SSH205 Midterm

Offer a close reading of one of the selected articles.

• Your analysis of three pages (800-1200 words) should consider both what the text is saying and how the message is being expressed.
• Your midterm should use MLA or APA formatting and include a Works Cited or References page that lists the online source of the article (no research should be used for this assignment) and be double-spaced with 12-point font (Calibri or Times New Roman) with 1-inch margins and so on. No abstract is required with APA formatting.
• Submit an e-version as a “doc(x)”/”pdf” file to our D2L Brightspace site by the deadline.

Remember:

• Do NOT produce a summary, a simple observation, or a list of ideas from the text. You need to make claims about how this particular article–with its specific passages and examples–produces meaning.
• The author’s subject is NOT your subject. The author’s article is your subject. Produce an analysis of the text rather than the issue more broadly or by adding on your personal opinion or review of the writing style or other subjective views.
• This assignment is a close reading and NOT a research assignment. The only evidence you will use to support your claims is your analysis of the text.
• Stay analytical and explain and evaluate logic rather than describe content or repeat points. It is a good idea to review the previously assigned chapters and videos as you prepare your essay.

The In-Class Midterm Essay BONUS Draft Exchange takes place one class before your midterm essay is due. To participate you must bring a typed draft of the assignment that amounts to at least one full page. This will include an opening paragraph and at least a body paragraph. Bring one copy of this document to class to use during the exchange, and you will submit one e-version of the assignment (a “doc(x)” or “pdf”) to our D2L Brightspace site before class.

Against Cheerfulness

Practising the Greek virtues of wisdom and courage is one thing. But being cheerful the American way borders on psychosis.

Mariana Alessandri

I once ended up at a Boy Scout ceremony in the northeast United States, where I inhaled the American spirit unfiltered. The boys’ uniforms had Stars-and-Stripes patches sewn on next to their badges. We recited the Pledge of Allegiance in front of an oversize US flag, and we prayed to America’s vague God, giving thanks for this and that, and asking for some strength or protection. The boys recited their Scout Law: to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, and… cheerful.

As a philosopher influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, I’d always imagined cheerfulness was a sickly child, born nine months after a Tinder date between Stoicism and Christianity. But that night I learned that cheerfulness was a British orphan smuggled into the US in the early 20th century, and was now making a living spreading itself all over contemporary American kitsch: throw pillows, coffee mugs and slippers. Cheerfulness has planted deep roots in US soil, and the poor Boy Scouts are made to believe she’s a virtue.

The Ancient Greeks named four virtues: temperance, wisdom, courage and justice. Aristotle added more, but cheerfulness wasn’t one of them. The Greek philosophers didn’t seem to care about how we felt compared with how we acted. Aristotle said that we would ideally feel good while acting good, but he didn’t consider pleasure necessary for beautiful action. Acting virtuously meant steering clear of excess and deficiency. But in order to reach his ‘mean’, we need to jettison every action that misses the mark. Most of the time, the mean is incredibly tough to find, but if it came down to a choice between feeling good while acting badly or feeling badly while acting good, Aristotle said to choose good behaviour. He understood that feelings are hard to control, sometimes impossible, but he also knew that positive feelings like to hang around virtuous actions. While we’re waiting for the good feelings to show up, he asked us to get to work on temperance, wisdom, courage and justice. But he never said anything about smiling through it.

The Roman Stoics inched closer to prescribing cheerfulness when they decided that we should pay attention to our feelings. They believed that we could control our attitudes. But even they didn’t champion cheerfulness, despite the American translators who try to poison them with it. For example, Marcus Aurelius, in his Meditations, advised himself to be εὔνους, literally ‘good-minded’. This was translated into English as ‘good-natured’ by Francis Hutcheson and James Moore in 1742 in Scotland, and then as ‘benevolence’ by the British translator George Long in 1862, before returning to ‘good-natured’ in 1916 under the influence of another British translator, C R Haines. In 2003, Gregory Hays, from Indianapolis, translated εὔνους as ‘cheerfulness’. Maybe Hays was a boy scout. Or Christian. Or both.

Bottom of Form

To the Stoic list of virtues, the Christians added faith, hope and love. These are a gift from God, unlike patience and justice, which can be achieved on our own. Faith is the belief that with God all things are possible; hope is risking that belief in real time; and love is willing to be wrong about it. These three add an undeniably emotional element to the mix of virtues, but even Jesus didn’t ask for cheer. The closest he got was telling the disciples not to look depressed when they fasted. Paul got even closer when he declared that ‘God loves a cheerful giver’. But the original Greek still sounds more like ‘God loves it when you give without needing to be persuaded’ than like the Boy Scout definition of cheerfulness. But Paul also said that Christians should ‘do everything without grumbling and arguing’. The pivot from action to attitude started by the Stoics and egged on by the Christians set the historical stage for Scout Law in the US.

In 1908, the British Lieutenant-General Robert Baden-Powell created (what would become) the worldwide Boy Scouts movement. He intended to instil good old Christian values into good old British boys. Cheerfulness and other newborn virtues soon circled the globe, hitting the US in 1916. Eventually, the Boy Scouts Association in the UK dropped it: they don’t need to be cheerful any more, according to their Scout Law, even though it was their idea. The lifting of mandatory cheerfulness reflects contemporary British culture, just as the policing of cheerfulness in the US reflects ours.

The Boy Scouts of America associate cheerfulness with positivity: a Scout should ‘look for the bright side of life. Cheerfully do tasks that come your way. Try to help others be happy.’ Instead of grumbling while he toils, a cheerful Boy Scout will cultivate a joyful attitude. He will ‘jump at opportunities’ that others won’t, and is more likely to find difficult tasks more enjoyable than others. Finally, a good Boy Scout believes that cheerfulness is infectious and can spread to those around him.

