Sheila Watt-Cloutier

Activist, author

• Born: December 2, 1953
• Birthplace: Kuujjuaq, Nunavik, Quebec, Canada

Education: McGill University, Montreal, Quebec

Significance: Sheila Watt-Cloutier is a celebrated Inuit activist known for her efforts to protect the Arctic environment and the Inuit community from climate change. Watt-Cloutier has worked as an Inuit spokesperson since the 1990s, though her efforts to improve social conditions for Inuits began in the 1970s. Her work as an Inuit leader, social and environmental activist, and author has earned her much praise and several prestigious honors.

Background

Sheila Watt-Cloutier was born in the northern Inuit village of Kuujjuaq in Nunavik, Quebec, Canada in 1953. Her single mother supported Watt-Clouiter and her siblings with a job as an interpreter. Her mother's job required her to travel often, so Watt-Cloutier and her brothers and sisters spent a great deal of time with their grandparents growing up. Watt-Cloutier's grandparents raised their grandchildren to appreciate the traditional Inuit way of life, which included nomadic customs such as hunting, fishing, and gathering food such as seeds and berries. The family diet included game such as ptarmigan, goose, fish, caribou, and whale, usually caught by Watt-Cloutier's brothers. Her family often traveled around the area by dogsled or canoe.

Watt-Cloutier left her Inuit community to attend school in Churchill, Manitoba, when she was ten years old. She and a friend showed promise as young Inuit leaders and were later sent to live with a white family in Nova Scotia to attend high school. Her experience with the white family—

led by a strict and tantrum-prone patriarch—made Watt-Cloutier long for her childhood home. The family also refused to send the girl's letters to her family in northern Quebec, making Watt-Cloutier feel trapped and voiceless. She later reclaimed this voice when she left to study at McGill University in Montreal. She took counseling, human development, and education classes that helped her articulate her suppressed emotions. Watt-Cloutier later worked for the hospital in Ungava in Quebec as an Inuktitut-English translator. Her work at the hospital fostered her lifelong interest in fighting to improve health care and education in northern Quebec. From 1991 to 1995, Watt-Cloutier aided a government review of the northern Quebec educational system. The review resulted in the groundbreaking 1992 report on northern Quebec educational procedures titled Silatunirmut: The Path to Wisdom.

Life's Work

Watt-Cloutier became a prominent political spokesperson for the Inuit community during the 1990s. From 1995 to 1998, she was a corporate secretary at the Makivik Corporation, which managed the $120 million compensation payment the Inuit received in 1975 for lands they lost to European settlers during colonization. The fund provided money for Inuit-related programs such as employment, social services, and businesses that catered to the Inuit people. Alongside her social activism efforts, Watt-Cloutier was also elected president of Canada's Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC) in 1995, winning reelection in 1998. The ICC was a nonprofit organization that dealt with the protection and promotion of the Inuit way of life. This included advocating for the safeguarding of the Inuit's Arctic environment. Watt-Cloutier was later named international chair of the ICC in 2002. Her role with the ICC included leading a coalition of northern indigenous peoples that lobbied to ban the use and production of persistent organic pollutants (POPs), which were capable of contaminating the Arctic food chain. Her work with the ICC earned her the Global Environment Award from the World Association of Non-Governmental Organizations. She also received the Aboriginal Achievement Award for Environment in 2004.

In one of her final acts as international chair of the ICC, Watt-Cloutier issued a petition requesting the assistance of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in 2005. The petition, signed by Watt-Cloutier and more than sixty other Inuit individuals, claimed that oversight failures by the United States led to global warming and climate change that was directly impacting the Inuit way of life, constituting a human rights violation. Although the IACHR decided not to hear her petition, her actions did not go unnoticed. She received the Governor General's Northern Medal in 2005. Watt-Cloutier left her position at the ICC in 2006. That same year, she received the Order of Canada. In 2007, Watt-Cloutier was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, though she lost to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. She was later included on Time magazine's Heroes of the Environment list in 2008. She also received a number of honorary degrees throughout the remainder of the decade from several Canadian universities, including the University of Ottawa, the University of Windsor, Queen's University, and the University of Victoria.

Watt-Cloutier became an independent consultant for environmental, cultural, and human rights issues following her time with the ICC. She also began drafting a memoir in 2010 detailing her upbringing and the effects of climate change on her Inuit community over the years. The book, The Right to Be Cold: One Woman's Story of Protecting Her Culture, the Arctic and the Whole Planet, was published in 2015. That same year, Watt-Cloutier was presented with the Right Livelihood Award for her efforts to curtail the growing threat of global warming. The award is widely considered an alternative honor to the Nobel Prize. Her book also earned several award nominations, including the 2016 British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction and the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. The book was shortlisted for the 2017 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Canada Reads list and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize.

Impact

Watt-Cloutier's dedication to protecting the Arctic environment from the hazards of global warming have earned her much esteem in her home country of Canada and across the globe. Her work has earned her numerous awards and honors, and her expertise continues to be regularly requested by those dealing with climate change issues around the world.

Personal Life

Watt-Cloutier has a son, who is a pilot for Air Inuit, and a daughter, who is a successful traditional Inuit throat-singer, drum-dancer, and singer. She also has a grandson.

Bibliography

Blue, Laura. "Sheila Watt-Cloutier." Time, 24 Sept. 2008, http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1841778‗1841779‗1841797,00.html. Accessed 15 Mar. 2017.

Klein, Naomi. "The Right to Be Cold: A Revelatory Memoir That Looks at What Climate Change Means for the North." The Globe and Mail, 13 Mar. 2015, www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/the-right-to-be-cold-a-courageous-and-revelatory-memoir/article23449642/. Accessed 15 Mar. 2017.

"Petition to the Inter American Commission on Human Rights Seeking Relief from Violations Resulting from Global Warming Caused by Acts and Omissions of the United States." Earthjustice, www.earthjustice.org/sites/default/files/library/legal‗docs/summary-of-inuit-petition-to-inter-american-council-on-human-rights.pdf. Accessed 15 Mar. 2017.

Rockel, Nick. "Sheila Watt-Cloutier Made Climate Change a Human Rights Issue." The Globe and Mail, 4 Oct. 2010, www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/sheila-watt-cloutier-made-climate-change-a-human-rights-issue/article1216160/. Accessed 15 Mar. 2017.

Rooney, Frances. Exceptional Women Environmentalists. Second Story Press, 2007.

"Sheila Watt-Cloutier." Speakers' Spotlight, www.speakers.ca/speakers/sheila-watt-cloutier/. Accessed 15 Mar. 2017.

"Sheila Watt-Cloutier." University of Winnipeg, www.uwinnipeg.ca/index/quest-bio-watt-cloutier. Accessed 15 Mar. 2017.