She shares her story of growing up in Nunavik, learning her people's traditional way of life, hunting and preparing 'country food'. Young people were taught how to survive in the harsh climate. Igloos were stronger than tents and offered protection from both weather and polar bears. Sled dogs were smart and capable and reliable.
Then she was sent to the 'South' for her education and was exposed to modern, Western life. She lost fluency in her native language.
Returning to her Arctic home she became involved in education. She saw how Southern colonialism was destroying her people's culture, resulting in a rise of addiction and suicides.
Sheila became an activist for her people, first in education and culture preservation, and later in the environment and climate change. The warming of the Arctic, caused by Southern use of fossil fuels, also means the destruction of her people's way of life, the animals they depend upon, and the very land
they live on. Her work led to being considered for the Pulitzer Prize.
Sheila's childhood memories offer a great understanding of her native culture, and her early experience in the South informs readers how traditional knowledge is lost. Her chapters on her activism and achievements are detailed and sometimes overwhelming; I can't imagine how she maintained the energy and strength to do what she has done.
I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.
The Right to Be Cold: One Woman's Fight to Protect the Arctic and Save the Planet from Climate Change
by Sheila Watt-Cloutier
University of Minnesota Press
Publication Date: May 1, 2018
Paperback $22.95
ISBN: 9781517904975
from the publisher:
For the first ten years of her life, Sheila Watt-Cloutier traveled only by dog team. Today there are more snow machines than dogs in her native Nunavik, a region that is part of the homeland of the Inuit in Canada. In Inuktitut, the language of Inuit, the elders say that the weather is Uggianaqtuq—behaving in strange and unexpected ways.
The Right to Be Cold is Watt-Cloutier’s memoir of growing up in the Arctic reaches of Quebec during these unsettling times. It is the story of an Inuk woman finding her place in the world, only to find her native land giving way to the inexorable warming of the planet. She decides to take a stand against its destruction.
The Right to Be Cold is the human story of life on the front lines of climate change, told by a woman who rose from humble beginnings to become one of the most influential Indigenous environmental, cultural, and human rights advocates in the world. Raised by a single mother and grandmother in the small community of Kuujjuaq, Quebec, Watt-Cloutier describes life in the traditional ice-based hunting culture of an Inuit community and reveals how Indigenous life, human rights, and the threat of climate change are inextricably linked. Colonialism intervened in this world and in her life in often violent ways, and she traces her path from Nunavik to Nova Scotia (where she was sent at the age of ten to live with a family that was not her own); to a residential school in Churchill, Manitoba; and back to her hometown to work as an interpreter and student counselor.
The Right to Be Cold is at once the intimate coming-of-age story of a remarkable woman, a deeply informed look at the life and culture of an Indigenous community reeling from a colonial history and now threatened by climate change, and a stirring account of an activist’s powerful efforts to safeguard Inuit culture, the Arctic, and the planet.
