Speech Given by Ms. Sheila Watt-Cloutier, President of Inuit Circumpolar Conference (Canada) and Vice-President of Inuit Circumpolar Conference
Keynote Address to the 12th Inuit Studies Conference at The University of Aberdeen, Scotland
August 23, 2000
Good morning. My name is Sheila Watt-Cloutier. I am President of ICC Canada and Vice-President of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference. It is a great pleasure for me to be here today--among friends--for I recognize many in the audience.
I am going to speak for about 20 minutes, and then my friend and colleague Jose Kusugak, President of the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, is going to join me to answer questions that you may have. I hope we can get a good exchange going, and that it will continue in the formal sessions over the next two days.
I have recently relocated to Iqaluit in Nunavut, but come originally from Kuujjuaq in Nunavik. Before I entered into politics I worked in the area of education and youth issues . In fact I was part of research work in the review of our education system as we looked deeply into issues in search of solutions for the challenges that were affecting negatively our lives.
Although the first speaker indicated that the Inuit are not too well known here in Scotland, the Scots are certainly no strangers in our homeland and in fact I am a product of a Scots' grandfather. I have come to honor and appreciate that Scots' part of me as I do the work on behalf of our people.
I am going to talk about some of the things we are doing at ICC Canada. Behind my remarks is an invitation. We invite you to think how your research, teaching, and writing can in partnership with us address pressing public policy issues, many related to the rapid pace of economic and social change in the North, and the changing place of the Arctic in the world. I hope we can also discuss how collaboration between universities, think tanks, foundations, and Inuit organizations can promote research to examine these issues. We have some ideas about research partnerships to share with you.
ICC works on the international stage to defend the rights and interests of Inuit in Canada, Greenland, Alaska, and Chukotka. Every four years we hold a General Assembly at which a President, four Vice-Presidents and an Executive Council are elected. Our priorities, work programme, and political interventions reflect resolutions adopted at these assemblies.
Resolutions passed at our last assembly in 1998--posted on our web site--address economic, cultural, environmental, social, and humanitarian issues. Our interests and concerns are very broad. Our mandate is to protect our environment, promote our culture and way of life, and to also promote economic development in the North that is culturally and ecologically sustainable. I look forward to David Scrivener's remarks tomorrow about the Arctic Council's difficulty in adopting a sustainable development programme.
ICC participates in many international processes. For example, during the last few years we have pressed the UN Commission for Sustainable Development to consider the Arctic and the role of Inuit and other indigenous peoples in economic development. We do the same at conferences of the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Our I.C.C. Greenland office has been heavily involved in efforts, recently successful, to establish a permanent forum for indigenous peoples at the United Nations. As a "permanent participant" in the eight-nation Arctic Council, all offices of ICC are involved in the council's programmes and working groups.
In the last two years ICC Canada has been solidly engaged in negotiations sponsored by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) toward a global convention on persistent organic pollutants (POPs). I will speak more about this later. Last year we mounted a humanitarian aid mission to Inuit in Chukotka and currently we are fundraising to do the same later this year. We have pamphlets about this at the back of the room. Please look at them and consider contributing, for Inuit in Chukotka remain in dire straits.
As well, ICC Canada is implementing sustainable development projects with Mayan and Garifuna Indians in Belize. Two months ago the Minister responsible for the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), announced a five-year, $5 million grant to us to expand our institution building and sustainable development project in northern Russia. We implement this project with the Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North (RAIPON). As you can see we are small but active. We have to react to many issues but we are also proactive in our work. The Inuit experience and expertise that we have developed over the last 20 years on negotiating land claims, building our institutions and governance systems, and running our own businesses is in high demand from other indigenous peoples from around the world. We have much to offer in these areas.
In Canada we are involved in two innovative and successful research partnerships--the Northern Contaminants Programme (NCP) and the Centre for Indigenous Peoples Nutrition and the Environment (CINE) at McGill University. I want to say a few words about each for they are the sort of research partnerships we favour and that are working.
