THE WASTEFUL WAYS OF THE WHITE MAN
Neuberger, Richard L.
The Wasteful Wavs Of The White Man By RICHARD L. NEUBERGER DOWN in the bottom of Hell's Canyon, which the Snake River has trenched into the deepest gorge on the North American continent, we met a...
...My own much less essential role in the war consisted of 21 months of garrison duty in the Arctic portions of Alaska...
...Then the dark cliffs on the Idaho shore of the mountain river shut him off from view...
...Much has happened since then...
...Sapp's grocery in Lewiston and credited to his account...
...Jorgensen, lieutenant in the Navy, fought at Tarawa...
...it means bombing raids and blasted homes and churches...
...Secretary of the Interior Ickes recently reported to the President that "the nicely balanced economy of the Alaskan natives has been upset both physically and psychologically by encouraging them to trap for the whites or do work for wages, and that as a consequence native culture has decayed...
...Radios and sewing machines and movies are nice, but they are not standards of happiness...
...Things such as movies, luxuries, machines, and radios do not mean improvement, especially when they come from the outside and not as by-products of the people's ingenuity...
...O'Connor's words as being backward and reactionary...
...His clothing and food came from his own land and were produced by his own ingenuity...
...Grady's promising son...
...They ate the meat, wore the skins, and slept in tepees fashioned from the hide...
...and it means greed and avarice for things which really do not contribute to the sum total of human happiness...
...People who sew with bone needles- and who have never seen a cinema can still be happy and contented...
...another had neither...
...Thomas Jefferson had no illusions about what our civilization meant to the primitive peoples exposed to it...
...Burke, died at Guadalcanal...
...It can bring medical supplies and transport people to the hospitals far away in rush cases...
...It also means wars and rumors of war...
...He told Capt...
...White men slaughtered the buffalo for money...
...It has gone into the making of the Eskimo character as much as any other factor...
...No longer was it share and share alike...
...Frequently I have wondered what these people, whose own ancestors were conquered by the white man, think of the unprecedented savagery now being displayed as the "civilized" nations of the earth bomb and plunder and burn each other...
...Vilhjalmur Stefansson believes that contact with the white man has been almost wholly detrimental to the Eskimos of Alaska...
...The Indians killed the buffalo for food...
...The airplane can be a blessing...
...There was a time when I would have scoffed at the Rev...
...it means Fascism and Communism and all the other tyrannies of man over man...
...it means sleepless nights and sedative tablets...
...They used the bone for needles and weapons...
...Yet while this decrease has been taking place in Alaska, the Eskimo population of Greenland has steadily gained in numbers...
...Half a century ago many parts of Alaska were inhabited by nearly 20 times as many Eskimos as dwell there now...
...But it can also bring alcohol and germs and a cheap commercialism which will ruin the Eskimos as a people...
...Yet looking back on that experience in Hell's Canyon, and thinking of all that has occurred since, I too believe that civilization's "blessings" might well be in quotes...
...Judgment Of An Arctic Priest Civilization, it is true, means airplanes and telephones and comfortable beds and tantalizing foods and luxurious surroundings...
...When the herds were gone, there was no future for the Indians except on crowded reservations...
...The Indians of the plains found in the buffalo a source of food, shelter, and clothing...
...There were no such things as 'middle men' in their lives...
...I imagine that the old Indian at Hoonah on the shores of Alaska's Inside Passage said it all, as we fished there for salmon one bright September morning...
...I do not scoff now...
...Our own Government is commencing to realize that the policy of the Danes in Greenland has been wise...
...More and more, a people which once was self-sufficient has become dependent upon external forces which are totally disregarded of their needs...
...The Indians and Eskimos of Alaska have no hereditary immunity to tuberculosis...
...They brought gadgets and devices which the natives had never seen before and which they did not need...
...One native family had a sewing machine and a radio...
...Is it not possible that native folks, whether of the South Sea islands or the Arctic barrens, might be better off without our intrusion and influences...
...The white man slaughtered the great herds indiscriminately, leaving the butchered carcasses to fester in the sun...
...New desires and ambitions and jealousies were created...
...War suddenly enveloped Alaska, and the natives could work for high wages on airfields and docks...
...In Alaska I met some of the simple natives who inhabit that lonely land...
...I have often wondered if Grady were not right that morning four years ago in the depths of the Idaho gorge...
...Then the whites had come...
...He told us he hadn't been out of the canyon for seven months...
...Poor guy," said Vic Jorgensen, "he doesn't get much benefit from civilization's blessings...
...All this was seen with sad and knowing eyes by the Rev...
...Savagery Of Civilization Moderation seems almost impossible for the white man, where a dollar or a pound or a ruble is involved...
...The white man inevitably brings tuberculosis germs, and the "white plague" carries off hundreds of natives, who have no resistance to its ravages...
...The Wasteful Wavs Of The White Man By RICHARD L. NEUBERGER DOWN in the bottom of Hell's Canyon, which the Snake River has trenched into the deepest gorge on the North American continent, we met a prospector named Oke Grogg...
...Our last glimpse of Oke caught him waving a battered Stetson in farewell...
...When we resumed our voyage downstream, Oke gave McGrady, the boatman, a chamois-sjcin poke of gold dust to be weighed on the scales in Mrs...
...But Grady Miller, the lean and hawk-nosed Forest Ranger from Freezeout Saddle, added laconically, "Better put quotes around that word 'blessings.' Maybe the guy knows what he's doing...
...They can bring ease and enjoyment into Alaskan life, but they can also bring a slavery...
...Now the airplane has brought, sewing machines, movies, and radio...
...Lots of Americans think that the isolation of the Eskimos is a fearsome thing...
...McGrady and I nodded in agreement...
...They'do not realize that at times it can be beautiful, and more than that, even ennobling...
...Stefansson gives the answer: "The Danes enforce a quarantine to protect the Eskimos from outside influences, and they encourage the natives to retain their old economy and culture...
...The Eskimo used to be the freest of men...
...Strange are the ways of the white man," he said...
...I have a number of Indian friends in the North and in my own State of Oregon...
...Who can say that the first introduction of the white man's civilization is a "blessing" to the primitive peoples who never before have come into contact with it...
...Paul O'Connor, a Catholic priest who has traveled 20,000 miles in the Arctic by dogsled...
...Is there something so highly desirable about our habits and customs and folkways that we should seek to export them to the last ultimate reaches of mankind...
...For many years these people had lived in primitive fashion among themselves...
...We ate bacon and hashed-brown potatoes and canned Del Monte peaches with him, and he asked us what was going on in the world beyond the chasm's rim...
...His words are worth considering: "The old Alaskan isolation has been smashed, and with it, I fear, a healthy independence is also disappearing...
...The Eskimo won't know the difference until it is too late...
...Meriwether Lewis, leader of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, that he would know whether other white men had preceded him across the continent by the presence of venereal disease among the natives...
...For the first time inequalities began to appear among them...
Vol. 8 • October 1944 • No. 43
