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The Current Transcript for July 3, 2017

Host: Mike Finnerty

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

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Since our operation began here in Mosul I have killed between 40 and 45 Islamic state jihadists, and God willing will soon liberate the entire city of Mosul.

MIKE FINNERTY: As Iraq's prime minister declares an end to the self-declared ISIS caliphate, fighting continues. Now female suicide bombers are being used to inflict casualties on Iraqi forces in Mosul and at a camp for displaced people. Recapturing one of Iraq's main cities has come at an enormous cost in civilians killed and wounded, elite Iraqi forces broken down and a celebrated mosque featured on some Iraqi banknotes destroyed. Coming up the end game for ISIS in Mosul. Also today some of the world's cultures are on the verge of disappearing.

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Of the 7000 languages spoken the day that most of us were born fully half are being whispered in the ears of infants and they're literally on the brink of extinction.

MF: In half an hour, anthropologist Wade Davis recounts his time documenting lesser known cultures for National Geographic. I'm Mike Finnerty. Welcome to the summer edition of The Current.

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After ISIS is pushed out, what's the future of Mosul?

Guests: Campbell MacDiarmid, Zaid Adamo, Bessma Momani

MF: Iraqi forces have encircled the remaining ISIS fighters in Mosul. For ISIS, Mosul was once their biggest prize, a city of 2 million people. It was from Mosul’s great mosque of Al Nuri that ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi first declared the so-called caliphate, that was just over three years ago. Now much of western Mosul lies in ruins including the Al Nuri mosque. Civilians have suffered. Thousands have been killed, wounded, displaced. Campbell MacDiarmid is a freelance journalist who has been covering the campaign for Mosul since it began. We've reached him in nearby Erbil. Hello.

CAMPBELL MACDIARMID: Good to be with you Mike.

MF: What is the latest from Mosul.

CAMPBELL MACDIARMID: So as you know it's kind of approaching the bitter end for ISIS in Mosul so they're now corralled into a very small area indeed. I think it's less than a square mile now of territory that they're retaining, and it's basically a foregone conclusion now that they will be defeated militarily at least. So what we're seeing now is a reversion to some of the more terrorist tactics that you know we've seen insurgent groups in the past adopt in Iraq. So one of the things we've been seeing over the past few days is suicide bombers coming out with the civilians. So the latest today was reports of this being a female suicide bomber coming out with civilians and then there was another attack down in Ramadi on the displacement side in Anbar. And what the effect of this is, is making the Iraqi security forces super suspicious of any civilians coming out of the old city and there are tens of thousands still under ISIS control and that's kind of having the effect of making them retaliate more against civilians. And I think what ISIS is hoping to do there is kind of so more discord with the civilian population, so that they will be able to capitalize that on the future and you know maybe some iteration of ISIS will be attempting to make some kind of comeback in the future.

MF: What what does that suspicion of the civilians in Mosul look like on the ground Campbell when you were there recently?

CAMPBELL MACDIARMID: Yeah.I mean I want to emphasize that you know it's not uniformly bad treatment by the Iraqi security forces. I did see a lot of acts of compassion and a lot of these civilians are coming out in a really bad state but also seeing a lot of hostility a lot of blanket accusations that you know all of the civilians are with ISIS. One thing I saw was that after some of these suicide bombings came out Iraqi security forces basically didn't want any of the civilians coming anywhere near them, so they stopped handing out water and supplies and started directing them down streets with the Iraqi security forces weren't. So they did not want them near them. And some of these streets hadn't even been cleared of IDs. And so it was it was dangerous for the civilians. The other thing we're seeing is that any men coming out without their relatives or without ID being treated as ISIS suspect. And something that's happening that is not particularly easy to document that if you've been working there for a while you feel you know fairly comfortable saying it is that anyone, or a lot of the ISIS fighters are being executed after being captured and you know, have no way of telling you who they can tell who is a fighter or not but there are you know extra judicial executions being carried out on the spot.

MF: And who is the biggest threat to civilians at this point? Because many of them have been killed in bombings as well from allied forces, Iraqi led forces.

CAMPBELL MACDIARMID: Yes. I mean this is the worst part of it is that these civilians are stuck in the middle facing absolutely impossible choices. So if they stay in their homes you know, they don't have food and they could be bombed at any time by coalition airstrikes or Iraqi security forces, you know artillery or helicopter gunships. And yet they can't leave their homes as civilians. You know ISIS realizes the value of having them there. They slow down the advance and also every civilian that gets killed is a kind of a propaganda victory for ISIS. Overall it's just an unbelievably horrific situation for civilians. There is no good options for them. You know if they stay they can be killed, if they leave they could be killed or treated with suspicion and hostility.

