Informant38

Inuit in Global Issues
Sheila Watt-Cloutier/ICC 2003:

"We have begun to appreciate the importance of the wisdom of the land in regaining the health of our families and communities. The land not only teaches the technical skills of aiming a gun or harpoon or skinning a seal, it teaches what is required to survive, giving confidence to our people. It builds the character skills of judgement, courage, patience, strength under pressure, and withstanding stress, which together is the wisdom that will help our young people to change, to choose life over self-destruction.

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The Arctic: Its People and Climate Change
Sheila Watt-Cloutier/ICC 2005:

"...in the late 1980s reconnaissance research in northern Canada showed that many Inuit women had levels of certain persistent organic pollutants - such as DDT and PCB - in their blood and bodies well above those in women in the South, with worrying public health implications. Studies in Japan, USA and Western Europe showed measurable health effects in people at levels at POPs lower than that found in Inuit.
Used in industry and agriculture and released to the environment in tropical and temperate lands, some POPs were reaching the Arctic sink on air currents. Bioaccumulating and biomagnifying in the food web, particularly the marine food web, Inuit were ingesting POPs by eating seals, whales and walrus. POPs were passed to the unborn through the placenta, and to infants through breast milk.
[...]
Science and traditional knowledge in the Arctic are saying the same things: climate change is happening now, it is getting worse, it is causing environmental change, and northerners are trying to adapt to it already.

Inuit hunters and elders report:

• melting permafrost causing beach slumping and increased coastal erosion;
• longer sea-ice free seasons;
• new species of birds and fish—barn owls, robins, pin-tailed ducks and salmon—invading the region;
• invasion of mosquitoes and blackflies;
• unpredictable sea-ice conditions; and
• melting glaciers creating torrents in place of streams.

We have lost through the sea-ice experienced and seasoned hunters traveling in areas formerly quite safe. It is now much more difficult to "read" the sea-ice. The environment is becoming much more unpredictable.