Human rights and the superior air-SARBS

Page 17

NASIVVIK

Great institutions devoted to the promotion of human rights exist in many countries, with awesome-sounding charters backing them up to protect their citizens.

In light of this, it's a wonder that human rights are in any way broken or disregarded. Yet, violations of them happen all too often, many people victimized from unlikely places, including governments.

Our people's main preoccupation until very recently was the pursuit of the right to eat and not starve. There's not even a readily available term for "human rights" in Inuktitut. But there have been severe examples of human rights abuses since the very first contact between Inuit and Qallunaat (white people):

On July 29, 1611, a battle took place between Inuit and some members of the crew of the English ship, Discovery, at Qikiqtasiit (Digges Island), just offshore from Ivujivik. During the skirmish, the human rights of five people were terminated when they were killed. The Inuit killed four Qallunaat, and the Qallunaat killed one Inuk.

About a month earlier, the crew of this ship had condemned the human rights of their captain, Henry Hudson, by setting him adrift with his young son and a few loyal men in a small open boat with few provisions. This one episode of history would have been a busy time for sorting out human rights violations, if human rights agencies then existed.

Fifty-nine years later, in 1670, King Charles II of England created Rupertsland out of a vast geographical area of what is now known as Canada by simply issuing a proclamation. Mostly believing these to be empty lands, kings could do this sort of thing without regard for anybody who may have lived in such lands. Any human beings occupying these "wastelands" were regarded as uncivilized "savages," not worthy of issuing any notice to.

The human rights of Inuit were being profoundly affected long before we ever became aware of them. Looking at these points in history, we can, in each case ask, Were Inuit human rights enhanced, violated, or utterly disregarded?

The legacy of colonial rule from England and France can mostly be defined by a superiority complex, which has afflicted its practitioners. Kings and queens, sitting on their thrones across the ocean, bandied about the rights of Inuit and their lands with absolute abandon. As a matter of routine, they could change Inuit citizenship status from one jurisdiction to another without a thought as to even informing their "savage" subjects about the matter.

I have identified a syndrome that defines this condition. It is the Superior Air-Redder Blood Syndrome, or SARBS. Not to be confused with SARS of recent infamy, SARBS asserts that immigrants from England and France breathed air somehow superior to that breathed by lesser beings. Their blood was somehow redder than those of our ancestors, whose lands they designated the Northwest Territories in 1870.

SARBS was responsible for terminating the future of the Nunavik (Northern Quebec) Territory in Nunavut in 1912 by Parliament's passage of the Quebec Boundaries Extensions Acts.

In 1936, two governments with this syndrome dumped a court case to a Supreme Court suffering advanced stages of it. The result was the Inuit of Nunavik being declared Indians for purposes of legal definition by the 1939 decision of that court In Re: Eskimo. As if we weren't wretched enough, we didn't even attain the tax-exempt status of our fellow Indians in that deal.

The federal government, highly infected with SARBS in 1953 and 1955, initiated the High Arctic Relocation Experiment. In this instance, in order to enhance the human rights of the Inuit they shipped to the High Arctic, they disregarded and violated these said human rights. This syndrome can severely twist the rational logic of its sufferer, causing him to do bad to do good, and vice-versa.

A new strain of SARBS reared its head in 1975 at the signing of the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement. The Inuit and Cree signed this upona SARBS-imposed condition of "surrender and extinguishment" of their Aboriginal rights, in return for certain benefits. Descendents of the immigrants who had assumed "boss-hood" of our lands had designed a legal superiority for themselves, which they simply forced upon the original inhabitants of the land.

Consider the original French settlers landing with Samuel de Champlain in Quebec in 1608. In unfamiliar surroundings, only eight of 24 colonists survived the first winter in the new land. The survivors of that first winter must not have looked to be in any shape to be superior to anybody who happened to live nearby.

It is one of the wonders of history that some of their descendents, now separatists in Quebec, are the ones most afflicted with terminal cases of SARBS!