MF: And Mosul one of Iraq's main cities, two million people in better days, what's left of the actual city?

CAMPBELL MACDIARMID: Well I mean one thing it's quite noticeable is the divide between east and west Mosul. So you have the Tigris River which runs through Mosul. The East side was where they fought first and they finished taking that in January. The destruction there was not as intense. I don't think the fighting was intense. I don't think ISIS ever really tried to hold it. They just tried to extract a cost from the Iraqi forces as they advance. So that's come back to life. There wasn't a huge amount of major damage to infrastructure, and a lot of the people who fled have returned to their homes. It's a different story in the West, though. As the Iraqi security, the special forces got ground down. The Iraqi government called on other forces and they were less well-trained and they had to rely a lot more on airstrikes and indirect fire to advance. So the destruction has been much greater. Entire streets and blocks of houses have been destroyed, lots of roads. You know I think 11 percent of all roads surfaces in West Mosul outside the Old City were being destroyed. So there's this going to be a lot more rebuilding to do there before people can leave and more people have left home. I think you're in total now something like 600000 have left their homes in West Mosul and I don't think many of those have been able to return yet.

MF: Campbell, the Iraqi prime minister last week declared an end to the self-declared ISIS caliphate. Is it finished?

CAMPBELL MACDIARMID: I mean I think it's certainly a blow to ISIS in terms of its ability to claim to be a caliphate and attract recruits from overseas. You know we saw back in 2014. Tens of thousands of people drawn to this idea of a Islamic caliphate. I don't think they've got that pull anymore. But what I do think they still have, is the ability to capitalize on grievances among the people. If there were atrocities committed against the civilians by the Iraqi security forces there you know, they really risks sowing future discord. And if they don't rush back with funds for rebuilding that's going to be another source of grievances for the people, you know, the Sunni people of Iraq.

MF: Campbell McDiarmid, thanks very much for speaking to us.

CAMPBELL MACDIARMID: Great, Thank you.

MF: Campbell McDiarmid who is a freelance journalist covering the battle for Mosul. And we reached him in Erbil. For our next guest, Mosul is not only the center of the battle raging against ISIS. Zaid Adamo grew up in Iraq before moving to Canada and spent many formative years in Mosul a place that still holds a big place in his heart. And he's with us in our Toronto studio. Zaid, Hello.

ZAID ADAMO: Hello. Hi.

MF: How do you feel about what's happened to Mosul?

ZAID ADAMO: Well it's a mixed feeling in fact, Mike. Feeling of kind of like joy that the city is liberated in fact, but at the same time it's a feeling of sadness a bit of like fear of the future and anticipation was going to happen next.

MF: You have in-laws and other relatives who live in Mosul. How are they?

ZAID ADAMO: Well I mean most of my friends and family live in the liberated side first, that as the report mentioned earlier, which the infrastructure is pretty not touched per say much damage. So all the people I know have been displaced before the incident like you know when ISIS just came into the city. So no one was harmed but their properties are still there. It was confiscated prior by ISIS. Now it's kind of like you know things trying to get back to normal.

MF: Zaid, three years ago when ISIS moved into Mosul, is it right to say that there were a significant number of people who were happy to see them coming?

ZAID ADAMO: Well for many of the people who were living in the city like the people of Mosul the first feeling let's say you know because there was like so much tension, sectarian tension that was in the city prior having the Iraqi army and the government forces per se in the city. There was like much of tension so when ISIS forces came in, the first impression let's call it of the people of Mosul was you know, they're here to kind of like liberate or they're here to kind of like you know take off the operation.

MF: There were there were grievances big grievances with the Iraqi government which is now Shiite led.

ZAID ADAMO: Correct. Correct. Correct.

MF: We should say you're Christian, by the way.

ZAID ADAMO: Yes.

MF: And the Sunnis in Mosul …

ZAID ADAMO: Is the majority.

MF: And when ISIS arrived, how did they feel?

ZAID ADAMO: Well because the let's say the forces the government forces as you mentioned are like the Shiite backed forces. They felt relief because ISIS, they are so-called Sunnis but there are kind of like you know the people of Mosul said at least there were on the same side. Then the real agenda of ISIS was kind of like discovered and declared a couple of months after that time sadly to say it was too late for the people of Mosul to like you know we did not agree on that.