It’s no surprise that cheerfulness was embraced not only by Boy Scouts but by the greater American culture too: the US is a melting pot of Christianity, Stoicism, cognitive behavioural therapy, capitalism and Buddhism, all of which hold, to varying degrees, that we are responsible for our attitudes and, ultimately, for our happiness. A quick browse through the self-help section of any US bookstore announces that lots of Americans are desperate to bootstrap their way to the bright side. Texts on embracing life’s miserable condition don’t exactly fly off the shelves. However, books on how optimism can be learned make millionaires out of their authors. They tell us that the key to happiness is positivity, and that the key to positivity is cheerfulness. The aorta of the US economy pumps out optimism, positivity and cheerfulness while various veins carry back US dollars naively invested in schemes designed to get rich quick, emotionally speaking.

Socrates was right in the Symposium when he said that we are attracted to what we are not, and the psychologists behind production and marketing know better than we do the ubiquity of US anxiety, depression and restlessness. Many of us who might not be cheerful by nature get pressured to smile by the reigning notion that we alone are responsible for our happiness. Window-shop in any middle-class city and you will discover a consumer culture desperate to live up to the adage ‘Think like a proton: always positive!’ Homeware stores are filled with reminders of how happy we could be if only we’d listen to our kitschy teacups with printed pseudo-philosophical adages such as ‘Continuous cheerfulness is a sign of wisdom,’ except that teacups don’t know the first thing about cheerfulness or wisdom, or whether they relate to happiness. Look at Denmark: the Danish are not particularly cheerful but, if the statistics are to be believed, they are happier than most. I’ve been to Denmark, and it’s not defiled with messages to ‘Keep calm and focus on cheerfulness.’

If you have to tell someone to be cheerful, they aren’t feeling it. Cheerfulness spontaneously felt and freely given is brilliant, but it is no more virtuous than acting courageously when one isn’t scared. Aristotle insisted that virtuous action be independent of, and sometimes contrary to, our feelings. In other words, virtuous action must be deliberate to count as virtue.

Baden-Powell knew this, and in 1908 he reminded his Boy Scouts that, when something annoying happens:

you should force yourself to smile at once and then whistle a tune, and you will be all right. A scout goes about with a smile on and whistling. It cheers him and cheers other people, especially in time of danger, for he keeps it up then all the same.

Baden-Powell’s words had the power to coerce a generation of boys to pretend that life is good when it isn’t. Cheerfulness advocates still find virtue in this charade. America’s unchecked faith in cheer abounds in our proverbs: ‘You catch more flies with honey,’ ‘Think happy thoughts,’ ‘Life is good,’ ‘Don’t worry, be happy,’ and ‘Laughter is the best medicine’ are all cheer-filled variations on Baden-Powell’s theme of forced bright-sidedness. ‘Minnesota nice’ captures the twisted Midwestern dedication to white-knuckling a positive attitude.

There is a fundamental difference between practising the Greek virtues of patience, justice or courage, and practising the American virtue of cheerfulness, which borders on psychosis. Patience asks us to change our behaviour, but it neither asks us to feel differently nor to pretend to feel differently. Granted, Aristotle believed that practising patience over a length of time would naturally make us more patient, but pretence was never part of the deal. You can act patient while feeling impatient, and it’s no lie. But when you fake cheerfulness, you are telling someone else that you feel fine when you don’t. This encourages the most maddening American T-shirts and aprons that say: ‘Smile! Happiness looks gorgeous on you!’

Cheerfulness conceived as a virtue – à la Boy Scout Law – instead of a spontaneous feeling is a pretence. It’s not an action but it is an act. Whistling while you work might be worth defending, but forcing yourself to smile when you don’t feel like it amounts to lying to the people around you. ‘Fake it till you make it’ has brutal consequences when applied to the emotions. When conceived as the attempt to trick others into thinking that you feel cheery, cheerfulness is far from a virtue. It’s a vice. It falls on the deficiency end of the spectrum of trust. Too much trust is called naïveté, and is a vice of excess. But cheerfulness is just as bad. It confesses: I don’t trust you with my darkest feelings; I don’t think you are responsible enough to handle my inner life. Forced cheerfulness is a denial of life. All experiences taste different, and if we force a smile through the sour ones, we are not living honestly. We might want to lock out certain people from our fragile hearts, but cheerfulness is an equal-opportunity vice; it keeps even my loved ones out of reach. Whoever gets our cheery selves does not get our true selves.

Cheerfulness also unwittingly cancels out the Christian virtue of faith. It says: you can’t handle the expression of my feelings, and I deny you the chance to prove me right. Since it is built on the certainty that others will disappoint, cheerfulness lacks faith. It denies possibility. In real life, others probably will disappoint us. If we show them what we are really feeling, they will probably screw it up. But given the emphasis on cheerfulness in the US, as etched into Boy Scout Law, it’s no wonder that they screw it up. Still, a botched attempt at compassion is better than being denied the chance to fail. Here’s an anti-cheerful but virtuous attitude: expect others to fail but give them the chance. Also, recognise when someone is giving you a chance to fail them. Vulnerability is a risk and a gift.

This newest virtue could be given the old name of honesty. Instead of a smile, if we could find it in ourselves to wear our natural expression – the one that the US TV personality Mister Fred Rogers called the ‘best kind of expression’ – we would be better for it. Wearing our natural expression would be a sign that we are saying yes instead of no to life’s kumquats, to sadness, anxiety, illness, grief, depression, loneliness and anger, among other so-called ‘negative’ emotions. These affirmations of life’s sourness might just make frowning – or wincing, or crying – easier. In turn, these newly sanctioned expressions of negativity might make talking easier, honestly discussing hardships. Our newly vulnerable selves would get to see the corresponding vulnerabilities of our close and distant neighbours. This exchange of fragility could possibly be the key to empathy. If we agreed to stop wasting emotional energy masking our disappointments with cheer, then we’d be free to cue into other people’s sadness. The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno saw expressions of pain exchanged between two people as the great equaliser of humankind. He believed that deeper connections could be made in wreckage than prosperity.

