 My name is Steve Manal. I'm the director of the College of Sustainability here at Dalhousie, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to tonight's environment sustainability and society lecture. Two things I wanted to mention to begin with. First is, for those of you who aren't students and who've been coming to this lecture regularly, next week is study week, so there is no lecture. The second thing, more seriously, is I want to acknowledge that we are on unceded MiGMA territory and that we are all treaty people. And this is the spirit in which we should be gathered here today. This evening, we're pleased to collaborate with one of our longtime partners in the environment sustainability and society lectures, and that's the Marine and Environmental Law Institute of the Schulich School of Law, and I'm pleased to introduce Camille Cameron, the dean of the Schulich School of Law, who will tell us a bit about the law school, the program, and about the Douglas Johnston lecture. Thanks very much, Steve. Steve said, my name is Camille Cameron, I'm the dean of the Schulich School of Law, and it's a pleasure to be able also to extend a welcome to you all to this lecture. We're pleased that we are able, the Schulich School of Law and the College of Sustainability, to collaborate on this venture. I think it's a ninth year for this particular Douglas Johnston lecture. And when there's a lecture named for someone, I think it's important to say a little bit about the namesake, and I will tell you then just a bit about who the person was. After whom the lecture is named. It's named in the memory of Doug Johnson, who for many years was a professor at law at Dalhousie Law School, and then at the University of Victoria. He was a leading teacher, scholar, and writer in International Marine and Environmental Law. He published numerous scholarly works on environmental law, international fisheries law, ocean boundary delimitation, treaty law, and the history of international law. His works include a number of authored, co-authored, edited, and co-edited books on the topics I've just mentioned. I've got a list of them here, but it's long, and I'm not going to repeat them. But it is quite an impressive list. His numerous contributions to the law school included the development of a marine and environmental law program in the 1970s. We're very proud of that program. It's one of our flagship programs, and it was the first of its kind in the country. In addition to doing that, he also strengthened our graduate program and generally contributed to the scholarly reputation of the law school. The last book he wrote received a posthumous award of merit from the American Society of International Law. I didn't know him, but I'm told he was a mentor and a friend to many generations of law students and other researchers, and his name certainly is well known in the field of marine and environmental and international law. He had a particular passion about the Arctic region, the place of the Arctic region, and his peoples in international law, and so I think it's fair to say that he would be quite impressed with the choice of the speaker for this evening. And on that note, and to introduce the speaker, I'll now turn things back to Steve. Thank you. So it is my honor and pleasure to introduce our speaker tonight, Mary Simon. Mary was born in an Inuit village with a population of less than a thousand in Nunavik in northern Quebec. She began her work as a producer for CBC North before she began a career in public service, and it's a very long and busy career. It sometimes gets... It's daunting to read the accomplishments and efforts. She was one of the senior Inuit negotiators during the repatriation of the Canadian Constitution. In 1984, she was appointed by then Prime Minister Jean Cretien to be the first Canadian ambassador for Circumpolar Affairs, and this was a post she held for a decade. Subsequently, she took the lead negotiating role in the creation of an eight-country council known today as the Arctic Council. She's also held the position of the Canadian ambassador to Denmark. She chaired the NAFTA Commission on Environmental Cooperation and has served as the Chancellor of Trent University in Peterborough. She's received many international honors, including the Order of Canada, the National Order of Quebec, the National Aboriginal Achievement Award, and the Gold Medal of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. She holds honorary doctorates of law degrees from no fewer than five universities and most recently published a new shared Arctic leadership report with recommendations on education, infrastructure, and environmental protection in Canada's Arctic. It's our very great honor to have Mary with us. Please join me in welcoming Mary Simon tonight. Am I on? Good evening, everybody. Thank you very much for the invitation to come and for your kind introduction. I'm really honored that there are so many young students amongst the audience. Not to say that the others aren't as important, but I just wanted to say that the younger generation today is is very engaged in many ways and it's really encouraging to see so many of you here tonight. First, I just want to thank Dalhousie University, especially the EESS program and the Marine and Environmental Law Institute for the invitation to speak here tonight. I'm really honored to be a part of a distinguished list of speakers invited for the Douglas M. Johnson lecture series and as you pointed out Douglas Johnson was a leader in the field of public policy and social and environmental justice. So public policy and social and environmental justice have shattered me during my entire life, adult life. Even as a little girl living in a small village, in Nunavik, I was directly impacted by decisions around education, education policy made in Ottawa and as you know, as you probably can see and I'll talk a bit about my family later when I talk