http://www.seashepherd.org/news/media_060106_1.html1/06/2006
Canadian Seal Products Disgust Inuit Sealers - Greenland Bans Canadian Seal Pelts
The annual Canadian seal slaughter is now being condemned by traditional indigenous sealers.
Greenland and Denmark have banned Canadian sealskins from their markets. The Greenland government took the decision to distance the aboriginal Greenland hunt from the Canadian commercial seal hunt. In a comment to the Danish newspaper Politiken, Mr. Aqqaluk Lynge, Chairman of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, stated, "In contradiction to the Inuit hunters the Newfoundlanders use nature as a slaughterhouse."
Canada has long tried to misrepresent the annual seal slaughter as indigenous despite the fact that the aboriginal peoples of Newfoundland, the Beothuks, were completely exterminated by the Newfoundlanders.
In recent years, Canada has enlisted the support of Canadian Inuit groups to reluctantly defend the slaughter. The Greenland Inuit are free to criticize the hunt because they have no reason to fear economic reprisals from Ottawa unlike their cousins in Canadian controlled territories.
http://www.canadianvoiceforanimals.org/SA_TenQuestions.htmlCapt. Paul Watson Answers 11 Common Questions on the Seal Hunt
1. Question: At some of the seal demonstrations on March 15th, the protesters were confronted by Inuit people accusing them of attacking Inuit culture. Is the campaign to protect the seals an attack on the seal hunting traditions of the Inuit people?
Captain Paul Watson: Isn’t it a strange coincidence that some Inuit people just happened to be strolling past the government offices on the day and at the same time the protests were taking place? And it is even more curious that these same Inuit people immediately went to the media to attack the protestors and they all said the same thing in Vancouver, Toronto, and Ottawa.
It was scripted, of course, and the Inuit were not there by accident. Canada has for years attempted to link the East coast slaughter of seals to native culture. The fact is, however, that not one Inuit person is employed in the slaughter that is targeting 319,000 seals in March and April of 2005. This is just a government media spin to generate sympathy for the sealers.
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In all of my campaigns against the sealers since 1976 when I first went to the ice, I have never seen nor have I ever confronted an Inuit or First Nations person killing a seal.