But deep connections come at a cost. Cheerfulness isn’t just an American phenomenon, but it is uniquely built into the nation’s identity as invincible, and it’s not clear that we are ready to part with it yet. To become flesh-and-bone, Americans would first have to give up the idea that happiness is a matter of attitude. This challenges not only the history of the Boy Scouts but, more broadly, the reigning image of the self-made American, the single individual who keeps his chin up and never lets them see him sweat. This narrative was vital in birthing the US and then making it the superpower it is today.

Giving up a commitment to cheerfulness would mean risking judgment for being ordinary, human, mortal. If, however, we could learn to share in the misery of others without trying to cheer them up and send them packing, and if they could do the same for us, then we’d have a shot at true fraternity, the kind that Aristotle prescribed when he said we should live with our friends. The kind that the Boy Scouts crave, and that Baden-Powell thought he was cultivating when he prescribed cheerfulness. Profound human connection and communion – in other words, love – has no use for forced cheer, and is often sabotaged by false faces. If we want to love better and seek true happiness and friendship, it’s time to cultivate honesty instead of cheer.

https://aeon.co/essays/cheerfulness-cannot-be-compulsory-whatever-the-t-shirts-say

How Music Has Made Auditory Surveillance Possible

The same technology that lets us share our favorite songs has also allowed governments to eavesdrop.

By Gabrielle Cornish

For as long as we’ve been able to transmit sound through the ether, it seems, someone has been listening in.

This has perhaps never been quite so prominent as it is now in our current consumer climate, in which auditory surveillance is a valuable commodity. Companies like Amazon, Google, and Apple have infiltrated our lives not by force or secrecy, but through glossy advertising and the promise of efficiency. We ask Alexa to dim the lights, Siri to tell us the weather, or Google Home to play the new Lizzo album. In order for these devices to do this, they have to be able to hear us. And in order for them to hear us, they have to always be listening.

But we weren’t always so welcoming of such auditory invasions. Indeed, these devices—disguised by shiny bezels and colorful lights—are a far cry from the sorts of covert listening technologies we’re used to seeing in spy films or television thrillers. Auditory surveillance was the stuff of Cold War espionage and nefarious governments—not consumer convenience. And yet the history of auditory surveillance is intertwined with one of our greatest sources of pleasure and entertainment. Music—specifically, the technologies we use to create, share, and listen to it—has been integral to the development of devices that let governments, other people, and companies eavesdrop.

The era of commercial telephony began when Thomas Edison, who had invented the phonograph just a year prior, telephoned from his home in Menlo Park, New Jersey, to Philadelphia in 1878. Not long after that, curious hobbyists and devoted inventors alike experimented with singing songs and playing music from afar. With telephony, however, came a new set of social and cultural expectations, listening contexts, and potential risks. Over the next decade, phone tapping—listening in to conversations live—was not uncommon, and it was not long until clandestine microphones (“bugs”) began to appear. In 1892, New York state made the intrusion a felony, and other states soon followed suit.

As the world descended into conflict in 1914, engineers used similar techniques and borrowed from telegraphy, too, to listen for German U-boats aboard British naval ships. Their methods for “enhanced listening” enabled the British to “see” the enemy via sound. By the Second World War, radar (“radio detection and ranging”) and sonar (“sound navigation ranging”) expanded these electroacoustic techniques to detect foreign objects and enemy ships. To counter these methods, actress Hedy Lamarr teamed up with composer George Antheil to develop the technique of “frequency hopping,” which prevented enemy submarines and ships from detecting American torpedoes. The two artists built on ideas of melodic change with their invention. While the U.S. government never used their technology, it laid the foundation for the development of Wi-Fi technology. The same technology that at the turn of the century had been used to transmit jazz and cabaret tunes to listeners around the world had been adapted, transformed, and militarized.

With the end of World War II came another global conflict: the battle for political and ideological supremacy between the United States and the Soviet Union. Fought as much by analysts as it was by soldiers, the Cold War became a flashpoint in the global development of auditory surveillance. The CIA, as one recently declassified document shows, saw such surveillance as key to the United States’ mission for global supremacy. But the CIA document also acknowledges that the United States lagged far behind its Soviet nemeses well into the 1950s. More than 100 covert listening devices, the report claims, were found in overseas embassies and consulates in the first few months of 1956 alone. In the battle for information, America was on the verge of losing.

The CIA, it seems, relied on tried and tested techniques of spycraft when it came to planting bugs—though, from time to time, it resorted to more unorthodox methods like training birds and cats to plant listening devices. The Soviets, on the other hand, spent much of the 1940s and 1950s developing new technologies that would make it easier to install and monitor devices.

The most famous—and most effective—of these was “The Thing.” Planted in the Great Seal of the United States in the Moscow Embassy in 1945, “The Thing” was one of the first covert listening devices to not require any external power source. Instead, it was a “passive” device, which meant that it was triggered by an external radio signal. In turn, a small membrane vibrated according to voices in the U.S. ambassador’s office, which were then retransmitted to the external radio receiver. Its small size, lack of a power source, and long operational life made it nearly impossible to detect.

Its inventor was, at least for much of his life, one of the most famous Soviet engineers—and someone deeply invested in music. Lev Termen had gained international renown in the late 1910s with the “termenvox,” an electronic musical instrument that was controlled exclusively by a performer’s manipulation of radio signals in the air. Known more commonly as the theremin, the instrument was played without ever being touched by a performer. It quickly became an international sensation, a seemingly “magic” technology of the future, and Termen demonstrated his instrument around the world. Its spooky, oscillating timbre made it well-suited for movie soundtracks, and it was particularly often used in horror and science fiction films. Composer Bernard Hermann, who was best known for his work with Alfred Hitchcock, used the instrument extensively in the soundtrack for The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), and the Beach Boys most famously emulated the sound of the instrument in their song “Good Vibrations,” from 1966.

