Media Enquiries: Stephen Hendrie, Director of Communications, Tel: 613.277.3178, hendrie@itk.ca
President's Speech
Saving the Canadian Arctic: An Inuit Agenda * British Museum * December 3, 2009 * London
Submitted by hendrie on Friday, December 4, 2009
“
Thank you for your kind invitation to speak to you and be with you today.
I have reviewed the topics and speakers in other parts of your “Making Things Better” lecture series, and I am honoured to be in such good company.
I am currently President of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, or ITK, the national voice of the Inuit of Canada.
In the Queen’s English, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami means “Inuit are united in Canada”.
Our work at ITK centers on ensuring that Inuit rights and interests are respected throughout Canada and, in particular in Inuit Nunangat.
Inuit Nunangat is the name we use to describe the Inuit Arctic homeland in Canada.
We have a sister organization --- the Inuit Circumpolar Council --- that represents Inuit living across the greater circumpolar homeland: Greenland, Arctic Canada, Alaska, and the eastern-most tip of Russian Siberia.
The title for my lecture today is “Saving the Canadian Arctic: An Inuit Agenda”.
As I begin, I am mindful that there is a core of medical anthropologists in my audience today.
I am not entirely clear about the daily routines of ‘medical anthropologists’; I can say that everyday anthropologists … perhaps you would call them the mere ‘garden variety’ … are not unknown to Inuit.
There is a joke told in today’s Arctic that the contemporary Inuit family is made up of five members: mom, dad, two kids, and an anthropologist.
I know that anthropology is the study of ‘man’, or, if you prefer, ‘humanity’, with a focus on physical evolution and cultural adaptation.
With that in mind, I think it is appropriate to build my comments on a modern policy agenda for Canadian Inuit, with some information of who I am, as a person and as an Inuk, and how my cultural context has shaped my outlook and the outlook of other Inuit.
First let me tell you a little bit about myself.
Like you, I may be many things to many people … mother, grandmother, wife, blueberry pie baker, just to name a few.
But my public life has been devoted to the advancement of the rights and well-being of the Inuit of Canada and of the circumpolar world.
It is the Inuk part of my identity that I wish to speak with you about today.
I was born in Arctic Quebec, known as Nunavik, in the small village of Kangiqsualujjuaq on the western shore of Ungava Bay.
My mother was Inuk and my father, from the south, managed the local Hudson Bay company post.
I spent my adolescence in the Arctic, living a very traditional lifestyle.
We camped, lived on the land, hunted and gathered food, made our own clothes and, most importantly, maintained an active connection with our Inuit heritage and language.
Part of my cultural tradition, as an Inuk, is the strong bonds that are created across the generations.
Some of the most influential and most enduring are those that are created between elders and youth.
My maternal grandmother, Jeannie, certainly one of the most important people in my life, was my teacher and mentor.
My own mother, Nancy, took on that role later in my life and her influence continues today.
They instilled in me a sharp appetite and respect for learning and self-improvement.
They taught me always to be proud of whom I am and, at the same time, always to keep my mind open to other points of view.
From my father's side of the family, I had the good fortune of learning about the "South" and the "non-native world" from a man who had a profound love and respect for the Arctic, its people and its natural beauty, and who also recognized and valued what the South could offer his family.
These influences have served me well as Inuit were propelled through a period of intensive and rapid change.
When I was born in the late 1940s, government had just "discovered" us as kind of citizens-in-waiting.
Thus began the move off the land to centralized communities, the relocation of families, the delivery of government health and social support programs --- in short the effort to keep us, a traditionally nomadic people, in one place so we could be more easily administered.
As I grew older and more exposed to the social and political values imported from the South, I quickly found that there was one system in Canada for "white people" and another for indigenous people.
I learned the words "racism" and "discrimination" --- concepts that were totally foreign to me in my early childhood.
I also learned that the social fabric of Inuit society, including the role of men and women, youth and elders, was very different from those in the South.
There are two root words in Inuktituut, ilira and kappia, that were used by Inuit to describe the combination of fear, respect and nervous apprehension Inuit felt about Southerners, both men and women, who came to the Arctic.
