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THE SIDEONE PROFILE
Siila WattCloutier: Change will happen at the speed of trust
A resident of Jericho, Vermont, Phyl Newbeck is a freelance writer for a variety of newspapers and magazines. She is the author of Virginia Hasn’t Always Been for Lovers: Interracial Marriage Bans and the Case of Richard and Mildred Loving.
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You might not expect to find a Nobel Peace Prize nominee living in a remote Arctic village. But for environmental activist Siila (Sheila) Watt-Cloutier, returning to her birthplace of Kuujjuaq, in Quebec’s Nunavik region, four years ago was a tonic after residing in big urban centres like Ottawa and Montreal.
“It’s my homeland,” she says. “I consider myself able to adapt and live anywhere, but home is home.”
Watt-Cloutier began her environmental work on the issue of toxins in the food chain.
“Scientists decided that since the Arctic was so pristine, they should do studies here about the occurrence of toxins,” she says. “They discovered it was higher than expected and was even in the milk of nursing mothers. That was the start of my work, which continued with issues of climate change, because those are parallel for us and are about human health and cultural survival.”
People didn’t initially understand when she referred to climate change as a human-rights issue, WattCloutier notes. “For most people, human-rights violations are individual occurrences, not collective rights – but entire populations can be affected.”
Watt-Cloutier worked with the Center for International Environmental Law in Washington, D.C., and San-Francisco-based Earthjustice to show that ice, snow and cold were things on which Inuit culture depends.
“We don’t just survive, we thrive,” she says. “Ice and snow are our lifeblood.”
Ice and snow serve many purposes in Inuit culture, she explains, including transportation, safety and
security. With the loss of ice and snow comes the loss of cultural activities like hunting.
“Hunting is not just the pursuit of animals that are nutritious,” she says, “but also about preparing our youth to develop character and life skills. Although the technical aspect of the hunt is important, they also learn patience and endurance, and develop knowledge and wisdom. All that will be lost if the ice is gone.”
For Watt-Cloutier, the disconnect between people and their food sources is at the root of many of the world’s problems. She describes communal Inuit dinners as a euphoric and spiritual connection and notes that both the sewing of animal skins and the wait for prey can be meditative. “When we are cleaning our animals and our hands are in the blood, it’s like having your hands in the soil of your garden,” she says. “There is emotional value to the food; it connects us to our ancestry and provides rites of passage for our youth.”
It has been Watt-Cloutier’s life work to make people understand that indigenous culture depends on the preservation of the natural environment. She has done so as an elected official, but also as a writer, speaker and teacher. “I think you have to work in both tracks,” she says, “and they have to be parallel.”
In 1995, she was elected Canadian president of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (now known as the Inuit Circumpolar Council), and in 2002 she became International Chair, representing more than 150,000 Inuit in Canada, Greenland, Russia and Alaska. She has written for numerous publications and has presented at conferences and workshops around the globe, but she is probably best known for her 2015
memoir, The Right to be Cold: One Woman’s Story of Protecting Her Culture, the Arctic, and the Whole Planet.
Despite leaving her post at the ICC in 2006, WattCloutier was busier than ever until the onset of COVID-19, as people began to realize the link between droughts, wildfi res, hurricanes, and climate change. “The work I did was not attached to elected positions but was fi rmly entrenched in my spirit,” she says.
In addition to the nomination for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, her many honours include being named a Hero of the Environment in 2008 by Time magazine, and a Nation Builder of the Decade by The Globe and Mail in 2010. She has 15 honorary Doctor of Law degrees, and in 2015 she received the Right Livelihood Award from the Right Livelihood Foundation in Stockholm.
Watt-Cloutier is concerned about a variety of issues facing Inuit people, chief among them the problem of suicide. “We have the highest suicide rate in North America,” she points out. “Historical traumas are at the root of this, and dispiritedness sets in.”
She contends one way to heal those traumas is through a return to native culture, but climate change is interfering with that. “As we try to heal through the land, the ice and snow are melting,” she says. “It’s not just an environmental issue, but also about how we prepare young children to make the right choices. If they can have that connection and resiliency through culture and the land, they can do anything. We are fi ghting even harder than ever to defend our way of life.”
Human trauma and planetary trauma are one and the same, Watt-Cloutier argues. “What we’re seeing are our normal reactions to abnormal actions.”
Her hope is that people will somehow fi nd common ground. “The ‘othering’ of one another is not helpful to indigenous people or anyone else,” she says. “The colonial approach had negative impacts, and we are trying to build new partnerships. It has taken a long way to get where we are. Change happens slowly.”
Part of the problem is that governments and universities tend to “silo” issues, Watt-Cloutier says, whereas Indigenous culture looks at problems holistically.
“I do believe change will happen at the speed of trust.”
The Covid-19 pandemic has given Watt-Cloutier a chance to refl ect. One consequence of the global outbreak is that the unresolved issues of structural racism and social injustice have risen to the surface, she notes. “I think many countries are being fully exposed for outdated racist policies that are putting those in poor health conditions even more at risk,” she says.
“Yet another troubling trend is that some people have taken the pandemic as an opportunity to heap blame on a particular animal or a country rather than recognize the overall damage that has been done to the planet,” she said. away from cities and towns,” she says, “but this is a grim reminder of how interconnected we all are.”
A BETTER PLACE
That said, Watt-Cloutier is optimistic about the future. She says she’s been impressed with recent youth movements and believes the coming generation will bring the world to a better place.
“We have to ensure that youth become change agents and liberators,” she says. “I wouldn’t be moving forward and expending so much of my intention and focus if I wasn’t optimistic about the future.”
Watt-Cloutier recently heard a 13-year-old child lament that she didn’t think she would reach the age of 40. “I told her not to go there,” she recalls. “Not because I’m dreaming in Technicolor, but because change can happen. Look how quickly the air and water cleared in major cities when the pandemic hit and a lot of unsustainable activity stopped.”
When asked where those who want to effectuate change should start, Watt-Cloutier borrows a quote from U.S. author and activist Marianne Williamson for her response: “As we go, so goes the world. The revolution that will save the world is ultimately a personal one.”
Taking action boils down to leadership, which doesn’t require an elected position, Watt-Cloutier stresses.
“Leadership means never losing sight of the fact that the issues at hand are so much bigger than oneself,” she says. “It’s important to model a sense of calm, clarity, and focus, and to check inwards to make sure one is leading from a position of strength rather than victimization.”
