Before British Columbia’s natives ally themselves too closely with the eco-warriors of Greenpeace in the ongoing struggle opposing the Trans Mountain pipeline, they’d be well served talking to their Indigenous friends in the Arctic.
Yes, that would be the Inuit whose youngsters now commit suicide at a rate near the highest on the planet and 11 times the national average, and where TB still flourishes and unemployment reigns supreme.
Ask those folk about Greenpeace and you might get a startling answer regarding the last big publicity campaign our international environmentalists sunk their perfectly aligned teeth into.
Or, instead, simply watch Alethea Arnaquq-Baril’s 2016 documentary Angry Inuk about the Inuit seal hunt and the decades-old conflict with southern animal rights and environmental groups.
The anti-fur campaign was led by Greenpeace, which found the perfect marketing and fundraising tool with graphic photos of Canadian sealers bloodily bashing the heads of innocent white seal pups back in the 1970s. That certainly got the Europeans to notice — heck, Brigitte Bardot was apoplectic. So, by 1983, seal skin and fur was banned.
For the rest of this column: https://calgaryherald.com/opinion/columnists/nelson-inuit-bore-brunt-of-greenpeace-activism