Inuit and Climate Change:Perspectives and Policy Opportunities

Terry Fenge

Climate Change: A Long-term Threat to the Inuit Way of Life Photo credit: Eric Loring

"The world can tell us everything we want to know. The only problem for the world is that it doesn't have a voice. But the world's indicators are there. They are always talking to us." Quitsak Tarkiasuk.

"Without the hunter-gathers, humanity is diminished and cursed; with them, we can achieve a more complete version of ourselves." Hugh Brody.

Introduction

Northern Canada is experiencing massive and rapid social and economic change that is likely to accelerate as oil, gas, and mineral resources in this "frontier" are developed for southern markets. Hunting and gathering remain, however, centrally important economic and cultural components of life in the Arctic and this should continue as a result of legal and financial support through northern land claim agreements.

 Inuit have a well-earned reputation for resilience in the face of externally induced economic and social change. But resilience has limits and many Inuit are now asking two difficult questions: might the long-term impacts in the North of global climate change erode fatally their hunting and gathering way of life? And, if so, what does the future hold for Inuit as a people?

The Policy Challenge

Leaders from most states gathered in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 to sign various legal and political instruments, including the Framework Convention on Climate Change. The Arctic as a region was barely mentioned in the preparatory conferences to Rio, the global summit, or the conventions that emanated from it. Viewed still, perhaps, as frozen in the cold war' s geopolitical rigidities, the region was outplaced by global concerns for the environmental integrity of tropical, equatorial, and desert regions, and was not identified in Agenda 21, the key policy document endorsed at Rio to lead humanity into the brave new 21^st-century world of sustainable development.¹

Political and scientific developments since 1992 suggest that the circumpolar Arctic is, politically speaking, coming of age, and that its inhabitants, particularly its Indigenous peoples, could, in concert with Arctic states, exert significant influence in future global debates, including those on climate change. Indeed, the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), billed as Rio plus 10, may well air Arctic perspectives on a number of globally important environmental issues. But what are the key political and scientific developments bringing broader attention to the Arctic that have a bearing on how and how well this region addresses climate change?

1. Circumpolar Co-operation. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 had a profound political impact on the eight states that occupy the circumpolar Arctic, enabling them to dispense with cold war rhetoric and ideological competition, and to explore their economic, social, and environmental commonalities. Cooperation among the states to address transboundary environmental matters was avidly promoted by the Government of Finland and received political expression in the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS) signed by all Arctic states in Rovaniemi, Finland in 1991. With growing acceptance in national capitals of the need for and benefits of co-operation in the circumpolar Arctic, the AEPS was renewed and expanded into an Arctic Council established through a political declaration signed by the Arctic states in Ottawa in 1996. Established as a " high level forum," the council recognizes the region's Indigenous peoples as Apermanent participants" able to participate in council debates and deliberations on the same basis as states.

While the council is nothing more than a political forum and relies for coordination upon the good offices of the chair nation, rotated every two years, it defines shared environmental and sustainable development research and policy agendas. Drawing upon information generated by the council' s working groups, individual states are better armed to participate in and mutually support each other in certain international and global fora.² Co-operation in the circumpolar Arctic among Indigenous peoples and sub-national governments predates the AEPS. Significantly, the Arctic Council has attracted certain European states and international non-governmental organizations as official observers. In sum, the circumpolar world is emerging as a geopolitical entity. Just where this will lead and how quickly is difficult to evaluate, but using the council Arctic states are able to cut across existing blocs in international processes, and there is some evidence that this is beginning to happen. At the very least, the council provides an institutional framework and agenda-setting process for this emerging geopolitical region, with environmental issues high on its agenda. The unique political status accorded Indigenous peoples to the council enables them to influence agenda setting out of all proportion to their limited numbers in the states in which they reside.