MF: So some things have changed.

ZAID ADAMO: Definitely.

MF: And how do you think most people in Mosul feel now that ISIS is being drawn out?

ZAID ADAMO: It definitely is a feeling of relief. I mean that's a given. It's the majority will feel the feeling of relief. Yet there's always that ideology that needs to be changed. The ideology sadly to say is still there.

MF: When you say ideology what do you mean?

ZAID ADAMO: There's always a tendency that the sectarian rift let's call it that's been kind of like brewing and percolating for so many years. It's always there. In my opinion it needs generations to kind of like you know change the mind like intensive like, let's call even therapy, I mean for the people. Because there's a rift between Sunnis and Shiites Sunnis and Shiites it has to be healed.

MF: So what happens when the last ISIS fighter leaves Mosul or is killed.

ZAID ADAMO: Okay let's think of that. Like so many, in my opinion and the reality is maybe, that so many of the fighters are just simply blending in with the displaced civilians. What will happen they'll simply shave their beards, drop off their AK 47, drop of their combat uniforms. They'll blend in the displaced people, they'll regroup, they'll come back again in a different name under different cover. Recruit more people, try to kind of like influence more with the with that sick ideology of hatred. And they'll form again.

MF: And so what has to be done to I guess win over civilians or try to calm or heal those rifts.

ZAID ADAMO: There is another rift even like you know there's another like let's say Mosul itself is like a very complex mosaic let's say of cultures, religions, backgrounds, ethnic groups. Now there is like if you look at the Yazidis and the Christians of the city who have been exposed to, we can call it a genocide scale level, rape, murder, kidnaps, churches, temples, Yazidi shrines have been destroyed. Like 1900 to 2000 year of history has been demolished.It's really hard to heal that rift even like, maybe the Canadian government could have a stand on that position, like in recognizing that genocide that happened. Now in saying that it's really hard to heal it like you know when you have a family member is being killed or God forbid raped,how can you heal that it's need generations of intense work.

MF: Zaid Adamo, thanks very much for coming in.

ZAID ADAMO: Pleasure is mine. Thank you.

MF: Zaid Adamo who is originally from Mosul went to school there and he is now living in Canada is with us in our Toronto studio. But loss of Mosul would be a major blow for ISIS. ISIS fighters are also in trouble in the Syrian city of Raqqa their de facto capital city with reports their only escape route has now been sealed. Bessma Mamani is a senior fellow at the Center for International Governance Innovation and a professor of political science at the University of Waterloo and she is in Waterloo Ontario. Bessma, Hello.

BESSMA MOMANI: Hello. How weakened is ISIS by the forthcoming loss of Mosul?

BESSMA MOMANI: Well I mean territorially of course it's a huge loss because Mosul is the largest city that they've held under their control. And of course that was symbolic to them in the sense that they were a quosi state. But more importantly it was really beneficial to them because it provided taxes. And at one point it was the primary source of revenue. So it was really important to of course liberate Mosul strategically for that reason. But I think the arguments that we've heard are ready and I think the overall picture is that ISIS is now just morphing into a very different kind of organization from one that claimed or proclaimed itself to be a quosi state being a classic insurgency terrorist organization and this is going to be I think far more difficult to control. Both geo-politically and for security reasons, because it will go after the soft targets that we're all too familiar with both in Iraq and of course beyond. And so it's a very different beast now and probably far more damaging in terms of lives lost.

MF: But doesn't that mean ISIS literally means the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. I mean if it loses hold of its territory in Iraq and Syria what's left of it?

BESSMA MOMANI: Well I mean keep in mind here that it's proclaimed itself to have all of these provinces. I mean there's a count about 35 so-called self proclaimed provinces of ISIS. Now some of them are quite large territory. Everything from the Sinai of Egypt to cities and towns in Libya. I mean this is where ISIS is now morphing into being a more global organization. And again at one point you know we only have to contend with thinking of ISIS as a localized problem. In fact it was at one point deemed to be by many analysts you know not trying to hit western targets or external targets but really focusing on internal governance is about consolidating control and not trying to acquire territory. But over time we've seen many organizations, Boko Haram being another one of Nigeria that has pledged allegiance to ISIS and now it really does have a very much a global tentacles similar to its predecessor al-Qaeda.