The NCP was established in 1991 through the Government of Canada's Green Plan. It funds research on sources, pathways and effects of contaminants in northern Canada, including pesticides, insecticides, and industrial by-products many from tropical and temperate countries that end-up in the Arctic and bioaccumulate in our food chain. By eating marine mammal fats, many of us, particularly women, have acquired in our bodies' levels of certain POPs, such as PCBs and DDT, much higher than women in southern Canada and adjacent USA. Levels found in some of us in northern Canada and western Greenland are well in excess of the "level of concern" defined by Health Canada.
These substances impair human reproductive, neurological, immune, and behavourial systems. Research is underway on the long-term health effects of these contaminants. This is a very serious health as well as environmental issue, for it threatens our culture and very way of life. We do not want to see the day where we must choose between our country food and cultural heritage.
We eat what we hunt. Sharing "traditional food" among family and friends lies at the core of what it means to be Inuit. Our land claim agreements recognize our right to hunt, fish, and trap, but how much is this right worth if we can not, in safety, eat what we hunt? There is much at stake here, since the skills taught on the land are transferable to the modern world. Character building skills such as patience, to be bold under pressure and stress, courage are the very skills that our young people need to survive and cope with the tumultuous change that has occurred in our homelands. These are the very skills they need in order to say no to self-destructive patterns.
We can make very few changes to our diet to reduce intake of POPs. The only long-term solution is to turn off emissions at source. Now, to persuade nations far from the Arctic and United Nations agencies to take such action requires scientifically credible information. The NCP and CINE are crucial to generating that information.
The NCP awards $6 million per year to researchers in universities and government agencies. The programme is managed by a committee of four federal agencies, three territorial governments, and Inuit, Dene, Metis, and Yukon first nations organizations. Indigenous peoples help define research priorities, evaluate research proposals, and decide who get the money. We also talk to the communities about the results of the research. This is an important change for we the Inuit help to decide whether your research is funded.
In our opinion, the NCP is a northern research success. While initiated by a Progressive Conservative federal government, it was renewed by a Liberal one, and at a time of massive cost cutting that saw the budget of the federal Department of the Environment reduced by over 30 percent! We fought hard to persuade the government to renew the programme because we were partners in it and because we knew the value of it.
When the NCP was established we saw the need for research on the diets of indigenous peoples relating to nutrition and contaminants, and for information to help people make informed decisions about their diet. No university in Canada was equipped to do this. The federal government shared our concern and so a new research institution--CINE was born. Established through a federal grant of over $2 million and based in the Faculty of Dietetics at McGill University in Montreal, the research conducted at CINE is very good indeed. I imagine many of you have read papers by CINE staff published in the academic, "peer reviewed" literature.
CINE is unique, certainly in North America, for it is overseen by a Board of Governors composed solely of indigenous peoples--Inuit, Dene, Metis, and first nations from northern and southern Canada. Under the direction of the board, CINE is expanding its geographical areas of concern and ICC Canada is helping to find money for new personnel to underwrite this expansion.
For example a task force of Canada's research granting councils recently recommended to the Government of Canada that 24 new Northern Research Chairs be established at Canadian universities. Jose Kusugak and I have written to the Canadian Minister of Natural Resources recommending that two of these chairs be awarded to CINE. We defended the budget of the NCP and are fighting to expand CINE's budget because these research institutions work with us and for us.
The NCP and CINE are important internationally. Their research has equipped Canada to encourage Arctic states and UN agencies to take on the POPs issue. The 1997 contaminants report by the circumpolar Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) owes much to the NCP and CINE. Ongoing negotiations toward a global POPs convention owe much to AMAP.
Research is important, but data alone won't guarantee that decision makers will draw the right conclusions and make the right decisions. Information must be translated into policy through the rough and tumble of politics and lobbying. ICC is immersed in this world too. Let me give you a couple of examples from our work on POPs.