After returning to the Soviet Union after a long stint in the United States, Termen was imprisoned in 1938 and placed in a sharashka: a type of labor camp in which imprisoned scientists, researchers, and engineers were put to work for the Soviet military. Termen would spend nearly 10 years there, during which time he used the same technological principles of the theremin to create “The Thing.” Released only in 1947—after being awarded a Stalin Prize for his invention—Termen worked for the KGB until 1966. During his tenure, the “Soviet Faust” helped to engineer a wide variety of technologies for espionage.

The connection between military operations and electronic musical media is a long-standing one. Tape recorders brought to the United States from Germany after the Second World War would enable composers and musicians like John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, and Les Paul to experiment with new musical sounds. Electronic music studios in the Cold War became important sites for the negotiation of cultural memory and ideological beliefs through music. Germany, too, repurposed its military resources by turning propaganda radio stations into sites for musical experimentation. And the earliest examples of computer music in the United States occurred in tandem with the expansion of military intelligence organizations; one software engineer on the West Coast recalled, “The same [software] can be used equivalently without any modifications whatsoever to either help make bombs or help make music.”

Termen realized this, as did the Soviet government. America only tuned in some years later; it wasn’t until 1952 that the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, George Kennan, would find the bug.

Upon his retirement from the KGB, Termen went straight to working as an employee of the Moscow Conservatory. Once there, he took the skills he had developed over nearly two decades of work in sonic espionage to once again create experimental electronic musical instruments. In Termen’s work, the musical and the martial converged. Whether his technologies would be used for creation or detection depended on time, place, and intention.

This distinction between music and warfare, between entertainment and surveillance, is key to helping us understand the proliferation of digital assistants today. Over the course of the 20^th century, ordinary consumers excitedly welcomed devices like the radio and phonograph into their homes. Such demand spurred further research and development of these technologies. Progress geared to the consumer, the narrative goes, was progress for society. But at the same time, this research had a dark underside, one inextricably linked with military conquest and global surveillance networks.

Seduced by the promise of ease, efficiency, and entertainment, we invite devices like Echo and Google Home to listen in on our everyday lives—and it’s our choice to do so. But it’s important to bear in mind that as we do this, we further the connections between entertainment and surveillance capitalism, a system in which our Hulu binges are linked to our Spotify playlists, which in turn influence the advertisements we see while scrolling through Facebook. The use of musical media in the service of auditory surveillance is nothing new, yes, but for the first time in history, we’re gladly welcoming it into our homes as part of a broader, intractable entertainment ecosystem.

For as long as we’ve been able to transmit sound through the ether, it seems, someone has been listening in. It’s time to pause quietly and ask ourselves: What do we—and don’t we—want them to hear?

https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/auditory-surveillance-music-history.html

Indigenous Knowledge and the Future of Science

Research on First Nation land often exploits the people who live there. What discoveries could come out of true collaboration?

by Jimmy Thomson

Jean Polfus had a moment of clarity sitting around a long oval table in Tulít’a, a community on the Mackenzie River in central Northwest Territories. It started with confusion over a pair of Dene words.

Goecha gots’anele. The words refer to a process in hunting whereby a hunter will circle around downwind to head off a caribou or a moose, taking advantage of the animal’s instinctual attempt to catch a predator’s scent. Polfus, rolling the unfamiliar term around in her mind, began to absorb some of its meaning. Goecha gots’anele. It related to wind and even to textures of snow. It related to particular places. It encompassed an entire way of thinking and the relationship between the hunter and the caribou, between the wind and the land.

It crystallized in her mind how language is rooted in the land. And the land, in turn, reflects the culture. “It’s just absolutely beautiful how connected the words are to the land,” she says, “and how connected the words are to the relationships people have with the animals.”

That moment in Tulít’a in 2014 set Polfus on a course of interdisciplinary research that would never stray far from her then newfound appreciation for the knowledge around her.

“It’s hard to really understand how people can perceive the world in a different way when they use a different language that you can’t understand,” she says. “I just got a glimpse of it.”

It’s an understanding shared through generations of Dene people. As one of Polfus’s community advisers, Walter Bayha, put it to her, quoting his own grandfather, “Our history is written on the land. The language comes from the land.”

This wealth of shared knowledge did not accumulate on its own. Polfus has spent the last seven years living in Tulít’a, a community of less than 500 people along the Mackenzie River. She built her career studying various types of caribou—mountain, boreal, and barren ground, all of which live there—and how they interact with different habitats.

Living in the community gave her an irreplaceable edge in understanding the caribou. More importantly, it granted her the time and space to win the trust of community members. Their knowledge shaped her work. Polfus is part of a growing movement of scientists who don’t just “consult” with Indigenous communities—they immerse themselves in them, learn from them, share knowledge with them, and return something to them in the process. The Dene call this mode of thinking “łeghágots’enetę,” translated to “learning together.”

“It’s finding the questions that you have in common,” says Aerin Jacob, a conservation scientist with the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative. “Where’s the overlap between [questions] communities want to have answered and what is your expertise?”

That overlap can be a place of both great opportunity and great resistance. It’s the site of an ongoing convergence of vibrant traditions, a stubborn establishment, and curious minds.

And, in some places, in some ways, it just might be the future of science.

In 2017, the three largest federal funding bodies for science, health, and social-science research in Canada announced a new type of grant. Indigenous Research Capacity and Reconciliation Connection Grants of up to $50,000 were awarded the following year to projects that “identify new ways of doing research with Indigenous communities.”

