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<\/a>The Nunavut hamlet of Clyde River is home to roughly 1,000 people, and is reachable only by plane, or by ship during the short ice-free summer. Like all of Nunavut\u2019s communities, it is dependent on diesel generators for power, and on satellites for phone and internet access. Hunting marine mammals for food is a way of life. Photo courtesy of Greenpeace<\/p><\/div>\n
One day he sat looking at a days-old newspaper on his desk. The paper, Nunavut\u2019s Nunatsiaq News<\/em>, contained an apology from Greenpeace<\/a> Canada for the organization\u2019s campaigns against the commercial seal hunt in the 1970s and 1980s, and for the impact those campaigns had on the Inuit. The apology, written by Joanna Kerr, the new executive director of Greenpeace Canada, stated that the organization had \u201ca deep desire to make amends with indigenous peoples for past mistakes,\u201d including the anti-sealing campaigns, which further marginalized and economically disadvantaged Arctic communities.<\/p>\n \u201cLike the corporations we campaign against,\u201d she wrote, \u201cwe too must be open to change. Open to examining ourselves, our history, and the impact our campaigns have had, and to constantly reassess ourselves\u2014not just by apologizing, but by humbly making amends and changing the way we work.\u201d She cited Greenpeace\u2019s ongoing campaign against Arctic oil development, and its consultation with indigenous groups from around the circumpolar region to shape that campaign, as proof that the group\u2019s modus operandi had changed.<\/p>\n Greenpeace didn\u2019t expect immediate results from Kerr\u2019s letter. The organization\u2019s lead Arctic campaigner, Farrah Khan, described their hopes this way: \u201cIf we put this out there, maybe five years down the road we might be able to make some connections with northern communities. We didn\u2019t really know where it would take us.\u201d<\/p>\n Natanine had seen the piece a few days earlier, but he hadn\u2019t read it. \u201cI hated them at the time,\u201d he says. The success of the global anti-sealing campaigns had devastated his parents, effectively hollowing out the market for the pelts they sold. \u201cThat\u2019s when we became poor.\u201d<\/p>\n Illustration by Mark Garrison<\/p><\/div>\n Now, though, he picked up the paper and read the apology\u2014and was, unexpectedly, moved to tears. \u201cI had a good cry,\u201d he says, \u201cand I said to myself that day, I\u2019m just going to forget this. I\u2019m going to forgive this organization.\u201d He called a community meeting and proposed that the hamlet approach Greenpeace for help. \u201cIt was pretty emotional,\u201d he says. In Nunavut, people like to say that the closest thing to a swear word in Inuktitut is \u201cGreenpeace.\u201d In the end, most people agreed with the mayor. Natanine wrote an email, and hit send. His timing was good: Greenpeace had just refocused its Arctic campaigning on the fight against oil and gas exploration. On July 22, Greenpeace issued a press release declaring its support for the community of Clyde River in its battle against seismic surveying. That support will be on display when the proceedings begin on November 30 in Canada\u2019s Supreme Court, in Hamlet of Clyde River, et al. v. Petroleum Geo-Services Inc. (PGS), et al.<\/p>\n Whatever the outcome, one of the broadest impacts of Natanine\u2019s act of forgiveness could be on relationships: between organizations, and the celebrity activists who support them, and communities caught in the crosshairs of activism. Because those who fight on behalf of natural spaces are beginning to recognize that people are a part of the environment, too.<\/p>\n The root of the hostility between Clyde River and Greenpeace can be traced back to Brigitte Bardot\u2019s visit to Canada almost 40 years ago.<\/p>\n The French actress, a passionate animal rights activist, arrived in the small coastal town of Blanc-Sablon, on the border between Labrador and far northern Quebec, in early 1977. She was part of an early Greenpeace campaign\u2014the fledgling organization was protesting Canada\u2019s seal hunt. Other Greenpeace campaigners had been met with physical violence when they arrived in town; locals jeered and heckled Bardot at a news conference, and one sealer confronted her with the dripping, bloody carcass of a skinned seal.<\/p>\n A representative of the Fondation Brigitte Bardot gives a speech in Paris. Projected in the background is one of the famous images of Bardot posing on the Labrador sea ice with a baby harp seal in 1977. Photo by Stephane De Sakutin\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n Bardot\u2019s presence grabbed the media\u2019s attention. She flew by helicopter to Labrador\u2019s sea ice for a photo shoot that\u2019s still famous today: lounging on the ice pack, staring intently into the camera, snuggling with a white-coated baby seal. It was an early example of the power of celebrity attached to a cause\u2014what U2\u2019s Bono once called \u201ccurrency of a kind.\u201d<\/p>\n Currency, however, fluctuates, and celebrity endorsements of causes are no different. Australian professor of cultural studies Graeme Turner calls celebrity activism a mixed blessing. The celebrity, he writes in a recent paper, is an ambiguous figure, just as effective at attracting derision as desire. Turner gives two examples of celebrity activists who produced a community backlash against their activism: an Australian athlete who protested a coal mining development in an economically depressed community, and basketball star Yao Ming\u2019s campaign against shark fin soup in China. It\u2019s not so uncommon these days for derision to override desire when locals, caught in the middle of an advocacy group\u2019s campaign, view the stars as interlopers, wielding their fame to the community\u2019s detriment.