about my personal life for a few minutes so that you know who I am. But just on the education side, the reason I said I was impacted at an early age and it probably had an impact on me as an adult was we could only go to school up to grade six in our community and even there, even though it was not a residential school, it was the federal day schools, we weren't allowed to speak our language in the school, in our community. So that was a very strange experience to go through as well. But the big impact that it had on me was when my father after grade six went to the federal day agent and put in, you know, the oral application to continue our education and because my mother married a white man, we were denied that education and the Indian Act was not supposed to apply to Inuit because we don't live on reserves. But at the same time federal agents when they, I guess, thought it merited a decision would sometimes make these kind of negative decisions that had a serious impact on families and we happened to be one of those large families where there was eight siblings and I had, I have seven siblings and I was homeschooled by my father. My father homeschooled us and got us through through high school and he must have been a very determined man because he had to order the correspondence courses from from Alberta and and then, you know, we would go to school and then he would have to send our completed courses out back to Alberta to get through the accreditation system and especially when we were going through high school. So that's what I mean by being impacted at a very early age when I was growing up because it didn't just happen to me or my family, it happened to to others in different ways. And when I was a young adult, I was also asked by elders to explain policy issues that were being negotiated into land claims agreements. This and this was one of those life-changing experiences for me because it introduced me to the consequences of policy and the dynamics of a negotiating table. Like when you're a small group with very little resources and you walk into a room in Ottawa or in Montreal or anywhere else in Southern Canada, you walk into a room where you are facing many people on the other side of the table, namely you know, government, government representatives and also developers because they were also involved in the in the negotiations. So these were like very quick, we had to learn very quickly without any real experience and it was always based on what we were taught by our elders that these were the positions that we had to take no matter what we were negotiating, that certain fundamental issues would not, we would not let them go. And that's what we did was we fought a hard battle, but in the end we agreed to these agreements in good faith. A lot of it was vague. A lot of the provisions in the land claims agreements are quite vague and sometimes when you go and implement those provisions with governments, they tend to interpret them in very legalistic ways so that the good faith and the honour in which we felt we negotiated these agreements are sometimes lost in further discussions with other authorities. So it's a continuing process. Just because we settled our land claims agreements doesn't mean that we don't have continuing issues and continuing negotiations. Negotiations are ongoing all the time, whether it's making sure that implementation is taking place or how we are setting up our public governments like the Nunavut government. Those discussions are ongoing and it's a process that's in place that hopefully will improve as time goes on because we take on more and more responsibilities. So therefore, in Inuit life, we always feel that these agreements are living documents. That they're not agreements that were static. For instance, in 1975 when we settled the land claims agreement in northern Quebec, that was in 1975 situation in terms of development issues. Now when you look at the region now in 2017, there's been great changes in the region. Hydro-Cubec has developed many more resources and ongoing discussions are going on with the Inuit of Nunavut for the resource development. So these things are always ongoing. And as an Inuk leader, I have sat across from ministers and prime ministers to bring forward a point of view of those living in the Arctic who would directly be impacted by this Arctic policy that is sometimes made in Ottawa even now without our full involvement. So I am here tonight to talk about this personal journey of mine and to explain my perspective on why Arctic policy needs our national attention. I also want to share with you the conversations I had last year with Arctic leaders when at the request of Minister Bennett I traveled to communities throughout the Arctic to hear their assessment and where we are today as an Arctic nation. I'll go back to that report after but first I'd like to talk a little bit about my family because it is part of the life that I continue to lead and this is the region where I come from. I come from Kujak. I was born, first of all, I was born in Kengisualu Kujak. That's a very long name for a community but I was born there and then I was raised, the family made Kujak our home community so we moved when I was about five years old. So next. So this is a picture of my family, some of my siblings on the left side, my grandmother in the middle and I'm there on the left with the scarf around her head and we're proudly showing off a seal that my father was going to prepare for our food so it was a very happy moment and there is my father who went to the Arctic when he was 19 years old. He passed away on Remembrance Day in 2009 and he was 91 years old so he never left the Arctic and he embraced my mother's culture completely and wholeheartedly and spoke fluently several dialects of Inutidut because he lived in different parts of the Arctic and when he was 19, 20, he was up in Arctic Bay and he was the Hudson