MF: It's taken the cooperation of a lot of different factions, competing agendas to take back Mosul and to try to push ISIS out. Can you walk us through some of the different players that have been involved in and maybe talk to us about how they can possibly continue working together?

BESSMA MOMANI: Yeah and I think with ISIS or with the fight against ISIS it's always far more easier to put a coalition together to fight ISIS than it is to sort of post govern after the fall of ISIS. And as your previous guest noted the real challenge here that we don't talk about is what is going to happen the day after? And in the case of In the case of Mosul I think there was a really almost resurgence of nationalism in Iraq one of the things that I think was quite beautiful to se. Unlike the time pre sort of liberation attempts was this [unintelligible] as you know sectarianism that that really takes over much of Iraqi society and culture and politics. But for a brief time we saw this rise of nationalism, Iraqi nationalism which hasn't been seen in a very long time at least, it was forced under Saddam Hussein's era. And now unfortunately I think we have to contend with the reality once the sort of party is over in terms of liberation, and I mean quite literally there have been parties in Mosul with people driving down from Baghdad and fireworks and so forth to celebrate the liberation of Mosul, but what's going to happen after? We have a situation where 60000 potentially even more refugees have left parts of the city. That's just in one part of it. In terms of the western part of Mosul which is directly under ISIS today we have hundreds of thousands that have been displaced. We have people who have permanently left. Much of the Christian community unfortunately have been completely driven out. And what's going to happen after in terms of controlling the city? It doesn't have electricity in some parts. As noted before roads and infrastructure have been demolished and frankly the international community is interested in declaring victory and a point to someone like Donald Trump who's you know made this his mantra to defeat ISIS militarily but nothing about what's going to happen the day after. And how do you make sure that there's no ISIS 2.0. You know as your previous guest noted this country and particularly the city needs a re-education process. I mean to remove that ideology you need re-education, a school curriculum. We've had four years of young students being indoctrinated by this perverse ideology. Where's the money going to be in terms of re-education, the reconciliation. And I think therapy is absolutely a big one the Yazidi women that have been raped. You know we had the foreign minister of of Kurdistan asking pleading, to please send your best psychologists. We need all the help that we can get. I mean that's the kind of severe reconstruction that Iraq needs that nobody wants to talk about because it's not nearly as sexy as defeating ISIS militarily.

MF: And the seeds may be there for future conflict.

BESSMA MOMANI: Absolutely and I think I agree with your previous guest that you know there is a recognition that you know they've tried this. There was an allure of ISIS before they knew what it was. You know what it entailed it was sort of sold and packaged as a form of self-government away from the very highly sectarian Baghdad government. I don't think we're going to see nearly the same kind of return to radicalization but that local grievances are still there. The national government although you know the current Prime Minister Abadi is far more sensitive to this than his predecessor who really I think laid the groundwork for much of the sectarian problems that gave rise to ISIS. But you still have this you know no comment or no real action on what are we going to do about creating that route. You know truth and reconciliation type process to make things good again. And again young men are absolutely being rounded up, accused of being ISIS sympathizers. I understand where the military and security forces are on that. It's very difficult you know they also know that they don't have a process to rehabilitate these fighters.

MF: That's what we're going to have to leave it there because we're right up against the clock.

BESSMA MOMANI: Absolutely.

MF: And thank you very much for your time. Appreciate it.

BESSMA MOMANI: Thank you.

MF:Bessma Momani senior fellow at the Center for International Governance Innovation and a professor of political science at the University of Waterloo. She was in Waterloo and this is The Current.

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ENCORE | Anthropologist Wade Davis on disappearing world cultures

Guest: Wade Davis

MF: Hello I'm Mike Finerty. You're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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MF: You don't meet too many explorers these days and for 13 years that was Wade Davis's gig. He traveled the world as an explorer in residence for National Geographic not searching for undiscovered lands but documenting and experiencing cultures which are in danger of disappearing. In addition to being an explorer Wade Davis is a professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia. He's also an author filmmaker and photographer and his latest book Wade Davis Photographs is a collection of pictures from his journeys. Now as you're listening to our interview visit our website and you can see a few of them for yourself. That's at cbc.ca/thecurrent way Davis spoke with Anna Maria Tremonti from Vancouver in October.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Your role as explorer-in-residence for National Geographic, which I have to say is the best job ever, was to change the way the world values and views culture. Why is that so important?

