-40° is the same temperature in Fahrenheit and Celsius. (On the matter of cabins and shacks.)

[azurelunatic]

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.

Comments

[rivkat]

Are there particular stories that are spurring this? Because while I take your point, I'd think the appropriate term would depend on the structure in the story. I also think we get a lot of fandom challenges where people stretch the definition of various terms to fit generally within the challenge parameters.

[azurelunatic]

This is bouncing off the reactions on my reading list from the people who are more sensitized to nuance in terminology. I haven't run into any yet that made me personally flinch back, but I've read two stories in the collection as of right now, and one was a week ago. The second one was last night, and was Resonant's "What You Call a Shack"; in that one, I particularly enjoyed the difference between Cap's rather more reality-based view and Tony. Oh, Tony.

Mostly, since people are sensitized to it and it touches on some gnarly issues, I'd like people who are writing these to be aware that "cabin" and "shack" are not direct synonyms and, like you said, to be mindful of what the appropriate term is for the exact thing they're writing about.

[nilo]

I just loved this post. I only lived in Fairbanks for three years, but I loved it - and I learned so much.


Here, if someone advertises a cabin to rent, it usually means wood. I learned that it has a different meaning up there. "Look honey, here's a place that might work. It says large cabin, nice views, and it's really inexpensive."

"What do you mean no water and an outhouse?"

[azurelunatic]

... hahaha, yes. Water is hard! And if you're lucky the outhouse has a door that closes.

[aedifica]

This is the third post to show up on my reading list about the shack thing, but I still don't know what the causal event was. What happened?

[azurelunatic]

There was a fic festival of some sort, 10 years ago, featuring Character A and Character B "shacking up" in Canada. It's enjoying a 10-year anniversary celebration-and-revival. Unfortunately, in doing so, it's stumbled into some fun-with-terminology that runs face-first into some issues.

Not everybody is universally agreed upon the severity of the can of worms; one of the people I was chatting with last night is far more pissed off with the conservative-asshat American tendency to offensively and inaccurately portray Canada's health care system while holding it up as a bad example to American voters, to a degree where wrong-terminology about shack vs. cabin/cottage is just at the eyerolling level.

[aedifica]

That makes things make more sense. Thank you!

[pauamma]

Not Russian (or a native speaker - or even a non-native speaker), but this sounds like a similar distinction to dacha vs. izba?

[twistedchick]

For the first few years of my life, my parents and I lived in what would definitely be a cabin, with a shack behind it that was a storage shed (very similar story to yours in some ways, except this was western NY, so cold existed but was not extreme. It wasn't unusual to have it go to zero F, but not to -30 F.) It later became a garage.

The shacks I know are fishing shacks, little sheds with tin-can chimneys that are pulled out onto thick lake ice for ice fishermen, so the fishermen can have a small heater nearby and stay warm while fishing. They generally look like they're about to fall down, and sometimes they do, but a couple of decades ago it wasn't unusual to see them poking up off the lake ice on the Finger Lakes or Chautauqua Lake; not so much on the Great Lakes because of ice movement.

[ursamajor]

That, and "Canadian Cabin" alliterates! ;)

*is staying out of the discussion otherwise; nothing to contribute but more confusion*

[mmegaera]

I know better than to call someone who isn't a Native Alaskan a native Alaskan, but I've always wondered what people born and raised there but not Native Alaskan called themselves. Thanks.

[azurelunatic]

I don't think that there's entirely a consensus, except to correct people who use "native" incorrectly. But I will accept Alaska Grown. :D

[waketosleep]

My hand to god, cottage/cabin/shack is actually an isogloss in Canada.