The new funding was a response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s sixty-fifth call to action: establish a national research program to advance the understanding of reconciliation. Importantly, more than half of the grants were dedicated to Indigenous not-for-profit organizations—not universities.

Internationally, the scientific establishment has been taking notice. Community-involved science received a strong endorsement in a June editorial in Science cosigned by Jane Lubchenko, former administrator of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“Expanding the range of effective solutions and scaling them globally requires scientists to engage actively with communities,” the endorsing authors wrote. Jacob says this broader acknowledgment is an important step to legitimizing research that falls outside of the academic establishment, adding that the community-involved science movement is still finding its feet.

“It’s increasingly recognized by funding agencies as being important,” she adds. “But that doesn’t translate yet into huge amounts of research funding.” Still, the conversation has evolved a long way from how things were done in the not-too-distant past, when there was no guarantee that researchers would even engage with Indigenous communities more than absolutely necessary.

“I think ten years ago it was a really progressive idea to even table your findings at a community meeting,” says Megan Adams, a PhD candidate at the University of Victoria. Adams has been working out of Rivers Inlet on the central coast of British Columbia, in Wuikinuxv First Nation territory, in close collaboration with community members. From the very beginning, that collaboration has meant going much further than sharing a slideshow over coffee. In the first two weeks of Adams’s graduate program—when she was supposed to be starting classes at the University of Victoria—her supervisor, Chris Darimont, instead sent her to Wuikinuxv to listen to community members.

The stunning rainforest inlet, 100 kilometres north of Port Hardy, is home to abundant salmon runs that power local food, social and ceremonial fishing, and a sport-fishing industry. It’s also home to a large and very visible grizzly bear population. “Where I work,” Adams says, “bears and people live side by side.”

The community wanted to know more about the bears’ diets and how that knowledge could inform its harvesting practices. “If bears don’t get enough food, not only do people have to see bears—who they care about—suffer, they also face increased bear-human conflict,” Adams says. “This is about food security for you and food security for bears.”

As she researched, Adams checked in with elders and community members. They directed her collaborative work with the nation. But the community wasn’t simply in search of information out of a sense of objectivity, in the tradition of Western science. The goal of community members was to establish an evidentiary basis, parallel to their own traditional knowledge, to stop the grizzly bear trophy hunt, and they saw Adams’s research as a means to that end.

“Western science was one of many tools they were using to stop the hunt,” Adams says.

Science holds its own objectivity in high regard. But Anne Salomon, a professor at Simon Fraser University, says scientists who believe in their own objectivity are fooling themselves. Scientists are operating from an unavoidable position of bias, from the way they’re trained to their values and beliefs to the ways they formulate questions and gather data, she points out.

“It’s farcical to think that any science is unbiased,” Salomon says. “We do what we can to still get an approximation of the truth we’re interested in, in the least biased way possible.”

Salomon, regarded as one of the foremost practitioners of community-involved ecology research in Canada, learned her approach early on at the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre. All ecological research projects at Bamfield, no matter how small, are brought to the Huu-ay-aht First Nation for approval first if they involve Huu-ay-aht lands.

Salomon thought that was just how things were done, so when she arrived in Alaska, she approached the local Sugpiaq villages to ask for their input into her work surveying the creatures that live between high and low tide. What they told her formed the basis for her research. “It was in talking with the chief and talking with the people that they told me about the decline in this particular chiton that led to all this work,” she says. The community wanted to know why the mollusc was disappearing. “That’s such an interesting question ecologically and also in terms of conservation.”

The species in decline, the leather chiton, turned out to be a keystone species in that ecosystem, a species whose presence or absence has knock-on effects for the entire food web. In picking up on that trend, the Sugpiaq had noticed something other resource managers had missed, and they noticed it because the community has an interest in the species as a resource—and because it was steps from their front doors. That is often true of Indigenous communities, Salomon says, and that wellspring of local knowledge and curiosity draws her back to them again and again.

“Theirs is a deeply marginalized voice—when in reality it should be revered,” she says. Today, she believes, scientists have a much more pressing duty to consult with Indigenous communities. Ḵii’iljuus (Barbara Wilson), a member of the Haida Nation, convinced her that the duty was grounded in the principles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The requirement for “free, prior and informed consent” applies to researchers, Salomon says, and that means accepting the answer you’re given. “When you ask for consent, you have to be prepared for ‘no,’” she says.

The work Adams has done with First Nations along the central coast has also combined traditional knowledge from the community with modern scientific approaches. Using local knowledge has helped them establish shifts in the bears’ habitats dating back well into the past, further than science alone would allow. It has led to renewed understanding of the multifaceted, deep interactions between bears and salmon, involving the communities at every stage.

“When we started that habitat work, the province didn’t believe the Kitasoo [Kitasoo/Xai’xais First Nation] were seeing grizzly bears on islands,” Adams says. People who had spent their entire lives in close contact with grizzly and black bears would be told the obvious by a provincial scientist: that black bears can look brown. Backing up what was already well known by the local First Nations with knowledge that was more palatable to government employees was one part of building the case for that knowledge to be accepted by the government.

“The dialogue has really changed.”

The Heiltsuk First Nation’s sprawling coastal rainforest territory borders that of the Wuikinuxv First Nation, to the northwest. It’s known for its stormy waters, mysterious spirit bears, abundant marine life, and towering red cedar, Douglas fir, and hemlock trees. That rich coastline has been threatened over and over again by overfishing, diesel spills, and the prospect of unwelcome crude-oil pipelines.

The Heiltsuk’s unceded lands overlap in the south with those of Wuikinuxv First Nation at Calvert Island—home to the Hakai Institute, a relatively new research organization that focuses on coastal ecosystems. Hakai came to Calvert Island in 2014. It wanted to conduct field research across the territory, from its shallow seabed to cascading rivers high above the inlets and islands.

Both First Nations insisted on a collaborative approach.

