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I'm not Canadian. I grew up in the scenic outskirts of Fairbanks, Alaska. We didn't have running water indoors until after I was in the 3rd grade, although a lot of that involved my father's stubborn/practical frontier mentality and my mother's willingness to put up with that.
I enjoy the shippy or smutty fic trope that involves the parties in question winding up somewhere delightfully isolated in lodgings that require close personal contact in order to stay warm, or similar shenanigans.
However. Actual Canadians are pointing out that the local word for the usual type of structure these two guys are stuck in is "cabin" (if log) or "cottage" (otherwise).
Reviewing some of the discussion, I would tend to agree that usage of the term "shack" where I grew up implied that the structure was, for whatever reason, not suitable for human habitation, and yet someone might be living there.
My father settled the property in the summer, with a platform tent. He built an uninsulated shack out of plywood and 2x4s, roofed with tar paper on plywood, for his first winter. This was a better move than staying in the platform tent, but I would not recommend this. If you're bad off enough that you're living in an uninsulated shack during a Northern winter, you have a non-zero chance of dying of the cold or dying of carbon monoxide poisoning if you're using an unsafe source of heat. This is a fact of life in the north. You respect that goddamn cold, and you respect it hard, because the land is beautiful and the land doesn't care if you live or die, and actually the land is out to kill you a lot of the time. But it's a fact of life. It just happens, and you live with it, and pampered grade-school children get it drilled into their heads how fast and bad it is the moment you take your warmth for granted.
My father is stubborn and resourceful, and survived without actually succumbing to carbon monoxide poisoning. He upgraded to the (insulated!) building that is now my mother's pottery shop before he and my mother got married. The next step up was a log cabin before I came along, and from there, an actual proper house where we didn't have to be scolded to not pull the oakum out from between the logs because that would ruin the insulation and chopping wood is no fun.
I don't know enough about Canada to add to the discussion about the people in Canada who actually live in shacks, nor enough about living in remote Alaskan villages to talk in any detail about any of the possible parallels. I do know the patient, careful tone I take to explain matters when someone calls me a "native Alaskan". It's the tone that means "I know you don't know any different, but you just stepped onto some very thin ice, and you'd best back up now."
"Native Alaskan" has a specific meaning in Alaska, one that does not just mean someone who was born and raised in the state. "Native Alaskan" and "Alaska Native" always has the capital N, and means that you are descended from at least one of the original tribes that settled The Great Land. I also have coloring and features that are ethnically ambiguous enough for various people to have incorrectly guessed in the past that I am (part) Alaska Native -- and also hapa, and Indian. So describing me as Native Alaskan would be both a mistake of fact (my father's family is mostly Scots-Irish by way of California; my mother's family is mostly Norwegian by way of Pennsylvania) and of terminology (I was born and raised in Alaska, but I am mostly Caucasian). My generation sometimes calls ourselves "Alaska Grown".
If someone continued to call me "native Alaskan" after I corrected them on the issue, there would be a problem. Alaska's various situations with endemic poverty, race, privilege, drug abuse, cultural obliteration and language death, and rural vs. urban life are complicated and ugly and I wouldn't even begin to know how to start describing it to someone who is not a local. Using a reserved term to describe someone when they are not a member of the group that the reserved term describes, is inaccurate and disrespectful. It's disrespectful to me, because it is an inaccurate description of me (just as I do not have purple hair, but unlike my hair color, which I can change if I wanted to, I cannot change who my genetic parents are), and it is especially disrespectful to actual Native Alaskans to lump any old son of a cheechako in with them, as if we had the same ancestral right to live there.
I don't think that using the wrong name for a type of building is close-order comparable to using a reserved term that's a respectful racial description on a person that it doesn't describe, but they are both wrong-terminology errors that can be made in good faith the first time, and they both touch on a similar morass of issues related to living in the frozen North.
So. Please. Cabin.
I enjoy the shippy or smutty fic trope that involves the parties in question winding up somewhere delightfully isolated in lodgings that require close personal contact in order to stay warm, or similar shenanigans.
However. Actual Canadians are pointing out that the local word for the usual type of structure these two guys are stuck in is "cabin" (if log) or "cottage" (otherwise).
Reviewing some of the discussion, I would tend to agree that usage of the term "shack" where I grew up implied that the structure was, for whatever reason, not suitable for human habitation, and yet someone might be living there.
My father settled the property in the summer, with a platform tent. He built an uninsulated shack out of plywood and 2x4s, roofed with tar paper on plywood, for his first winter. This was a better move than staying in the platform tent, but I would not recommend this. If you're bad off enough that you're living in an uninsulated shack during a Northern winter, you have a non-zero chance of dying of the cold or dying of carbon monoxide poisoning if you're using an unsafe source of heat. This is a fact of life in the north. You respect that goddamn cold, and you respect it hard, because the land is beautiful and the land doesn't care if you live or die, and actually the land is out to kill you a lot of the time. But it's a fact of life. It just happens, and you live with it, and pampered grade-school children get it drilled into their heads how fast and bad it is the moment you take your warmth for granted.
My father is stubborn and resourceful, and survived without actually succumbing to carbon monoxide poisoning. He upgraded to the (insulated!) building that is now my mother's pottery shop before he and my mother got married. The next step up was a log cabin before I came along, and from there, an actual proper house where we didn't have to be scolded to not pull the oakum out from between the logs because that would ruin the insulation and chopping wood is no fun.
I don't know enough about Canada to add to the discussion about the people in Canada who actually live in shacks, nor enough about living in remote Alaskan villages to talk in any detail about any of the possible parallels. I do know the patient, careful tone I take to explain matters when someone calls me a "native Alaskan". It's the tone that means "I know you don't know any different, but you just stepped onto some very thin ice, and you'd best back up now."
"Native Alaskan" has a specific meaning in Alaska, one that does not just mean someone who was born and raised in the state. "Native Alaskan" and "Alaska Native" always has the capital N, and means that you are descended from at least one of the original tribes that settled The Great Land. I also have coloring and features that are ethnically ambiguous enough for various people to have incorrectly guessed in the past that I am (part) Alaska Native -- and also hapa, and Indian. So describing me as Native Alaskan would be both a mistake of fact (my father's family is mostly Scots-Irish by way of California; my mother's family is mostly Norwegian by way of Pennsylvania) and of terminology (I was born and raised in Alaska, but I am mostly Caucasian). My generation sometimes calls ourselves "Alaska Grown".
If someone continued to call me "native Alaskan" after I corrected them on the issue, there would be a problem. Alaska's various situations with endemic poverty, race, privilege, drug abuse, cultural obliteration and language death, and rural vs. urban life are complicated and ugly and I wouldn't even begin to know how to start describing it to someone who is not a local. Using a reserved term to describe someone when they are not a member of the group that the reserved term describes, is inaccurate and disrespectful. It's disrespectful to me, because it is an inaccurate description of me (just as I do not have purple hair, but unlike my hair color, which I can change if I wanted to, I cannot change who my genetic parents are), and it is especially disrespectful to actual Native Alaskans to lump any old son of a cheechako in with them, as if we had the same ancestral right to live there.
I don't think that using the wrong name for a type of building is close-order comparable to using a reserved term that's a respectful racial description on a person that it doesn't describe, but they are both wrong-terminology errors that can be made in good faith the first time, and they both touch on a similar morass of issues related to living in the frozen North.
So. Please. Cabin.
