That’s when Sheila Watt-Cloutier went to work. In 1995, she became a regional representative to Canada’s Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC) and was such a formidable force she was made president of the council later the same year. She hit the floor running when global negotiations started on the POPs Treaty. “Can you imagine how I felt as a mother and grandmother? I couldn’t fathom that this would be something the world could accept and not do something about. Our entire way of life was at stake.”
In 2002, she was elected International Chair of ICC, representing 155,000 Inuit in Canada, the U.S. (Alaska), Greenland and Russia. By now, she was attending climate conferences all over the world and stirring up a debate no one could ignore. Paul Crowley, her legal counsel in Iqaluit, says, “Her story touches people. What she says resonates around the world.” Her message is this: the top of the world is in a meltdown, and the runoff will damage every place else. “These people knew nothing about us, never mind what they were doing to us,” she says. “I had to find a way to take this farther. It was about my grandson’s future, my cultural heritage.” At the same time, there were groups in the U.S. beginning to hook climate change to human rights, and they thought,
“Maybe that Inuk woman has a case.” That’s when she hooked up with Donald Goldberg who, until recently, was the senior counsel for the Center for International Environmental Law and Climate Change.
Watt-Cloutier liked him right away. “I don’t need missionaries. We’ve had plenty of those in the North trying to save us. I’m not a powerless victim. I need allies, people I can partner with.”
That’s when she played her seemingly audacious human rights card and filed her petition along with 62 Inuit hunters and elders to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (the body that reports on human rights standards to the OAS), alleging that unchecked greenhouse gases from the U.S. had violated Inuit cultural and environmental human rights as guaranteed by the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She was backed by an international legal team from Earthjustice and the Centre of International Environmental Law.
One of those lawyers was Martin Wagner, the managing attorney of international programs at Earthjustice, who says, “Her action was unprecedented. She pulled it off. Institutions are already starting to talk.” She says, “As chair, I knew I had to put a human face on the environmental issue. This was new even to the people who work on rights issues.”
A host of international environmentalists came onboard, including Lloyd Axworthy, who chaired the panel with Watt-Cloutier when she launched the petition at the eleventh session of the Conference of the Parties to the Climate Change Convention. Her career catapulted into the stratosphere. In 2006, she left ICC when her term ended and went out on her own. Then, on Feb. 2, 2007, word leaked out that she’d been nominated with former U.S. vice-president Al Gore for the Nobel Peace Prize. What she didn’t realize on that day was this would be the beginning of the end of the spiritual quest she’d been on to find peace.
