Says Meeka Mike, a hunter who went with Watt-Cloutier to present their petition to the OAS, “The wind direction changes several times a day, the ice doesn’t freeze as thick, the colours that indicate the ice is safe are no longer reliable, and there’s a haze that we never saw before.” She fingers the plastic covering from an after-lunch fortune cookie and says, “We didn’t know how these things were made.” Now she knows that the manufacturing of plastics and the lack of filtration systems are at the heart of what’s altering their lives. “Siila is teaching the world about the Arctic and the impact of climate change. She speaks for our people and has become our global voice.”
Watt-Cloutier doesn’t call herself an environmentalist and never uses words like global warming, preferring climate change. “I’m just an Inuk woman who is attempting to protect her way of life for herself, her people and her grandson.”
When she tells the story, interrupting it only to remark on a snowmobile going by or a raven swooping down or the soft pink tone the sun is casting on the ice outside her window, she weaves the tale of a people through her own life experiences. “In 50 years, we’ve gone from living in harmony with traditional hunting off the land to a modern world that has hit us very hard.” She cites historical traumas such as forced relocation, medical ships that took people with TB to the South in the ’50s and never brought them back home, Brigitte Bardot’s romanticized version of the seal hunt in the ’60s. “The pelts went from $100 each to $5 each overnight. She smashed the market.” Together, she says, this was the perfect recipe for spiralling down to addictions – drugs, alcohol – the highest suicide rate in North America. “This is the wounding that our people need to recover from.”
The current crisis started with a hole in the ozone layer in the ’80s. While everyone knew the gaping hole in the Arctic was bigger than anyplace else, no one paid attention to the sunburns and cataracts that were at epidemic proportions for the hunters. Then, toxins hit the headlines in the ‘80s and ’90s. POPs (persistent organic pollutants, known as the dirty dozen, that include DDT, PCB and dioxins) were showing up in fish and wildlife in southern Canada, so scientists came to the North – the pristine world of snow and ice – to get a measure of what a normal toxin level ought to be.
The shocking test results revealed the Arctic was being poisoned by levels that were up to eight times higher than what they were in the industrialized South. Marine mammals – seal, whale, walrus – and polar bear were storing toxins in their fat, the main diet of the Inuit. Mothers’ breast milk was contaminated. So was the cord blood of newborns. Although the scientific contingent who conducted the studies sounded the alarm, the rest of the world wasn’t listening.