2. The Circumpolar Arctic and International POPs Agreements. In May 2001 more than 100 states convened in Stockholm under the auspices of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to sign a legally binding global agreement to reduce the use and eliminate the generation and emission to the environment of key persistent organic pollutants (POPs), including PCBs, DDT, dioxins, and furans. This convention had been preceded in 1998 by an agreement among member countries to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UN/ECE) to a POPs protocol to the Convention on Long-range Transport of Atmospheric Pollution.³

Research conducted in the early to mid-1990s in Canada under the Northern Contaminants Programme (NCP) and simultaneously by the Arctic Council's Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) showed long-range transport of key POPs from tropical and temperate lands to the Arctic and significantly elevated levels of certain POPs in the blood and lipid tissues of many Indigenous people as a result of eating country food laced with POPs. The NCP provided data to support these conclusions and also brought Inuit, Dene, Metis, and Yukon first nations into a direct partnership with four federal agencies and the territorial governments to jointly establish research priorities and to disseminate research results in communities. The programme put Indigenous peoples on a steep learning curve about the public health and environmental implications of POPs and equipped them to participate in AMAP and in international POPs negotiations sponsored by the UN/ECE and UNEP. That global climate change seems to be enhancing transport of POPs to the Arctic is a recent and unwelcome conclusion.⁴

The NCP and AMAP enabled both Arctic governments and Indigenous peoples to persuade the UN/ECE and UNEP to sponsor international negotiations. Political resolutions adopted by AEPS and Arctic Council ministers at their biennial meetings and direct and sustained advocacy in international negotiations by the Inuit Circumpolar Conference and other permanent participants to the council, often in cooperation with Arctic nation states, pushed these negotiations to successful conclusions.

Of potential precedence to future climate change debates, both international agreements on POPs single out the Arctic for its vulnerability and ecological fragility and make much of the need to protect the health of its Indigneous peoples from POPs. The states, permanent participants, and observers to the council learned from this experience; Arctic concerns can be effectively addressed in international and global negotiations when supported by high quality scientific research that illustrates the Arctic dimension to a global issue, when Arctic states press UN bodies to sponsor negotiations, and when Indigenous peoples work together with Arctic states to achieve results.

3 . Climate Change and the Circumpolar Arctic. In the past 40 years, annual temperatures in the Canadian western Arctic have climbed by 1.5 degrees C while those over the central Arctic have warmed by 0.5 degrees C. According to the federal Department of the Environment, a global doubling of carbon dioxide emissions could cause temperature increases of nearly 5 degrees C in summer and 5-7 degrees C in winter over the Canadian Arctic mainland. Global models of climate change project significant and pronounced changes in temperature and precipitation in high latitudes. Worst case scenarios project massive thinning and depletion of ice cover in the Arctic and northward migration of permafrost boundaries with potentially worldwide climatic impacts and as yet poorly understood but potentially devastating social, cultural, and economic consequences to the region's Indigenous peoples, particularly Inuit.⁵

That climate change in the North is already occurring is evident to Inuit, as the next section of this paper shows. In response to global projections and growing local concerns, the Arctic Council initiated in October 2000 an Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA), to be conducted in cooperation with the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC), scheduled for completion and ministerial review in 2004. The United States is chairing the assessment. Co-ordinated in Canada through the federal Department of the Environment, Canadian scientists are assuming significant research and writing roles in this exercise under the leadership of Gordon McBean formerly of the Meteorological Service of Canada and now with the University of Western Ontario. Drawing upon their permanent participant status to the council, the Inuit Circumpolar Conference and the Sami Council are members of assessment steering committee.

Climate Change and Traditional Ecological Knowledge:
Three Arctic Illustrations

Hunters and gatherers are keen observers of the natural environment. They have to be; they depend upon it for food. Canadian universities and researchers, some employed by federal agencies, have repeatedly documented the extent and intensity of land use by northern Indigenous peoples and their detailed and often exquisite knowledge of animal behaviour and biology, particularly of harvested species, and ecological relationships. Indigenous peoples rely upon a complex set of indicators to illustrate the state and health of the natural environment and to enable them to operate within it.

Traditional, experiential-based ecological knowledge (TEK) of the land by Inuit and Dene is now broadly recognized as legitimate, accurate, and useful although it was until recently dismissed by many credentialed experts as anecdotal and unreliable.⁶ Federal statutes, such as the 1997 Canada Oceans Act, mandate federal agencies to use TEK in decision-making. Resource-management institutions established through northern land claim agreements do so as a matter of course.

