Strengthening Our Connections
April 2006
Banner photo: ©MIMOTITO/Digital Vision/Getty Images
Our Way Is Respect
Henriette Rasmussen is former minister of culture, education, science and church of the government of Greenland. She is an Earth Charter Commissioner and has been active in the Inuit Circumpolar Conference for many years.
SGI Quarterly: What is the perspective of Inuit people on the relationship between humans and other animals and the natural world?
Henriette Rasmussen: Traditionally we were very much attached to the natural environment and dependent on it--you can see this from our mythology, our legends, our hunting methods and usage of the environment. During the darkness of the winter months, we navigated with the help of the stars. But indigenous peoples' relationship to nature is changing because of climate change and the demands of globalization. These changes are very visible here in the Arctic.
This was why we formed our NGO, the Inuit Circumpolar Conference--to protect our livelihood and because of threats from the industrial areas, such as acid rain from Europe. Also the high levels of cancer among our people concern us very much.
I wish that during our industrialization and urbanization period the knowledge which my parents and grandparents had, their relationship to land, to the rivers, had been kept. For example, you could not leave any waste near any river. You must always bury fish waste and never throw it in the river itself.
Even when people caught a seal and it was killed, you believed in the afterlife of the seal, you would give it water in its mouth because of the belief that it was going on a journey somewhere else and needed some water. We had a very sensitive way in our hunting culture and a great deal of respect for animals. We would use every inch of the carcass. Now the trend in the world is that you use something and you throw it away.
I wish we had taught our children better about our traditions--in fact, we are doing this now for young hunters. We need to reconsider our old habits, our old ways of living. The sharing of things is also a very Inuit way of living. Every time you caught anything, you would share it with everybody else. But then the economic system changed and now everything costs a lot--because transportation into the Arctic is very expensive. Even the hunters in the north are dependent on an income in order to survive, so while you still give away some of your catch to your family, it is not so common as before. You also have to sell some of it.
One way climate change is affecting the Arctic is that the sea ice is melting. It is thin and undependable when before it was one meter, two, three meters thick. The seals reproduce in the sea ice itself. The babies are born inside the sea ice. Our concern is also for the seals--what will happen to these seals when the sea ice melts. . . .
The open ice will open up new ways for the Arctic people of course--there will be more waterways, and maybe it will also be possible to do more agriculture here.
But our concerns are also about the low lands in Europe or in the Pacific, the Maldives where people have their villages near the water. We are so interconnected in the world. It connects us more that we must now face problems like these.
SGIQ: Do you feel your situation in the Arctic means that you have a special duty to be warning the world?
HR: We want to let the world know about the pollution of our environment which is otherwise so clean. But according to scientists the pollution from Europe, even from Southeast Asia, is ending up here through the air and through the water. That may be the reason we have so much cancer. This pollution ends up in the food chain--we eat oil from the animals and that's where the pollution ends up. It is stored in the fat of the seals, in the fat of the whales, in the fat of the polar bear. I know young mothers who won't eat seal oil, for example--because heavy metals, cadmium, PCBs, POPs--these are found now in our diet and we are so concerned about it, because if they accumulate during your pregnancy, it could be dangerous for the fetus.
SGIQ: How do you view your role as an Earth Charter Commissioner?
Untitled sculpture by Josiah Nuilaalik, courtesy of Marion Scott Gallery
HR: I think the Earth Charter is a perfect tool for education. When I explain it is a compromise between many cultures about the protection of the environment, people listen carefully. What I have been saying to the press in Greenland is that we should reconsider the material world we have built up. We must regain our spirituality somehow. In that sense the Earth Charter is a fine instrument.
SGIQ: When the Earth Charter was being drafted, I believe there was considerable discussion over the wording of the section on how to treat animals, which now reads "with respect and consideration."
HR: Our discussions were very interesting. We have a very different view from some environmentalists who are working for the individual rights of the animals. The original wording was to have "compassion" for animals.
Then, I said, we cannot join the Earth Charter because our relationship to animals is not compassion. It would be respect. We respect animals, we respect nature, that's our relationship to nature from our traditional way of life. We respect the animals we catch, and we treat them in quite a spiritual way.
We have many songs about the seals, about the whales, about the fish, so I would say we have very close relationships to animals, but if you have real compassion, then you cannot kill them.
Our feeling is that some people have gone too far away from life itself, if they only know fish as small, frozen blocks in the supermarket.
We are so few people, the Inuit. We are 130,000 people in total in Greenland, Canada, Alaska and Siberia, and what we eat is animals which are living wild in our environment, and we go and catch them. It is a different relationship we have to these animals. And the best catch, for example, for a seal hunter would never be a baby seal if you need to feed your family, it's a grown-up seal of which you would use everything.
In our language the words we have for seals and other animals almost caress them, for example, puisinnguaq for a "dear seal" or tuttorsuaq nukatugarsuaq, an affectionate term for a great young reindeer. We have a respectful relationship, it's not like hatred that we have toward animals. We don't kill them because of hate, we kill them because one of us must survive; it's like a lion and a zebra, the relationship; we are interconnected, with nature and with the animals which we live among.
All of us as human beings, we must reconsider our situation because of climate change. That's why I think that it's important for the indigenous peoples still to recollect their cultural relationship to the land, to the animals, because I think it will be a plus for the environment and for the survival of all of us.
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