These feelings permeated our lives and our relationship with Southerners, Southern institutions, and Southern ways of doing things.
It was years before I gained the self-confidence to assert myself and my beliefs in the non-indigenous world.
I began working on Aboriginal rights issues in the early 1970s.
Landmark legal decisions in British Columbia and in the northern Canada had provided a new legal basis for discussing Aboriginal rights to lands and resources.
My first real experience occurred during the negotiations for the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement that grew out of an important legal decision in Quebec.
This agreement was the first comprehensive Aboriginal land claims agreement --- the first modern treaty --- in Canada.
Matters of land ownership, rights to resources, compensation for damages and local and regional government were successfully concluded.
We were a small, rag-tag, poorly funded group of Inuit and Cree up against big governments and very powerful industrial interests.
We were very young but could speak fluent English, unlike our elders and more experienced local leaders.
Because of this language skill, our traditional leaders vested us with the responsibility to go forward and explain our people to the Southerners who were intent on developing our lands without our approval or even our involvement.
When the Quebec government announced that the largest hydroelectric development project in the world was to be built on our lands, we were catapulted into the world of white politicians and businessmen.
I have these indelible memories of sitting in darkened boardrooms somewhere inside office towers in Montreal wondering "what on earth am I doing here?”
I remember walking into those rooms filled with dread.
But at the same time we knew that many people back home were counting on us to be the link between them and the powers that were controlling their lives.
We had no choice … we had to do it.
And we succeeded.
We got our agreement.
It was painful, and many difficult compromises had to be made.
We lost colleagues along the way for whom the stress and the disconnections were too much to bear.
But there was no turning back for us after that.
We got a taste of what we could do when we stood up for our rights and our identity.
In addressing the future of the Arctic, and the agenda Inuit are pursuing to sustain and secure its future in an ever-shrinking world, I shall try to speak to three questions.
1. Who are the Inuit of Canada and how did we get to be where we are today?
2. What has been our place in Canada; what particular challenges do we face as Canadian Inuit living in the Arctic?
3. Where do the Inuit of the entire circumpolar region fit into the larger environmental issues confronting all the peoples and states of the world?
Let me begin with who we are and how we got there.
In the words of William Blake’s famous hymn, England is “a green and pleasant land”.
Indeed it is.
And for an Inuk … I can’t speak for you … it is also an intensely used, heavily populated place.
It presents stark and obvious contrast to the Canadian Arctic.
We still live in a society made up mainly of extended families, and small communities, where personal reputation and inter-personal connections count very heavily in the rhythm of daily life.
There are approximately 55,000 Inuit living in Canada, spread from Labrador in the east to the Northwest Territories in the west.
The Arctic is roughly one-third of Canada’s land and marine mass with 50% of Canada’s shore line.
There are 53 Inuit communities with populations ranging from more than 5,000 to as small as a few hundred.
Unlike many First Nation communities, Inuit do not live on reserves.
We have chosen municipal status within our respective territories and provinces.
Inuit are the solid majority of the permanent population in the Canadian Arctic as a whole and in all the communities, with the exception of Inuvik and Iqaluit.
Inuit are also becoming more numerous in some southern cities, such as Ottawa, Montreal, Winnipeg and Edmonton.
Inuit have lived in the Arctic since long before historical records.
Archaeologists are still debating how far back Inuit occupation of the Arctic can be traced, and the complex interconnections among the pre-Dorset, Dorset, and Thule Inuit cultures.
All very important stuff, but we know from our own legends that we have been in the Arctic for a very, very long time.
What archeology and prehistory do tell us is that our ancestors can be traced back to the Siberian side of the Bering Strait, and likely migrated to what is now Alaska when the ice-age ‘land bridge’ formed linking the two continents.
So in that sense, a short answer to the question “How did we get to be where we are today?” is … “We crossed over to Alaska and just kept going east until we hit the east coast of Greenland and then ran out of land”.
Despite emerging regional and temporal variations, our life in the Arctic portions of eastern Siberia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland has always been built around the opportunities, risks, and realities of a hunting way of life.
Until relatively recently, most Inuit lived a nomadic lifestyle with very little contact with the ‘outside world’.