While how best to interpret and use TEK remains a significant challenge, passing information and hunting-based skills from one generation to the next provides at least a partial but nevertheless valuable picture of the past rarely provided by comprehensive scientific programmes, which in the Arctic are of recent initiation. Policy and decision-makers in Ottawa wanting to know of the impacts of climate change in the North might usefully consult hunters, for they have first-hand experience of the rhythms, cycles, and subtle changes to the environment. Moreover, Inuit have repeatedly offered to share what they know of their environment in the hope and expectation that their observations will assist others to help them better manage their environment and prove useful to environmental managers outside the Arctic. It is important to note, however, the need to separate observations and conclusions in the Arctic resulting from climate change from those relating to other processes. For example, changes in animal distribution, abundance, and behaviour--areas in which TEK can be of considerable use--may or may not result from climate change.

Sachs Harbour, Banks Island

In 1999 the Winnipeg-based International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) and the Inuvialuit community of Sachs Harbour, Banks Island, Northwest Territories, initiated a project to record and illustrate community observations of climate change. The resulting video in which Inuvialuit quietly but with firm authority point out what is happening to their immediate environment was shown with apparently telling effect to delegates at the 2000 climate change negotiations in The Hague, negotiations that nevertheless failed to agree on how best to implement the Kyoto Protocol.

Community residents reported all manner of climate change-related environmental alterations, beginning in the mid to late 1980s. While fewer and thinner polar bears is the compelling image of climate change in the North popularized by the media and some non-governmental organizations, Inuvialuit in Sachs Harbour reported not only on the future of charismatic megafauna but prosaic, commonplace, and cumulative changes that threaten their own cultural future: melting permfrost resulting in beach slumping; increased snowfalls; longer sea ice-free seasons; new species of birds and fish--barn owls, mallard and pin-tailed ducks, and salmon--near the community; a decline in the lemming population, the basic food for Arctic fox, a valuable harvested species; and generally a warming trend.  That the consistency of kerosene and fuel oil no longer resemble milk and jelly in mid-Winter is the compelling indicator of that trend offered by long-time resident Andy Carpenter. Rosemary Kuptana, a former resident of Sachs Harbour and member of the board of IISD, pointed out that environmental indicators used for generations to predict weather and aid hunting and travel over sea ice, no longer worked reliably. With weather patterns, temperature, and precipitation increasingly unpredictable and the shape and look of the land becoming unfamiliar, it is increasingly difficult for Inuvialuit to read the land and follow the seasons.

Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated Climate Change Workshop

In response to growing concern about the long-term impacts of climate change, the Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated (NTI), the Inuit organization mandated to implement the 1993 Nunavut Land Claims Agreement, hosted in March 2001 a twoday workshop in Cambridge Bay to bring together elders and hunters from 15 Nunavut communities to share experience, observations and views related to climate change. A verbatim record of the workshop is available from NTI.⁷

It was only a reconnaissance study involving fewer than 20 people, but participants noted widespread environmental change in Nunavut as a result of altering climate and weather and repeated many of the observations made by Inuvialuit in Sachs Harbour. These observations included melting permafrost; retreating glaciers and ice sheets on Baffin Island; new species of birds in Summer; longer ice-free seasons in Hudson Bay; shorter snowmobile travel seasons over sea-ice; more pronounced wind storms; and strengthening sun. Elders joked about the need for Inuit hunters to use stronger sunscreen lotion, which suggests growing problems with UVB radiation. The workshop concluded that Inuit must prepare themselves for climate change and the social and economic developments that will surely follow, particularly use and transit by general cargo vessels of the Northwest Passage.

Voices From the Bay

Perhaps the most ambitious, rigorously conducted, and generally successful TEK study of environmental change in northern Canada is reported in Voices from the Bay, a book published by the Canadian Arctic Resources Committee and the Municipality of Sanikiluaq, a small Inuit community on the Belcher Islands in the midst of Hudson Bay.⁸ Completed in 1996 and published in 1997, this study brought together 78 Inuit and Cree hunters and elders from 28 communities on the shores of Hudson and James bays in a series of workshops over three years to describe, record, and verify ecological changes, including but not limited to climate change, in this huge bioregion. The book is based on a geographical information system and computer-assisted analysis of a 2,000 page, approximately 800,000 words, database generated through the workshops.

