“Unseeing eyes”
Velma Wallis explains, “The two big scoops lined with chicken wire dripped with underwater growth as they were pulled out of the water. Flies had already began to work on the huge glistening salmon, their unseeing eyes staring upward.” It is ironic for ‘ unseeing eyes’ to stare. The ironic comment regarding the eyes emphasizes the flies’ obliviousness of Velma Wallis and her father’s presence.
“The Gwich’in were Treated as primitives”
Velma Wallis reports, “By the 1910s, the Gwich’in people had shed their mooseskin attire and bedecked themselves in trousers, white shirts, and shiny black shoes. But as well dressed as they were, the Gwich’in were treated as primitives.” It is sardonic for the Gwich’in to be considered as primitives after implementing the white dressing protocol. The white’s notion of superiority is not grounded on dress code; it is based on the predetermined philosophies about the Native’s subservience which cannot be smothered by alterations in the dress codes. Had the Native stuck to their Native dressing, then it would have been somehow admissible to associate them to Natives. For the whites, being Native is unconditionally corresponding to primitivism.
