town. It was fun and he got to show off new buildings and construction projects, but near the end of the tour things got more serious. The Chief took us to a small cabin on the outskirts of the town, a place where he said people came for peace of mind. The white cross over the door announced that this was a Christian retreat. The cabin was peaceful, but displayed on the walls was ample evidence of pain, a stark reminder that life in the North remains more difficult and dangerous than in lower latitudes. There were framed pictures of young Sahtu who had died violent deaths, and pictures of youth who had committed suicide. There were crepe-draped pictures of smiling elders, now dead. A festoon of several thousand paper cranes, a gift from Hiroshima, Japan, reminded us that during World War II the Sahtu from Deline had mined the radium that went into the atomic bomb, but without proper radiation safeguards. Far too many cancer deaths had hit the community in the years after the war—so many that the people of Hiroshima, of all places, felt empathy for the Sahtu.

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