These old photographs, like ghost ships, seldom bring us what we want.

August 12, 2022 2:09 PM

A photograph of schoolchildren, taken at sea, their pinched faces registering the roll and pitch of the Harmony as she makes her way between the mission stations. Settler children. Inuit children. Dual-heritage children with fathers from Scotland or Norway or Nova Scotia. Hybrid lifeways. Seal children sewn into the sleek dappled skins of harbour seal and harp seal, the fur running down the body, gut sewn, shedding all the waters of the world. The seal’s gift to the hunter. The mother’s gift to the child.

Photographs from the Moravian Church Mission Ship to Labrador "Harmony" in the early 1900s and the global epidemic of 1918-1919, a visual essay by Jonathan Westaway. First in a series Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North from the Network in Canadian History and Environment's (NiCHE) diverse blog.
posted by Rumple (4 comments total)

Much of the background for this essay was gathered from Memorial University of Newfoundland's online portal "Labrador Inuit through Moravian Eyes".
posted by Rumple at 2:19 PM on August 12, 2022

Oh, this is heartbreaking and beautiful and thought-provoking. Best yet, this crucial caution:

Looking backwards, we need to be mindful of Eve Tuck’s warning of the dangers of damage centred narratives that reinscribes ‘a one-dimensional notion of these people as depleted, ruined, and hopeless’, pathologizing forms of research in which colonial ‘oppression singularly defines a community'

posted by Jesse the K at 3:21 PM on August 12, 2022 [5 favorites]

Susi, Sara, Martha: what vibrant, curious young people. That light existed, and will always have existed, despite what came after - apropos of the quote Jesse the K added above, I almost wish this had been the leading image for the piece. Thank you for sharing, Rumple.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 7:19 PM on August 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

Haunting.
posted by samthemander at 11:52 PM on August 13, 2022