Bay post fur trader, he was a fur trader from Manitoba, from Sandy Lake near Winnipeg and when he was on Arctic Bay he learned to speak the language very quickly and in those days when people like my father went to the Arctic they became not just the fur trader but they became the postmaster, the doctor that gave the injections for some epidemics that were happening such as measles they became sort of the RCMP representative although they didn't do what the RCMP people do but kept track of what was happening in the community and I think he was a great northerner and this is a picture of one of the federal the residential schools up in, I think it might have been in Chester, or Aklavik this is an Aklavik picture in 1930 and these are some of the residential school students that were taken from their families to go to school and as you probably have heard many stories about what happened in Canada with the residential schools so I won't go into a lot of deep discussion about that if you want later you can ask questions but I did want to talk about two words in our language that are very significant and I used to hear these words when I was a young child or when I was a young person they were used by Inuit to describe the combination of fear, respect and kind of a nervous apprehension that they felt about southerners that came into the north and these feelings kind of pre-mated our lives all the time and I remember the feeling even today I can actually feel it when I talk about Ilira and Kapia so it wasn't that people were against anybody they just didn't know what was going to happen and because the relationship wasn't developed in any way when people were ordered to do something they felt some fear an apprehension about what was happening so I'm not talking about this to say in any way that there was anything negative it was just the feeling of the relationship that was present so who are the words? it's coming so this is the has anybody ever seen this? so this is something that's been developed a lot by the school in Ottawa it's a special school that's being developed for Nunavut students that finish high school and want to go to continue their education Nunavut and the land claims agreements so this is a model that shows the pre-contact with southern people and how the relationship developed with explorers the whalers, the missionaries and the traders and then after that relationship the government era came into play and the federal government started to establish the Canadian justice system which Inuit were not very familiar with the military, certain posts were made military sites like Kujak was a military site Iqaluit was a military site and then there was the forced, we call them forced relocations because there were families from the region I come from Inuqjuak that were moved up to the high arctic into what is now called Resolute Bay and Gris Fjord and those people are originally from northern Quebec and with no supplies, no real planning at all they were moved by ship into those northern regions and in fact I facilitated and co-chaired an inquiry into those relocations for the Royal Commission for the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples some years ago in the 90s and the elders that spoke at that inquiry told us that because they come from northern Quebec where we have small trees and vegetation they brought their wood stoves and their tents and they were put on shore by the ship and they were left to their own devices but they found out that there was no wood to make a fire because in the high arctic there is no wood except drift, if you get wood it's driftwood and they had to survive basically on their own they also didn't know that the sun was gone from November to February because in Nunavik it actually doesn't go all the way down it's a very short day but it doesn't go all the way down so they didn't know that it actually went dark for several months so these are things that people dealt with but you know they were very... it's unbelievable how people can survive those kind of situations but in it were very... they survived those elements and they survived those elements in their own communities as well but they were more prepared because they were used to their region they knew where they could hunt they knew where they could fish so they were used to the area that they come from so the hardship wasn't the same it was completely different but they still survived and now we have two very thriving communities in the high arctic that help assert Canadian sovereignty and you know I think we're very proud... Inuit are very proud Canadians they think very highly of Canada as a country and they feel they're an integral part of Canada and therefore we fight for the same level of acknowledgement the same level of services as other Canadians we are also taxpayers just like other Canadians because we don't live on reserves but the relationship for First Nations is different and in its own way it works for... although First Nations say there's a lot of issues that need to be addressed but in our case we don't have a reserve system so we therefore don't have the same relationship with the federal government so then you go into... I think there's the issue of the dog killings there's the movement of people into communities because the government wanted the children to go to school and the attraction was the family allowance check people didn't have a lot of money right so when they were offered a family allowance check if they sent their kids to school I think a lot of people didn't agree to do that because they could buy some food they could buy some things that they really needed in their home so these were some of the attractions that were set out to ensure that Inuit were moved into community settings and then there's also very different stories about the dogs being killed after they were moved into communities so that they would not be able to