The two permanent participants in the Arctic Council that I chose to highly are the Arctic Athabaskan Council (AAC) and the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC).
The Arctic Athabaskan Council represents the interests of approximately 45,000 Athabaskan people who have traditionally lived in Alaska and Canada’s Yukon and Northwest Territories. The Athabaskan people have survived thousands of years in nomadic settlements and animals like caribou, moose, beavers, and fish have been staples for the survival of their people. The AAC has been recently focused on environmental issues facing Alaska and Canada. Two of its current main projects are the assessment of the health of salmon rivers with traditional knowledge and examining/enhancing arctic resilience to combat permafrost thaw (and negate its effects.)
The Inuit Circumpolar Council represents the over 180,000 Inuit people of northern Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Russia. Like the AAC, the ICC advocates for environmental issues that are pertinent to their respective cultural territories, especially arctic maritime policy. Currently, the ICC’s relationship with the Arctic Council mostly focuses around expanding and representing Inuit rights, including educating Inuit youth and organizing gatherings and demonstrations to show the voice and will of the Inuit people.
In my opinion, one of the best ways to strengthen their influence is to communicate their voices on a larger, international scale. The nations of the Arctic Council recognize the AAC’s and the ICC’s importance and legitimacy when dealing with Arctic policy. However, non-arctic nations are not being relayed the same sense of urgency when making policy decisions. For instance, Japan’s rejection of the international ban on whaling effects the ability for Alaskan Athabaskans and Inuits to hunt whales for cultural and subsistence purposes. Japan, a non-arctic nation, is only hearing the voice of the international community, and not the voices of the tribes its practices are affecting. Another good example of this is India and China, two major world polluters who are accelerating the pace of climate change, but their nations and peoples’ lives are not nearly as vulnerable to the effects of climate change as Arctic Indigenous populations. In summary, the permanent participants need their voices heard on the global scale, not just the arctic regional scale.
I agree that Arctic Peoples should be heard as a member of the international community. However, as these are entities representing relatively small populations, I am concerned that the world’s attention, currently pulled away from the Arctic by violent conflict elsewhere, will be hard to attract. Of course, Arctic peoples should not have to wait for other international conflicts to cool down to have their interests given fair treatment. I gleaned through our reading that exerting influence within their respective Arctic nations may be necessary to refocus diplomatic energy in the Arctic.