Celebrity seal-hunt tweet ignites another Twitter war

Eemeelayou Arnaquq butchers a seal at the Toonik Tyme seal skinning contest in Iqaluit yesterday. (FILE PHOTO)

Special to Nunatsiaq News

A copy of Alethea Arnaquq-Baril’s 2016 documentary Angry Inuk should have arrived at the offices of NBC’s The Ellen Show by now.

Tanya Tagaq’s record company, Six Shooter Records, decided to use the DVD as a piece of mailed activism on April 9 after a discussion erupted on social media about the impacts of banning the importation of seal products.

On April 6, India passed a ban on seal skin imports that was met with celebratory posts on social media from animal rights activists, including Ellen DeGeneres of The Ellen Show and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, better known as PETA.

On Instagram, The Ellen Show’s account re-posted a PETA photo of a seal with the words, “India bans seal fur!” written across it.

Beneath the photo, they had written: “Thank you, PETA. Great news! After nearly a decade of work by PETA India, India has banned seal fur! It’s only a matter of time before the commercial seal slaughter is a thing of the past.”

Since then, Inuit community members, Indigenous rights activists and some of the most prominent Inuit celebrities in Canada have been voicing their concerns and criticisms via social media and tagging both organizations.

When Tagaq tweeted that she wished The Ellen Show would watch Angry Inuk, stating that “she deserves the truth,” Emily Smart at Toronto’s Six Shooter Records decided to deliver the video right into the hands of the vegan talk show host.

How can we get @TheEllenShow to watch the film #angryinuk? Will you help us? She deserves to know the truth.

— tanya tagaq (@tagaq) April 9, 2018

According to Smart, when she saw the debates in her Twitter feed on April 9, there just happened to be a DVD copy of Angry Inuk sitting on her desk nearby.

Hello @TheEllenShow — we've put our copy in the mail today for you. pic.twitter.com/TQLDsiOKu9

— Six Shooter Records (@SixShooterR) April 9, 2018

So Smart decided to mail it out to DeGeneres for Tagaq and the other Inuit who were hurt by the news of the seal ban and the anti-seal hunt comments that came rolling in with it.

“We saw what Tanya was sharing on Twitter—what’s it going to take to get Ellen to watch this film? It’s something small that we could do for Tanya,” Smart said.

Neither Smart nor the others who have attacked DeGeneres on Twitter for anti-sealing comments have received a reply from The Ellen Show’s star.

Nunatsiaq News also did not receive a reply from DeGeneres’s team before press time.

“There was no reply,” Smart said. “I don’t think Ellen has ever engaged in these discussions.”

PETA issued a statement on Twitter on April 9, that said, “although Indigenous people in northern Canada hunt seals, PETA’s campaign has always been against the commercial seal slaughter carried out by non-aboriginal fishers as an off-season cash grab.”

But many commenters replied to that noting that nowhere in PETA’s campaigns do they explicitly make that distinction. They also asserted that a lot of the statistics and facts that PETA uses in these anti-seal hunting ads are incorrect.

Help us END THIS! Tell Prime Minister @JustinTrudeau to stop the commercial seal slaughter now: https://t.co/ZNyMlzPopb pic.twitter.com/CyAEXi4ydE

— PETA (@peta) April 9, 2018

Some even suggested that PETA watch Angry Inuk as well.

“It’s an incredibly important documentary we learned a lot from,” Smart told Nunatsiaq News.

“It is something we want everyone to watch. So we just wanted to support Tanya and others who are just asking people to become more informed.”

Arnaquq-Baril was also involved in these social media exchanges, tagging both DeGeneres and PETA directly in her tweets that urged those who oppose seal hunting to consider how it impacts the livelihoods of Inuit.

I urge you to watch my film Angry Inuk. Please. Campaigns against seal hunting have deeply racist roots and keep the poorest and most food insecure population in North America in a constant state of crisis.

— Alethea ArnaquqBaril (@Alethea_Aggiuq) April 12, 2018

She says she was glad to see someone send The Ellen Show her film, especially knowing that it was Tagaq’s record company.

“She’s been such a fantastic advocate on this issue,” Arnaquq-Baril said.

But she does not believe that DeGeneres will engage in dialogue about how anti-sealing activism affects Inuit in Canada even if the actor does watch the film.

“I am not optimistic that Ellen DeGeneres will ever be brave enough to speak with us but I do hope that she will watch the film,” Arnaquq-Baril said.

“She could at the very least take a bit of time to hear from the people most affected by her anti-seal hunt activism. We may not have been making many sales to India anyway but bans like this still impact us because they are international negative news stories which affect our market prices.”

Fashion designers, understandably, don’t want to work with material that they can’t sell to many countries, she said.

“Every ban hurts us,” Arnaquq-Baril said.