In the mid 1990s member countries of the UN Economic Commission for Europe--essentially the northern hemisphere--negotiated a POPs protocol to the 1979 acid rain convention. It is a fairly weak agreement but it is a step in the right direction.
Have a look at the first couple of pages, the preambular provisions, of the protocol. References to the Arctic and to indigenous peoples stand out. That's because ICC Canada drafted the clauses and, with the assistance of the United States and Scandinavia, persuaded the sympathetic Swedish chair to table them and have them adopted. Inuit brought to these negotiations a moral ground and a singular voice that compelled attention.
ICC is fully engaged in ongoing global negotiations to draft a new legally binding convention on POPs. Over the last two years my staff and I have attended negotiations in Germany, Switzerland, Kenya, and Canada, and our tickets are booked for the final negotiating session in South Africa in December.
In conjunction with the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, Dene Nation, Metis Nation--NWT, and the Council for Yukon First Nations we are fighting for a comprehensive, rigorously implemented, and verifiable global POPs convention. I don't know whether this will be achieved.
We have shown the effects in our homeland of actions taken by nations far from the North. We have had a sympathetic hearing. Click on to the UNEP web site and follow the links to the global POPs negotiations. The first image you see there is an Inuit carving of a women and child. I presented this to Klaus Topfer, Executive Director of UNEP, at the negotiation in Nairobi. This carving carved by an Inuk woman from Nunavik is now the symbol and conscience of the negotiations and sits in front of the Chair Mr. John Buccini at every negotiating session.
While our goals for this convention are crystal clear, we can not take a "North versus South" approach in these negotiations. Tropical countries are not going to immediately stop using DDT until alternatives are found when it saves thousands of lives every year by preventing malaria. In fact ICC has reassured these developing countries that we will not be party to an agreement that threatens the lives and health of others. At the same time we have to be diligent about protecting the Arctic. It is quite the balancing act to be effective in these negotiations.
At the global POPs negotiations Inuit and indigenous peoples in the North are reaching out to indigenous peoples and others in tropical and temperate countries. The chronic health and environment problem in the Arctic mirrors an acute health and environment problem in the home and workplace in Central America, Africa, Southeast Asia and elsewhere. Certainly POPS affects us all.
It is horrific that mothers in Mexico and Central America to have to rely on dangerous chemicals to save lives that at the same time threaten our health and our cultural way of life in the Arctic. What kind of a world have we created that requires women to make these sort of choices where mothers of the Arctic have to think twice about breast feeding because of the very chemicals the mothers of central America need to save their babies. Surely we can find alternatives and solutions to this unacceptable situation!!
All eight Arctic states are participating in the global POPs negotiations, but they don't seem to be working very closely together. This is disappointing but, perhaps, not too surprising--the circumpolar Arctic is not a geopolitical fact--yet. However, Arctic Council ministers are meeting in Alaska in October. On their agenda is a proposal to implement a new programme--an Arctic Council Action Plan on Pollution. This document contains the important principle that Arctic states will work together, whenever possible, in international fora when Arctic interests are at stake. We hope this principle will be endorsed by the ministers and singled out in the political declaration they will sign.
Whatever the result of the global POPs negotiations, it is useful for northern indigenous peoples to co-operate when addressing certain issues on the global stage. At the very least we have been able to persuade the Government of Canada to take a stronger position in these negotiations. Indigenous peoples in northern Canada are now talking about how to work co-operatively to address the climate change issue in the North. This would see us working closely with all permanent participants in the Arctic Council including the Sami Council, Aleut International Association, and RAIPON of Russia.
I have tried to cover some of the key issues ICC Canada is working on, and I have tried to show how research partnerships can if done right genuinely help to empower the Inuit world rather than disempower which unfortunately has been the case on many fronts from our perspective. In closing , I believe we are ready for equal partnerships in research, are you?
