Open letter to the president of Nunavut Tunngavik Inc.

Will ITK-NTI lawsuit hurt residential school survivors?

I, as a survivor of the Chesterfield Inlet residential school and a beneficiary of the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement, am very disappointed and hurt by NTI and your class action lawsuit against the federal government.

I, along with a number of my colleagues, have been dealing with the courts for a number of years and NTI was never there when we needed their support.

Now that the Assembly of First Nations has been very visible in trying to come to terms with the federal government on the residential schools issue, NTI and the Inuit leadership are playing catch-up without communicating with their people.

First, I contacted our MP, Nancy Karetak-Lindell, in early June 2005, asking why the Inuit leadership was not on board with AFN, when there were Inuit survivors of the residential schools. I also contacted Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, but have yet to hear from them.

I understood that the AFN directive was only for having attended a residential school and did not include abuses and losses, and I informed our MP that the compensation sought by AFN would not be satisfactory for the Inuit, as there were major differences.

NTI is using exactly the same figures that AFN put forth to the federal government — $10,000 for each residential school student and $3,000 for each year that they attended.

If NTI goes ahead using these same figures, Inuit are going to be short-changed, as the differences include location, where everything is costlier to purchase than in southern Canada. Inuit are taxed for everything, while some or most AFN people will not be, and most Inuit survivors did not have a grasp of the English language as did other aboriginal peoples who had on-going contact with the Qallunaat. All the Inuit were taken away from their parents and flown hundreds of miles, while that was not always the case in southern Canada.

Second, as I stated earlier, we have been dealing with the courts and some of us are finalizing the physical and sexual abuse aspect of the issue. That is where the insensitivity of NTI is felt most. Some of us are finally laying our demons to rest.

But now, here comes our parent organization with a lawsuit that is not carefully thought out and has not been presented to a majority of their affected beneficiaries.

Thirdly, it is very discouraging to hear that NTI is using beneficiaries’ money to take someone to court again. This time, the plaintiffs being represented with this lawsuit may not reach triple digits as the figures they are using are not adequate and many of us will not and may not be able to sign up.

Of course, we are sensitive to those who never signed up for our lawsuit, which has been ongoing for over five years now. But since our lawsuit has been ongoing for so long, we are wondering why NTI legal counsel never looked into it to see if they would be duplicating it.

We need assurances from NTI that all NLCA beneficiaries will benefit from this lawsuit.

John Illupalik
Igloolik