WADE DAVIS: Well, that grew out of the Geographic's commitment to conservation. As they turned into their second century, they very overtly decided that if their mission in the first 100 years had been to help you know the world, in the second century, their mission would be to help you save the world in a sense. And so they brought on the seven original explorers-in-residence, each one of which sort of had some specialty. Bob Ballard for deep-water exploration, Sylvia Earle, the early great oceanographer, Jane Goodall, and they brought me on as the social anthropologist because they were very aware in part from some things I had written for them about the sort of hidden backdrop of our age. The fact that by complete academics consensus of the 7,000 languages spoken the day that most of us were born, fully half aren't being whispered in the ears of infants and they're literally on the brink of extinction. And since a language of course is not just vocabulary or grammar, it's sort of the flash of the human spirit. It's a way that the essence of a culture comes in the material world. To lose half the languages of humanity is to lose half of humanity's ecological, spiritual, social knowledge in a generation. And this of course doesn't have to happen.

AMT: Talk to me a little bit more about this, the role of language and the parallel to cultures disappearing.

WADE DAVIS: One of the reasons this is so particularly poignant at this point in time, is that it’s happening in the very generation in which geneticists have finally proven it to be true, something philosophers have always hoped to be true, and that is a fact that we're all brothers and sisters. And I don't mean that in the spirit of hippie ethnography, I mean quite literally in this last generation, studies of the human genome have left no doubt that it's a single continuum, that we're all cut from the same genetic cloth, that race is an utter fiction. And what this means of course, is that all human cultures share the same genius and whether that genius is expressed in technological wizardry, which has been our great achievement, or by contrast placed into the task of unraveling the threads of memory inherent in myth, it's simply a matter of choice and cultural orientation. This is really, really important because it affirms a central revelation of anthropology which was really brought into being by the great anthropologist Franz Boas and that's of course cultural relativism, the idea that the world into which you were born doesn't exist in some absolute sense but it's just one model of reality, the consequence of one set of choices your culture made. But the other peoples of the world aren't failed attempts of being new or failed attempts of being modern. Every culture is a unique answer to that fundamental question: what does it mean to be human and alive? And when the peoples of the world answer that question, they do so in the 7,000 different languages of humanity. And what that really means is that every culture has something to say, each has an equal claim to reality just as none has a monopoly on the route to the divine. Each has something to say. Each deserves to be heard.

AMT: Well, let's talk about some of the cultures you feature because it is so important to look at the cultures when we talk about the language. You’ve spent a lot of time in Tibet. What is it about this culture that stays with you?

WADE DAVIS: The idea we had is to change the way the world viewed and valued culture, we would take our global audience of the Geographic to places around the world where the cultural expressions were so dazzling, so remarkable that you couldn't help but come away with a new sense of the value of culture. So we didn't just go out to the field to sort of celebrate the exotic other as some traditional you know ethnographic films have done. We specifically went to places that had lessons to say, so in the case of Tibet, you know the fascinating thing I guess was perhaps best distilled by a Lama in Tibet who once said to me you know we in Tibet don't believe that you went to the moon but you did. You may not believe that we achieve enlightenment in one lifetime but we can. And so in a sense, the Tibetan Buddhist tradition has devoted and the reason we called the film we made the Science of the Mind is because what is science but the empirical pursuit of the truth. And what is Tibetan Buddhism but 2,500 years of direct empirical observation as to the nature of mind.

AMT: Is our Western culture imposing its own traditions on those traditions though? Do you see that as a danger? Do you see that as a normal way of things? Do you see that as something that contributes to that loss of language?

WADE DAVIS: I think you know it's not the traditional versus the modern. It’s kind of about the rights of free people to choose the components of their lives and I don't think any anthropologist would be suggesting that anybody be kept from the genius of modernity or that any of the people in the so-called modern world go back to a pre-industrial past. The whole question is you know what kind of world do we want to live in? And how do we figure out a way that as we transition forward in the march of history, we can maintain the glory of the diversity which really is a sense of poetry of life itself.

AMT: Also I guess the point is to value cultures that are different and understand that they—as you make the point that you were told that we achieved enlightenment even though you didn't believe us.