go out on the land and then after that they started to create communities that were involved in having a say about what was going on in their communities and part of that movement was through the co-ops the cooperative movement was one of the early organizations that came to the north that started to work with Inuit in terms of their ability to carve the carved beautiful stone carvings their print making was very good some people became famous because they were so good as you know so Inuit started to be involved in the movement of making the communities more socially inviting to our own people that lived in that community and the leaders decided that one of the things that we had to do was to create a national organization so that Inuit that lived across the Arctic in four regions had one voice nationally so this was something that was formed in 1971 and that was really the beginning of the discussions about having negotiations for settling the land that was outstanding and development was pressuring governments to settle these claims so that development could proceed so these negotiations began in the early 70s and the first agreement that was signed was the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement I couldn't remember the name for a minute there the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement that was signed in 1975 and that's where I was talking about earlier about going into rooms where you had all these people on one side of the room and four or five of us on the other side and negotiating these very big issues and difficult issues that somehow the Inuit leaders got through all of this and here we are today things move ahead not that there are problems but we are still moving forward and things will get better and I'm an optimist so that no matter what happens that's what I always believe in so we had the land claims agreements then we decided we needed an international voice because there were Inuit that lived in Greenland a substantial number mostly the island of Greenland was made up of Inuit and then there was the Inuit in Alaska there was a lot of Inuit living in Alaska and in fact it was a leader from Alaska from the North Slope Borough Eben Hobson that first brought everyone together in 1977 I was a very young person at that time and I remember going to Point Barrow Alaska to be involved in this international meeting with Inuit from three different countries and to this day I can remember the joy of how people felt when they got together as one people it was absolutely amazing but we always had an empty seat because our brothers and sisters from Russia were not involved we couldn't get them involved at that point but when I became president in 1986 1986 but that's a long time ago one of the first things that we did the ICC council was to start discussions with the Russian government to get the Inuit of Russia in Chakotka involved in the organization and it took us many years from 1986 to 1992 1992 they came to the ICC General Assembly in Inuvik and they participated for the first time but when I went to Russia I went to Chakotka twice in 1986 and 1987 and even Perestroika hadn't really started yet so it was still very much a country that was not open to dialogue with other peoples or other countries at that level, at the indigenous peoples level even then it was very difficult to get in but we finally got the approval to go in but of course we had authorities with us all the time we could not really have any meetings without the authorities being present and that was in 1986, 1987 but we did, we had meetings, they were all very cordial and we didn't make a fuss about them being involved we just talked together and I always like to tell this little story, short story one of the council members for the ICC was from Alaska and he was from, when the Iron Curtain went down there were two islands, that little diameter and big diameter and families lived in both islands and they went back and forth by boat and by dog team and shared families hunting together and when the Iron Curtain went down within 24 hours they had no contact so this council member that sat on ICC with me came with me on this trip and he hadn't seen his cousins or his relatives for 40 years so he was a young guy, I guess a young teenager or a young boy when this happened and he brought his niece with him, that was a young person and when we got to Anadir he got off the plane and he saw these people and he recognized his cousins right away even though he hadn't seen them for 40 years and they started talking together in IUPIC with the language they speak there they hadn't lost any of it and it was just amazing to see, it was so, so inspiring and I always remember that story and then we got back into Canada we did the constitutional negotiations and as you know we have some recognition in the constitution as aboriginal peoples in Canada with distinct rights and that was a long fought battle and one little word may not mean very much to us on a day to day basis but when you're negotiating the constitutional rights there must be lawyers and law students in this room one little word can break a negotiation and I don't know, a few times we were right on the verge of breaking off everything and somehow we kept it all together and had agreement with First Nations, Métis and Inuit and the provinces and the federal government and those rights that are in the constitution are very few in words but they took a long time to achieve so it's a very meaningful recognition because in 1894 or 1896 the constitution called the savages the term they used in that constitutional document called us, for a better word they called the savages because I guess because we lived out on the land anyway that's all changed for the better and then we had all these different land claims agreements in the Nunavut and in Inuit the IBC, the broadcasting corporation was established at that time as well