The 11th Inuit Circumpolar Council General Assembly came to its close on Canada Day, 1 July. The general assembly, which was carried out under the slogan “Inoqatigiineq – Sharing Life”, had among its dominating themes uses of renewable and non-renewable resources, and various resistances to these uses in as well as outside of the Inuit world.

The issue of the EU ban on seal products which will come into effect in August this year created a heated discussion among Inuit leaders on the one side and their guest from the European Commission Nicholas Hanley, head of the Commission’s Unit of International Relations, on the other.

Hanley accepted a gift from his hosts consisting of a seal skin with the remark that the EU seal ban exempts products made from seals harvested by Inuit. This provoked several Inuit leaders to take the floor and condemn the ban, arguing that it will colapse the market for seal skin products regardless of provenance.

Mary Simon, President of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, called the exemption an “empty box” whereas outgoing ICC Chair James Stotts said that the ban was “a disrespect and disregard of Inuit culture.”

The question of legitimacy of the ban has been brought before the World Trade Organization by Canada and Inuit organizations have filed an injunction with a European court instance to have the ban blocked.

Mr. Hanley, on his side, argued that trade prohibitions similar to the EU ban has been in force in the United States for decades, therefore he did not understand why so much attention was now given to the EU ban.

Regarding the extraction of non-renewable resources - oil, gas, and uranium in particular -, opinions among the Inuit delegates differed, some emphasizing the necessity of extracting natural resources in order to secure development, others stressing the need for carrying out exhaustive environmental impact studies before deciding to start drilling.

Both views were reflected in a statement made by ICC Alaska delegate Reggie Joule to the Greenlandic radio station KNR. In that statement, Mr. Joule pointed to the Mexican Gulf oil spill as an example of how lack of public control over oil companies will lead to disasters.

Yet, he also pointed to the commercial aspect of public control: “The community must try to become co-owners in oil projects in order to get more money out of them.”

At the General Assembly, ICC announced that an emergency summit on development is going to deal with the issues of Inuit natural resources extraction. The occasion for this might be the pan-Arctic Inuit leaders’ summit, which, according to the Nuuk Declaration, ICC is to set up in 2012.

The fourth session of the recent Inuit Circumpolar Council general assembly in Nuuk on hunting and food security was rounded of by Finn Lynge, grand old man of Greenlandic public life and civil society.

Mr. Lynge gave a presentation entitled “Responsive and responsible development” that centered on Inuit opportunities for linking up with the surrounding world in questions of sustainable development.

Mr. Lynge, firstly, commented on the political development since the introduction of Home Rule in Greenland in 1979 with its ever-increasing gap between the political discourse and the social and environmental realities.

Greenland, Mr. Lynge remarked, is presently ruled by the most formally professed red-green political party in the modern history of the country, viz., the Inuit Ataqatigiit lead by Premier Kuupik Kleist. However, Mr. Lynge said, “the former leftwingers have swung around and are now going with the industry”, and stated: “There is no left left.”

Mr. Lynge then went on to remark that, despite consistent campaigning for the right to sustainable use of nature, it is not the claim for Inuit stewardship of the land, but rather animal rights measures that have prevailed, as the present EU ban on seal skin products clearly demonstrates.

Neither the Greenland Government, nor the ICC, Mr. Lynge said, have done enough in the way of maintaining relationships with their partners south of the sixties like the International Union for the Conservation of Nature or the United Nations’ Environment Program.

Time has come, he concluded, for ICC to relate also to people and organizations within environmental policy networks that mobilize ambivalent feelings on the part of Inuit:
“Go out there, meet them, understand them.
And give them to understand our world.
Create a meeting of the minds.”