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Six Thousand Lessons Of the six thousand valuable lessons that might be offered to a persistent traveler, here is one I received. Over the years, in speaking with Eskimo people — Yup’ik and Inupiat in Alaska and Inuit in Canada — I came to understand that they prefer to avoid the way we use collective nouns in the West to speak about a species. Their tendency is not to respond to a question about what it is that “caribou” do, but to say instead what an individual caribou once did in a particular set of circumstances — in that place, at that time of year, in those weather conditions, with these other animals around.
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