“Learn to understand them instead of fighting them”

“Learn to understand them instead of fighting them” is Ijitsoq Akesuk’s central counsel to Leon Anawak as they consider how humans should respond to unfamiliar beings connected to the marine crisis. The line rejects victory as the measure of human action. Akesuk instead asks Anawak to recognize a shared world in which life is interdependent and the limits of human knowledge matter. The expression’s companion formulation, “See them as a part of yourselves,” makes that idea intimate: the beings are not to be treated as an external problem that humans can simply dominate.

The Counsel and Its Occasion

Akesuk’s advice comes in a conversation about whether the crisis can be solved through scientific understanding or combat. He invokes a shamanic account in which harm to life has angered the spirits, including Sedna, and then redirects the question from identifying the beings to deciding how to meet them. His recommendation is to make contact and heal divisions, even though Anawak objects that they are not people. Akesuk answers that personhood is not the point: they belong to the world as surely as hands and feet belong to a body.

The saying therefore does not promise that understanding will be easy, or that the beings will become human-like once understood. It changes the terms of the encounter. Rather than ranking species by intelligence or claiming mastery, it asks Anawak to treat the unfamiliar as part of a larger living whole. Akesuk explicitly contrasts that approach with battle, which, in his view, can end only in death.

Indigenous Knowledge and Historical Disruption

The expression gains weight from the history Akesuk and Anawak discuss. Anawak has been directed to seek elders’ knowledge, but the account of Canada’s Indigenous peoples describes how the Indian Act of 1885 disrupted oral transmission by encouraging people to leave their homelands and sending children to residential schools for integration into white society. Reparations could not restore what had been lost, and fewer people retained the old lore. The conversation presents the elders not as a convenient source of a ready-made explanation, but as people whose knowledge has itself been damaged by political intervention.

Akesuk also connects present identity to forced relocation. Inuit were moved from traditional territory in the southern Arctic to Resolute and Grise Fjord; later, people were transported farther north without the tents, kayaks, canoes, or sleds needed for life on the land. The stated justifications for relocation conflicted with the poor access to caribou trails and summer breeding grounds. Akesuk says he too was relocated, and that Anawak’s parents were as well. This history makes the appeal to understanding more than a general plea for tolerance: it comes from a speaker whose community has experienced the consequences of outsiders claiming authority over other lives and territories.

Akesuk does not treat cultural continuity as a simple return to the past. Since 1999, Nunavut has had its own territory, and traditions such as dog-sledding, building igloos, and lighting fires with flints are being revived. Yet he acknowledges that the earlier nomadic way of life has been lost and that the community is living through profound trauma. His emphasis on giving the living hope, while allowing time for healing, lends the advice a practical and historically grounded character: understanding requires attention to change and loss, not romanticizing them.

Interdependence Rather Than Mastery

Earlier, Akesuk explains the principle behind the counsel through the phrase “Everything is one”. A change to a river affects people, animals, and the sea; a change in one part of the system affects the rest. Anawak calls this ecology, but the exchange places the idea within a wider cultural teaching rather than treating it solely as a scientific label. The later comparison between other beings and parts of the human body carries the same principle into the crisis: separation is a misleading basis for deciding who deserves consideration.

That reasoning also counters the novel’s recurring problem of limited human perspective. The continental shelf, generally no more than two hundred metres deep, is familiar territory compared with the depths beyond it, described as more mysterious to science than outer space. At sea, horizon and sky can merge in rain and cloud; far below the surface, sight and the inner ear cannot reliably tell a person whether they are rising or falling. The ocean repeatedly exceeds the sensory and conceptual tools humans bring to it. Against that setting, Akesuk’s counsel does not claim that spiritual or Indigenous knowledge supplies a complete answer. It insists instead that uncertainty is no warrant for attacking what humans do not yet understand.

Significance in Anawak’s Story

The expression offers an ethical counterpoint to responses organized around threat, control, and force. Its challenge is not that humans must approve of every action by the beings, but that a struggle for mastery cannot secure a lasting victory when humans are entangled with the life they seek to command. Akesuk’s distinction between understanding and fighting reframes contact as a possibility of repairing divisions, rather than an excuse to erase difference.

For Anawak, the exchange also links the attempt to understand marine life with the effort to approach Inuit experience without assuming that an outsider’s categories are sufficient. The elder’s counsel emerges alongside a history of broken oral traditions, displacement, and cultural adaptation; it is offered by someone who speaks from within that history, not as an abstract maxim detached from it. The line’s decisive significance is thus both ecological and relational: it asks humans to make room for forms of life they cannot reduce to themselves, and to replace domination with the work of understanding.