“I hear people say, ‘We’ve been studied to death,’” says Jess Housty, a Heiltsuk First Nation councillor in the coastal community of Bella Bella. Housty says researchers were often coming to the community and taking what they needed—in the form of interviews with elders or other knowledge holders or in the form of invasive animal-based ecological research—then leaving, “advancing their careers with nothing tangible left in the community.”

That is no longer the case.

Researchers who want to work in Heiltsuk territory must now get approval from the Heiltsuk Integrated Resource Management Department. It’s a way for the First Nation to vet projects before they begin. Housty says ultimately it’s about the expression of Heiltsuk sovereignty over their lands and waters—something from which the First Nation has never shied away when it comes to other pressures on its resources.

“It’s not enough to say you’re sovereign—you have to act sovereign,” Housty says, quoting, as she often does, the community’s elders.

Most applications are accepted or returned to the researchers with suggestions on how to improve them. Some have been outright rejected—“often social-science-research questions that we felt were racist or exploitative of the community,” explains Housty.

Those researchers who are not willing to adapt their proposals to work within the community’s rules are shown the door. “That helps you weed out the people who you don’t want working in your territory to begin with,” Housty says.

Other benefits also arise when the community asserts control over how research is done in its territory. The Hakai Institute employs Heiltsuk members as field technicians. In the Wuikinuxv First Nation, Adams has been trying to leverage the funding and privilege that comes with her affiliation with the University of Victoria to work with youth, running a camp in a hard-to-reach part of the territory.

Polfus has been doing the same in Tulít’a, spending time in schools and working with community members in an effort to expand local capacity. “I really hope…the next generation of researchers doing work on caribou in the North are from the communities,” she says.

That’s already happening in Bella Bella, where a school-based program is giving young people the chance to shadow resource officers and collect real data that will be used by their community to inform decision making. Time spent out on the land is part of their curriculum. Other First Nations are now taking notice, and the practice is starting to spread.

“We are visited by, I would say, about a dozen communities a year,” Housty says. The visitors are looking for advice on how to assert sovereignty, the way the Heiltsuk have done, and on how to get a stewardship program up and running.

When the Gwich’in land claim was complete, covering a large swath of northern Yukon and the Northwest Territories, one of the first steps taken by the newly empowered First Nation was to establish a board to oversee all research in Gwich’in territory.

“Once the project takes place, if they collected any tapes, any kind of documentation, they would have to give us any kind of tapes, transcripts, photos related to the project,” says Sharon Snowshoe, who heads the board. The data are used to inform local decisions and advocate for local development priorities. It’s also a safeguard for the future.

“It’s going to be available for the future generations,” Snowshoe says.

When twenty-three-year-old Henry Huntington arrived in northern Alaska in the spring of 1988, straight out of Cambridge, he intended to stay a few months to round out his polar knowledge.

More than thirty years later, Huntington is still there. “I just got hooked,” he told The Narwhal. “You had real communities, people who had been there for thousands of years doing interesting things.”

When Huntington arrived, the subsistence whaling hunt of the lñupiat communities—their way of life—was under threat. The International Whaling Commission had unilaterally withdrawn its approval for Indigenous whaling, and the communities were left reeling.

Rather than accept the decision, however, the whalers decided to fight back with science.

Travelling from place to place along the coast, gathering information for the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission, Huntington found himself floored by the amount of local knowledge and its overlap with the whaling tradition.

“It was like a little spark,” he recalls. “People crowded around the table and had lots to say about where the ice was, where the whales are, what they do, where the people go, what the key features are, what their names are.”

But when he went to publish his results, he was met with resistance from the scientific establishment, which largely believed science was meant to come from scientists, not from Indigenous whalers.

“They seemed to give flimsy reasons for not publishing,” Huntington says. “For a lot of people, this was something new and hard to quantify. How much faith should you give in the words of some guys who’s spent his life out on the land, but has he had any training? Is there any rigour associated with this? Is he saying things just for his own benefit?”

Huntington made a conscious effort to publish his work as ecology or biology papers, rather than as anthropology, firmly asserting the place of traditional knowledge in natural science and moving the practice of consulting with communities into the mainstream.

Chris Darimont, Raincoast research chair at the University of Victoria and science director for Raincoast Conservation Foundation, has spent his entire career working in cooperation with Indigenous communities. He sent Adams to Wuikinuxv, having built trust and setting the groundwork for her arrival over many years.

He argues that no matter how much say a community has over the direction of research, just like any good science, it’s all peer reviewed and replicable. “Our responsibility is not only to that community,” he says. “We have a professional responsibility as scientists to do good work and, critically—here’s a key part—have our work subject to peer review and submit work that is reproducible.”

Huntington says some of the resistance he met in his early days in Alaska has been overcome, opening the door to more applications for this kind of work. Some of the openness is sincere, some less so. But, overall, he says, echoing Adams, “that attitude has changed, or at least, the rhetoric has changed.”

As it grows in acceptance, scientists may start encountering the awkward moment when their results disagree with the community’s traditional knowledge.

“When you have disagreements between the two types of knowledge, that’s where we have the biggest opportunity to discover something new,” says Polfus.

A camp in the Mackenzie mountain range in central Northwest Territories, where non-Indigenous scientists and Indigenous knowledge-holders work side-by-side. Photograph by Jean Polfus

For Polfus, that happened in the Mackenzie Mountains near Tulít’a. Science has three categories for the caribou found there: mountain, barren ground, and boreal. The Dene have another subcategory of mountain caribou, known to them as tęnatł’ǝa—the fast runner, a subtype the elders say comes from far away, “possibly as far away as the ocean,” she says.

“This type hasn’t been identified by Western science,” she says. And it still hasn’t; that will require a dedicated study involving linking DNA in scat from caribou to community members’ observations of tęnatł’ǝa individuals. It could have major implications for policy, since different caribou are protected in different ways by species-at-risk legislation.

