Abstract
As an Inuit woman who maintains a worldview rooted in Inuit culture and Indigenous knowledge, Sheila Watt-Cloutier brings her knowledge of Inuit traditions and lived experience into the international world of diplomacy and public policy. The Right to Be Cold is her memoir of the struggle to make climate change a priority in the international community. In it, she argues that the protection of the ways of life depending on the Arctic environment, particularly the cold, is a human right that transcends national boundaries. Hulan argues that Watt-Cloutier’s writing not only shows how Indigenous leaders from the Canadian Arctic are exerting their own sovereignty and forging alliances with others from the circumpolar world and beyond to pressure governments to take action to protect Indigenous communities and traditions threatened by climate change, but also teaches readers about Indigenous knowledge.
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- 1.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission traveled across Canada collecting the testimony of survivors of Canada’s residential schools. The final report of the commission submitted in 2014 can be accessed at www.trc.com.
- 2.
As Hartmut Lutz observes building on McGrath’s work, “the earliest forms of Inuit literature are the results of literacy programs by missionaries” (72). In collaboration with Alootook Ipellie a team of scholars including Hartmut Lutz, Renate Jütting, Ruth Bradley-St. Cyr, and Hans-Ludwig Blohm published The Diary of Abraham Ulrikah. Abraham’s diary, which tells his mentor, the Moravian brother Elsner, of the hardship and abuses the group suffers, is filled with testimony to Christ. Abraham, whose letters to his Christian mentor form the basis of the earliest known Inuit autobiography, was one of a group of Labrador Inuit taken from Hebron to be displayed in the Hamburg Zoo. After touring several European cities, the small group gradually succumbed to smallpox.
- 3.
As the editors of the new edition explain, even the spelling of Freeman’s name “Mini” was altered to the anglicized “Minnie” in the edition available when Blake was writing.
- 4.
Sanaaq has been hailed as the “first Inuit novel,” a distinction once given to I, Nuligak in order to distinguish it from oral tradition collected in books by Agnes Nanogak, Zebedee Nungak, William Oquilluk and others. For a contemporary oral history, see Uqalurait edited by John Bennett and Susan Rowley.
- 5.
Melanie Magrath tells the story of the RCMP’s destruction of the sled dogs in The Long Exile, and Sheila Watt-Cloutier references the documentary films Qimmit: A Clash of Two Truths (NFB, 2010) and Echo of the Last Howl (Taqramiut, 2004) as well as the eyewitness accounts given in the Qikiqtani Truth Commission Reports.
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Hulan, R. (2018). Negotiating Sovereignty: Sheila Watt-Cloutier’s The Right to Be Cold . In: Climate Change and Writing the Canadian Arctic. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69329-3_3
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