The attached table summarizes environmental observations recorded in this study. Particularly interesting observations include wholesale changes in location, number, and duration of polynas--open water areas in Winter--in eastern Hudson Bay, and changing flyways of Canada and snow geese. The study provides a complex model of sea-ice formation and ablation related to temperature, currents, wind, and tides, likely to be of considerable use to oceanographers and climate change scientists. The study indicates that alterations in weather and climate are by no means uniform within the bioregion.

Conclusions from the Case Illustrations

Voices from the Bay illustrates, in particular, inherent methodological difficulties of connecting TEK observations with climate change. That northern Indigenous peoples have much to say that is important and accurate about the distribution, abundance, behaviour, and health of animal populations and that this should be incorporated in resource management is no longer controversial, and their knowledge is avidly sought by wildlife biologists. Yet suggesting a causal relationship between say, changes in animal behaviour as recorded through TEK studies and climate change remains problematic. Notwithstanding these difficulties, all three cases illustrate the advantages to natural and social scientists and those who develop policy based upon science of working with Inuit and all northern Indigenous peoples and calling upon their expertise to address the multi-faceted climate change agenda.

Each case illustrates an important fact--much of the impact of climate change on northern Indigenous peoples will be channeled through ecological changes to which they will have to adapt. Already Inuit hunters are altering their hunting patterns to accommodate changes to the ice regime and distribution of harvested species, both marine and terrestrial, that appear to be as a result of climate change. We can hypothesize significant changes to the extent and intensity of land and resources used by Inuit from those documented in the 1970s in the superb three-volume Inuit Land Use and Occupancy Project.⁹ Having spent considerable time and political energy negotiating comprehensive land claim agreements, Inuit leaders are warranted in questioning the value of the agreements'constitutionally entrenched rights to harvest wildlife if, as a result of climate change, key species can no longer withstand hunting or are no longer to be found.

A Northern Perspective on Canada's Policy Response

That northern Indigenous peoples are likely to pay a disproportionately heavy price culturally, socially, environmentally, and economically as a result of climate change is well known. Nevertheless, while climate change has been a policy issue challenging the federal government for many years, Ottawa has yet to seriously engage these peoples on this most compelling of issues.

At the intergovernmental meeting of energy and environment ministers of April 1998, which mandated 16 Multi-stakeholder Issue Tables to produce options for the National Implementation Strategy on Climate Change, Indigenous peoples and their interests were all but ignored. A perusal of northern projects supported by the Canadian Climate Action Fund reveals that most involve physical science, and few attempt to incorporate TEK. Those few that address the concerns of northern Indigenous peoples, including the first case illustration reported in this paper, involve southern-based non-governmental organizations as interlocutors to manage projects, effectively diluting the opportunity for partnerships to develop between Inuit and other northern Indigenous peoples and federal agencies, notwithstanding the fiduciary principles that underpin their relations and comprehensive land claim agreements that establish institutions upon which Indigenous peoples and the federal and territorial governments are represented to manage land, water, and wildlife in the North. A similar conclusion can be drawn of the recently established Whitehorse-based Northern Climate Exchange. A March 2001 circumpolar conference on climate change organized by the exchange issued a declaration that failed to single out or even mention Indigenous peoples.

The Policy Opportunity: Partnering with Northern Indigenous Peoples

What lessons from the global POPs and circumpolar experiences briefly reported in this paper might assist the federal government better address climate change in the North, bearing in mind the region's Indigenous peoples, particularly Inuit, are on the front line in adapting to the impacts of climate change? Canada committed in the 1992 national Green Plan to spend about $5 million per year through the NCP to examine sources, pathways, bioaccumulation, and health and environmental effects of transboundary contaminants in the North. As well, it funded the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (Canada), Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, Dene Nation, Council for Yukon First Nations, and Metis Nation--Northwest Territories to help manage the NCP, to explain the issue to their constituents, to promote informed food choices to avoid ingestion of contaminants, to sensitize federal agencies, parliamentarians, and non-governmental organizations to the public health as well as environmental implications of the issue, and to help Canada prepare for and participate in international negotiations on POPs.