There are Inuit living today who were young adults before they ever encountered non-Inuit.
We lived on the land, hunted and fished, organized ourselves around immediate and extended family, and spoke a very complex and nuanced language.
While the depth of contact between Inuit and European peoples was limited on a day-to-day basis before the first half of the twentieth century, our relationship to the world entered a period of ongoing evolution as a result of that contact.
From the time of Martin Frobisher’s ill-fated voyage and continuing through centuries of activities involving naval ships, whalers, traders, missionaries, police and public servants, Inuit have been living through a complex inter-societal relationship with qablunaaq (our word for non-Inuit people)and, more specifically, a political and legal relationship with the Crown --- first the British Imperial Crown and then with the Crown in right of Canada.
In the period leading up the 1960s and 1970s, the relationship between the Europeans and Inuit was a grossly one-sided one, with Inuit suffering a steady loss of control over our ability to make decisions for ourselves and for the lands and waters that have sustained us for thousands of years.
We became a colonized people, pushed to the margins of political and economic and social power in our own world.
The low point of this one sided relationship was experienced in the period when entire family camps were wiped out by measles, when Inuit households were coerced into relocating thousands of miles in order to serve agendas developed elsewhere, and when Inuit children were taken away to residential schools.
A society’s loss of control cannot be illustrated more pointedly, or more painfully, than through the forced rupturing of the bonds between parents and children.
Within a few generations, Inuit were forcibly resettled, converted to Christianity, suffered terribly from contagious diseases, had their children subjected to residential schools, and saw their family members sent to TB sanitariums, some never to return.
We became part of what many Canadians viewed as Canada’s “Native Problem”.
We were caught up in policies seeking assimilation on the one hand, and the relentless push to extract or develop natural resources in the interests of Canadians on the other.
Our rights as aboriginal peoples --- let alone our preferences and sensibilities --- were not part of the picture.
This lack of voice, this invisibility even close to home, was duplicated in our early efforts to engage the rest of the world.
In his recently released book, Who Owns the Arctic, University of British Columbia law professor Michael Byers relates a telling story … let me quote it to you:
“John Amagoalik, as the former president of the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, recalls attending a meeting of the United Nations where a foreign diplomat blithely stated that ‘nobody lived in the Arctic’. Amagoalik approached the diplomat afterwards, held out his hand, and said ‘Hi, I’m nobody’.”
Yet we did not reconcile ourselves to our colonization or our marginalization.
We mounted a great effort, along with First Nations and Métis peoples in Canada, to make our voices heard.
We did everything we could to re-assert our say over our lands and waters of Inuit Nunangat, and over our future.
We used the meeting halls, the airwaves, the negotiating tables, the courts, and, from time to time, the streets to make our case.
Starting in the 1960s, a succession of young Inuit decided to take on the larger society that had colonized us and to re-gain at least a degree of control over our own lives.
I am proud to say I was among them.
All of this was happening in a faraway place many Canadians had little or no knowledge of at that time.
The Arctic was not considered a part of the Canada that mattered.
We knew instinctively that had to change.
We did this by studying the larger features and assumptions of Canadian society and deciding how we could develop and promote a political agenda that would adapt and employ those features and assumptions to our benefit.
In the years of the late 1960s and 1970s, we quickly came to see that three major opportunities were available to us.
First of all, new issues of common law aboriginal title and aboriginal rights arose from a series of court cases that had re-opened what was considered long-settled case law that had previously rejected legal rights flowing from aboriginal use and occupation.
Second, there was a growing search for Constitutional reform in Canada, fuelled largely by Quebec’s restlessness but accompanied by other issues such as arguments for guarantees of individual and minority rights.
And third, the internal map of Canada put much of the Arctic in what could be described as the ‘holding category’ of the Northwest Territories and regions such as Nouveau Quebec and northern Labrador --- all a very long way removed from mainstream political focus, but at the same time also removed from some traditional brakes and barriers to political change.
It is difficult for me to summarize in a few minutes, the enormous efforts and ultimate successes we achieved.
But our modern treaties and other political achievements have opened a new chapter.
They govern how development will take place and guarantee a strong, if not exclusive, role for us.
