ICC picks 30-year veteran as new president

“The early days were the fun days.”

By JANE GEORGE

Jimmy Stotts, who represented Alaska on the first executive of the former Inuit Circumpolar Conference 30 years ago, is the new president of the Inuit Circumpolar Council. The ICC executive appointed Stotts after Patricia Cochran, also of Alaska, resigned in June. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)


Jimmy Stotts, who represented Alaska on the first executive of the former Inuit Circumpolar Conference 30 years ago, is the new president of the Inuit Circumpolar Council. The ICC executive appointed Stotts after Patricia Cochran, also of Alaska, resigned in June. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

If your memory goes back 30 years, you probably recognize the face and name of Jimmy Stotts.

Stotts, along with John Amagoalik, Mary Simon and Aqqaluk Lynge of Greenland, sat on the first executive of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference in 1980, where he represented Alaska.

“It was a long time ago when we were all young and beautiful. The early days were the fun days. Now it’s a lot of hard work— that’s a big change,” said Stotts who was recently appointed president of the ICC, now known as the Inuit Circumpolar Council.

Before his appointment, Stotts, an Iñupiaq from Barrow, was ICC’s executive director at its Alaskan office in Anchorage.

Today ICC’s most important role is to “keep people connected in a cultural sense and “to trying to keep our identity and our culture going,” Stotts told the Nunatsiaq News in his first media interview since becoming ICC president.

“That’s the most important thing for me. Just to know that you can go to Inuvik or go to Nuuk, and it’s the same people,” he said in his first media interview since he became ICC president.

As Stotts sees it, ICC has changed over the past 30 years, mainly because many of its member organizations, particularly in Canada and Greenland, have “grown up.”

“A lot of these organizations can quite frankly do very well on their own,” he said.

But Stotts said many of the same important issues, relating to the environment, climate change and control over land and marine resources, are as important to ICC as they were in 1977, when the organization representing Inuit in Russia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland held its first general assembly.

The biggest challenge facing Inuit in the future will be to build capacity, Stotts said, “to get our hands around being involved at the level we have to be,” particularly in high-level national or international discussions.

“There a shortage of people. A lot of the issues are complex, very technical, and it’s just hard for a small population, with all the changes that are being thrust upon on us, to have capacity,” he said.

Maintaining Inuit language and culture across the circumpolar region is another common challenge facing Inuit, he said.

Stotts is old enough to remember when the Inuit language was strong in Alaska and elsewhere. Now, it depends on where you go, he said.

“I’m in my 60s now. When I grew up in Barrow, all the kids, we all spoke Inupiat, and never thought anything about it. The kids today, very few of them are what I would call fluent,” he said.

Stotts took over as ICC president from Patricia Cochran who resigned last month over disagreements with the board over how much attention the ICC should devote to climate change.

This past April Cochran presided over an indigenous peoples’ climate summit, a meeting that ended in disarray after delegates failed to reach a common position on resource development and its links to greenhouse gas emissions.

One option in the summit’s “Anchorage Declaration” on climate change called for “the phase out of fossil fuel development and a moratorium on new fossil fuel developments on or near Indigenous lands and territories.”

A second option called for “a process that works towards the eventual phase out of fossil fuels, without infringing on the right to development of Indigenous nations.”

ICC has since distanced itself from the summit statement, Stotts told Nunatsiaq News because it already supports sustainable development.

According to a definition commonly used by United Nations, sustainable development is development “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

“It didn’t make sense for us to have an ambivalent statement on climate change. We either believe in something or we don’t. ICC has had the same position for many, many years, that we believe in sustainable development as defined by the United Nations,” he said.

Climate change is just one of the issues Stotts said he plans to focus on before he hands the ICC leadership to Greenland next summer at the general assembly in Nuuk.

In the meantime, Stotts wants to work more even closely with the Arctic Council.

And he plans to visit Nunavut sometime before his term ends next summer to raise more consciousness about ICC and why it’s still important for all Inuit to support.

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