<\/p>\n Certainly, the people of Blanc-Sablon derided Bardot, and plenty of pro-sealing Canadians have made jokes about the stars that followed in the actress\u2019s wake over the years, including Jude Law, Perez Hilton, Sir Paul McCartney, and Canadian actress Pamela Anderson, who has been one of the most consistent anti-sealing activists. In December 2013, Anderson traveled to St. John\u2019s, Newfoundland, to offer the Canadian Sealers Association $1-million if they would agree to end their hunt. (They declined.)<\/p>\n But the anti-sealing campaigns have never been about convincing the local community to get on board, really: they are about swaying outsiders, and applying external economic and social pressure.<\/p>\n Sir Paul McCartney and his then-wife, Heather Mills, posed on an ice floe with a seal pup in March 2006. The photo shoot, intended to raise awareness of and protest Canada\u2019s seal hunt, was in homage to Brigitte Bardot\u2019s ice floe photos from 1977. (Canada banned the hunting of baby harp seals in 1987.) Photo by Reuters\/Alamy Stock Photo<\/p><\/div>\n Though it hasn\u2019t completely extinguished the practice, the global campaign against Canadian sealing has been a success for its proponents. In 1987, the Canadian government banned all hunting of \u201cwhitecoats\u201d\u2014the white-furred baby harp seals that Bardot clutched in her photos. Many nations have banned the importation of seal products for fur or meat, including the United States and the European Union. The value of seal pelts has plummeted, according to reports in the Toronto Star<\/em><\/a> and other outlets: from 2006 to 2012, the per-pelt price dropped from $105 to $30, and the overall industry shrank from $46-million in 2006 to just $6-million in 2010. In 2014, Canada lost an appeal to the World Trade Organization to overturn the EU ban.<\/p>\n Activists have focused mainly on the large-scale commercial hunt off Newfoundland and Labrador, but their actions rippled to the remote communities of Canada\u2019s high Arctic, closing off an economic opportunity while also demonizing a practice that is a bedrock of Inuit culture. As a result, many Inuit, including Natanine, blame environmentalists and animal rights groups for exacerbating the legacy of colonialism in their communities by cutting them off economically and isolating them culturally from the world at large. The result is a too-common cycle of violence, addiction, abuse, and suicide, made even worse by economic stagnation and the global vilification of their cultural traditions.<\/p>\n Clyde River\u2019s bitterness is understandable: the photo of a glamorous Bardot with one cute seal pup changed Inuit lives for the worse. With Natanine\u2019s gesture, accepting Greenpeace\u2019s olive branch, the next celebrity visit to the Arctic promised something entirely different.<\/p>\n As the issue of seismic surveying heated up this past summer, Greenpeace invited British actress Emma Thompson to Clyde River. Thompson\u2014who\u2019s starred in everything from The Remains of the Day<\/em> and Sense and Sensibility<\/em> to Nanny McPhee<\/em> and the Harry Potter movies\u2014arrived in town to broadcast to the world that the battle the community faces is about social justice. By potentially endangering (or at the least, disrupting and diverting) the marine mammals, the oil and gas companies were also potentially endangering the people. In essence, the celebrity message was vastly different from the past: do not mess with this community\u2019s economic, social, and food security.<\/p>\n Emma Thompson visits the cultural center in Clyde River with Jerry Natanine. The actress and the former hamlet mayor have teamed up to fight seismic surveying in the waters east of Nunavut\u2019s Baffin Island. Photo courtesy of Greenpeace<\/p><\/div>\n During her week in town, Thompson visited the grave of a young man who killed himself. She gasped at the extortionate food prices in the grocery store, learned to play a traditional game using seal flipper bones, and sat in on a lecture about the dangers of seismic surveying to marine wildlife. She met with elders and youth, attended a community feast, and spent time with Natanine, who\u2019s no longer the mayor, but is still taking a leading role in the hamlet\u2019s fight against offshore oil and gas exploration. In a diary of her visit<\/a>, Thompson wrote admiringly of Natanine: \u201cHe would smell b.s. a mile off with his eyes shut and mothballs up his hooter.\u201d Her diary, published by Time <\/em>magazine, concluded with: \u201cThe Arctic isn\u2019t just about ice. It\u2019s about people.\u201d<\/p>\n Thompson\u2019s thoughts, writ large, closed the circle for Greenpeace, helping to heal the wounds opened by Bardot and the stars who followed her onto the ice. That matters, though it won\u2019t, in itself, stop the seismic surveying project.<\/p>\n A lot has happened since a desperate Natanine sat at his desk and read the organization\u2019s apology. In the summer of 2015, Clyde River lost its case in the Federal Court of Appeal, but earlier this year the Supreme Court of Canada agreed to hear their request to overturn the NEB\u2019s decision. Their lawyer will argue that the NEB failed in its duty to sufficiently and meaningfully consult with the Inuit communities on Baffin Island before allowing the project to go ahead.<\/p>\n<\/a>
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