“I’m not telling a shrill story about the poor Inuit,” she says. “We know a little about sustainability up here in the North. If you protect the Arctic, you save the planet.” For this woman who personifies the wisdom of the hunter and says, “If I only have one bullet, I have to use it well,” her historic petition to the Organization of American States that linked climate change to human rights was a shot that was heard around the world. In that petition, the Inuit claimed, “The subsistence culture central to Inuit cultural identity has been damaged by climate change and may cease to exist if action is not taken by the United States in concert with the community of nations.” Tough talk from a woman who only travelled by dog team and canoe until she was 10 years old.
The 1948 Declaration of Human Rights does cite the right to the benefits of culture, property, health, life, physical integrity, security, food, income, residence, movement and the inviolability of the home. But until recently, those rights were not applied to the environment. Now that the ice is melting out from under them, Watt-Cloutier has become the David who’s taking on the American Goliath.
Her journey is a spiritual quest that includes coming to terms with what she calls “the wounding.” Being a fatherless child – “The white men used to come here, plant their seed and leave. My own father, an RCMP officer, denied my existence even though it was well known he was my father. That rejection had a hold on me for most of my life.”
Being sent away to school at the age of 10 – “I lost my language and culture” – was another piece of the puzzle that haunted her. Her own divorce in 1991 after a 17-year marriage – she is a lioness-like mother to Sylvia, 32, a performer, and Eric, 30, an Air Transat pilot, and a grandmother to 10-year-old Lee, the beloved child she’s helping raise with Sylvia and Lee’s father, Qajaaq. Add the international role she currently plays as keeper of the Arctic key, and her journey takes on a personal dimension that’s hooked directly to her claim on a culture and lifestyle that’s in danger of extinction.
She looks out the window at the silent barren vista of snow and ice over Frobisher Bay and says that’s what sustains her. “I have a partnership with that view. It protects me as I protect it. The stillness and calm hold me close.”
Climate change in the north is three times more rapid than it is in the rest of the world. With temperatures increasing twice as fast as anyplace else, the consequences have become too obvious to ignore. There are species migrating to the Arctic that the Inuit have no names for: wasps, robins, barn owls. Sunburns used to be unheard of; now, hunters slather on sunscreen even when it’s –40 C. Thunder and lightning storms were also unknown; now, they happen even during the winter months. And to each change, there is a repercussion. For example, the caribou hoof their way through the snow to reach the lichen for winter feeding. But when it rains and then freezes in the winter, they can’t get their hooves through the ice. Western Canadian Inuit communities fear the salmon that are moving into these warming waters will wipe out the weaker Arctic char, a staple of the Inuit diet.
