Shawn-Paul Joahasie, 6, plays in a snow bank in Iqaluit, Nunavut, where the G7 finance ministers are meeting. (Fred Chartrand/Canadian Press)
Governor General Michaelle Jean helps Inuit women in Rankin Inlet cut up a seal for lunch in May 2009. (Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press)
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Human rights and the seal hunt, the debate moves north
Spike a seal and watch the emotions boil over on all sides of this debate.
Should those who hunt seals, like the Inuit of Canada's North, be the ones to determine the future of that species? Or must they surrender their self-determination — their own human rights — to the interests of those animal activists who argue a different moral view?
The meeting of the G7 finance ministers in Nunavut this weekend splashes that messy dilemma all over the world stage.
Since Iqaluit has been chosen, it is a good time to call to mind a kind of sacred connection.
Our neighbours
Of course Nunavut's leaders are going to try to leverage this finance summit to educate us all on who they are.
Is that such a bad thing?
The 35,000 people who live in Nunavut are our fellow citizens, our sisters and brothers, if you will.
They are not just political pawns to be trotted out when it comes to sealing or climate change debates. They are the neighbours we seldom have the chance to understand.
The Inuit are on record, in fact they are even in the European General Court, saying that their indigenous ways with the seal are directly connected to the Atlantic commercial seal hunt, the one that is at the centre of so many protests.
That's also the seal hunt that takes place in those regions where unemployment is over 15 per cent and where sealing can provide as much as 35 per cent of someone's annual income.
The importance of the spring seal hunt to local economies in Quebec, and Newfoundland and Labrador, is indisputable. And that itself is a cause — the survival of small communities — that the Inuit directly relate to.
"We perceive the seals differently than people in the South," says Inuit Senator Charlie Watt. "To us, they are the wild dogs of the sea and they are direct competitors for food. Seals, like humans, hunt fish.
"We strongly support the commercial hunt in Canada and we continue to support our brothers in Newfoundland and the lower St. Laurence."
More than just subsistence
The senator makes the case for what each of us take for granted — the freedom to support ourselves as we wish, and the freedom from having the moral judgment of others limit our own self-determination.
"What God has given to us is what we use in order to survive," says hunter Jackie Nakoolak of Coral Harbour, Nunavut.
"God has given us this land that we're going to look after, and eat what is given to us.
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To defend that choice — and the ability to expand upon it — the Inuit are actually suing the European Union countries that they will be hosting at the G7 summit, suing them for their seal-product ban, which cripples the commercial seal hunt even as it exempts the Inuit's subsistence hunting.
Subsistence alone is not enough, the Inuit are saying. To survive as a self-supporting community they may well need to develop the resources they have at hand, including seals.
As the environmentalist and community leader Mary Simon, president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, put it: "It is bitterly ironic that the EU, which seems entirely at home with promoting massive levels of agri-business and the raising and slaughtering of animals in highly industrialized conditions, seeks to preach some kind of selective elevated morality to Inuit.
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So watch as Inuit political leaders take advantage of the G7 finance summit to show us that the more seal pelts sold to make fur coats and accessories, the better.
The premier of Nunavut will seat her guests on sealskin chairs, waitresses will sport seal accessories as they serve seal meat, and, of course, someone prominent will have a sealskin jacket on.
I doubt the G7 participants will have time to hop on the back of a snowmobile and follow an Inuit hunter out to sea with a rifle. There they could worry that the thinning Arctic ice might crack beneath them.
In a community where only one in four adults can find employment, where subsidized groceries are still five times the price of those in the South, and where raw meat caught from the land is as vital as beef and chicken is to those in the big cities, it is pretty apparent just who the EU ban is hurting.
It is pretty clear, too, that this "Inuit thing" is not just a cultural quirk but the essence of what it is to be co-inhabitants of a shared planet.
(2010/02/06-CBC news)
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