How Internet helps Canadian Inuit in the North to be heard by the South - Michael Delaunay
Track:
Politics
What:
Talk
When:
10:45 AM, Thursday 3 Oct 2019
(30 minutes)
Where:
DoubleTree par Hilton Montréal -
Symphonie 4 (on Level 5)
How:
Nunavut,
majoritarily inhabited by Inuit, is not only far away and isolated from
the south geographically, but is still not understood by the south.
This might be one of the
reasons why seal hunting, and the use of seal skin and meat, is still
not understood as being vital for those populations by the southern
populations in Canada and USA. As internet is now a reality in the
North, even if in many villages it is still very slow,
expensive and unreliable, the large use of social media has been a very
useful tool to try to change the southern view of the Inuit way of
life, and explain how important it is for them. The #Sealfie campaign on
Twitter is a good example of the use of internet
as a way to fight the preconceived ideas coming from the south, and
impose the Inuit message. Twitter is used as a political tool by some of
the Inuit, mostly leaders. We argue that this unprecedented campaign on
social media in order to fight for the Inuit
culture and the right to hunt seals was a key moment for Inuit and that
it still has an echo today, both in the Inuit society and online, where
social media is still used to put forward the importance of seal
hunting in the Inuit culture and try to educate
southern populations