By bringing Indigenous peoples together with four federal agencies--Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Environment, Fisheries and Oceans, and Health--to manage the programme, the NCP helped link together domestic science with domestic policy. For example, Inuit organizations were able to bring their NCP-based knowledge to bear in parliamentary hearings to amend the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. The programme had a marked influence in defining environmental security threatened by long-range transport of POPs to the Arctic as a Canadian foreign policy objective to be addressed in the Arctic Council, the UN/ECE region, and finally, globally. Drawing upon their work in the NCP, northern Indigenous peoples established a coalition that participated actively and adroitly in all global POPs negotiations, frequently in support of Canada's aims. Indeed, at the final global POPs negotiations in South Africa in December 2000 the coalition took upon itself the role of defending the Government of Canada from ill-informed, inaccurate accusations about its position authored by a putative academic from Harvard University and published in The Globe and Mail.¹⁰ That Indigenous peoples would publicly defend the honour of the Crown says much about their partnership, trust, and mutual respect with agencies of the Government of Canada developed through the NCP. On their part, civil servants on Canada's negotiating team came to appreciate the significant public relations and political value of having northern Indigenous peoples vocally "on side," and appreciated that they were, in effect, representing the interests of Inuit, Dene, Metis, and First Nations in the negotiations.

It would be incorrect and naive to suggest that that the global POPs experience is tranferable holus bolus to the more complex and economically and politically more significant climate change issue. Be that as it may, a partnership between the federal government and northern Indigenous peoples on all facets of climate change, including research, impacts, communication, and adaptation, is possible, desirable, and overdue. Here lies a challenge for the federal departments of Environment and Natural Resources, Ottawa' s lead agencies on climate change, and for the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development which should be promoting a partnership model with sister agencies. There should also be considerable room for input and involvement by northern Indigenous peoples in Canada' s international position, strategy, and posture.

A partnership is taking shape in the climate change assessment sponsored by the Arctic Council. It is curious that Canadian Inuit are more closely a part of this international initiative than they are of national assessment and evaluative processes on which they are, however, consulted. Federal agencies and Canadian-based permanent participants in the council can not draw upon a climate change equivalent of the NCP for the simple reason that one does not exist in the policy, institutional, and intergovernmental framework Canada uses to address this issue. Just how comprehensive and effective Canadian participation will be in the circumpolar assessment in the absence of such a programme remains to be seen. All northern Indigenous peoples organizations involved in the NCP have suggested it as a partnership model for climate change action and research in northern Canada. The President of ICC Canada formally proposed such an arrangement in her speech at the March 2001 circumpolar climate change conference sponsored by the Northern Climate Exchange.¹¹

Failing the establishment of an NCP style programme on climate change or a reworking of existing programmes, implementation of northern comprehensive land claim agreements might provide the framework in which to develop required partnerships. Supple-menting these agreements are implementation plans approved by federal and territorial governments as well as Indigenous peoples that could be amended to address climate change related programmes, activities, and responsibilities. The bottom line, however, is that federal agencies with mandates to address climate change should talk with Inuit, Dene, and Yukon first nations organizations to establish the partnerships required to bring northern concerns more fully to the attention of national and international decision-makers.

Terry Fenge is President of Terry Fenge Consulting Inc., and Strategic Counsel to the President of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (Canada). Dr. Fenge can be reached at . This is an edited version of a paper that appeared in Isuma: The Canadian Journal of Policy Research.

Notes

1. N. Bankes, T. Fenge, and S. Kalff, " Toward Sustainable Development in Canada's Arctic: Policies and International Relations" pp 170-189 in F. O. Hampson and C. J. Maule (eds.) Global Jeopardy (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1993).

2. For a useful outline and discussion of Arctic co-operation see C. Archer, and D. Scrivener, " International Co-operation in the Arctic Environment" pp 601-619 in M. Nuttall and T.V. Callaghan (eds.) The Arctic: Environment, People, and Policy (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000).

