Indigenous Technologies

 

Emily Gettis

GEOG390: Professor Simpson

Reading Response 7

10.14.20

            Harold Napoleon’s essay “Yuuyaraq: The Way of the Human Being” is a letter that draws attention to the cultural and physical loss suffered by Alaska Natives through oppressive and colonially facilitated addiction and shame. The destruction of Yup’ik people detailed in this letter is all encompassing in terms of who and what is affected by addiction. Napoleon is clear to say that spiritual well-being and communication is key to identity and cultural healing, and he shows this through explanations of how the Yup’ik operated in the “old world” versus the transition heaved on them as a means of control and destruction. Alcohol and addiction to it plays a role in terms of how cultural and identity loss facilitated by dominating forces is the manifestation of the Yup’ik heartache Napoleon references, then perpetuated by generations of feelings of unfulfillment and absence of communication.

Napoleon uses clear and specific language based on what he has personally experienced in active addiction and as a Yup’ik man to show how addiction has ripped through Indigenous communities; the source being colonialism. After he lays out the historical timeline and the significant impacts from disease, oppression, genocide, and the effects on survivors as PTSD, Napoleon lays out the solutions that are likely to make positive shifts in Native communities. He claims that culturally specific solutions in the hands of Yup’ik (or Indigenous people) is key to recovery and rehabilitation from drug and alcohol abuse. Also, a relinquishing of land control and welfare/anti-poverty systems doled out by non-native governments is crucial to spiritual well-being because “these responsibilities belong to us. We want to be normal again. The way many of us live is abnormal, like caged animals. We are fed, housed, watered, cared for, but we are not free, and it is killing us” (pp. 34). This is a call for reorienting away from systems designed to oppress and manage Indigenous people that continues to spiritually suppress. There is a connection here to the article “Indigenous Cartographies,” where Sletto shows how the power of maps can participate in a form of violence by essentially freezing, dominating, and objectifying “fluid, shifting…lived indigenous spatial relationships” (pp.147).

    I think of connections to Foucault in these two readings and see how these forms of cartography and reorganization is a form of discipline, while also creating social and individual beliefs. While there wasn’t too much about architecture (other than the prison as a laboratory) in Napoleon’s letter, he mentions how there was a disconnect or “an anomaly” between physical needs being taken care of while the Yup’ik still suffer spiritually. Because of this addiction is still part of the community system. I was really interested in Napoleon's call for twenty year period correction facilities that are run by Alaska Natives (pp. 31) and am curious as to what a twenty year period ending looks like and why that number was chosen.