Substitute people

When my teammate Eunice first started her practice as a doctor, she had a series of interesting short-term jobs. She filled in for a doctor who practiced out of a pharmacy (I see they are starting to do that in North America now. Copy cats). This doctor did surgeries on the side, and Eunice was concerned she’d be required to help perform abortions. Then she filled in at a clinic that certified sex workers as being clean of AIDS and STDs (now called STIs). Then a friend of hers persuaded her to join him in setting up a clinic in a small town outside Oaxaca City. He would do bloodwork, and she would give consults. Everything was going well until she realized that people were coming in for bloodwork when she hadn’t ordered it. Her partner’s lab was thriving. After a little PI work, she realized her partner was selling the bloodwork as a cure in itself. After all, getting pricked with a needle and having blood removed has to be good for something. Give a little blood; get a little healthier. If you think that’s strange, just think about how long blood-letting was a staple of medical care for centuries.  Medicine is still as much an art as a science. How much we trust the artists without really knowing what they are doing.

I think about this under that radiation machine. How long did the doctor take to explain what happens when the machine buzzes and lights flash and everyone leaves the room? Oh, he gave me a booklet to read, and I can look it up, but the information is sparse, and I can’t figure out why the thing buzzes five times from one position and two from the next or why something I can see bathed in green light inside the machine seems to open and close between zaps. I can’t understand how this slow “blood-letting” that’s over so quickly doesn’t kill all my cells or cause even more cancer. How much we trust the artists without really knowing what they are doing.

On the way to Lively last weekend, I looked out the window at the quartz-veined rock walls next to the highway, like river banks, and on top of every bank I was surprised to see little piles of stones. There were hundreds of these piles, maybe thousands, all along the road. They were just piles of stones, made to look a bit like a man and left on all the high points beside the highway. They are called inuksuk (meaning people substitute) and were once navigational markers for the people who lived in the Artic, where the terrain has few natural landmarks. They are found from Alaska to Greenland and have become not only a symbol for the Inuit people themselves, but a national symbol for Canada. They were used for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

In 2007 the Inuvialuit artist Bill Nasogaluak built an inuksuk for the city of Monterey, Mexico, to commemorate Canada’s involvement in the city. One of its stones comes from the Artic and the other from Toronto, the artist’s hometown, and together, they form the inuksuk’s heart. If only that worked! We are starved for symbols.

Why do people stop their cars on a highway riding north toward the Artic and build these little man figures by the thousands? What about this simple symbol draws them, stopping them cold on the road? What are they marking with their little rock piles, the substitute people they leave behind? In one way this simple art seems so accessible, so communal. In other ways it seems mysterious, uniting us with strangers who lived in another world of cold barrenness we don’t understand, and with strangers who still live there, and with strangers who are simply Canadians stopping beside a road to pile up stones. How much we trust the artists without really knowing what they are doing, or what we are doing.