the right to be cold by sheila watt cloutier

From 1995 to 2002, she served as the elected Canadian president of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, and in 2002 she was elected its international chair. She has received honorary doctorates from twenty universities for her pioneering work linking climate change to human rights. She has been awarded the Aboriginal Achievement Award, the UN Champion of the Earth Award, and the prestigious Norwegian Sophie Prize. In 2007 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for her advocacy in showing the impact of global climate change on human rights. Sheila Watt-Cloutier is one of four winners of the 2015 Right Livelihood Awards (also called the “alternative Nobels”) for her work on climate change in the Arctic. 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.

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. 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. 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. She decides to take a stand against its destruction. 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. The Right to Be Cold is Watt-Cloutier’s memoir of growing up in the Arctic reaches of Quebec during these unsettling times.

In Inuktitut, the language of Inuit, the elders say that the weather is Uggianaqtuq-behaving in strange and unexpected ways. 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. For the first ten years of her life, Sheila Watt-Cloutier traveled only by dog team.

The right to be cold by sheila watt cloutier