They provide a more predictable and inclusive business environment and reinforce the great desire in the Arctic to achieve economic self sufficiency in ways that build our cultural values into the new economy.
Political breakthroughs have occurred alongside ongoing and still unresolved economic hardships.
Today in the Arctic, the cost of living is staggering.
I can fly economy class at least twice from Ottawa to Hong Kong for the same price as flying from Ottawa to a community on Baffin Island.
Foods and commodities that supplement traditional country foods are also very expensive.
A loaf of whole wheat bread in Paulatuk, in the Northwest Territories, is $11.00, while two litres of milk in the same community costs $18.00.
Country foods continue to be a very important part of our culture and daily lives.
Hunting, however, has become quite costly.
Tens of thousands of dollars are required to be properly equipped as a hunter.
Gas prices, as you can imagine, continue to skyrocket.
Incomes are often shared in order to support a hunter within a family in order to assure access to country food.
With few exceptions, there are no road connections to the rest of Canada.
Transportation is by air and sea.
While air travel shrinks these distances, Inuit communities are still very isolated from the rest of Canada.
Geography and history combine to present Inuit our families and communities with many serious and stubborn challenges.
We are paying a heavy price for the legacy of colonization and the societal stresses that accompanied the rapid and intense changes in our lives.
The pace of change in our lives has been breath-taking and has few parallels in the developed world.
Sixty years ago, most Inuit were still living on the land, following the seasonal migrations of animals and conforming to age-old traditions of hunting and fishing, confident in their abilities and secure in who they were.
Today, we are experiencing youth suicide, violent deaths and substance abuse at record levels.
We are reeling from these realities and struggling to find solutions and a path forward.
And yet, social justice for aboriginal peoples struggles to find a place at the forefront of national debate in Canada.
Let me give you just a few though graphic facts.
We have lower educational outcomes than other Canadians; our housing conditions remain well below the Canadian standards; our health indicators continue to lag behind the rest of Canada; substance abuse plagues our families and communities; and the suicide rate is 11 times the Canadian average --- most being young people.
It is not acceptable for citizens of Canada, a G8 nation, to be suffering these conditions.
Facts such as these are sobering and can, if we are not careful, become paralyzing rather than motivating.
We do not believe that other Canadians are antagonistic or ill-disposed to us, and we continue to hope that other Canadians seek and support creative solutions to our issues in ways that will benefit both us and Canada as a whole.
While conscious of the scope and depth of our challenges, we also know we have seen some changes for the better.
Despite the tremendous distances, the Arctic is now connected by modern communications to the rest of Canada and the world.
All Inuit communities have some level of broadband access.
All four of our Inuit regions have achieved comprehensive modern-day land claims agreements.
These are Constitutionally-protected treaties between Inuit and the Crown and have formed the basis of a re-defined relationship with the Government of Canada and the Governments of Quebec and of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Land claims agreements --- when respected and implemented properly by the Crown --- provide us with a set of tools for shaping our lives and developing our lands and resources.
Collectively, Inuit own large parcels of land, some with full subsurface rights.
We now share in the management and, to some extent, the benefits from natural resource development.
We have access to investment capital and are using it.
We own air and marine transport companies, fishing companies, service industries for oil and gas development, and are joint venturing with various business enterprises.
We are also now very well organized politically.
We have our national organization, sophisticated regional organizations that have grown from our land claims agreements, and a strong international network through the Inuit Circumpolar Council.
Inuit have made important contributions to the global discussions on climate change, indigenous rights and sovereignty, to name but a few.
Inuit have a significant role in international discussions about Arctic waters, marine transportation, environmental initiatives and the future of international Arctic relations generally.
These are all important dimensions of who we are.
But most importantly, we are a People.
We know we are a People in our hearts and in our bones, as well as in our heads.
We have common memories, common bonds, common values, and a common way of looking at things that tie us together.
We are Inuit.
Why is this important?
It is important because until others understand and accept this, we will have not reached our most important objective --- to be accepted as the Inuit of Canada with our rightful place as a founding and enduring people of Canada, with all that must come along with that understanding.
Inuit have been very involved in the development of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and its adoption by the General Assembly of the United Nations in September 2007.