3. For an outline of these international agreements from an Inuit perspective see T. Fenge, "Indigenous Peoples and Global POPs" Northern Perspectives , Vol. 26, no.1 (2000), pp 8-14.

4. For an outline of the work conducted under both the Northern Contaminants Programme and the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme see L. O. Reiersen, "Local and Transboundary Pollutants" pp 575-599 in Nuttall and Callaghan op. cit. In addition, see J. Jensen, K. Adare, and R. Shearer (eds.) Canadian Arctic Contaminants Assessment Report (Ottawa: Northern Contaminants Programme, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, 1997).

5. For an introduction to the complex world of Arctic climate see G. Weller, "The Weather and Climate of the Arctic" pp 143-160 in Nuttall and Callaghan op. cit.

6. For an introduction to traditional ecological knowledge see J. T. Inglis (ed.) Traditional Ecological Knowledge Concepts and Cases (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre and Canadian Museum of Nature, 1993).

7. Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated, "Elder's Conference on Climate Change" (2001) mimeographed.

8. M. McDonald, L. Arragutainaq, and Z. Novalinga Voices from the Bay (Ottawa: Canadian Arctic Resources Committee and Environmental Committee of the Municipality of Sanikiluaq, 1997).

9. M. M. R. Freeman (ed.) Inuit Land Use and Occupany Project 3 vols. (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services, 1977).

10. The offending opinion editorial "DDT Saves Lives" by Amir Attaran was printed in The Globe and Mail on December 5 2000. A letter in response, "We Can All Win" by Sheila WattCloutier, Robert Charlie, and John Crump was printed in The Globe and Mail on December 11, 2000. Both the opinion editorial and letter are reprinted in Silarjualiriniq No. 6 (October to December 2000).

11. V. Ford, "From Consultation to Partnership: Engaging Inuit on Climate Change" Silarjualiriniq No. 7 (January-March 2001), pp 2-4.

Click to view a chart of : Regional Environmental Changes Observed by Inuit and Cree in the Hudson Bay Bio-region
 

October 5, 2001

By Fax
Hon. Ralph Goodale
Minister of Natural Resources

Hon. David Anderson
Minister of the Environment

Hon. John Manley
Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Trade

Hon. Robert Nault
Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development

Dear Sirs,

We are taking the unusual step of writing to you collectively to recommend ways to improve implementation in northern Canada of the national climate change action plan, and to pursue Canada's interests on this issue in the circumpolar region and the world. To achieve our shared objectives on climate change we should build a close working relationship between agencies of the federal and territorial governments and Indigenous peoples organizations representing Inuit, Dene, and Yukon First Nations.

For some years we have worked cooperatively and successfully with federal and territorial agencies to implement the Northern Contaminants Programme (NCP). As a result of the NCP Canada successfully persuaded the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to sponsor negotiation of a global convention to eliminate emission of key persistent organic pollutants  (POPs) that end-up in the Arctic contaminating the animals that we hunt and eat. This convention was signed in May. We participated in the global negotiations as members of the Canadian delegation and as official observers. Your negotiators will attest that we added legitimacy and credibility to Canada's negotiating position and strategy. There is every reason to believe we can similarly assist in bringing the Arctic dimension of climate change to the attention of the world with positive long-term results.

Northern Indigenous peoples have, by and large, been left out of the federal decision making process on climate change. For example, our interests and concerns were not considered by the 16 multi-stakeholder tables established in April 1998 to produce options for the National Implementation Strategy on Climate Change. Few northern projects funded by the Canadian Climate Action Fund address our concerns, and many of those that do are managed by non-Indigenous organizations making it difficult for us to develop needed partnerships with federal agencies.

We do not want to focus on past difficulties. Instead, we want to work with key federal and territorial agencies to embed our concerns, interests, knowledge, and perspectives in Canada's national approach to climate change. We suggest that representatives of federal and territorial agencies and northern Indigenous peoples organizations meet in the near future. The goal of such a meeting should be to draft for your consideration consensus-based policy, research, programme, and institutional design recommendations to establish the partnership that surely is needed to fully address this most compelling of national and international issues.

Yours truly

cc. Premier, Government of Yukon
Premier, Government of the Northwest Territories
Premier, Government of Nunavut