That kind of longing.

I have discovered "Billy Connolly: Journey to the Edge of the World", a four-episode series that follows the acclaimed Scottish comedian as he travels the North West Passage.  If you haven't seen it, you must.  I have watched two episodes and am salivating to watch the rest.  

The second episode takes place in Nunavut, mostly on Baffin Island and as always when I see documentation of Arctic life, I was taken aback by the beauty, the difference in culture from my own, and the permeating sadness at the deterioration of that culture.

What does this have to do with Once Little?

There is a particular scene with a particular person that hit me with an almost physical blow; I had been watching the show folding laundry and I had to sit down, tears in my eyes.  Connolly was in Iqaluit and he paid a visit to an Inuit museum.  There he met an Inuit man who lives at the Salvation Army and comes to the museum almost every day to watch old documentary films of Inuit life.  The man's grandfather and great uncle are in the film, but he points out that everyone is now dead.  

The footage is incredible and colourful and vibrant.  It shows the man's forebears dressed in their traditional cold-weather wear, smiling and laughing, holding their children, aware of the cameras, amused.  Connolly comments at how happy they looked, how at ease, how they knew their place in the world, they had a sense of belonging about them.  What sharp contrast to their lives today, where he notes that people seem displaced, ill-at-ease, unhappy.  The culture is eroding in the face of what some call progress and leaving generations upon generations of wealth and pride in tradition to slowly die off with a few passionate elders.  The man watches these films over and over and when the camera showed his face, I was overcome by the longing I saw there.  

The life displayed in these films that he knows by heart seems so simple and yet so intangible.  He is not a young man, but as I watched, I saw the face of a child who just wants to go home and be folded into the loving arms of his family.

I realize I have absolutely no experience with Inuit and Native life and culture and I know how arrogant and even ignorant this entire post may come across.  But when I see the eyes of someone who would seemingly trade everything he has ever known in this life to be able to step back into history, to a way of life that may never be again, it is beyond powerful.  It shames me, it makes me want to live a better life and it spurs me to give everything I can of myself to ensure my children never know this kind of longing.  

Images found online.