While not having formal treaty status, that Declaration now forms part of the world’s human rights architecture.
Following the adoption of the UN Declaration, and the increasing international focus on the Arctic as a region, including underlying issues of international law, circumpolar Inuit decided to make our own statement about the rights of Inuit as a people.
In April, 2009, circumpolar Inuit representatives adopted and released a document entitled A Circumpolar Inuit Declaration on Sovereignty in the Arctic.
That Declaration asserted confidently and forthrightly that Inuit are an indigenous people of the world with the rights and responsibilities of all indigenous peoples, including the right to self-determination, the right freely to pursue our economic, social, cultural and linguistic development, and the right freely to dispose of our natural wealth and resources.
States are also reminded of their obligations to indigenous peoples under a variety of international agreements.
The Circumpolar Inuit Declaration does not assert the identity of Inuit as one of the world’s indigenous peoples as a substitute, or as an alternative, to being citizens of the four Arctic states in which we live.
Rather, it states that Inuit rights as an indigenous people, and Inuit citizenship in the four Arctic states, are not incompatible.
I take pride in being both an Inuk and a Canadian.
At a time when issues of sovereignty in the Arctic have been very much in the news, including disagreements as to assertions of sovereignty and sovereign rights by Arctic states, the Declaration offers a reminder that the concept of sovereignty must necessarily be situated within a wider body of still changing international law.
Finally, the Declaration clearly articulates the desire by Inuit to develop innovative and creative jurisdictional arrangements that balance our rights and responsibilities with those we share with others living with us and those of states.
Surely one of the features and one of the strengths of liberal democracies is accepting, cherishing and nurturing our differences as well as our commonalities.
Inuit have fought hard to get to this core sense of how we fit into today’s Arctic as both Inuit and as Canadians.
We plan on keeping it.
In recent years we have also been a creative contributor to the development of international institutions and processes focused on the Arctic, having been active participants in the work of the multi-party Arctic Council since its inception.
International institutions and processes focused on the Arctic, and those with broad global mandates, will, of course, be challenged as never before by the threat of global warming.
The urgency surrounding mitigating the impacts of climate change grows with the almost daily news of unprecedented developments in our Arctic environment.
When American explorer Robert Peary mounted an expedition to the Arctic in 1906 he estimated that the Ellesmere Island Ice Shelf was some 9,000 square kilometers.
Today the largest piece left is less than 900 square kilometers!
Put simply, the Arctic is melting, with dramatic consequences for all of us.
We have deployed some of our best and brightest to bring our message to the world.
Two years ago, Sheila Watt-Cloutier, my friend from Nunavik, was co-nominated with Al Gore for the Nobel Prize for her work on climate change.
Other Inuit representatives also tour the world calling for action.
Earlier this fall I was speaking in Stockholm in preparation for the upcoming UN Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen a few weeks from now.
The effects of global warming are being felt on a day to day basis in the Arctic.
The scientific predictions for what we can expect in the Arctic region in the not so distant future are alarming.
No --- alarming is not a strong enough word --- terrifying is better suited for the hunter who is lost on shifting ice or for the family whose house is splitting in half as the foundation sinks in the melting permafrost.
There is a community in my region of northern Quebec --- Salluit ---that is literally sinking into the permafrost.
This is happening to varying degrees across the Arctic.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has identified the Arctic as one of the most vulnerable regions of the world.
The recent Arctic Council Arctic Climate Impact Assessment Report predicts accelerating changes in coming decades with marked impacts on the northern ecology and significant social, economic, human health and cultural impacts.
At the G-8 meeting in Gleneagles Scotland in 2005, adaptation to climate change in the Arctic was identified as a high priority.
The United Nations Environment Programme characterizes the Arctic as the globe’s “barometer” of climate change.
The Arctic will continue to melt under current conditions and trends.
This will contribute significantly to a rise in sea levels.
Sea level rise may be one of the most destructive effects of climate change worldwide.
A massive deployment of political and capital investment towards mitigation is required.
The world needs to reduce and capture carbon emissions.
As a planet, we cannot adapt to unconstrained carbon emissions.
Successful adaptation to difficult circumstances and to change in large part defines who we are as Inuit.
