From an Inuit Point of View Arctic Climate Change from the Inuit Side
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GOVERNMENT OF CANADA PROGRAM FOR INTERNATIONAL POLAR YEAR TRAINING, COMMUNICATIONS AND OUTREACH APPLICATION FORM 1. Applicant Information Title of Proposal From an Inuit Point of View Arctic Climate Change from the Inuit Side Name of Project Leader Zacharias Kunuk Affiliated Organization Igloolik Isuma Productions Inc. Address Box 223 Igloolik NU X0A 0L0 Phone/Fax/Email 867.934.8809 fax-8700, [email protected] Team Members 1 Name Norman Cohn Affiliated Organization Isuma Distribution International (www.isuma.tv) Address 5764 Monkland Ave, Montreal H4A 1E9 Phone/Fax/Email 514.486.0707 fax-9851 cell 514.576.0707, [email protected] 2 Name Bernadette Miqusaaq Dean Affiliated Organization Isuma Distribution International (www.isuma.tv) Address Box 595 Rankin Inlet NU X0C 0G0 Phone/Fax/Email [email protected] 3 Name Mary Simon Affiliated Organization Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK) Address 170 Laurier Ave West Suite 510, Ottawa K1P 5V5 Phone/Fax/Email [email protected] 1 Add additional lines if more space is required. Team Members 4 Name Guillaume Ittuksarjuat Saladin Affiliated Organization Artcirq Youth Circus Video Collective (IsumaTV/artcirq) Address Box 215 Igloolik NU X0A 0L0 Phone/Fax/Email [email protected] 5 Name Carol Kunnuk Affiliated Organization NITV: Nunavut Independent TV Network (IsumaTV/nitv) Address Box 223 Igloolik NU X0A 0L0 Phone/Fax/Email [email protected] 6 Name Sheila Watt-Cloutier Affiliated Organization Address Box 706 Iqaluit NU X0A 0H0 Phone/Fax/Email [email protected] Add additional lines if more space is required. 2 2. Overview of Project A short overview describing the proposed project and its goals (max 300 words). From an Inuit Point of View (FIPV) is a two-year internet-based filmmaking process to research and present from the Inuit side environmental issues, climate change and the 21st century politics of the arctic homeland. Led by Igloolik Isuma Productions founder, Zacharias Kunuk, Canada’s foremost northern filmmaker, FIPV uses Isuma’s new video website, www.isuma.tv, as a global media platform for prominent Inuit spokespeople and ordinary Inuit, especially youth, to speak through the internet to the future as they see it. Under Zacharias's direction, collaborating with Nunavut Independent TV (NITV), Artcirq Youth Circus/Video Collective and other non-profit agencies, FIPV trains and hires young Inuit filmmakers to create 100 short films – one a week for a hundred weeks - across Nunavut, Nunavik, NWT and Greenland, exploring the meaning to Inuit of media catch-phrases like 'climate change,' 'global warming,' ‘animal welfare’ or 'protecting the environment.' Prominent Inuit spokespeople including Nobel nominee Sheila Watt-Cloutier and former Canadian Arctic Ambassador Mary Simon lead a continuing public discussion through IsumaTV about the arctic future as a human rights issue, and the role Inuit should play in managing their environment. IsumaTV creates 'channels' for uploading unlimited video or audio content, including Live-TV and remote mobile netcasting from the arctic wilderness. Satellite-based internet stations in selected northern communities allow Inuit to communicate directly among regions, to identify and solve common problems. Worldwide promotion and educational outreach build an audience interested to follow what Inuit have to say about the future of the arctic and the future of the planet. This project harnesses the power of the internet, Isuma's experience with media production and the energy of Inuit youth to make sure the Inuit side gets a fair place in the debate. 3 3. Objectives Please check off the objectives your proposal will address: Raise awareness about the Canadian Arctic, its Engage children and youth, particularly X peoples, and northern issues, among Canadians X Northern youth, in polar science and and the international community research Provide experience and training for Create dialogue and build connections between Northerners, particularly Aboriginal and within Northern and Southern regions of Northerners, in the skills, techniques and X Canada, as well as between Canada and other X knowledge needed to carry out northern- countries, to foster greater understanding of the based research and monitoring during and importance of the polar regions beyond IPY Promote IPY and polar science and research, and communicate the progress and collective results Document and share Traditional of IPY science and research on climate change X X Knowledge as it relates to northern impacts and adaptation, and/or health and well- environmental change being of northern communities 4 4. Detailed Project Description When acclaimed Inuit filmmaker and Officer of the Order of Canada, Zacharias Kunuk, made his first independent video in 1985, he called it From an Inuit Point of View. A half- hour documentary, produced on a $15,000 Canada Council grant, FIPV recorded aspects of Inuit daily life in Igloolik – Halloween in the elementary school, square dancing at the community hall, a family camping on the land – from what Zach always called ‘the Inuit side.’ Never subtitled and rarely shown, FIPV led Zach through thirty films and two decades to the Cannes Film Festival and worldwide recognition, simply by continuing to record his community and arctic homeland from the Inuit side. During the same period Zach’s community and arctic homeland underwent a similar evolution, registering both momentous change while remaining strangely the same. Like everything, it depends on your point of view. Since 1978 the arctic ice pack has lost 20%, or 600,000 square miles, shrinking at the rate of 8% every decade; while Zach and his friends, including his 81 year-old father Enookie, keep hunting year round for seal, caribou, walrus, whales and polar bears, tracking animals over the same terrain with the same skills and knowledge their ancestors used for the past 4,000 years. Climate Change, Global Warming, Shrinking Ice Packs and Skinny Polar Bears are front-page news in the new, environment-focused politics of the early 21st century, although Inuit are rarely mentioned. Mainstream media identify global warming as a scientific crisis for humanity, but not as a human rights crisis for Inuit and other Indigenous peoples. Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, collects $50 million at the box office and an Academy Award. Gore is co-nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize with Inuit environmental activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier and a panel of scientists, but when Gore and the scientists win the Prize somehow the Inuit activist fails to make the cut. Will the arctic militarize as the Northwest Passage becomes navigable? Will untapped oil and gas suddenly become viable through global warming? Will uranium mining come to Nunavut, with a deep-water port in Iqaluit or Nanisivik? Will Canada’s north become the new South Africa of diamonds? Will polar bears become extinct in our lifetime? Huge questions represent trillions of dollars and planetary consequences as the backdrop for the world’s International Polar Year. From an Inuit point of view, however, these questions and their consequences for Inuit are nothing new, but rather the same familiar preoccupation with Self over Community that characterizes exploration and colonization of the arctic by foreigners for the past 500 years. This IPY project, also called From an Inuit Point of View, looks at our arctic homeland and planetary future from the Inuit side. What do Inuit think? What do Inuit know about their land, climate, animals and environmental balance; about the social politics of interdependency and cooperation in the face of limited resources? Most important, what can Inuit contribute to understanding the most dangerous problems of the 21st century? 5 The world ignores the Inuit point of view at its peril. Last June, Zach’s father Enookie was out alone hunting caribou 100 kms north of Igloolik when his snowmobile got stuck in an early spring thaw. Bad weather and fast-melting snow hampered air and ground searches. Stranded for 28 days with no tent or food, given up for dead by the military search and rescue teams, 81 year-old Enookie caught six fish and two ptarmigans and was in good spirits when a passing Twin Otter finally noticed his abandoned snowmobile and radioed for help. ‘He said he did a lot of exercise waiting,’ Zach told Dawn Walton of the Toronto Globe and Mail. ‘He went by the shore and figured sooner or later people going fishing would have to run into him.’ Sounds simple? Maybe, but could Al Gore and his team of scientists do it? ‘You never give up,’ Zach added. ‘He knows the land like the back of his hand.’ * * * * * 21st century internet offers a shattering opportunity to democratize mass media. Marginalized minorities now have unmediated access to their own communities and global audiences. No longer do Indigenous cultures need to be collected, analyzed, represented and ‘preserved’ by others. Recent advances in online video technology allow Indigenous filmmakers to present Indigenous media content – including remote mobile Live TV - widely online for the first time. 432 years after Martin Frobisher first landed on Baffin Island, the International Polar Year focuses attention on the arctic as never before; the polar environment and its flora and fauna are in the news daily as a planetary front line in the battle against Global Warming and Climate Change. From an Inuit Point of View insures IPY will have an Inuit side, a human rights component highlighted on a public, global, media platform. www.isuma.tv is the world’s first interactive video website for Inuit and Indigenous media content. Launched December 17, 2007, IsumaTV evolves and advances previous online innovation by Igloolik Isuma Productions supported by Telefilm Canada and Canadian Heritage’s Canadian Content Online, including www.isuma.ca, www.atanarjuat.com and www.sila.nu. Live from the Set at www.sila.nu/live, on location in the High Arctic during the 2005 filming of Isuma’s second feature film, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, allowed viewers to experience the ‘making of’ an Inuit film through daily videos, embedded blogs and interactive exchanges with Isuma’s cast and crew during eight weeks of production.