Yesterday my diary centered on domestic abuse among American Indians, wherein I included the example of a 1989 study that quantified domestic violence among 19 indigenous peoples of North America. Markers of low to minimal levels of violence included:
...shared decision making, wives' control of some family resources, equally easy divorce access for husbands and wives, no premarital sex double standard, monogamous marriage, marital cohabitation, peaceful conflict resolution within and outside the home, and immediate social responses to domestic violence
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Alaska Natives generally have very high rates of domestic abuse today. What literature I've found thus far has not been instructive on whether this is more frequent among differing peoples (Aleut, Yupik, Inuit, even down to differences in localities) and what effect colonization and assimilation has made on the northern peoples.
The Inuit, for instance, have a starkly unique culture that is as much fascinating as it is morally challenging.
Let's begin with some brief geography. The term Inuit refers to some of the native peoples of Canada and Greenland, while their Alaska cousins prefer Inupiat. The Inupiat live in Alaska's North Slope, coastal Siberia, and on Little and Big Diomede Islands. (The North Slope is also home to the Gwich'in who call the fauna-rich and petroleum-deposited Arctic National Wildlife Refuge their millenial home and hunting grounds.) In Canada, the Inuit's range is more extensive: the northern continent and islands, the west and east coasts of Hudson Bay, the north of Labrador, the entirety of Baffin Island, a landmass larger than Montana, and the most hospitable coasts of Greenland, where the people are called Kalaallit. The general rule of thumb is that the Inuit live to the north of the Arctic tree (taiga) line. As citizens of Denmark, there are Inuit peoples numbered among the nations of Asia, Europe and North America combined.
Anthropologist Jean Briggs specializes in the indigenous cultures of the Arctic: namely, she's lived among the Utkuhiksalingmiut (called Utku) of Chantrey Inlet and the Qipisa of Cumberland Sound on Baffin Island. Her Inuit writings are summarized in the bibliographic Peaceful Peoples, by Bruce Bonta.
As with the Iroquois and other peoples discussed yesterday, the Inuit traditionally practice rigid but complementary gender roles, with little aggression across gender lines.
Briggs, Jean L. "Eskimo Women: Makers of Men."...
In traditional Inuit culture there is no institutionalized gender conflict and very little tension between the sexes, though men and women feel some ambivalence about loving and being loved. Inuit couples have clear sex roles: men are the hunters who provide for their families, they do all the heavy work, and they repair things; the women do the lighter physical tasks such as cooking, child care, and sewing. Both spouses value the contributions of the other--the woman believes that she could not live without the hunting skills of her husband, and the man realizes he could not survive without the warm clothing sewn by his wife. While they are some exceptions, most feel they are incapable of doing the other's work. The husbands make the major decisions after consulting their wives. In public, men and women socialize in separate groups, but, in private during the evenings Inuit couples frequently have close companionable relationships in which they talk, play cards, or share special foods that they don't bring out for the neighbors--delicacies that symbolize the closeness of the husband, wife and children.
In fact, an Inuk (Inuit person) is raised to be as non-greedy as he or she is raised to be nurturing. This is a great paradox or contradiction: Inuits take great pride in their hunting and kill seals, whales and other animals with glee, feeling no guilt or shame in their actions. (Contradiction is easily found in American and other cultures.) However, among each other, Inuit people would find shouting or violence shameful: with ostracism the only acceptable recourse for such displays of aggression. From an early age, the Inuk learns to channel anger and negative emotions through play.
Brigg, Jean L. Aspects of Inuit Value Socialization. Ottawa: National Museums of Canada, 1979.
For Inuit adults, play is an essential method of creating, maintaining, and internalizing nonviolence nurturing values among children. While it promotes a sense of right and wrong, it also fosters complex, ambiguous sets of contradictory emotional meanings and uncertainty for each values. In Western society, play is an activity for coping with the real world; in Inuit society, the real world is comprised of play. Play is a form of expressing and controlling negative values; it shows that the individuals has feelings under control. The Inuit in the Central Arctic do not even scold their children--they feel bad behavior by children may be caused by scolding. They prefer to maintain playful relations with children, thus demonstrating their carefully controlled, reasonable, nurturant values. Even the play aggression by adults is a form of loving behavior. Adults do not attempt to correct misbehaviors nor to impose their will; they will joke instead of confronting a child, and turn confrontations into games. By the time they are two, children learn to respond to potential anger from adults in the same fashion, by playful behavior.
Self-control is the preferred constraint on behavior. The Inuit moral code surpasses what we think of in terms of guilt. In fact, their morality exceeds the guilt-shame spectrum that is commonly used to distinguish societies, and includes a strong use of fear. Inuit learn to fear each other and fear their own personal power at a young age.
Two major values guide Inuit behavior. Nallik- is translated by the English concepts for love, pity and nurturance, with a strong implication of attachment, protectiveness, and total suppression of hostility. To reinforce among children these desirable behavior, the Inuit use a form of "benevolent aggression." Examples might include making hostile, suggestive comments such as telling a child that her new shirt is lovely and if she'd die the adult could have it, or suggesting that she might consider killing a new baby brother. The suggestions in these games of hostile, aggressive actions helps to create in the child the opposite effect--the game promotes the positive, loving emotions. The games maintain an awareness that there is a danger in having possessions that others don't have, and that one must love and protect baby brother. They create a sense of the peril in wanting what is clearly wrong; correct, loving behavior is thus reinforced with strong internal controls.
The other dominant value in Inuit culture is Isuma.
Brigg, Jean L. "Expecting the Unexpected: Canadian Inuit Training for an Unexpected Lifestyle." Ethos 19 (September 1991): 259-287.
In the pragmatic worldview of the Inuit, people and objects are highly adaptable and without fixed characteristics. In order to develop this worldview, they train their children, both directly and indirectly, in isuma--human thought, reason, judgment, and emotional control. A particularly important aspect of isuma is the ability to control anger, an emotion that is never admitted or acted upon. People with proper isuma do not need to have directions imposed by others--they automatically anticipate needs and respond without being asked... They feel that seriousness and strong emotions--joy, excitement, worry, grief and anger--are all dangerous, so they emphasize happiness, joking, laughing, and playing. Laughing is often a way of releasing tensions about distressing events, such as the man who broke down in laughter when his tent started to burn--he said he couldn't do anything else but laugh.
The extreme nature of life in the Arctic has not necessarily dictated all these mores and behaviors, because other Arctic peoples have differing practices. But what we see with these markers--strong self-discipline, the use of fear, the sublimation of intra-personal aggression, aversion to material accumulation and attachment, and a general hesitance towards seeing people and objects ideologically--with the exception of gender--all have obviously practical implications. From season to the next, what at one time is safe ice for sledding is hazardous, or become water. Without strong community harmony, the great hazards of these places cannot be overcome. The fear the Inuk feels as a child is an internalization of the fear of the outer world where even spirits themselves can cause harmful emotions.
Note: Alaska Natives are considered a separate racial category from American Indians/Native Americans because evidence indicates that Alaska Natives were in the Americas and Greenland much later, even by thousands of years. Races are constructed based on historical migration patterns, not genetic or biological differences. Together with Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians and American Indians comprise our First Americans.