“But there really wouldn’t be another word for this in Dene language if it wasn’t important for their hunting success.” Sometimes, however, the implications aren’t so supportive of the scientific interpretation of the world. Huntington encountered that tension as he worked on Saint Lawrence Island, in the Bering Sea.

Among the knowledge he gathered about whale migratory patterns and behaviours, he discovered something surprising. Whalers in the community had a word for whales coming alongside their boats on the side away from the harpooner, eyeing up the whaling crew. If the crew was found worthy, the whale would offer itself to the crew on the harpooner’s side of the boat.

The very idea of a whale endangering itself like that—let alone deciding to sacrifice itself to another species—flies in the face of all biological science. Yet the word was earnestly shared with the scientists.

Reviewers had a hard time believing it. “Fair enough, from the biology point of view,” Huntington concedes. But he felt that the term revealed enough about the whalers, along with their world view and their traditions, that it was a valuable observation regardless of whether it made sense to biologists.

“That speaks to a whole relationship with the whales that informs and motivates the way the whalers do their thing,” says Huntington, who included the term—angyi, related to the Yupik word for “giving something”—in his results.

Asked if he believes the biology can ever be reconciled with the traditional knowledge, Huntington insists that it doesn’t matter what he believes. “Maybe the two will never agree,” he says. But “if we go in with a filter of saying, ‘I’m only going to take seriously the things that make sense to me,’ we’re really closing our minds.”

The Particular Cruelty of Domestic Violence

America’s broken legal system, combined with cultural beliefs about family, pressures women to stay in violent, dangerous marriages.

Rachel Louise Snyder

Domestic violence is like no other crime. It does not happen in a vacuum. It does not happen because someone is in the wrong place at the wrong time. Homes and families are supposed to be sacred territory, the “haven in a heartless world,” as my college sociology teacher drilled into me. This is part of what makes the violence so untenable. It’s violence from someone you know, from someone who claims to love you. It is most often hidden from even one’s closest confidantes, and on many occasions the physical violence is far less damaging than the emotional and verbal violence.

I’ve been studying domestic violence for the better part of the past decade and have interviewed hundreds of people—victims, abusers, and experts in domestic violence— for my book on the topic. I can’t tell you how many abusers I’ve heard bemoaning their inability to stop loving the same women they assaulted so severely it landed them in prison. It is, perhaps, a powerful aphrodisiac, the idea that someone is gripped by love so intensely that he or she is powerless in the face of it.

American culture dictates that children must have a father, that a relationship is the ultimate goal, that family is the bedrock of society, that staying and working out one’s “issues” in private is better than leaving and raising kids as a single mother. As if a home with one adult abusing another adult isn’t broken, as if there are degrees of brokenness.

The messages are insidious and they are consistent. Those messages reverberate when politicians wrangle over reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act, and then fund it so sparingly it’s practically a hiccup in the federal budget. The Office of Violence Against Women has an entire budget of just under $489 million at present. To give a frame of reference, the entire annual budget for the Department of Justice, which oversees the Office of Violence Against Women, is currently $28 billion.

But victims receive the message to stay in other ways, too. It’s visible when the court system puts them on the defensive, asks them to face a person who might have tried to kill them, a person they know only too well might kill them for real next time. It’s visible in court rulings that give violent perpetrators a mere slap on the wrist, a fine, maybe. A few days in jail after a brutal assault. It’s visible when law enforcement treats domestic violence as a nuisance, a “domestic dispute,” rather than the criminal act that it is.

And, after all of this, people have the audacity to ask why victims stay.

The reality is that many victims are actively and stealthily trying to leave, working within the system that exists and step-by-step, with extreme vigilance, doing everything they can to escape. In so many cases, onlookers mistake what they see from the outside as the victim choosing to stay with an abuser. They fail to recognize a victim who is slowly and carefully leaving, and what leaving actually looks like.

None of this is surprising, given that many societies didn’t recognize domestic violence as wrong for most of human history. Some interpretations of Jewish, Islamic, and Christian religions have given the husband purview to discipline his wife in more or less the same manner as he might discipline and control any of his other properties, including servants, slaves, and animals. Some of these faiths’ holy texts even gave instructions on the manner of wife beating, such as avoiding direct blows to the face or making sure not to cause lasting injury. In the United States, the Puritans had laws against wife beating, though they were largely symbolic and rarely, if ever, enforced. (I also recognize that men can be victims and women can be perpetrators, and that there are grim statistics of domestic violence in LGBTQ relationships and communities. In general, men remain the overwhelming majority of perpetrators, and women the overwhelming majority of victims by nearly every measure.)

Often, abused wives were believed to have provoked the violence of their husbands—and this belief threads through hundreds of years of literature on domestic violence, infecting nearly everything written about spousal abuse prior to the 1960s and ’70s. On those very rare occasions when a case of private violence did make it to a courtroom, the rulings tended to side in favor of the man so long as the wife’s injuries were not permanent.

Apart from the Puritans’ laws, it’s only been in the past century or so that laws against wife beating have been written in the United States, and even those early states that began writing legislation against spousal abuse in the late 19th century—Alabama, Maryland, Oregon, Delaware, and Massachusetts—rarely enforced their own laws. The founding of the American Society Against the Cruelty of Animals predates laws against cruelty toward one’s wife by several decades. A federal law prohibiting domestic violence wasn’t passed until 1984.

As I write this, there are still more than a dozen countries where violence against one’s spouse or family member is perfectly legal—which is to say that no specific laws against domestic violence have been written. These include Egypt, Haiti, Latvia, Uzbekistan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, among others. Russia decriminalized any domestic violence that doesn’t result in bodily injury in 2017.

