Dispatches

Today at the Charles Lynch Press Theatre on Parliament Hill, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami President Mary Simon launched "Inuit Qaujisarvingat: The Inuit Knowledge Centre". The decision to create Inuit Qaujisarvingat arose from a February 2008 Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami Board of Directors meeting as a method of addressing the gap between western science and Inuit knowledge, as well as a method of capacity building among Inuit to respond to a growing interest in the Arctic and Arctic issues.

On Tuesday November 3rd Mary Simon delivered the Symons Lecture on the State of Canadian Confederation in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.

The lecture discussed the need for Canada to demonstrate international leadership in working with the global community to develop real solutions to combatting rapidly accelerating climate change at COP15, and the necessity of approaching policy making for Inuit Nunangat around the principle that Inuit must be fundamental partners in developing those policies. The core message delivered is that there exist many gaps in education, health, social, economic, and housing standards, between Inuit and southern Canadians, and that those gaps must be closed before Inuit can be full partners in Confederation.

On Saturday October 24, 2009, a global day of action for climate change, a day when Canadians marched to Parliament Hill to express their concerns on this important matter, I spoke on the same issues at the European Development Days Conference in Stockholm, Sweden.

The title of my presentation: was "My Homeland Is Melting".

In the presentation I addressed the many international leaders who gathered at this event regarding how climate change is affecting our homeland, our people, and our way of life - we are feeling the effects of climate change on a daily basis.

An ITK representative is in Bangkok, Thailand this week participating in an Indigenous Peoples Food Systems for Health project with Dr. Harriet Kuhnlein of McGill University.

Dr. Kuhnlein is the founder of the Centre for Indigenous Peoples Nutrition and Environment (CINE).The Canadian portion of the project is located in Pangnirtung, Nunavut and uses traditional Inuit knowledge, storytelling, and food to promote the health and well-being of community members.

On Thursday October 1, 2009 Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami President Mary Simon presented to the the House of Commons Committee on National Defence. She requested the committee take into account that, “asserting Arctic Sovereignty in the Canadian Arctic must include Inuit.” The presentation, available here, argues that Inuit have been used to assert Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic historically, as in the case of the high Arctic relocation in the 1950s. Further, with the settlement of five comprehensive land claim agreements, since 1975, Inuit argue that these constitutionally protected treaties with the Crown contribute to Canada’s assertion of sovereignty in the Canadian Arctic.

Among the six recommendations in the presentation, ITK President Simon suggested the creation of a joint Inuit-federal authority to oversee increasing ship traffic in the Northwest Passage in the Arctic.

Members of the National Committee on Inuit Education (NCIE) met for the first time September 23-24, 2009 to discuss the process of creating a National Strategy on Inuit Education. The committee has a year to draft the strategy, aimed at eliminating the gap in Inuit educational outcomes and achieving educational success for Inuit comparable to all other Canadians.

"With this process, we aim to define the solutions ourselves. We will transform the outcomes in our schools by working collaboratively and collectively, as Inuit have always done. It is about defining what we want and imagining our future,” said National Inuit Leader Mary Simon, chair of the NCIE. Inuit currently have the lowest graduation rates in Canada. Some 61 percent of Inuit aged 25 to 64 have not completed high school, compared with 23 percent of non-Aboriginal Canadians, according to Statistics Canada."