and then the creation of Nunavut, the government it was agreed to at the same time as the land claims agreement so when the creation of Nunavut happened or the land claims agreement was signed we created the Inuit and the Canadian people created a new territory and changed the landscape of Canada and that was a very significant constitutional change in Canada as a country because we had to make sure that the laws and the constitution of the Nunavut territory was consistent with Canadian law so all these were very significant milestones not just in Inuit history but in Canada's history as well and then so now what we're at is the devolution Nunavut is in a period of negotiating further rights within the government to take more authority over different issues under the authority of the federal government right now and there's a lot of different issues I'm not like intricately involved in the negotiations so I can't tell you exactly what is being negotiated now but devolution did start and that's the objective is to reach some kind of an agreement that would allow the Nunavut government to achieve more authority over different issues that it did not have at the creation of the territory and that's how they did it in Greenland as well they took on more authority as time went on when people were able to take on more governance issues and more ability to govern the territory so that's what's going on so that's kind of like the story in a little nutshell so I don't know how long I've been talking what time is it so I've already talked about this when you created the ICC so you can pass that I did that as well so you can pass that so that's the Prime Minister Trudeau signing the Constitution Act of 1982 with the Queen when the Constitution was repatriated from England to Canada in 1982 so I talked about Section 35 the rights of Aboriginal people and you know when I was talking about a word sorry I touched this when I was saying a word makes a significant difference in a negotiation the word existing was the word without that we couldn't reach an agreement they had to have that word that's the story of the Constitution Section 35 is the word existing and it does give some limitations when you really put it into discussing law and Aboriginal rights how far back they go whether Section 35 is either a full box theory or a half full glass or is it an empty box so the courts have now decided that it's more of a full box than an empty box so some of the court decisions have come out in favour of Aboriginal rights but it's always a challenge to go to court you never know how it's going to go so those are decisions that have to be made by leaders and then remember Elijah Harper yeah, Meach Lake Meach Lake was negotiated without recognising any Aboriginal rights and that was after Section 35 so we were going to lose the whole thing and Elijah Harper had the one vote he could kill it and he did I mean people, Canadians a lot of Canadians weren't very happy but in the end we had to do what we had to do it was not against anyone's rights but to be excluded from a significant document like the Meach Lake Accord was enough for Elijah Harper to vote no and that's going to be in the history books I hope okay so I thought maybe I'd talk about my report for a few minutes which is the one I've recently done I don't know if Louis, Louis are you here? Louis I guess he's away I worked with a young guy and some other people that I won't name in particular but I give them significant I recognise the significant role this very small team played in this report but Louis was one of them he's the guy that travelled with me across the Arctic and it was a very challenging appointment and it was based on the joint declaration that was signed by Obama and Trudeau and with that declaration they decided to appoint a special representative for Minister Bennett to see how they could implement this declaration and the main thrust of so I was asked if I would do this and I agreed to do it because I felt it was significant and one of the main things that I had to do was to talk to Northerners Northerners living in the Arctic not just indigenous people but all Northerners so we consulted from Labrador, Newfoundland all the way to Whitehorse in the Yukon and we heard some very, very significant stories that weren't necessarily new to me but I had to hear them from leaders in the north to be able to write them out because it wasn't the report was not about me giving an opinion on the state of the Arctic it was a report based on the findings of our consultations but it made it easier for someone like me to do it because I had been involved in northern development and northern political development for some 40 years so it made it easier for me to know like how to engage people and what kind of questions I had to put forward to Northerners on different issues so my report addresses many key issues from education and language research and indigenous knowledge closing the infrastructure gap including the digital divide that we have housing reducing fossil fuel dependency because at the same time that we're talking about climate change we still depend 100% on fuel for our energy in our communities even though a lot of development has taken place we still depend on that entirely for diesel engines for our community energy so the option of looking at alternatives was one of the things that I had to look into and I also had to continue the conservation discussion one of the key findings that we made was that indigenous Northerners really wanted to have protected areas indigenous protected areas that could be different from national parks or from other protected areas because there are no protected areas in the marine except now with Lancaster Sound we have a national park in the Lancaster Sound but we don't have it anywhere else but Nunatsiawut is actively discussing a protected area in the marine in the ocean so that was one