i gotta say i obviously liked the north water quite a bit but i have my thoughts you know. why are we as native people always saviors but never given full agency? i think obviously patrick aligns himself far more with the inuit that he encounters in the arctic but in some ways it really feels like that same old white-man-becomes-indigenous sort of plot there at the end
within the context of the story it obviously endears me to patrick that he views indigenous people as fellow people and is always respectful and not patronizing (which is kind of huge in 1859), he doesn’t ascribe to the “we need to teach ~the savages~ our ways, they’re so primitive and childlike” that the priest pushes onto him—he’s more like “that’s not my business what others believe and i’ve lost all faith in a christian god so power to them for having their own belief system, i think it makes more sense tbh”
speaking in terms of the indigenized white man trope i do think i appreciate that he learns and highly values what he learns, he carries it with him, but then also goes back home instead of becoming this stupid mystical white savior figure (though i do think it’s a bit corny that they’re like “oh they think you have powers” but that’s neither here nor there, i’ve got mixed feeling on it). i think that speaks a bit to his positionality as a colonized person himself (we see it so literally with the fact that he is irish but speaks with an english accent because he was raised/adopted by an english surgeon) who has already participated in colonial violence and has lived to regret it. i think there’s some really interesting stuff there that could have been built out more intentionally and intelligently if it had been told by someone who understood the topic better
and at the same time, it’s a show that came out in 2021, and i wish the inuit he encountered had been given more agency and more context. translate what they’re saying. give them names.
generally i liked it, but there’s of course room for improvement. 7/10
