Who Has It Worse?

I have just finished reading The last heathen : encounters with ghosts and ancestors in Melanesia by Charles Montgomery. It was an interesting read in a vague anthological way - containing facts and stories about a people that I know absolutely nothing about and a land that I will never visit. But what attracted my interest the most was the description/discussion of how various imperialistic countries, mainly Britain, consistently interchanged religious beliefs and capitalism. That is- the need to get labourers (slaves) to work elsewhere, the need to sell products to the indigenous people were combined with the need to convert those people to whatever particular brand of Christianity was acceptable at a particular point in history. These changes are well documented partially because European influence happened a bit later in the 19th century so there is more writing available. As well the area is both more geographically isolated and a smaller than North America a. The attempts to eradicate traditional beliefs were more obvious. The attempts also appear to have in some ways been less successful.

It struck me as I was reading the book of how similar were the tools of both Christianity and capitalism in their drive to create a world that served only one master, of how ruthless was the drive to destroy other cultures that were beyond their understanding or at least beyond their desire to try to understand. At some point, I started to compare the experiences the Indigenous people of Canada with the experiences of the various Indigenous groups within Melanesia. This is a dangerous thing to do. Comparing the life experiences and suffering of various peoples and groups allow those people to separate their experiences from others, to feel as if they are better (or worse) than other groups who have been colonialized. It is this process of segregating groups from each other that weakens any movement to create change. If one group's pain and suffering have been greater than another's' - then that in some weird perverted way - it gives us permission to ignore all of the other issues, the other groups.

A number of years ago when I was teaching at Fleming college, one of the videos that I used was The Story Telling Class (1). The documentary is about a high school in Winnipeg that uses A Long Way Gone - an autobiography by Ishmael Beah who was a child soldier in the Sudan, as a platform for students from countries destroyed by war to share their experiences with their Canadian born peers. At some point, the Canadian born students start to question why they are not allowed to tell their stories. When Ishmael Beah visits the class he talks about how we should not compare our emotional pain or stress. That it is not useful to dismiss someone's experiences because on the surface - it was not a terrible as another's. That regardless of the experience, the level of pain may be the same. By dismissing an individual's experience, we isolate that person or that group and ensure that they will never be allies. Such divisions only facilitate the growth of the elite.

It would seem to me that what we must learn to do is to accept all other people's life experiences and perceptions of those experiences while not diminishing our own and without attempting to rank who has had a worse life.


(1) http://www.bullfrogfilms.com/catalog/story.html