NTI’s veteran VP steps back up to the plate
“We need to see more benefits flowing”
NTI’s long-time vice president James Eetoolook, pictured here in 2010, will run to keep his position Dec. 8. (FILE PHOTO)
With a career in Nunavut and Inuit politics spanning more than 30 years, James Eetoolook has seen the territory’s land claim process from its very start.
And he’d like to, as much as possible, see that hard work pay off for beneficiaries.
Eetoolook, 68, first joined the board of directors of the Tunngavik Federation of Nunavut when it was created in 1982.
Since the organization became Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. in 1993, Eetoolook has served as vice president, in different forms — a job he’s hoping to keep when beneficiaries go the polls Dec. 8.
“Sometimes the government has been slow to implement parts of our land claims [agreement],” he said of his career’s work. “And we have to knock on their door all the time.
“We have a huge responsibility representing beneficiaries.”
On Dec. 8, Nunavut beneficiaries will elect just one vice president, not two as before, and that position will become full-time.
The new vice president will chair at least two NTI board committees, including the Inuit Social and Cultural Development Advisory committee and the Inuit Wildlife and Environment Advisory Committee.
Eetoolook calls wildlife one of the “backbones” of the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement.
He admits it’s not always pleasant to hear what outsiders have to say about Inuit hunting culture, an issue he’s dealt with throughout his entire career.
As an organization, NTI has been a champion of the Inuit economy, he said, by promoting the sale of locally harvested products.
“I think our wildlife department has been successful on a number of things,” Eetoolook said in a telephone interview from his home in Taloyoak.
As an organization, NTI lobbied hard to see polar bears not up-listed to Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora , a move that would ban all international trade in polar bear products.
Eetoolook also nodded to the territory’s narwhal management plan that NTI helped to develop.
His focus, if elected, will be to revive and allocate more money towards NTI’s hunter support program, cancelled earlier this year while it undergoes review.
“It’s been very successful and brought many benefits to Nunavut’s hunters,” he said. “This time around, we need to see more women involved [because] sewing clothing is very much a part of our harvesting culture.”
As current vice president, Eetoolook said the program’s review is complete and should be submitted to NTI’s board of directors in the new year.
But he acknowledges that hunting alone won’t address the poverty many Nunavummiut face, pointing to resource development as a potential new source of income for communities.
“We need to put our lands to work so we can start to receive some money,” Eetoolook said, although he’s quick to express caution. “Our land is fragile, and so is the well-being of Inuit.”
While NTI has a mining policy, Eetoolook said it’s important that the organization draft another one specifically for oil and gas development.
But before the territory opens itself up to that kind of development, Eetoolook believes devolution — a process by which Nunavut would take on province-like powers including full control over natural resources — must occur first.
Although, as vice president, he played a role of the development of NTI”s 2007 uranium policy,” Eetoolook said Nunavummiut still need to know more about the radioactive metal and the implications for its extraction and processing.
“But for now, we’re burning fossil fuels and we know it’s damaging, so we should also be looking at greener ways,” he said. “Southern industries are part of the problem — are we going to sit back and watch it happen?”
Eetoolook offers an example: NTI’s efforts to have Distant Early Warning sites across the territory cleaned up and decontaminated following an agreement reached with the federal government in the late 1990s.
But it’s just one accomplishment, Eetoolook said, in a territory with some of the most pressing social issues in the country.
“We need to see more benefits flowing,” he said.
Voters must be Canadian citizens, at least 16 years of age, and enrolled under the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement.
And voters now have five ways to vote in NTI elections; they can vote at advance polls on Dec. 1, in person on election day on Dec. 8, or by mobile poll, proxy vote or mail-in ballot.
Read our profiles of the other two NTI candidates:
(0) Comments