of the things that I had to discuss with Northerners and what I found when I was consulting people was that every single meeting that I went to or every single person that I spoke to always talked about how important education was but education in the context of creating something that was meaningful and people could identify with as an Aboriginal person which meant that we would we need to develop education that uses inuktitut as a teaching language or another indigenous language in the north and that we needed to develop curriculum to be able to teach in the inuktitut language beyond grade four like right now we can teach inuktitut up to grade four that it's English or French but the objective is to create a new education system that includes the use of our own language as a teaching language and to develop curriculum that is also based on the north and not just on the people but the north and the Arctic itself and education we decided when we were writing the report we decided that we had to frame the report in a way that put education as the cornerstone of all the issues that people spoke to me about because if we had a good education system and we had better educated individuals the workforce would change the dynamics of job opportunities would change so education sort of became the cornerstone of the whole report and I won't go into a lot of detail on it but I think if anybody is interested in reading it it's not very long I didn't want to publish a long report because I find that when I get these thick documents you know you read the first I don't know ten pages or so and then you sort of go to the end and read the end so I thought well why not do a report that will allow people to read right through it so I also did the report in a narrative in a more narrative way not just in terms of these are the issues but more in a style that starts from a beginning and sort of ends in a way that is both very stark in its language when it comes to the different issues that are touching our people on a day to day basis because as much as we have made progress on all those issues that I talked about constitutional development, recognition in creating land claims agreements having an international organization and the list goes on but we are still faced with kind of an insurmountable problem in our communities the social infrastructure the social well-being mental health issues continue to be issues that dominate some of our discussions in the north and I like when we were doing the report we asked ourselves why is this happening despite all these things that we've achieved why are we still in this state and the report tells you why and it's because of all those other things that have happened historically where we continue to have severe impacts on our social mental health capacity the impact was so great that intergenerational trauma was passed on to people's children like violence in the family violence against women now we have not just suicides but we have some murder cases happening and that happens in every society but when we look at a very small group of people in a large region it's very like stark so the report tells you I think why we continue to have those issues and I end my report with mental health because until we can address the mental health issue that is facing our communities and the social problems that continue to face our communities the education the level of education that will be achieved is still low because if you're not well you're not going to want to go to school you're going to drop out in grade 9 or grade 10 that's really sort of the level when kids drop out of school up north and then there's no service to help people with some of the problems they're having mentally and that can be traced back to these issues that I talked about so I'm almost out of time so I just want to end my talk with a few words on reconciliation because that's been pretty hard I think we're done with the you don't want to see that if we think small our actions will be small I think that's true okay so I just want to end my talk by talking a little bit about reconciliation in the context of our policy you know like as I talked tonight I think you could sense that we are aware or maybe even fully aware that we all face nation building questions not just indigenous people but other Canadians also face nation building questions and my generation of Inuit as I outlined tonight was the generation of Inuit who left our homes on the land and moved into communities throughout Canada's Arctic and began the decades of long work of building institutions and implementing land claims agreements so your generation, a lot of young people are here your generation I think on nation building and I am speaking to the students here tonight will take many paths but we are certain about one of these paths your generation will need to move forward on reconciliation with Canada's first peoples my own personal view on is that reconciliation doesn't fall to our leaders it is also our responsibility as individuals to help make the kind of positive changes that we aspire to as people living in a great country like Canada reconciliation is about seeing things differently than the narrative most Canadians know about Aboriginal people reconciliation is about making changes in power relationships and I think that is why the work on a new Arctic policy is so important as the great 19th century social activist Frederick Douglass once said if there is no struggle there is no progress so I am looking at to you to your generation to advance the struggle on reconciliation to move our country forward make the journey easier and the destination closer support the building of new partnerships between Inuit, First Nations, Métis and other Canadians in your home in your communities in the organizations that you work in now or will work in soon if we all do that our country we will all be richer for it so thank