So much of the existing legal precedent around domestic violence in the United States  happened very, very recently. It wasn’t until 1984 that Congress finally passed a law that would help women and children who are victims of abuse; it was called the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act, and it helped fund shelters and other resources for victims. Stalking wasn’t identified as a crime until the early 1990s and still today is often not seen for the threat it truly is—not by law enforcement, abusers, or even by the victims actually being stalked, despite the fact that three-quarters of intimate-partner femicide victims in America have been stalked beforehand by partners or ex-partners. A national hotline for victims of domestic violence was not established in this country until 1996.

Around this time, three initiatives revolutionized how the U.S. addresses domestic violence. One was the 2003 advent of high risk teams within domestic-violence agencies that try to quantify the dangerousness of any given domestic-violence situation and then build protections around victims. Another was the 2002 opening of the country’s first family-justice center, started in San Diego by a former city attorney named Casey Gwinn; family-justice centers put victim services under one roof—police, attorneys, victim compensation, counseling, education, and dozens of others. And the third was the Lethality Assessment Program, begun in Maryland in 2005 by a former police officer named Dave Sargent, which primarily addressed how law enforcement dealt on-scene with a domestic-violence situation.

It was no mere coincidence that all three of these programs began around the same time. The women’s movement in the 1970s and ’80s had brought battered women to the attention of a nation just beginning to accept the idea of equality. The focus, in those years, was on shelters—building them, funding them, getting abused women away from perpetrators. But in the 1990s, that began to change. Advocates, attorneys, police officers, and judges across the country all told me that two primary events caused this. The first was the O. J. Simpson trial.

For many, Nicole Brown Simpson became the face of a new kind of victim. She was beautiful, wealthy, famous. If it could happen to her, it could happen to anyone. O. J.’s history of violence with her had been known to law enforcement. He’d been arrested, then bailed out, then sentenced to “telephone counseling” by a California judge (after which the case was dropped). Nicole’s 911 tapes allowed listeners into a rare scene: a woman under siege by a man who claimed to love her. The threats, the coercion, the terror—it was all right there. Her murder hurled into the forefront a conversation that advocates had been having for years—that domestic violence could happen anywhere, to anyone. How to reach victims who didn’t reach out to them was one of their biggest problems in those days. But when local papers ran stories about Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, for the first time nearly all of the articles included sidebars with where to go for help. Victims suddenly began to access resources in unprecedented numbers. Calls to domestic-violence hotlines, shelters, and police skyrocketed after the trial. Domestic violence edged its way into the national conversation.

Nicole Simpson’s case also became a rallying cry for victims of color who asked, rightfully, why it took a rich, white, beautiful woman to get the story of domestic-violence homicide out in public view. After all, women of color experienced private violence at the same or even higher levels as white women.

That part of the post-Simpson national conversation is slowly being addressed today in Native American, immigrant, and underprivileged communities on a larger scale than ever before, thanks in part to the second major event that changed how America treats domestic violence: the Violence Against Women Act. VAWA put intimate partner violence before lawmakers who had, until then, seen it as a private family matter, a problem for women rather than the criminal-justice system. It had first been introduced to Congress by then-Senator Joe Biden in 1990, but the bill didn’t pass until the fall of 1994, just months after O. J.’s arrest. (A jury acquitted O.J. of his wife’s murder in October 1995, a year after the bill’s passage.)

Finally, for the first time ever, cities and towns all across the country could get federal funding to address domestic violence in their communities. These funds allowed for targeted trainings of first responders, the creation of advocacy positions, shelters, transitional housing, batterer-intervention classes, and legal training; VAWA funds meant victims no longer had to pay for their own rape kits, and if an abused partner was evicted because of events related to her abuse, she could now receive compensation and assistance; victims with disabilities could find support, as could those in need of legal aid.

These and many other systems and services that address domestic violence today are a direct result of the passage of VAWA. In 1992, then-Senator Biden told the Associated Press, “[Domestic violence] is a hate crime. My objective is to give the woman every opportunity under the law to seek redress, not only criminally but civilly. I want to raise the consciousness of this country that women’s civil rights—their right to be left alone—is in jeopardy.”

VAWA requires reauthorization every five years. The 2013 reauthorization was delayed because many Republican senators and representatives didn’t want the bill to specifically mention same-sex partners, Native Americans living on reservations, or undocumented immigrants who were battered and trying to apply for temporary visas. After heated debates in both the House and Senate, the reauthorization finally passed. The next reauthorization is up for renewal as I write this. It passed the House in April, but still hasn’t passed the Senate. Advocates all across the country that I spoke with feel keenly the tenuousness of their positions and their funding in a political climate with a commander in chief who displays open hostility and sexism toward women, and who has himself been accused of groping and assault by more than a dozen women, as well as sexual assault by his first wife. (She later said she didn’t mean this in a criminal sense, but rather in a sense of having been violated.) Trump kept his staff secretary, a man accused of abuse by two ex-wives, in the White House, until media and outside pressure—and not a moral imperative—forced Rob Porter out. “The consequence of [Trump’s] words and deeds are so profound for women,” Kit Gruelle, a survivor and activist, told me. “We are leaping backwards at an obscene pace.”

I once asked Lynn Rosenthal, the first White House liaison to the Office of Violence Against Women during the Obama administration, a question: If she could do whatever she wanted with whatever money she needed, how would she solve domestic violence? She said she would take a community, study what worked, and then invest everywhere. At the same time, she says, “You can’t look at one little piece of the system and say, ‘Oh, that’s the magic bullet.’ That’s what … people want to do. If we could invest in one thing, what would it be? Well, the answer is, there’s not one thing.” And that’s the whole point: Private violence affects nearly every aspect of modern life in some way, yet the country’s collective failure to treat it as a public health issue demonstrates a stunning lack of understanding about this very pervasiveness.

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/05/no-visible-bruises-domestic-violence/588631/