NTI president lambastes Arctic leaders at ICC

Cathy Towtongie, the president of Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., issued a loud warning to circumpolar Inuit leaders in Kuujjuaq this week: either deal with social issues, or see all your other efforts fail.

“Social issues are making our people unsure of the future; they are zapping our strength. They are overwhelming those we serve – we cannot avoid them or downplay them,” Towtongie said.

She said most northern leaders have coped with social issues by ignoring them, pretending they don’t exist or just remaining silent.

“We must turn our attention to suicide, addiction, abuse, crime, illiteracy, family dysfunction and violence. All of these barriers to our mental and emotional health have multiplied during many of the leadership’s great silence about them,” Towtongie said.

A predominately male audience of circumpolar leaders showed no great enthusiasm for Towtongie’s message, and greeted it with a brief ripple of half-hearted clapping. No social issues were specifically mentioned on the agenda for this week’s ICC conference.

Towtongie went on to say that any new initiative aimed at improving the lives of Inuit is doomed to fail unless northern leaders also address social issues.

“Any lack of integration to address these pressing social challenges will ultimately doom these strategies to failure,” Towtongie said.

“This is so often lost on the inventors of these new initiatives and crafters of these announcements – that our people are becoming more restless and frustrated and wonder when we will ever be getting to their issues,” Towtongie said.

As leaders from around the circumpolar world flocked to Kuujjuaq this week, several Arctic communities in Canada were reeling from recent incidents of violence.

They include:

* The beating death of a well-known Iqaluit man, David Nowdlak, 48. Nowdlak’s funeral was held in Iqaluit this week. A 17-year-old Iqaluit boy has been charged with second-degree murder in connection with the death.
* The shooting death of a 27-year-old Kuujjuaq man, Aloupa Watt, at the beginning of August, for which an 18-year-old boy from Kuujjuaq has been charged with first-degree murder. The boy also faces charges arising from an earlier incident in which another man was wounded in the stomach with a shotgun.
* The stabbing of 42-year-old Tommy Alikatuktuk in Iqaluit on August 7. A 32-year-old man, Mosesie Nakasuk, has been charged with aggravated assault.
* A tense standoff in Baker Lake this weekend that delayed this year’s first day of school in the community. A 41-year-old man with mental health problems armed himself with a knife, a hatchet and a gun, and then barricaded himself inside a house for more than 60 hours.

Towtongie said the silence of northern leaders has helped these kinds of problems get worse.

“Our people individually and collectively need to hear us as leaders acknowledging the toll it is taking.”

In addition, Towtongie said, action on social issues must be incorporated into all programs and projects.

“We must incorporate these pressing social issues into every agenda,” Towtongie said.

ICC’s outgoing president, Aqqaluk Lynge, later told delegates that the absence of social issues on ICC’s conference agenda doesn’t mean that the organization doesn’t care about them.

He said it simply means that ICC officials don’t want to see them pushed off to one side.

“We decided social issues were so important that we did want to make them into a ghetto,” Lynge said.