Speech Given by Ms. Sheila Watt-Cloutier, President of Inuit Circumpolar Conference (Canada) and Vice-President of Inuit Circumpolar Conference
Plenary Intervention in Montreal, Canada, at The First Meeting of The Inter-Governmental Negotiating Committee Toward a Global Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants
June 29, 1998
Good morning. My name is Sheila Watt-Cloutier. I am Vice-President for Canada of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, the organization that defends the rights and interests of Inuit internationally. ICC represents Inuit who live in Alaska, Canada, Greenland and the Chukotka region of Russia. I am delighted to be here today and thank the many people who have made this forum possible, particularly those from Physicians for Social Responsibility.
I was born in Kuujjuaq, a small Inuit village in northern Quebec. Although most Inuit now live in settled communities and enjoy many of the advantages of modern technology, we remain a people tied to the land and to the sea for Inuit are a coastal people.
We are all here today because international negotiations commence in Montreal tomorrow toward an international treaty to reduce emissions of key persistent organic pollutants (POPs). Many of you likely see this as an environmental issue. To Inuit, however, this is a matter of public health.
For those of you who are not familiar with Inuit issues, we are as a people facing many challenges on many fronts and contaminants are one of the larger issues. To sustain ourselves during the last century of rapid change, we have treasured more than ever our land and the food which comes from our land. The process of hunting and fishing, followed by the sharing of food, the communal partaking of one animal, is the time honored ritual which links us to our ancestors and each other.
The power of this connection holds us together as a people, gives us the spiritual strength and physical energy to survive the challenges we face, and cannot for one second be underestimated.
So imagine for a moment if you will the emotions we now feel, shock, panic, rage, grief, despair as we discover that the food which for generations has nourished us and keeps us whole physically and spiritually, is now poisoning us. You go to the supermarket for food. We go out on the land to hunt, fish, trap and gather. The environment is our supermarket.
Over the last five to ten years, considerable research has been conducted in Canada, Greenland, and other northern countries that shows many POPs end-up in the Arctic "sink" our part of the world. Our living land itself, whose healing energy is so strong, it can be palpably felt by anyone, is being made to quietly absorb layer upon layer of contaminants. Summaries of some of this work is available at the back of the room.
Once in the Arctic many POPs enter the food web bioaccumulating and concentrating in whales, seals, polar bears, fish and other animals that are staples of our diet. Depending upon the amount and type of country food consumed, many Inuit have levels of certain POPs in their bodies well in excess of "levels of concern" defined by the Canadian Department of Health. The Canadian Arctic Contaminants Assessment Report and the State of the Arctic Environment Report prepared by all eight Arctic nations and published last year, show that levels of some POPs in some Inuit is 10 to 20 higher than in most temperate regions!
Many of these contaminants are passed from one generation to the next through the placenta and breast milk. As we put our babies to our breasts, we feed them a noxious chemical cocktail that foreshadows neurological disorders, cancer, kidney failure, reproductive dysfunction etc. This is truly worrying. The bond between mother and child lies at the core of our culture. I expect this is the same for all peoples around the world. That Inuit mothers far from areas where POPs are manufactured and used have to think twice before breast feeding their infants is surely a wake-up call to the world. Certainly we take this invisible and insidious threat very seriously.Olivier Receveur and his colleagues at the World Class Centre for Indigenous Peoples Nutrition and the Environment at McGill University have conducted much research into this problem. Additional research is now underway by CINE, government agencies and academics to quantify the health "risks" we face by eating country food. Research already completed on children and women who regularly eat large amounts of POPs contaminated fish from Lake Michigan suggested observable and measurable behavioral effects and "learning deficits" passed from one generation to the next. Significantly, the level of POPs found in many Inuit is far higher than that found in either the women or children in the American study.
While our land is immense, we Inuit are few in numbers and don't constitute a major lobby group. Until recent years, we have not been influential in world affairs as we were still reeling from tumultuous change. But we are back now and wish to speak out on behalf of the land that has sustained us for hundreds of generations. We are the land and the land is us. We cannot stand by, waiting for slow moving governments to step in and make everything right, rather we must try to effect what change we can.
The few comments explain why I am here speaking with you today, and why ICC will use its observer status in the UN and through our participation in the Canadian Northern Aboriginal Peoples Coordinating Committee on POPs which includes the Inuit, Dene Nation, Metis Nation NWT and the Council for Yukon First Nations to press for a comprehensive, rigorous and verifiable global treaty on POPs. This is our goal. We have been active already in Geneva pressing for the POPs protocol to the UN/ECE Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution. We have had some success, for example, the preambular language to this protocol pointedly mentions the Arctic and indigenous peoples. As well, we fought hard to ensure that the pesticide Lindane be included in this regional agreement as a restricted substance.
Negotiations toward a global POPs agreement are going to be arduous and challenging. They will raise fundamental issues about the relationship between the developed and the developing worlds. Real vision will be needed to achieve a strong and lasting agreement. National governments are inherently cautious and slow moving. Many will likely genuflect to industry.
I am convinced that to achieve ICC's goal which I hope many of you share will take co-operative efforts by all the aboriginal, public health, public interest and environmental communities. We must press, cajole, argue, persuade, communicate, and encourage governments and industry to commit to a global agreement that will protect our health and our environment.
To achieve our objective likely requires a global campaign. I hope key groups here today will talk about how to organize and mount such a campaign. Certainly Inuit and ICC are prepared to be part of such an international effort.
The Arctic region, seemingly so pure and pristine, but already laced with deadly and invisible pollutants has in my opinion become the canary. If the canary survives so can we all.
If we can help people to see that a poisoned Inuk child, a poisoned Arctic and a poisoned planet are one in the same, then we will have effected a shift in peoples awareness that will result without doubt in positive change.
Thank You
