Six on Canada: Mosquitoes are a Canadian icon; The Inuit (nee Eskimo) suicide Crisis; French Heritage Day At Old Fort Niagara; In search of my Canadian identity; Obama’s endorsement of Justin Trudeau is an unjustifiable American intrusion; The next g
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And please don't forget to check out the pertinent images attached to every post
Thanks John and Gary
| "As a tourism campaign, marketing your city as the “Mosquito Capital of the World” flies in the face of all logic. Mosquitoes are generally not a big-ticket attraction. I imagine there are not too many people who’d put a mosquito-themed vacation on their bucket list. Nevertheless, in 1984 the buzzing town of Komarno, Man., located roughly 70 kilometres north of Winnipeg, did just that: Embracing its reputation – its name means “mosquito infested” in Ukrainian – the town proudly erected a menacing, 15-foot-tall statue of a mosquito with a wingspan approaching 17 feet – the largest mosquito on the planet. While Komarno’s title as the mosquito mecca is unofficial, Canada garrisons the largest national contingent of the 100 trillion or more mosquitoes circling almost every inch of the globe. As a country we are, quite literally, the mosquito capital of the world. |
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| With a vast labyrinth of rivers and lakes comprising 20 per cent of the world’s fresh water (a vital ingredient for the reproduction of mosquitoes), Canada is a mosquito wonderland. In fact, the oldest mosquito fossil on record, dating to about 80-100 million years ago, was unearthed in Canada. From the Arctic tundra to the Great Lakes, Canada is consumed by mosquitoes. |
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| Even the austere Arctic and its nomadic animals are not spared from being hounded and probed by hungry hordes of mosquitoes. “There aren’t a lot of animals for them to eat in the Arctic, so when they finally find one, they are ferocious,” says Lauren Culler, an entomologist at Dartmouth College’s Institute of Arctic Studies. “They are relentless. They do not stop. … You can be completely covered in a matter of seconds.” Ravenous swarms literally bleed young caribou to death at a bite rate of 9,000 a minute – or, by way of comparison, they can drain half the blood from an adult human in just two hours. For Canadians, and perhaps for our caribou, mosquitoes are as pervasive and generic to our culture as hockey, Tim Hortons and butter tarts." |
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"The girl, Maureen told me, had just come back from visiting relatives in another village and had spent the previous afternoon sorting through clothes she wanted to give away. Then the family settled down to butcher and eat a seal—raw, in the traditional Inuit way—on a piece of cardboard on the sitting room floor. Afterward, Sarah put on some makeup and went out. She’d just broken up with an older boyfriend of whom her parents did not approve, but they’d had so many fights about it that Maureen didn’t dare ask where she was going.
If Nunavut, the semi-autonomous Canadian territory that is home to roughly 28,000 indigenous Inuit people, were an independent country, it would have the highest suicide rate in the world. The suicide rate in Greenland, whose population is mostly Inuit, is 85 per 100,000; next highest is Lithuania, at 32 per 100,000. Nunavut’s rate is 100 per 100,000, ten times higher than the rest of Canada and seven times higher than the US. When I visited Nunavut’s capital, Iqaluit, in July, virtually every Inuit I met had lost at least one relative to suicide, and some recounted as many as five or six family suicides, plus those of friends, coworkers, and other acquaintances. Three people in my small circle of contacts lost someone close to them to suicide during my nine-day visit. Acquaintances would direct my attention to passers-by on the street: “his older brother too,” “his son.” Almost one third of Nunavut Inuit have attempted suicide, and most Inuit I met confided, without my asking, that they had done so at least once."
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