Differing Perspective -- Miss_Sanguine
Quilaq couldn’t understand why his tribe was assisting those in the south. Those people were nothing but barbarians and it was a wonder they’d managed to exist for this long. How could a people who allowed their women to fight and hunt think themselves anything but savages? Women were meant to stay at home and bring peace and healing to their families. He couldn’t imagine what it would have been like if his mother had been away for long periods of time to hunt, along with his father. He would have been home alone; no one to tell him stories as he fell asleep in the cold nights, no one to soothe his mind and heart with feelings of comfort and warmth. When he thought of women he thought of love, of warm blankets, of the sweet scent of heated seal-meat with spices.
The primitive igloos in the Southern Tribe were probably void of homely warmth. The women must look savage, with man-like arms that could break one in half instead of embrace one and make all of his or her troubles melt away. The tribe was probably small because all the females hunted and ended up dead, unable to give birth to life and keep the population thriving.
When he watched his little sister head out the door to go to her Healing Lessons, smiling back at her as she said goodbye, his heart stopped a little at the thought of her putting herself in danger like those in the Southern Tribe did. How could the brothers stand seeing their sisters go out with weapons against horrific dangers like sea-lions and polar-leopards? They had to be heartless; too focused on fighting to care about what happened to those who could one day give life to another.
And one couldn’t forget their living conditions. The Southern Tribe lived as though Nomadic, their homes being nothing but tents of skin and snowy igloos with little fires outside for cooking. They were spread thinly throughout the South Pole after the Fire Nation had come and reduced their numbers severely-something Quilaq personally thought they deserved, after having abandoned the North Tribe to live elsewhere.
“Nothing but a bunch of savages,” he said to himself as he fit on his hunting gear and prepared to follow his fellow guy friends out into the tundra.
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More people from the Northern Tribe had arrived earlier that morning, and Kuk’uq had watched as they’d come ashore and disembarked from their large ships. They looked like the Southern Tribe with their varying blue parkas and weathered skin, but there was an air about them that made it apparent they were not. They walked with their heads high, bright smiles on their faces, but the smiles looked false in the eyes of the tribesman.
They thought they were better than him and his people just because they had such higher numbers. They thought themselves prosperous and had come to “share” this prosperity. Kuk’uq saw it the other way around, however. Just because his people didn’t have as many “worldly possessions” didn’t mean they were impoverished. His people may have been few, but they were close, each member of the tribe a member of his family, blood-related or not. They were like a pack of wolves, all one and looking out for each other. Who could want more?
The Northern Tribe did not have that. They lived in large buildings in a city that could house thousands. Their houses were just that, they were not homes. The Northern Tribe wasn’t even a tribe, it was more of a populace of people living together without even knowing one another. They did not know the bonds that truly made a tribe what it was.
In the North, women were not permitted to fight or hunt or fish. This seemed rather ridiculous to him. A woman was just as good a fighter as man, though not as powerfully built. A woman could catch just as many fish, face the fiercest of wild animals and stab through its heart with as much ease as a man, she could tell stories as well as any of those told by a man. Kuk’uq’s oldest sister, for example, could send a man crying for his mother faster than anyone. She was a celebrated figure in his village for the triumphant hunting expeditions she had been on, for the bounteous meat and furs his people lived shared. And at the same time, she was the most kindhearted person he knew; giving thanks to the kills she had been blessed with, providing comfort to those that needed it.
To stifle a woman’s abilities by making her stay at home was an outrage; a waste. There was so much more to a woman than homemaking. It was the pride of the men that allowed it, and pride was a horrible thing. It tore people apart. It was like saying a man could not sew or cook, which Kuk’uq knew for a fact they could. He rather enjoyed cooking, and his brother could patch a parka in moments.
What would happen, he wondered, if all the men in the Northern Tribe went to war and died? They would be leaving behind all of their women with no means of taking care of themselves. They would not know how to get food, how to trap a squid or harvest sea prunes. They would all die off.
He hated to say it, for it made him sound like a terrible person, but these Northern Water Tribesmen were nothing but… but savages. He did not want their help, nor did his tribe need their help. They were a burden, a stain on what it meant to be Water Tribe.