Patricia Cochran
Chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council
The Arctic keeps hitting the headlines as the part of the world most affected by climate change. The Inuit are Eskimos who live in the Arctic. Patricia Cochran, Chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC) discusses the severe impact of climate change on communities in the Arctic.
Can you tell us in what way the Inuit are affected by climate change?
The arctic is the place where the most devastating effects of climate change are being witnessed. In our communities there is not one of us who knows someone who has not perished. We have many people in our communities who are experienced hunters/gatherers, who go out on the land and simply fall through the ice and are never seen again. This is not a theory to us, it is our reality that we have to live with every single day.
'It is not just that we lose people we are losing communities'
It is not just that we lose people we are losing communities. With the erosion and storms many communities have to move entirely because they have been destroyed by the storms, their homes and their schools have literally fallen into the ocean so now many of them are looking to move their village. Communities that have been there for 10,000 years are being asked now to move from their homeland to some place else.
It is not just about loss of life is it? It is about losing communities, cultures, and languages?
It is a very difficult thing to think about losing your culture, identity, and your home. How would anybody feel if you are told you have to leave your community where your roots are?
85 percent of our communities are coastal communities because that is where we live. We hunt and we fish, so hundreds of villages are facing this situation.
One village in particular has spent more than 150 million dollars just at looking solutions. We are talking about 200-300 million dollars for each community.
What kind of solutions are you considering?
One of our villages in Alaska has filed the first ever law suite against all the major oil companies because of the impact of climate change.
We are at the point where we have to try every option that is available to us. The courts are one, the UN is one. With the UN we understand the bureaucracy – it took 25 years working on the declaration on indigenous people - we don’t have that kind of time.
We are now looking at communities in partnership with other people who care about indigenous communities and what can be done.
Many indigenous communities refer to the need for the international community to take into consideration their traditional knowledge in the fight against climate change. Can you explain this?
The indigenous worldview, the way we view we things around us, the way we are educated and we are taught within our communities is very different form the western perspective where things are separated. Climate change is seen as if it is something on its own that has no impact on anything. It makes no sense to us, for us it is connected/related to everything, human beings, animals, and plants.
There appears to be a paradox though, on one side indigenous communities are saying that because of climate change their traditional knowledge is being undermined, it does not always apply anymore. But on the other hand they say their traditional knowledge can provide some of the answers to climate change? Can you clarify this?
My understanding of traditional knowledge is that it is not static - it is dynamic. The knowledge I bring is different from what I received from my mother and my grandmother. It is built upon all of the information of the past thousands of years of stories, songs and information that has been passed from communities. It is passed on.
People think of traditional knowledge as if it is living in a museum, but it is living and breathing living in all of us and it has survived centuries in the harshest conditions.
We were here long before those other people got here and we will be here long after they are gone. We have the knowledge and experience to survive in any kind of experience and that is the kind of knowledge that we are responsible to bring to the rest of the world.
So what exactly is it that you are asking of the UN, of international governments?
Indigenous people must have a place at the table where decisions are being taken, where policies - that severely and critically impact our people - are being made. It is not enough to have an advisory group, we need to be part of the decision making process, part of an agreement that allows indigenous representation in that decision-making. We will find ways to make it happen – we will work with people who wish to work with us in all forms.
'Indigenous people must have a place at the table where decisions are being taken'
More and more of the eyes of the world are looking at UN and governments to see what their reaction is. So all of these things are connected - recognizing that indigenous peoples should be equal partners on decisions that are made in our land and our territories.