Week 1

It's the weekend, and I'm catching up on a few things. The cold is here, apparently (-40C wind chill last night), so I'm waiting for it to warm up a bit before I go into the office. In the mean time I am finishing reading Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams. It isn't very recent, and would probably be written alot differently now (first published in 1984), but it is interesting...lots of polar bear ecology and romantic reflections on life in hard places. Josh put me on to it, and I have liked it.

Josh arrives on January 31, by which time the interview process will be in full swing. The focus groups and community meetings will be done by Thursday, and if all goes well, we can begin interviewing right after that...maybe as early as Friday or Saturday. I am going to give out referral coupons at the focus groups, and some of those folks might like to get in on the process early to earn a couple of dollars. I will have to take it a bit slow, because the bank account, while open, will not have any money in it to pay anyone until two weeks from Monday...the time it takes for a check from the US to clear. Once it is in, then it should be smooth sailing, financially, but until then I will have to dip into personal funds. It can be costly: with referrals and interview fees, it can add up to $300 or more per day. A week of that will just about do me in.

Nain is in a bit of stir. I wasn't sure whether to write about this or not, but have decided it bears on the project and people might have some useful advice. But for reasons that will be immediately clear, I have mixed feelings about it (from reading Lopez's book, I am beginning to think of anthropologists as the human equivalent of arctic foxes...small, somewhat maladapted creatures who make their winter living by heading out onto the ice to scavenge polar bear kills...parasites living off of someone else's struggle to get by, despite their beautiful coats). In any case the story is all over the CBC North news, so it is clearly not a secret.

The day before I got here there was a woman found dead here in Nain. The cause of death is unclear, and there is RCMP investigative team here. The have called it a "suspicious death". She was in her early 20s, and apparently in a tumultuous relationship with a young man of about her age who had previous run-ins with the law. The town is of course very suspicious and upset, and the RCMP aren't saying anything. No arrests have been made, which makes people here nervous to think that there might be someone dangerous in town while the police seem to do very little. Of course they are not doing very little--they are waiting for the autopsy, which is being done in Goose Bay. But they are a bit high minded and hide behind procedure. As one person here put it, they are very hands off when dealing with violence against native women.

All that being said, Nain is like any town...these things happen more often than people are prepared to admit, especially in places where alcohol affects families and turbulent describes the political economy as much peoples' personal relationships. OIne result is that I have started looking at some of the crime and economic data for Labrador as a whole, and the north coast, which is predominantly indigenous towns--Nain (Inuit), Natuashish (Innu), Hopedale (Inuit), Makkovic (Inuit/white) and Rigolet (Inuit/Metis/white)--compare well with the non-indigenous towns on the south coast--Cartwright (white/metis), Mary's Harbour (white), Charlottetown (white), Paradise River (white). All have similar levels of employment, similar dependency on the government employment, and similar levels of outmigration. And similar levels of violence.

In any case, I don't intend this to be a news blog. I raised the event here because it bears on one of our prime research topics--what we are calling "household wellness"...a catchall for questions about violence and insecurity within households. It is an issue in any small town, and not specific to Nain or Labrador. But our approach is somewhat different in this project. We are asking people a number of questions about where/to whom they would direct people for help, whether they have been approached for help, and a number of other questions that try to avoid asking directly about what is happening (which is none of our business, in a certain sense) to the social structure which surrounds these events. By constructing the composit network of people as they are affected by this issue, we can look at how that structure is tied into the structures put in place to reproduce the town as a whole, on a daily basis. The point of this approach is to take the question of violence out of the realm of the personal or psychological and instead look at it as something that happens within a context of a group of people acting socially to produce individual and collective livelihoods, public structures and the resources to run them, and systems of inequality that place social divisions within the day-to-day events of small and large places. A complicated task.

With that said, I'm off to the office to try to get some work done, and perhaps shoot a few more pictures of a cold, beautiful place. K