Sheila Watt-Cloutier

It was December 7, 2005.

An Inuk woman filed a petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. With her, sixty-two Inuit hunters and Elders from Canada and Alaska put their names to the text.

Their argument: greenhouse gas emissions from the United States threatened Inuit culture. So they violated Inuit rights.

That woman's name was Sheila Watt-Cloutier.

She was born on December 2, 1953, in Kuujjuaq, Nunavik, in northern Quebec.

For her first ten years, she was raised in the traditional way. She travelled on the land by dog sled.

Then she was sent far from home, to schools in Nova Scotia and in Churchill, Manitoba, within the residential school system.

She returned to the North. In the mid-1970s, she worked at Ungava Hospital as an Inuktitut translator.

In 1995, she was elected president of the Inuit Circumpolar Council in Canada. She was re-elected in 1998.

She helped negotiate the Stockholm Convention, signed in 2001. It dealt with persistent organic pollutants, such as PCBs and DDT.

From 2002 to 2006, she chaired the Inuit Circumpolar Council internationally.

It was during this term that she filed the 2005 petition.

At first, the Commission declined to consider it. Then it invited Sheila Watt-Cloutier to testify at a hearing in Washington on March 1, 2007.

Launching a petition against the United States, she said, was not personal.

In 2006, she was appointed to the Order of Canada.

In 2007, she was among the more than 180 nominees for the Nobel Peace Prize. Al Gore was also among them.

She also received the Right Livelihood Award, for her lifelong work to protect the Inuit of the Arctic.

In 2015, she published The Right to Be Cold. The book was shortlisted for Canada Reads.

Sheila Watt-Cloutier is Inuk. In 2005, she had not spoken alone: sixty-two Inuit hunters and Elders had signed with her. This way of acting together echoes Ubuntu, without being the same thing.

What remains of her is the image of a child from Kuujjuaq travelling on the land by dog sled. And of a woman who, years later, defended the right to be cold.