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Speaking to the Research Community
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Sheila Watt-Cloutier, President of ICC Canada and Vice President of ICC, speaking to the researchers. Photo credit Terry Fenge. | | | For some years research in the North has been in crisis. Lack of funding and deteriorating infrastructure have taken their toll. The Globe and Mail reported earlier this year that more is spent on research in northern Canada by foreign nations than by Canada, a lamentable state of affairs that amounts to a loss of intellectual if not legal sovereignty. But on 21 September 2000 a National Task Force on Northern Research, supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, suggested ways and means to halt the slide. The task force urged the federal government to:
- establish 25 Northern Research Chairs at Canadian universities;
- create 40 graduate scholarships and 40 postdoctoral fellowships;
- support 70 strategic research projects;
- build partnerships between university researchers and northern communities;
- fund critical infrastructure and logistics.
Just what the federal government will do in response to the recommendations of the task force remains to be seen. Likely Cabinet will consider the matter if and when it addresses a policy for Northern Science and Technology.
In the post land claims environment Inuit have an important stake in northern research. Not only do Inuit wish to be consulted on and informed about research programmes and projects, they have ideas and suggestions as to appropriate priorities to serve Inuit needs and aspirations. Ms. Sheila Watt-Cloutier, President of ICC Canada and Vice-President of ICC, recently spoke to researchers and academics at an international Inuit Studies conference in Aberdeen, Scotland. Her speech, which illustrates the success of the Northern Contaminants Programme and the McGill University Centre for Indigenous Peoples Nutrition and the Environment--key research partnerships with Inuit--is included in this issue of Silarjualiriniq. As well, this issue reprints a letter from ICC Canada and Inuit Tapirisat of Canada to the Hon. Ralph Goodale, Minister of Natural Resources Canada, responding to the recommendations of the Task Force on Northern Research.
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Speech given by Ms. Sheila Watt-Cloutier, President of Inuit Circumpolar Conference (Canada) and Vice-President of Inuit Circumpolar Conference 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 vice-president of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference and president of ICC Canada. It is a great pleasure for me to be here today among friends, for I recognize many in the audience.
I will speak for about 20 minutes and then my friend and colleague Jose Kusugak, President of the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, will join me to answer questions. 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 politics I worked in the areas of education and youth issues. I participated in a review of our education system, researching issues and searching for solutions to the challenges that were negatively affecting our lives.
Although the first speaker indicated that the Inuit are not well known here in Scotland, the Scots are certainly no strangers in our homeland. I am a product of a Scots grandfather and have come to honour and appreciate that part of me.
While I tell you about some of the things we are doing at ICC (Canada) please recognize that 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 thoughts 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 promote culturally and ecologically sustainable economic development in the North.
ICC participates in many international processes. During the last few years, for example, 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 ICC Greenland office has been heavily involved in efforts 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 for another mission later this year. Please consider contributing: Inuit in Chukotka remain in dire straits.
ICC (Canada) is implementing sustainable development projects with Mayan and Garifuna Indians in Belize. And, 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 experience and expertise that Inuit have developed over the last 20 years on negotiating land claims, building our institutions and governance systems, and running our own businesses are in high demand from other indigenous peoples around the world. We have much to offer.
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 well.
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 of which come from tropical and temperate countries and end-up in the Arctic, where they bioaccumulate in our food chain. By eating marine mammal fats, many Inuit, particularly women, have acquired levels of certain POPs, including PCBs and DDT, that are much higher than those levels found in 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.
Research is under way on the long-term health effects of these contaminants, which impair human reproductive, neurological, immune, and behavourial systems. This is a very serious health and 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 our 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 cannot, 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, courage, and to be bold under pressure and stress, are the skills that our young people need to survive and cope with the tumultuous change occurring in our homelands. These are the very skills they need to say "no" to self-destructive behaviour.
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 United Nations agencies and nations far from the Arctic to take such action requires scientifically credible information. The NCP and CINE are crucial to generating that information.
The NCP awards $6 million annually 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 gets the money. We also talk to the communities about the results of the research. This is an important change: 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, even in 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 research. 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, CINE conducts very good research. 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 carving to Klaus Topfer, Executive Director of UNEP, at the negotiation in Nairobi. This carving, done 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 cannot take a "North versus South" approach in these negotiations. Tropical countries are not going to immediately stop using DDT, when it saves thousands of lives every year by preventing malaria, until alternatives are found. 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 the POPs issue affects us all.
It is horrific that mothers in Mexico and Central America have to save lives by relying on dangerous chemicals 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 types of choices; where mothers in 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 to meet in Alaska in October and their agenda includes 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 climate change 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.
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. In closing, I believe we are ready for equal partnerships in research. Are you?
