Delegates urge more contact between Inuit and scientists

The Inuit Circumpolar Council needs to be more open and less defensive— and start to collaborate more with organizations, governments and scientists to get its message out, delegates at this week’s ICC general assembly in Nuuk heard this week

Two eminent Greenlanders, statesman and author Finn Lynge and Minik Rosing, a professor at the University of Copenhagen, gave them that advice in speeches to the assembly.

If the ICC had reached out more in the past, people and lawmakers in the European Union would have known more about sealing and been more sympathetic to the Inuit point of view, Lynge said.

“The anti-sealing rage might have been mitigated or stopped,” he said.

As an example of the lack of communication, Lynge cited a 3,000-plus page series of reports, recently produced by the United Nations Environmental Program.

UNEP’s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment looked at the consequences of ecosystem change for human well-being and involved the work of more than 1,360 experts worldwide.

But the assessment contained no mention of references to ICC.

“That is unacceptable,” Lynge said.

ICC should have been more proactive in reaching out to the EU, to make sure it’s invited to the table and participates in what’s going on elsewhere, he said.

To think that “people south of 60 are going to bow to us” is “sheer utopia,” Lynge said.

Inuit must stop sticking their heads above the barrier and telling environmental groups they don’t understand — and instead “infiltrate” their ranks: that’s the way to achieve fruitful contact, he said.

“The fact is that basically people are reasonable and can be reached,” Lynge said.

If ICC can do this, “it will create what is the most important: a meeting of minds.”

Geologist Minik Rosing told ICC that Inuit should change their mindset about there being “two kinds of knowledge”— traditional environmental knowledge and western scientific knowledge — because there is only one kind of knowledge.

“Knowledge is knowledge — whoever has it,” Rosing said.

Rejecting what science has to say can be “an impediment for the Arctic to be heard in the world,” he said.

As well, traditional ecological knowledge should be subject to the same kind of scrutiny as science, he said.

But not all speakers at the ICC assembly showed such openness.

The outgoing vice-president of ICC-Canada, Violet Ford, said colonizers have marginalized Inuit and their knowledge.

For that reason, traditional knowledge gets overlooked and is not incorporated into decision-making, she said.