Representation Of First Nation Peoples

9 Pages 2227 Words

nce we see the changing of Avik’s native cultures and beliefs. He leaves his grandmother alone who he must protect in the harsh elements. By releasing this responsibility he is renouncing the culture and community that he has grown up in. Upon entering into the new society that Walter has taken Avik to we again have a sense of Avik losing his native ways. One of the most powerful of these scenes is the doctors have just applied casts to Avik’s body in hopes of curing him from this disease he would have never contracted had it not been for the intervention of Western Europeans into the Arctic. Avik wakes up to find white casts all over his body. This shows how Europeans are trying to make his culture nonexistent. The casts all over his body represent the white influence that is slowly spreading over his body and his mind. Avik desperately tries to remove the casts from his body but to no avail. He cannot stop the “whiting out” process that has no overtaken his mind and soul. Gittings says it best when he states, “The hospital set is brightly lit to emphasize its blinding white walls, the white uniforms of the staff and in one scene the white plaster cast that encases Avik as part of his TB treatment, a visual sign of a rigid and constricting white culture imposed on the Aboriginal.” We are also aware of the aspect of the Europeans being almost omnipresent in the way they go about “whiting out” Avik’s heritage. Through the use of technology Avik becomes more and more assimilated into the white race and culture. One technological advance used is X-ray. When the X-ray’s of Avik’s body are shown to him he jumps up and flees in terror from this mapping of his body. This mapping shows the extent of the hold t...