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September 21, 2000
The Hon. Ralph Goodale
Minister of Natural Resources
Room 407
Confederation Building
House of Commons
Ottawa, ON
K1A 0A6
Dear Mr. Goodale,
We are writing about the recently completed report of the Task Force on Northern Research sponsored by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). We urge you and your colleagues to adopt all recommendations of the task force; particularly important are those dealing with the proposed 24 Northern Research Chairs and the Community/University Research Alliance. Inuit have considerable experience of working with northern researchers, and we are poised to assist universities and the granting councils implement the recommendations of the task force. In light of contaminant and health-related research we are conducting with four agencies of the federal government, we make a specific recommendation to you regarding the proposed Northern Research Chairs later in this letter.
Inuit have long understood the need for high-quality research to generate information needed to address diverse issues and problems. Protecting the fragile Arctic environment; exploring for and developing oil, gas, and mineral resources; enhancing our culture; addressing pressing social issues; and helping the Arctic take its place in the consciousness of the nation and the world are goals that require research and creative use of generated information.
Massive and accelerating social, economic, environmental, and political changes are under way in the North. The Arctic is no longer a peripheral part of the globe of interest to few, but a region with energy and mineral resources demanded by many. As well, the Arctic is showing the influence of global processes: climate change, ozone depletion, and deposition of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) from tropical and temperate countries. Rapid implementation of the task force report will generate knowledge to help Inuit, all northerners, and Canadians at large come to grips with these issues.
The relationship between Inuit and academic researchers from southern universities has not always been smooth. Some researchers have been less concerned with leaving a positive legacy in the North than with the number of publications their work can accommodate. We have learned that interdisciplinary research which leaves a lasting legacy results when communities and Inuit organizations partner with researchers and universities. Designing partnerships between southern institutions and northern interests is a key principle that underlies the task force report, and one that we thoroughly support. We suggest you and your colleagues inform NSERC and SSHRC of the importance of research partnerships with northerners, particularly in the design and conduct of social science projects.
Research partnerships are not easy to put in place, but they are indispensable if northerners are to be treated as full participants in and not passive subjects of research. We bring to your attention two very successful examples of northern research partnerships: the Northern Contaminants Programme (NCP) and the Centre for Indigenous Peoples' Nutrition and the Environment (CINE).
For the past nine years, the NCP has awarded up to $6 million per year toward path-breaking research on sources, pathways, and effects of contaminants, many of which are brought to the North on air currents from countries far to the south. These contaminants accumulate in our ecosystem and in our bodies as a result of eating "country food" with very worrying long-term health effects. The NCP is chaired by the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development in co-operation with the departments of Environment, Fisheries and Oceans, and Health, with the active involvement of the territorial governments. Representatives of five northern indigenous peoples organizationsDene Nation, Metis Nation-NWT, Council for Yukon First Nations, Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, and Inuit Circumpolar Conference Canadasit on the programme management board. These organizations assist government agencies to define research priorities, evaluate solicited and unsolicited proposals, and communicate research results to the communities.
Recognizing a significant gap in the ability of Canadian universities to undertake needed contaminant-related dietary research, the NCP funded the establishment of CINE at McGill University. This research institution is overseen by an all-Aboriginal board of directors, and as such is unique not only in Canada but also in North America.
The information generated by the NCP through universities, federal agencies, and CINE has been quite remarkable-a Canadian success story widely known in northern circles. Alaskans are now trying to establish a programme modeled on the NCP. CINE researchers are very much in demand in Russia, Alaska, Scandinavia, and many other regions. Information generated through the NCP has equipped the Government of Canada to convincingly make the case for international negotiations to eliminate the generation and use of key POPs that migrate to the Arctic. Global negotiations toward a POPs convention are being sponsored by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and an agreement is likely to be reached next year. The NCP and CINE have generated credible information that is informing national and international policies. Moreover, they have equipped indigenous peoples to intervene in these international negotiations, enabling us to leave behind the role of passive "victim" and to work on the national and international stages to address the vexing problems of chemicals and public health.
The purpose of bringing this experience to your attention is to provide the context to our strong recommendation that two of the proposed Northern Research Chairs be awarded to CINE to support, implement, and further build the partnership between northern indigenous peoples and the research community. The relationship between Inuit, Dene, Metis, and Yukon first nations with CINE has no counterpart in any other university in Canada.
We appreciate that NSERC and SSHRC will put in place formal application procedures for the Northern Research Chairs. We will encourage McGill University to expedite an application by CINE. It takes time to develop innovative research partnerships, but when based in CINE recipients of the chairs will fit immediately into a successful institution and partnership with northerners, and can quickly implement their research programmes. Indeed, it may be that other universities intending to apply for Northern Research Chairs and to design research partnerships with northerners could look to CINE as a useful model.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Yours sincerely,
Sheila Watt-Cloutier
President, ICC Canada
Jose Kusugak
President, Inuit Tapirisat of Canada
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