you very much tonight if you have any questions thank you so much so we do have time for questions we will start with a couple of questions from students and then open it up to everyone questions for Mary so the question suggests the questioner suggests that she knows a bit about problems of transparency in negotiating policy with Indigenous communities and are you finding in these new efforts that transparency is still a problem for moving forward with policy in the north yes it continues to be a problem I think it has changed there is more engagement with leaders at a political level but then those political agreements that are made when they filter down into the policy side and the development side the implementation side of what is agreed to often times the transparency isn't there so it continues to be an issue for Indigenous people so the question the questioner is interested in some of the profound social issues you are talking about at the end of the talk so domestic violence suicides and others and wondering about what institutions are established that are in need for different kinds of institutions to deal with those things is that an important part of the process moving forward yes very much so it's a big part of it right now when you hear about the suicide rates in the Arctic which are considered to be the highest in Canada we don't have mental health services there's except if you live in a big town like there is very little service so we need a lot of training for our own people to be able to provide those services and then institutions or organizations to support those services the infrastructure is greatly lacking so I think that like right now when somebody is you know has attempted suicide they're taken to the nursing station or to the small hospital and they just allow them to stay in the hospital for three days until they calm down and they let them go home and that's the support they get so it's it's not it's very insufficient the incarceration rate has gone way up so the jails are overcrowded like the men's prison in Iqaluit recently there was an article in the Nunitsiak news said that it was so overcrowded that like ten people being in the same room kind of situation and that kind of support to engage people that can start to help people that are in jail for petty offenses they need support to get out of that system as well and to engage them back into being productive people in their own community that doesn't just happen on its own a lot of the time I think the support is done through a process of bringing people out once they've served their sentence and providing some support to help them engage back into their community those unless you're in a place like Iqaluit in the communities it's pretty much non-existent just how important do you think these kind of shared and transferring authority models apply to things like social services as well as governance because in your graph of Inuit this increase in Inuit authority over their own lives so in an emergency like a healthcare emergency or a mental health emergency it would be tempting to somehow try and throw resources at it but it seems to be really important that that be done from within Yeah, it doesn't always work just by throwing money into the community if the infrastructure and the training hasn't been done like training and building a place where people can go shouldn't happen when there's a crisis it should happen before and the services should be available before somebody goes into crisis so the planning of the healthcare system for instance should include that and perhaps in the negotiations they are doing that I'm not like I said intricately involved in the negotiations so I can't say that that's in or out of the discussions but it should be an integral part Questions from anyone? So the questioner observes that the circumpolar conference tries to recognize a kind of singular Inuit nation that spans four different countries at the same time as those four countries are increasingly squabbling over the resources under the Arctic seabed is there a potential for conflict between Inuit and their sort of recognized nations when those recognized nations begin to have conflict over resource between Inuit I'm not sure but there certainly is a potential for conflict but we don't call ourselves a nation within the circumpolar countries that discussion has never really taken place like we are a nation within a nation within different nations but we are part of the Arctic Council which I didn't talk about indigenous people the international organized six international indigenous organizations are part of the Arctic Council as permanent participants which allows them to participate in the ministerial meetings with foreign ministers when they meet every two years and then they're involved in all the working groups in all the senior officials meetings so that status which has never been realized in other forums it gives allows indigenous people to participate in those talks so that's a forum that's one forum that potentially has the power to discuss those issues and so militarization is not one of them that's off the agenda we had to take that off the agenda because we already have a forum for military activity although we argued that military activity can create environmental degradation or environmental issues and therefore the Arctic Council to discuss those issues but I think that discussion has been reignited in the Arctic Council and hopefully they can deal with it because the pollution in the Arctic Ocean from military activity is if you really read some of the reports that have been done it's unbelievable it's quite scary up in the high Arctic so Inuit in the four countries like Alaska, Canada, Greenland Russia's not really involved in it right now because their government stop prohibited them from being participants again just a few couple of years ago but the Inuit of Canada Greenland