Dec.6, 2011- Durban Presenting at the Climate Change Studio at the International Conference Centre. The topic was “Becoming Someone: Learning From our Mistakes”. Curtis Konek opened with a statement made by the late Job Mukyunik about the Ennadai Lake relocations. Photo credit: Gary McNutt
Our booth is designed like a documentary film storyboard where scene one is the Inuit past, scene two is the present for Inuit youth and scene three is the future. The future is left blank and gives visitors to our booth the opportunity to write or draw what they think the future of climate change will look like.
Armed with dry-erase markers, here are some pictures of visitors who share their perspectives on future climate change.
Cousins half way across the world from home- Arviat to Durban
By Curtis Konek
Dec. 4 Sunday 2011
Jordan and I are really close cousins, we grew up together. We have the same friends. We hang out most of the day and spent time with our family. We like to work together and help each other.
Jordan and I have been in Durban for the last 2 days. On our way to Durban we flew for 30 hours. We spent time in London UK for 10hours. We stayed in the airport and chilled there. On our first day in Durban we were so tired of traveling and needed fresh air. When we landed we went to get our press passes and went to the place where we are staying (Tekweni Backpackers). The owner is a Canadian who lives in Durban. Tekweni is so nice, it has a taste of South Africa. Also there’s a water pool and ball pool. On our second day we set up our booth (Inuit Youth Delegation). We put up pictures, posters, and a map of Nunavut. When we finished our booth there was a number of people who asked questions and some of them didn’t know who we were at first. To one man, I said that we are Inuit but he didn’t understand. Second i said that we were Eskimo and he still didn’t understand who we were so we showed him pictures of Inuit. We are here to talk about our Elders’ perspective on climate change and to show that we care about climate change.
From the Coldest to the Warmest climate
by Jordan Konek
November 29, 2011
Today, we left Arviat, Nunavut on our way to Durban, South Africa to join COP17 climate change conference. We were supposed to leave yesterday and ironically we didn’t leave because of a blizzard at home. But I wasn’t too surprised because there’s this saying that “when you get too excited for something, usually it won’t happen if you really want to go”.
We are now in Churchill, MB and will be overnighting in Winnipeg, MB tonight. I am ready to learn what other people in the world think about climate change and how its affecting them. I’m also ready to tell the world what we Inuit and aboriginal people think about climate change and how it’s affecting us. This is an opportunity that I am most excited about because aboriginal people never really get a chance to take these kinds of international meetings, I believe even a National meetings are rare. We had a meeting before we left to talk about how media all over the world will watch what we’re saying, so we will be talking a lot about what we should say and what we shouldn’t. I’m not too worried about it though. The other thing that I’m excited about is that it’s going to be my first time to get out of Canada and it’s going to be South Africa a whole different culture meeting each other, a whole new animals, a whole new climate and a whole new country to us. Like Peter Irniq said “I want the Inuit to know their culture and their language, even more, I’d like the whole world to know Inuit culture and language”. I’m ready to share my culture to other people in the world. Let Inuit culture be told and shared from the coldest to the warmest climates.
