Sheila Watt-Cloutier

3.5 stars

Sheila Watt-Cloutier was born in a Northern Quebec Inuit community and raised by her mother and her grandmother. She was sent away to school in Churchill, and (mostly) enjoyed her time there. She later married, had kids, and went back and forth between her home in Northern Quebec and the southern part of the province.

Eventually, she would become an activist; she is most commonly associated with environmental activism, but really she is an activist for her Inuit culture, for education and health care, and yes, for the environment and climate change, and how it is currently affecting the Inuit culture and lifestyle. They are seeing the effects of climate change now, and they feel that they deserve “the right to be cold” – they need that cold – in order to sustain their traditional culture.

This was good. I expected more of the environmental aspect in the book (and a lot of that did come in the 2nd half), but actually ended up enjoying the biographical part of the book best. Much of the 2nd half of the book included her travels to various conferences and counsels to tell the story of the Inuit to put a “human face” on the environmental crisis in the Arctic. Surprising to me, I just didn’t find that part as interesting. Overall, though, I liked it.… (meer)

Urggghghhghifadjghgh. I hate it when books are important but just not well written. The memoir parts are cloying and simplistic, the details about when and where Watt-Cloutier became in charge of what are dull, and the real meat of the argument, when she actually talks about policy, especially Indigenous resource extraction in the Arctic, where she really shines, is pushed away to the back. She says it again and again: her goal is to put a human face on climate change in the Arctic, and so, obviously, in a book about her, she (along with some family members) is the human face, but it ends up being a "and then this happened and then this happened" until she gets to her arguments in the end. Interspersing different arguments with human faces maybe would have kept my attention more.

I know you're not enjoying that book Geoff says to me. Because it's the fourth night you are reading it.

On one hand, you should read it because you should learn about the Arctic and climate change and bad things happening (which always gives me anxiety and makes me feel helpless because I feel helpless with all this), but on the other hand, it's kind of like lumpy oatmeal, so eat it 'cuz it's good for you but there's probably a more palatable style that the oatmeal could have been presented in.

The Right To Be Cold by Sheila Watt-Cloutier went on sale (in the US, it's been out awhile here in Canada) May 1, 2018.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.… (meer)

In The Right To Be Cold, Sheila Watt-Cloutier raises the point that for many people, depictions of animals from the arctic are much more familiar than the human inhabitants. When we talk about global warming, the "face" of climate change in the north is usually a polar bear. We see so little of the Inuit, people whose self-determination, culture, and ability to survive are being threatened by warmer temperatures.

Throughout her book, Sheila Watt-Cloutier discusses the Inuit people, shedding light on the trauma that colonization has caused. She shows how various policies serve to erase Inuit culture and make people reliant on southern cultures and systems that are not their own and often cause harm. And she shows how climate change and pollution are not simply environmental concerns, they affect basic human rights.

With frequent headlines about the melting arctic, it's hard to think of a more timely book -- or, for that matter, a more underrepresented side of a global crisis. This is a book I will be recommending whenever I can.… (meer)