and Alaska have formed a commission that wants to make the open Polenia in the Arctic Ocean where the whales and all the mammals go and feed throughout the winter it's a big open area and it's an open Polenia and the work that they're doing right now is to create that as an international protected area so their report is coming out soon and hopefully that will help in the negotiations so those are some of the things that are happening so the questioner is speaking to the importance of local knowledge and local engagement in education and wondering to what extent is local knowledge and knowledge of the local part of Inuit education and if it's there what's that like we had quite a few Inuit teachers in Nunavut and they were very engaged in the education of students and making sure that local knowledge was integrated into the system but over time some of these teachers have moved on to other jobs because other jobs paid better and other jobs had better equality in terms of parity wage parity and the education system unfortunately I don't think pays enough for the teachers that teach in the north maybe the teachers get a lot of benefits I don't know but I think that for Inuit teachers to move on to other jobs because it was more financially feasible for them then we need to look at how we are addressing the teachers teachers in the north so there are local teachers and they teach they teach up to grade four that's where the problem starts is the local knowledge and the curriculum development has happened up to grade four to an extent it's still not the level it's not an equal level all the way it should be standardized but it's there but after grade four we don't have a lot of Inuit teachers that can continue to teach let's say grade five, six or seven except maybe a few like maybe there's a handful but that's not enough that doesn't engage nearly enough teachers so we need a lot more training training for Inuit teachers to be able to teach in our language and that's part of the challenge is if we want to teach as a language of instruction then we need to have Inuit teachers to do it so that's part of the challenge as well so if I could summarize the comments for the audience so you're recognizing from another forum involving master mariners and Coast Guard that there's a recognition that when dealing with these issues the very first principle is to develop a principle around partnership around inclusion around Inuit and other indigenous persons being at the table at the level of principle and it's very relevant too great great so we can share the outcome of that seminar then was an encouragement that captains of Coast Guard vessels would bring elders aboard treat them as partners and guests and reciprocal hospitality great sure thanks for that so the last comment I'll reflect back to the audience was that one of the incentives for Canadian Coast Guard to engage in this was that the US Coast Guard is already doing it and drawing on that indigenous knowledge great we have one more question because my voice is about to give out did you see a question what has happened to your report since it was submitted and what do you hope will happen I hope that the implementations that are in the report there's quite a few and you know they range from different issues that I talked about I'd like to see how the government will implement those agreements Minister Bennett the report was for I did the report for her and once my report was submitted I was I completed my my assignment immediately after though I thought it could have been a bit longer because then I could have probably done some discussions with ministers and so on about the recommendations but I didn't have any control over that so the idea in the report is not just to explain that the issues are out there and need addressing we actually made recommendations in the report now some of them are we're discussing some of them like the University of the Arctic there's discussions going on right now that we hope will start to move it ahead and we recently had a round table in Peterborough at Trent University and the round table asked ITK the National Organization to take the lead on it which they've agreed to do so but I say this without really knowing how it's going to work out like I don't I don't have a handle on that and I don't have a specific role other than having co-chaired the round table after my report to discuss my recommendation and then you know there's a lot of other recommendations in the report that I don't think are being addressed right now although I have heard from northern leaders on numerous occasions that the report is being used by the federal government as a foundational document for the Arctic policy development that they're doing right now that they're engaged in so hopefully it has served some purpose but the objective is to have those discussions both with northern leaders and territorial governments to see how how specifically those recommendations can be dealt with although the government always points out that they are implementing those recommendations like the Arctic University some of the education stuff they say they're implementing so there are ways of looking at the report and looking at ways the governments are leading and they can show that they are actually involved in discussing those issues not necessarily the recommendation itself but the issues and trying to figure out ways to advance but I can't be more specific than that maybe one thing maybe one thing that we can all do since the report seemed to be awfully short from that table of contents that you guys are talking about what the government says and asks our elected officials about what's been done less than an hour on the internet government of Canada website INAC Indigenous and Northern Affairs we'll get a web link on the ESS Lecture Series website too so with that we'll be meeting Mary Simon for a really wonderful presentation