'Our Homes Are Going into the Sea'
Interview with Sheila Watt-Cloutier*, Inter Press Service (IPS) Fri Apr 6, 10:14 PM ET
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 6 (IPS) - "The ice is not only our roads but also our supermarket," says Sheila Watt-Cloutier, an Inuit leader who has been fighting for the rights of indigenous peoples in the Canadian Arctic region for many years.
The Inuit people journey across the frozen ocean for much of the year. For them, sea ice allows for safe travel on the perilous Arctic waters and provides a stable platform from which to hunt its bounty.
But all that has begun to change as a result of global warming. The ice is melting from below, and the Inuit hunters can no longer trust its stability.
In the past few years, many hunters have died or been injured after falling through thin ice. Changing weather patterns have forced many native communities who lived in coastal areas for thousands of years to move to other places.
Testifying at a hearing of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission in Washington last month, Watt-Cloutier said that global warming "is destroying our right to life, health, property, and means of subsistence."
At the hearing, Watt-Cloutier, who has been nominated for this year's Nobel Peace Prize, also raised critical questions about the role of governments that refuse to acknowledge the disastrous effects of climate change on the environment and indigenous communities in the Arctic region.
Following are excerpts from a recent interview IPS conducted with Watt-Cloutier.
IPS: We all know that the Arctic region is becoming increasingly vulnerable to global warming. Could you explain how is it affecting the biodiversity of the region, and the lives and culture of your people?
Sheila Watt-Cloutier: Our hunting culture is very much based on the snow, the ice. Nowhere else in the world does the ice and snow represent mobility and transportation [as it does] for us. So the changes are really great in terms of the ice forming much later in the fall and breaking up much earlier in the spring, and we also are having the ice conditions changing as well, in terms of it not forming as thick as it used to be. And because this is our highway, it becomes an issue of safety and security.
The permafrost is melting in certain areas much more than others. At certain areas in our region, like where I come from in Nunavut, we've had to move and relocate some houses because they were bucking inwards because of the permafrost melting. And then we have places like Alaska where the coastal erosion is so big, so huge, that homes, over the years, have just gone into the sea.
Some of the other things are different species of fish and different species of birds and insects that have found their way into the Arctic now, for which we don't even have names, because they are following the warming trend and they end up in the Arctic. The glaciers are melting so fast that what used to be safe streams for our hunters and our families to cross sometimes have become torrential rivers.
IPS: What about the communities that have suffered from displacement. Is there any assistance from the governments of the region?
SWC: In Alaska, they are trying to find ways in which to relocate them, yeah, but really who fits the bill? That's the problem. Because no one has been able to address this issue as seriously as it needed to be addressed over the years. And now as a result it's too late for some of those communities where there are no adaptation programmes [and] there is no help in terms of relocating them.
IPS: In your testimony before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights you said that all of this is a violation of human rights. Could you explain?
SWC: Well, we filed a petition to the Commission citing that the inaction of the United States, one of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, is indeed violating the human rights of the Inuit of the Arctic by their inaction to address this issue of mitigation of greenhouse gases. I testified about the legal impact and the connection between human rights and the climate change. But we have yet to hear back from them.
IPS: Tell us about how you look at the role of the Arctic Council, which includes Iceland, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Canada, Norway, Russia and the United States, in addressing the issue of global warming?
SWC: Well, the Arctic Council was created as a high-level governmental membership of those eight countries to deal with sustainable development of the circumpolar world. It has the indigenous people as permanent participants, but not as voting members of it. What we had thought when it was created in 1995 was that it would be able to take more effective action than it has. It has become very good at technical assessments, but it gets paralysed in the politics afterwards.
IPS: U.N. treaties on biodiversity and climate change are already in place. What more do you think the international community can do to minimise the damage that has been done to the biodiversity of the planet, particularly in your region, and its indigenous peoples?
SWC: Well, I think already the
United Nations has played a positive role, for example in the contaminants issue, the persistent organic pollutants, which led to the Stockholm Convention, which is now one of the fastest conventions to have been signed, ratified, and enforced in the history of the U.N.. So when the world comes together to do the right thing, it can do the right thing when the will is there. So that's a success story. But when it comes to climate change issues, it becomes once again paralysed not only at the Arctic Council level, but when the negotiators go in, for example, from powerful countries like the United States who have decided not to sign onto Kyoto.
IPS: The U.S. has not signed onto the treaty on biological diversity either. This treaty recognises the indigenous peoples' knowledge as an essential aspect of global efforts to reverse the loss of biodiversity. What do you say about that?
SWC: The U.S. sterilised the process. And it becomes so hard that even if the global community is moving ahead in those areas, the United States continues to be the odd-man out. But I am still very hopeful that things will change in the United States as well.
IPS: How do you assess the role of the international financial institutions in addressing these issues? How important is the funding aspect?
SWC: Well, it's just one of those situations where we fall through the cracks, because any of these big institutions usually don't fund developed countries. We, in the Arctic, Canada, the United States, Greenland, are considered developed countries, yet we are challenged almost like Third World countries.
We don't qualify to get effective funding to address these issues because our own governments are supposed to be looking after us. There have been no real climate change programmes yet, either in the United States or Canada, to address this issue on our behalf.
IPS: What about the participation of indigenous communities and the significance of their role in the overall efforts to address climate change?
SWC: Well, what we have been trying to say is that we are a people who still feel very connected to our environment, we are very connected to our food source, so we understand the cycles and the rhythms of nature very well. We are not just powerless victims over these compelling issues. Of course, we are very challenged, of course we become the net recipients of these contaminants and are disproportionately negatively impacted.
But we want to play an active role with the world, because we are still a people who connect so much to our hunting way of life and to the ecosystem that we know about sustainability. We have thrived, and not just survived. We want to be equal partners in this. And, of course, the world sometimes tends to view the indigenous people as a thorn in their side rather than equal partners that have solutions to offer to this debate.
*Haider Rizvi is a U.N.-based journalist who has covered indigenous issues for IPS for many years.