WADE DAVIS: Well, yeah. Another story I tell in the book is about the wayfinders of Polynesia, where you know we can actually demonstrate that whereas at a time when European transports were hugging the shores of continents for fear of the open ocean until the British solved the problem of the longitude with the invention of the chronometer, we know by contrast that 10 centuries before Christ, the ancestors of the Polynesians set sail into the rising sun. And we can actually document, as we did in sailing on this wonderful vessel, the Hokulea, with the Polynesian Voyaging Society these young sailors who still use the traditional navigation techniques of their ancestors and the skill set is simply dazzling. And so you know that's part of what the book's all about. It's all trying to sort of take you to places that aren't vestigial. These aren't people disappearing. These are kind of dynamic cultures that are still very much wanting to be around the kind of the campfire, the human experience, and having their voices heard as we all figure out what kind of world we're going to leave to our children.

AMT: You think—what is it, is it the hubris of the European whites that has perpetuated this view that other cultures weren't ahead of the European-based culture?

WADE DAVIS: Well, you know anthropology or you know the very idea of culture really didn't really exist as an organizing principle until Franz Boas in the late 19th century. And anthropology itself didn't exist as a discipline until the late 19th century, really.

AMT: But the hubris was there.

WADE DAVIS: Oh, the hubris was there. And a lot of the way we looked at—because of the moment in time when you know European technological industrial achievements had given Europe, for a moment in time, such complete power. And remember that even the superiority of white European society, particularly the white male, was accepted at such a given in the 19th century that there wasn't even a word in the English language for what we would now call racism. And in the early years of anthropology, you know anthropologists inspired by Darwin and if species changed through time, what about cultures? And it developed the sort of evolutionary idea of culture that we sort of went from you know the savage to the barbarian, to the civilized to the strand of London. In other words, cultures around the world were seen as sort of set theatre pieces that represented sort of frozen moments in time in this imagined evolutionary ascent conveniently to ourselves. And that was actually the lens through which until Boas, you know anthropologists sort of viewed these “primitive” peoples of the world. And as anthropologists then began to go out into the field inspired by Boas and part of the things that Boas asked people to do was to suspend their own prejudices and that was what he was suggesting, you know it was really a shattering into the European mind. It was kind of like the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom. And then as anthropologists went out, they realized there was actually no—once you weren't simply stacking the deck and measuring success by what made us successful, you suddenly realized that there was no reason whatsoever to use the word primitive as a descriptive term for any culture in the world and that really has been the gift of anthropology.

AMT: Another picture from the book jumped out at me: a group of people on top of a glacier with a cross. What's the ritual? Where are they?

WADE DAVIS: Yeah, that’s called Quyllurit'I, the Star Snow Festival in southern Peru and what it is in a nutshell, it's almost like a kind of an Indian Woodstock. I mean every year when the Pleiades emerged in the sky, thousands and thousands of people converge in a sacred valley called the Sinakara and it's a perfect expression of 500 years of Catholic faith on top of hundreds of years of pre-Columbian ideas. And so the basic ritual is that the crosses from the community are carried up into the sacred valley and then by a specialized group of men called pablitos, who are able to deal with the spirits of the dead that haunt the ice fields, they carry the crosses up into the ice, plant them for 48 hours and then the crosses sort of empowered by the power of the earth, by Pachamama, are then retrieved and brought back down to the communities, completing the kind of sacred cycle of the divine. I mean one of the reasons we made that film is that you know we always struggle you know why do we think about the earth? Why do we have this environmental crisis that we have? And part of it is that you know in our particular intellectual tradition, we kind of de-animated the world so that—for me I was raised as a Canadian kid to believe that a mountain was just a pile of dirt or rock ready to be mined. Well, that made me very different from those people in Peru who are literally raised to believe that a mountain is a deity, an Apus, divinity that will direct their destiny. And the important thing is not to say who's right and who's wrong. It's how the belief system mediates the relationship between the culture and the place, often with very profoundly different consequences for the ecological footprint.

AMT: There are cultural practices that are uncomfortable for us, take some of the things you document in New Guinea. Tell us about some of the practices that have developed.

