Page 91 - EarthHeroes

Sheila turned the pages of the magazine and looked at the photos one by one. In the first, a road was buckled like a rollercoaster track. Another showed a house tipping on its side, sinking into the ground. Finally, there was a forest with trees toppled in every direction. She couldn’t believe these had been taken in her home region of Nunavik. But the Arctic was warming and the permafrost
– soil that remains frozen even in summer – was melting, making once solid ground unstable. To Sheila, this was just one of the many alarming ways in which climate change was affecting her Arctic home.
Sheila Watt-Cloutier is an activist for the rights of Inuit – the Indigenous peoples of the Arctic regions of Canada, Alaska and Greenland. She was born in 1953 in the village of Kuujjuaq, Nunavik, Canada – a place of big skies, frozen oceans and endless snow. Winters were long and dark, with temperatures dropping
to minus 20 degrees Celsius, and auroras dancing in the skies like shimmering curtains of green light. She lived with her mother, grandmother, sister and two brothers. The children loved playing outside, often sliding down hills on sealskins. Sometimes the boys built small igloos as playhouses. The family travelled by dogsled. Sheila remembers family days out, wrapped in blankets, speeding
over ice and snow and through forests of black spruce, with her brother leading the dogs. The girls would ice fish on the frozen river while the boys hunted ptarmigan, a pigeon-like bird. Summers were short, warming to only 10 degrees Celsius. Then they would look for birds’ nests and pick berries in the tundra, the vast treeless plains of their home. Sheila only spoke Inuktitut until she was six, when she started primary school. At home, her mother and grandmother often prepared traditional ‘country food’ of seal, caribou, whale or walrus given to them by hunters, along with berries and kelp, a type of seaweed.
Aged 10, Sheila’s happy childhood ended when she and her sister were sent away to school further south in Nova Scotia, and later Manitoba. This was common for Inuit and other Indigenous children. Canada was colonised by
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