A global vision

MIRIAM HILL

Sheila Watt-Cloutier reaches into a suitcase beside the sofa in her Iqaluit home and pulls out a red box.

The chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, an international organization representing about 150,000 Inuit living in the Arctic regions of Canada, Alaska, Greenland and Chukotka, Russia, has recently returned from a whirlwind trip that saw her visit Washington, D.C., to receive an award on behalf of ICC Canada and then jet up to Alaska to speak to the Alaska Federation of Natives.

But it’s what she received in Washington that she’s anxious to show.

On Oct. 19 WANGO, the World Association of Non-Governmental Organizations, presented ICC Canada, the chapter of which Watt-Cloutier has been president since 1995, with its inaugural Global Award for the Environment.

Watt-Cloutier brought the award back to her makeshift home office in Iqaluit rather than leaving it in the Canadian head office in Ottawa not because she wanted to take the credit, she assures, but because having it in her presence inspires her.

“Because I work with image, I work with the power and energy of land I really am a spiritual person,” she says.

She removes the two pieces of crystal from the box and places it on the table. The base of the piece is a transparent cupped hand into which an etched world globe sits. It fits so closely that when the sphere spins it appears to be hovering in the air over the base.

“It is very symbolic to me, the symbolism of the hand. And the way that it’s perfectly engineered, it’s like it’s just floating there,” she says, smiling. “It’s like the hands are not grabbing it, there’s no mechanism, but yet softly it sits in one’s hands. That’s the nature of the work we do, it’s tending to Mother Earth.”

Raised on the land until she was 10, it plays an integral role in Watt-Cloutier’s life and being. A patio off the back of her home overlooks rolling hills and the still unfrozen Frobisher Bay. As she speaks the sun is starting to set, casting light on the side of her face.

Watt-Cloutier was elected ICC chair in August and from then until now, ICC’s head office has been located in Watt-Cloutier’s home, supported by the Canadian office in Ottawa. This interim situation is normal, she says, since it takes between four to six months to secure funding and set up a head office.

The first executive council meeting under her command is tentatively scheduled for early January and her staff is already working on a hands-on agenda for the meeting, which will concern itself with dissecting the Kuujjuaq Declaration and planning how to make it a reality.

The priorities for ICC are the environmental contaminants issue and climate change. Watt-Cloutier says when tackling such massive issues, you have to go into meetings with a political strategy and make sure you can propel the issue to another stage.

“The environment is a priority because it’s all absolutely connected to who we are culturally,” she explains. Inuit haven’t removed themselves from the land either physically or spiritually.

“We haven’t disconnected and we don’t have hundreds of years, or even a hundred years of being entrenched in institutions,” she says. “We are connected still to the source. We are connected to the pulse of the land. It still is very much what drives us to make changes for us as a people.”

Watt-Cloutier says even though she considers herself a deeply spiritual person, she is also a strategic politician, planning how and when to get important issues on the table.

A recent trip to the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, taught her another political lesson — not to take even support from the Canadian government for granted. With so many world leaders at the event, which was divided into many venues, Inuit didn’t have a chance to raise the concerns and issues she would have liked.

“It really drained me completely because we had worked so hard and long with our Canadian government to set this in motion and put the Arctic on the map,” she said.

“I met the (Canadian) Prime Minister down there at a reception where I didn’t have his undivided attention. What did he think; I was going to talk about how great the cocktails were? It wasn’t about that, it was about the chemical cocktails in the Arctic sink that I wanted to talk about.”

But she says her role is not one to just scream for attention of the Arctic, but it’s for everyone, worldwide.

“Because we are a people who are on the land and snow every single day we witness the most minute of changes and we are scientists in our own right and I think they have to pay heed,” she says. “The world has vested interest in keeping us on the land because we are the guardians.”