WADE DAVIS: Well, I mean you know in New Guinea for example, in coming of age ceremonies there is a community called the Sambia who actually believe that for a young boy to become a man, he must be filled with semen to become in a sense, fertile. And so the initiation involves him basically committing fellatio repeatedly with the elder men in the initiation space, the hut if you will. And of course none of this has anything to do with pedophilia. None of this has anything to do with homosexuality. It's just the idea that they have. And so that's how the boy becomes fertile and capable of becoming a father. And once he comes of age, he of course becomes a father has a wife and life goes on. You know one of the things though, some traits of culture, I'm always asked this question, Anna Maria, you know does anthropology defend everything just because it exists? You know the classic example would be female circumcision and sort of extreme genital mutilation in some traditions in Africa for example. And it's important to realize and remember that anthropology never calls for the elimination of judgment. It just calls for the suspension of judgments, the very judgments that we’re kind of ethically and morally obliged to make as human beings can be informed ones. So you mean no one would hesitate to condemn the Nazis even though they had a religion and a worldview or whatever you want to say. But the anthropological lens is kind of more useful when it's pointed at something that we cast judgments about but about which we know very little and a great example of that would be voodoo which I also talk about in the book. You know when we think of voodoo as a black magic cult, material for you know Pulp Fiction and bad movies and so on. But you know then if I asked you to name the great religions of the world, what do you say? Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, whatever, but what continent’s left out? Sub-Saharan Africa, the tacit assumption being that African people had no religion. Of course they did. And voodoo is not a black magic cult. It's just a [unintelligible] from Dahomey that mean spirit or God and voodoo is just the religious world view that came over to the new world during the terrible slavery era.

AMT: You know we can't talk about Indigenous culture without talking about Canada. You've featured photos of the Inuit in the Arctic. How does this culture compare to the other disappearing cultures you document?

WADE DAVIS: Well, I think that the story of the Canadian Arctic is so poignant because you know when the British first arrived there, they took the Inuit to be savages. The Inuit took the British to be gods. Both were wrong. But the thing we often forget about the Inuit is how compressed the European experience has been for them. I mean in places like Igloolik, you know had very little sustained contact with European society until maybe the 1930s, maybe as much as the 1950s. And they had to deal with so much. You know obviously initially the diseases that swept through ultimately the culture of poverty, the residential schools, high rates of alcoholism and suicide. And out of all that kind of craziness came the glorious creation of Nunavut, the new homeland. And just as the Inuit again are on this edge of this fantastic Renaissance and an example to the world because you know these cultural processes are not always negative. They can be extraordinary glorious and uplifting. But now of course throughout the Arctic, they're dealing with a force beyond their capacity to control and deal with and that's climate change. And you know if you travel in the Arctic, it's so dramatic. I mean I have photographs in the book from Qaanaaq, the northernmost community in the world in northwest Greenland and the ice used to come in there in September and stay till July. Now it comes in November and is gone by March. I once flew across Smith Sound just 12 degrees south of the North Pole with a close friend of mine from Igloolik, Theo, who had done that journey with his dogs not too many years before and as he looked down at the open water of Smith Sound in April, he just began to weep. And he just said what became of the ice? And you know I've had Inuit friends say you know this is not our weather. We have robins in Igloolik. We don't even have a name for them birds. So if anyone—and one final point on climate change too is that you know for us, Anna Maria, climate change is either a technical challenge or an economic opportunity or a scientific debate if you will. But we forget for cultures that live so closely to the land and cultures who actually believe as many do that their rituals maintain the ecological harmony of the world. When something goes wrong, it's their fault. So for them, climate change is an existential challenge. It's a deep psychological blow. And they didn't cause it.

AMT: You speak of Indigenous culture including the Indigenous culture in Canada with such respect and interest. I was in Prince George earlier this month hosting a forum on missing and murdered Indigenous women and we had an interesting question from our audience at that event. I'm going to play it for you now.

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What I wonder is if there are societies in the world that view their Indigenous populations on a higher level and treat them with better respect and dignity and if there are, can we learn from those societies and take those lessons back home to Canada?

AMT: Wade Davis, I thought that was a great question. Is there a country that Canada can learn from in terms of how Indigenous people and culture are revered?

WADE DAVIS: Well, I think, Anna Maria, we have to recognize that that nation states are never threatened by Indigenous people if those states are prepared to accept diversity. In fact they will realize that the Indigenous people enhance the nation state. Now Colombia is actually a good example. When I first lived there as a student in the 1970s, I was doing research with an extraordinary complex of peoples often called the Elder Brothers, the Kogi [unintelligible.] These are the people that live in this isolated volcanic massif that soars to 20,000 feet. They remain ruled in a bloodstained continent by a ritual priesthood. The training for the priesthood is astonishing and they speak in full paragraphs with great articulation about their absolute beliefs that their rituals maintain the cosmic balance of the world, the ecological balance. Now in the early seventies when I would go to visit those people, parents of my friends in Bogota would say, [Alternate language]. Why do you want to live with the dirty people? Well, now two generations later, the last five Colombian presidents as a first act of office, often even before their inauguration, is to go up to those mountains to seek the blessing of the mamos because that entire complex of people have emerged as a sort of symbol of continuity and hope in a country that's had so much agony.