We are shouldering many immediate impacts from global warming.
Yet, the geopolitics of greenhouse gas mitigation is constantly shifting, often in ways that test confidence and hope.
Our strategy is twofold.
First, we will continue to support and lobby for international, national and regional efforts to curb carbon emissions, understanding that this is first and foremost a planetary crisis.
Second, as a result of what humans have already done to alter the composition of the atmosphere, we must accept that there are some climate change impacts that are now inevitable.
Most of the world’s leading scientists and policy makers believe that adaptation has become more than just a policy option --- it has become an inescapable imperative.
Inuit around the circumpolar world are working, at both the international and national levels, to push governments to take global warming action, including dealing with the linkages between adaptation and mitigation and other topics of special relevance to the Canadian Arctic.
This isn’t our first experience at tackling broad environmental problems originating outside the Arctic; in the past we worked very hard, and with some success, to reduce the export of persistent organic pollution to the Arctic.
But global warming is in another league altogether.
We must create a common purpose around the needs of our homeland and ultimately the planet as it relates to climate change.
Previous efforts to deal with climate change in the past have not done the job.
International diplomacy and public policy-making have so far fallen woefully short of achieving the workable consensus needed to take on climate change.
Indeed, carbon emissions in so many countries’ emissions have not declined, but rather have grown since 1990.
We need real action on required emissions cuts.
Careful and creative planning and analysis, and genuine and fair consultation, particularly in the Arctic, will always be essential.
But we can no longer delay action.
New levels of leadership are crucial.
Clear international commitments and actions, backed up by effective packages of domestic laws, spending priorities, and tax measures, are essential.
The scope and severity of the challenge must transcend short term ideological partisanship and narrow national self-interest.
We need a robust and integrated approach to climate change.
We need to rethink, retool and re-engineer the way we do things, and the way we see each other and the world we share.
We need reliable international reporting, monitoring and enforcement arrangements.
Progress can be made regionally as well as globally, and coalitions across jurisdictions and boundaries should be welcomed.
Environmental security and economic security are mutually dependent.
Our efforts to foster sustainable economic growth and environmental performance must be made mutually reinforcing.
The real threat to collective economic well-being is uncertainty.
Investors will not be attracted to developing countries, or for that matter developed countries, if they have little confidence as to what states will do in relation to fundamental policy choices surrounding climate change.
The costs of uncertainty must be fairly and fully assessed against the costs of the mitigation and adaptation.
Hard targets are essential.
The ultimate goal must be to achieve a substantial and absolute reduction in global emissions of greenhouse gases.
Hard emission reduction targets applied to nations and to industries must recognize competitive realities and be set within an overall policy framework that allows profitable firms to increase their investment in new technologies.
Meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions require massive investments in next-generation clean technologies, reduction and carbon capture and storage.
Canada, for example --- if it can summon the will --- clearly has the natural resources and the technical and financial skills to become a leader in new energy technologies.
All such technologies --- clean coal, natural gas, carbon capture and storage, nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, bio-fuels and others --- should be open for consideration, at least at the outset, as part of a sustainable or transitional energy mix.
And we will need to arm ourselves to face those consequences of global warming that are already being experienced and will not be reversed.
Adaptation strategies specifically directed to the Arctic’s particular circumstances are urgent in the near-term.
The effects of climate change are today being experienced in northern communities.
All states must now turn their attention to helping their citizens cope with the havoc already brought to our planet by man-made climate change.
The developed states can create an International Monetary Fund and a World Bank to stabilize monetary and fiscal conditions among states; I have proposed that the upcoming COP-15 meeting in Copenhagen lead to an International Climate Change Adaptation Fund with an initial investment of $20-billion by the G20 countries to help citizens of the planet adapt to the inevitable changes and to accelerate technology transfer.
Inuit are not bystanders to this complex crisis.
As an Arctic people we are at the epicentre of climate change.
And as human beings we are charged with the responsibility of ensuring a safe and healthy world for our children and future generations for time immemorial.
Let us act now in partnership to save ourselves and our planet.
Our children demand no less.
And deserve no less.
It has been a pleasure addressing you today, and I thank you for your kind attention.
Thank you.
