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Climate Change and Arctic People

Climate Change and Arctic People

  Environmental activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier steps up to the Speaking in Maine podium. She is a Canadian Inuit from Northern Quebec who represented the interests of Inuit in Russia, Alaska, Canada, and Greenland at the Stockholm Convention that banned the manufacture and use of persistent organic pollutants that enter the Arctic food chain. In 2005, Watt-Cloutier and others filed a landmark petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, alleging that unchecked greenhouse gas emissions violated Inuit cultural and environmental rights.

Speaking in Maine returns to Bowdoin College in Brunswick for a talk by environmental activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier.

She is a Canadian Inuit from Northern Quebec who represented the interests of Inuit in Russia, Alaska, Canada, and Greenland at the Stockholm Convention that banned the manufacture and use of persistent organic pollutants that enter the Arctic food chain.

In 2005, Watt-Cloutier and others filed a landmark petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, alleging that unchecked greenhouse gas emissions violated Inuit cultural and environmental rights.

Raised in a traditional Inuit community, she attended school in Nova Scotia and Manitoba before enrolling at McGill University. She worked at Ungava Hospital as an Inuktitut translator and was an advocate for improving the health and education systems that served Inuit communities.

She served as corporate secretary of Makivik Corporation, the Canadian Inuit land-claim organization established for Nunavik, and president (Canada) and later international chair of Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC).