Thank you for having us here today. I also want to extend a special thank you to the Inuit community that lives in the southern provinces for always informing the work we do and consulting with us.
My name is Jennisha Wilson. With me is Kathy Morgan, who is the president of our board of directors at Tungasuvvingat Inuit. I am the manager for our programs related to sex work, exiting the sex trade, and anti-human trafficking.
Tungasuvvingat Inuit is a provincially mandated Inuit-specific organization that supports Inuit who live outside of Inuit Nunangat, which, if folks don't know, is the land claim region. TI provides support to Inuit at all stages of their life, from prenatal to elder years, through front-line programming, systems navigation, multisectoral advocacy, and policy development. With 30 years of experience supporting Inuit in southern Canada, TI has been able to understand, assess, and advocate regarding the needs and aspirations of southern Inuit.
On a national level, there are over 60,000 Inuit in Canada. Comparative statistics from 2006 to 2011 inform us that there is growing trend of Inuit resettling in southern Canadian provinces, such as Ontario, with an estimated 30% of the national total residing outside of the land claim regions. On a provincial level, Ontario is home to 10,000 Inuit, and Ottawa is home to about 6,000 on any given day, give or take people migrating to and from.
Migration patterns can be attributed to many push and pull factors, such as poverty, medical care needs, mental health and addiction supports, foster care relocation, incarceration, visiting family, personal choice, and attainment of post-secondary education. Migration patterns are significant to the conversation of human trafficking because Inuk victims of trafficking are suggestively higher in occurrence when they arrive in southern provinces such as Ontario. In our program alone, which has been operating for about a year now with dedicated funding, we work with approximately 25 community members who have a history of being trafficked in some capacity and who are now either working as survival sex workers and/or dealing with their own particular journey around looking to exit being trafficked through labour and/or being solicited for trafficking.
Trafficking of Inuit in Canada is a lived reality for many. However, human trafficking as a concept is foreign to Inuit. There is no translatable word in Inuktitut, which is a native tongue, for human trafficking. However, that fact does not discount the reality that many Inuit men, women, boys, and girls are exploited sexually for forced labour and solicited because they are at risk or vulnerable. Despite this lived reality of Inuit, many find it difficult to believe that this happens in Canada and that it happens so often.
If it is our goal to understand how we can better support victims of human trafficking, specifically those who are Inuk, and we must come to this work with the perspective that history plays a significant role in shaping vulnerability and patterns of abuse. The colonial experience of Inuit is often characterized as rapid and recent, and we work with individuals who have literally gone from living in igloos to owning microwaves. Within their lifetimes, they have experienced an entire colonial process. That has also facilitated the normalization processes that are inherent to human trafficking, such as grooming, recruitment, transportation, control, and harbouring of Inuit.
Drawing from the colonial history of Canada with Inuit, I will provide just a few examples from a very long list to display how it is normal for Inuit to not understand that they're being trafficked when they actually are.
Forced relocation of Inuit from northern Quebec to the high Arctic, which is now known as as Nunavut, was a process put in place to ensure Arctic sovereignty. Inuit were lured with the understanding that they would be able to go home after two years of being there and were promised that they would be provided with supports from the government. This was not the case. Many folks endured experiences of very high climate changes and lack of economic support with regard to food and shelter. Also, relocation was often very messy. Folks were separated from their families and loved ones. I know individuals on the ground today who are still impacted by this forced relocation.
There were dog slaughters. If folks are familiar with Inuit culture and history, they'll know about using a dog team to go to and from hunting grounds. As well, the lay of the land was very important for self-sufficiency and for access to traditional hunting practices. This was a colonial strategy to slaughter all the dogs. It was put in place by the federal government and executed by the RCMP. It led to a lot of Inuit having to forcibly transition to western, permanent community trading-post styles of accessing food and resources.
The great artist Napachie Pootoogook, who is also the mother of the late artist Annie Pootoogook, who was Ottawa-based and who passed away in 2016, drew about this in her lifetime and talked about the common things that she saw in her everyday life. She saw a woman being traded by an Inuk man to an RCMP officer in exchange for life-sustaining resources.
The human zoo of 1880 is another example. There is a documentary about the human zoo, which I encourage everyone to go see. In it, eight Inuk from Labrador were taken to Europe, lured by false promises of wealth and adventure. They were put on display for Europeans to see what it was like to be a traditional Inuk. They died within a year of being on display.
These are just a few examples from history. There are so many more than I can unpack to talk about how Inuit have been groomed and taken advantage of. It has been normalized in history and continues to be normalized. These processes still impact Inuit today through intergenerational trauma, learned behaviour, fragmentation of Inuit society and families, and the creation of poverty and vulnerability. I say that, and I also say that Inuit are incredibly resilient at the same time.
I'll end my conversation piece with the question of how we move forward in a meaningful way. For Inuk victims of human trafficking trauma, racism, discrimination, and lack of socio-economic wealth create a context that is perfect for exploitation. History also supports that.
Within the work that we do at TI, we notice that the individuals who are trafficked the most are Inuk men who are traditional carvers and also have mental health and addiction issues, Inuk women who are living under the poverty line and are often lured into sex trafficking, and Inuk youth who are in care or forcibly relocated to the south with no social or family connections. These youth are often actively sought out by traffickers.
With that said, solutions to human trafficking require multi-dimensional approaches. In other words, Inuk victims who come forward with their experiences need to be assured, when they're working with individuals who are in the realm of social services and who look to support them, that those individuals are informed and know the history of Inuit. That's really important because you can't actually support healing unless you know the history of a people, and the Inuit experience is different from the first nations' experience and from the Métis' experience. Social services workers also need to be equipped to provide a trauma-informed and culturally based perspective and work.
This speaks to the need for sustainable funding for Inuit-specific community-led programming and investment in culturally based programs to healing. Equally important, we've noticed in the programs that we offer that it takes victims seven tries to exit a trafficking experience, potentially even more. The barriers to exiting include the lack of assurance that there is sustainable funding for them to exit, a lack of housing, and a lack of access to economic opportunities that do not include, for example, engaging in sex work after being trafficked, as well as concerns about safety, security, and meaningful access to community. Programming has to cover the basic needs of victims, but it must also ensure that they are connected to culture, because you can't heal without cultural supports.
With regard to awareness and education, Inuk are very different from other indigenous groups, and it's really important in the work that we do at TI that we take an approach to human trafficking based on an Inuit perspective. We are funded until January 2019 to create a community response framework to human trafficking. The importance of this framework is to support not only victims of trafficking but also individuals who might be from a community and end up being traffickers. There's a need for reconciliation, which, unfortunately, mainstream and other approaches to human trafficking are not taking into consideration. If they are, it's from a pan-indigenous perspective, which equally underserves the community.
With that in mind, I just want to say thank you. I look forward to any questions folks might have.