Arctic Peoples

by Clive Tesar

The United States Government is beginning to show signs that it understands the seriousness of climate change. A new Bill in the United States Senate backs an 80% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2050. The Bill, sponsored by Senator Boxer, has attracted the support of democratic presidential hopefuls Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama.

A senior Senate staff official told a visiting delegation of Arctic Leaders,

We hope to be in a position to do something very aggressive on global warming when we have a new President. However, we still have a lot of difficult people, including two senators from Alaska who won’t agree.

The Arctic Leaders have been visiting Senators’ offices in Washington DC, for the past three days to persuade the Senators to back urgent action on climate change. The Leaders have stressed that they are not backing any particular Bill, or any particular US political party, but simply want to see the United States take any action that will start to stabilize temperatures in the Arctic.
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by Bobbie Jo Greenland 

There are a number of issues facing young indigenous people wherever they live in the world. In November 2005 I attended a forum in Copenhagen, Denmark, hosted by the International Working Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA). I was invited to make a presentation on the youth issues in my home region of Northwestern Canada. There were also presentations made by youth from other parts of the world, including South America. I learned that indigenous peoples, especially indigenous youth, are facing the same struggles and experiencing similar triumphs no matter how far apart they live. This is because our peoples have gone through similar situations in history.

One of the biggest concerns among young people today is the loss of language and culture. We are living with the results of what happened to our people over generations, as people from other places tried to take away our culture and make us like them. Young people today are living in between two worlds. Many of us are educated in both the Western world and in our traditional way of life as well. It is a great challenge to keep a balance between the two.
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by Bobbie Jo Greenland

I attended the Coastal Zone Canada 2006 Youth Forum in [GP:Tuktoyaktuk], Northwest Territories, Canada, from August 11-14, 2006. This conference was about the impacts of climate change on coastal communities. Tuktoyaktuk was a good place to hold it. The community has spent millions of dollars in the past few years on putting rocks on the shoreline to try stop erosion. The warming climate is raising the sea level, and warming the permafrost that holds the shoreline together. Read the rest of this entry »