A repugnant foreign law

It’s heartening to hear that U.S customs officials will finally return Pelly Bay’s marionettes to the people who made them.

As we went to press this week, we learned that the Department of Sustainable Development has informed the Hamlet of Pelly Bay that U.S. officials have agreed to return the dolls within seven to 10 days.

This is as it should be, because morally, the U.S. government had committed an act of theft. The people of Pelly Bay innocently believed that they were not breaking U.S. law when they sent them across the border last month for repairs. The small amount of wild animal material contained in the puppets posed no threat to any species. Their purpose in sending the dolls to the U.S. was consistent with the spirit of that country’s Marine Mammal Protection Act, repugnant though that law may be.

The high-handed U.S. seizure has, however, helped to expose the odious nature of the MMPA, and why the U.S. congress must be urged to change it.

Nunavut crafts people and hunters are capable of producing a range of marine mammal products without posing a threat to any species. This includes things made from ivory, whale bone, baleen, and seal skin, as well as food products made from seal meat. But there’s no point in producing commodities that you can’t sell for profit.

The United States is a huge, affluent market. Gaining access to that market for Canadian Inuit products would go a long way towards reviving Nunavut’s moribund renewable resource economy.

In its dealings with the rest of the world, the U.S government has long preached the virtues of trade liberalization, often using their political and economic power to urge free trade upon nations that aren’t willing or ready to accept it.

But the MMPA demonstrates that the U.S. government is not willing to practice what it preaches. Alaskan Inuit are allowed to bring marine mammal products into the lower 48 states. Canadian and Greenlandic Inuit are not. This is a discriminatory practice that violates trade principles that the U.S. has enthusiastically promoted elsewhere.

Changing the MMPA also means confronting the lunatic pseudo-environmentalism of the animal rights movement and the powerful, well-funded anti-fur lobby. U.S. legislators must be persuaded that it’s worth their while to confront these irrational but powerful political forces.

As well as being a story about big issues and powerful people, this is also a story about little people and little issues.

This story was also about a group of elders in Pelly Bay who made some puppets for a video about Inuit culture. They never should have had to worry about their dolls in the first place. JB