“If we abandon our Inuit ways, or no longer find it important to use our language, we will be nothing but another mosquito,” the father screamed to his son as he sat shotgun in a black Escalade, the booming bass of Jay-Z drowning out his wisdom. His son just laughed and gave his dad the finger as he and his dudes peeled off to go score some boss weed in town.
Later that night, somewhere in the blasted moonscapes of the Yukon tundra that same concerned Inuit father, named Pukkeenegak like his father before him, with a salmon in his hand and a dream in his heart fell through a hole in the ice and was never seen or heard of again. The good people of his tribe had 11 different words for what happened to him on that day. One of them, translated roughly in English, meant: “Missing Him Forever.”
But the only word in Pukkeenegak’s mind, as he sunk in to the icy depths was qallunaaq. Roughly translated in to English it means “white people.” Pukkeenegak hated qallunaaq. As he sank he mouthed it with a malice as hot as the water was cold. Qallunaaq, qallunaaq. Long after Pukkeenegak passed in to the mystical land of his forefathers, bubbles containing his hate drifted to the surface and popped. If you listened closely that day you still couldn’t hear anything, but man, this guy really hated white people and their ways. Which is why he is a racist and worthy of no further consideration. Unlike his son who made a wonderful adjustment in to modernity.