AMT: So does the society also recognize that or are those the politicians? Are they being political or is it is it real?

WADE DAVIS: I think it's very real. I mean I think that the Kogi—it's not that there aren’t conflicts or challenges of you know land use and encroachment, of course that's going on, but there's no question that the Kogi and the Arhuaco have become symbolic in Colombia. And also in Columbia, a good friend of mine, Martin von Hildebrand was head of Indian affairs and Virgilio Barco, the president of Colombia said to him you know just do something for the Indians, as he put it. And in five remarkable years, Martin did more than something. He secured legal land tenure to an area collectively the size of the United Kingdom for 57 groups in the Northwest Amazon. And once they had their land, a whole renaissance of culture unfolded.

AMT: Because you know in this country, we will see our leaders have ceremonies and Indigenous blessings. What we don't see enough of in the—anyone in the Indigenous community will tell us this—is that we don't see enough respect for the people themselves for what they're going through, for what they can offer to the rest of society.

WADE DAVIS: Well, I think that you know that's our job and I think one of the unfortunate things about anthropologists in the academic world being effectively mute because of the kind of conventions of the academy, is that maybe we're not telling those stories powerfully enough to move the dial on the public discourse if you will. I'd like to think that you know Canada is making progress. We've got a long way to go. But compared to the world of my childhood when the residential schools were still thriving, no one questioned them, when you know when I would work in logging camps it was just an unwritten rule that no First Nation would ever get above the landing in a logging crew. I mean a lot's changed and we just have to keep pushing forward toward proper and complete justice for all First Nations people. I mean you know I tend—Anna Maria, maybe because I'm a dad, I don't know. I tend to be a real optimist because I just find that pessimism is an indulgence and despair is kind of an insult to the imagination. And you know my father always said just do what you need to do and then ask whether it was possible or permissible.

AMT: So we're almost out of time. What can a distant culture tell us about the way we live here and now in Canada in 2016?

WADE DAVIS: Well, I think it's not necessarily that they can tell us anything. People are always saying to me what does it matter to someone in Toronto if some tribal society in Africa disappears? Well, it probably doesn't mean anything to you in Toronto at one level but on the other hand, what would happen to that—how would that tribal society in Africa view the disappearance of Toronto? It probably wouldn't bother them too much, but I would argue that we're either—Toronto or that travel group to disappear—it would matter to humanity as a whole. You know the real question, as Margaret Mead said, you know what kind of world do we want to live in: a kind of monochromatic world of monotony or a polychromatic world of diversity? You know she said her greatest fear was that as we drifted toward the sort of blandly amorphous generic world, not only an entire range of the human imagination be reduced to a single modality of thought, we’d wake one day she said from a dream, whereas as from a dream having forgotten that there are other possibilities of life itself. I mean diversity is joyous. Diversity is whimsical. Diversity is to realize the other ways of being, other options. I mean people would say to me when I wrote that book The Wayfinders and did the CBC Massey lectures in 2009 and the editor put on a snappy subtitle: “Why ancient wisdom matters in the modern world.” I answered that question ultimately in two words: climate change. Not to suggest that we go to a pre-industrial past, but rather to suggest the very existence of these other ways of being, these other ways of thinking, put the lie to those of us in our own culture who say that we cannot change as we all know we kind of must change the fundamental way that we interact with the planet.

AMT: Wade Davis, it's good to hear from you. Thank you.

WADE DAVIS: Thanks very much, Anna Maria.

MF: Anna Maria’s interview with Wade Davis a professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia and explorer in residence for National Geographic for 13 years. Some of the photos he took during that time are featured in a new book. It's called Wade Davis Photographs and you can see a few of them on our website over at cbc.ca/thecurrent. And that's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio 1 for the summer show Love me. This week two best friends I've never met in person and one of them insists they keep it that way. Remember you can always take The Current with you to go on the CBC Radio app where you can browse past episodes of our show and start listening, just a few seconds. You can search for stories you missed or want to hear again. Right from their smartphone or tablet. And you can even make your own playlist of your favorite stuff to listen to you know on a summer road trip, on the back porch, at a day at the beach or the park gets free from the App Store or Google Play. I am
Mike Finnerty to talk to you tomorrow. Thanks for listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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July 3,2017 Full Episode Transcript

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