$70,000 video designed change opinion of seal hunt

SEAN McKIBBON

IQALUIT — A sealing video screened last week in Iqaluit for Nunavut’s bureaucratic elite may not be exactly the same when it gets sent to Canadian schools and American lobbyists and congressmen.

The $70,000 video was produced by Inuit Communications Systems Ltd. (ICSL) for the Department of Sustainable Development as a counterattack in the 30-year old publicity war waged by southern animal rights activists against the seal fur trade.

“It’s to educate people in different parts of the world who may not understand what it [sealing] means to us,” said Sustainable Development Minister Peter Kilabuk after the screening.

But the video still has to be shown to a focus group in Montreal to help determine its final form.

One scene showing an Inuk shooting a seal and then dragging it behind his boat to the floe edge with a harpoon may not go over well with southern audiences.

“There’s a great deal of debate within the department, even among the Inuit staff, about whether those seal hunting scenes should be in the video at all,” said Larry Simpson, a “sector development specialist” for Nunavut’s Department of Sustainable Development.

Simpson worked on the video with Katherine Clarida Fry, ICSL’s managing director and producer of the video, and Greg Hancock, the GNWT’s media specialist, who helped write the video.

“It’s a matter of strategy and emotion,” said Simpson. Without the scene the point of the video might be lost and could open the video to criticism that it was glossing over the realities of the hunt, he said.

But what many Inuit view with sentimentality could have an entirely different effect on some southern audiences, he said.

Years of campaigning by well funded groups such as Greenpeace and the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) has built a mythology that is hard to counteract, Simpson said.

At 48 minutes, the video has been edited to fit a one-hour broadcast slot with space for commercials, Clarida Fry said. She said there has been some talk of also having a shorter version.

The video opens with images of Arctic landscapes and Inuit culture interspersed with comments from elders, wildlife officers and even a marine biologist about the importance of seal hunting to Inuit culture and survival.

“I think it’s told in a very honest and culturally appropriate way,” Clarida Fry said.

“We wanted to make sure we portrayed a little bit of what it is like to live in the north and be a hunter,” Fry said . She said the video tries to show the “naturalness of living on country food, and subsistence hunting.”

By first introducing the hunters— a father and son from Pangnirtung — and showing the process of the hunt, the wait, and the passing of traditional knowledge from father to son, the film should give a context to the scene in which the seal is actually killed, Clarida Fry said.

“Of course we can’t control what people think if they view that one scene in isolation and we’re not going to change the minds of extremists overnight,” she said.

Later on, the video actually takes aim at anti-sealing groups, with footage of protesters being interviewed while displaying a general ignorance of Inuit culture.

Through a voice over by Abraham Tagalik, the video says that massive campaigns by animal rights activists have all but destroyed the sealing industry.

In 1974 IFAW hired the same advertising agency as Coca-Cola to co-ordinate a $100,000 “Stop the Seal Hunt,” campaign. Seal pup products are now banned in Europe and the U.S. Marine Mamal protection Act prevents any importation of seal products into Canada’s largest trading partner.

With annual revenues of $60 million a year and support from U.S., Canadian and European celebrities, the IFAW represents a publicity juggernaut, Simpson said.

But the department doesn’t expect to change minds overnight, Simpson said.

“It’s a long term project. We’re just a drop in the bucket,” he said.

The first drops will come in the form of a glossy magazine-style publication called Seals and Nunavut, our tradition, our future, which is to be mailed out to 6,000 Canadian schools using a mailing list provided by the Canadian Fur Council.

The magazine will include an order form for teachers to fill out if they want a copy of the video and an outline for discussion of the video in class, Simpson said. DIAND has kicked in $24,000 to help pay for distribution of the video, Simpson said

The video will also air on APTN, but Simpson said his department would like to also have the video air on an another national Canadian network, as well as on a national American network.