Daniel MacIsaac
Northern News Services

NNSL (Feb 01/99) - A United Nations conference in Africa last week held implications for the contamination of Arctic country food and provided the backdrop for a reunion of five Canadian aboriginal organizations.

The UN committee meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, discussed the feasibility of negotiating an internationally binding agreement to limit persistent organic pollutants, or POPs, which pass through the food chain and hold concerns for long-term health effects in humans.

Present at the conference were representatives of the Canadian Northern Aboriginal Peoples Co-ordinating Committee, bringing together the Council of the Metis First Nations, the Dene Nation, the Metis Nation, the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada and the Inuit Circumpolar Conference. Stephanie Meakin runs an Ottawa-based consultancy agency retained by NAPCC and said their collaboration in the committee represents the first time the five groups have gotten together since constitutional talks in the 1970s.

"Because this is a global issue, there's no way individually they are going to make an impact in the world," she said, "but now if things aren't going well, I can send a letter to all five groups and get signatures, so we're quite effective.

Speaking from Ottawa last week, Meakin said the international ICC has already shown itself to be effective, and holds observer status at the United Nations. She said NAPCC will have a voice in Africa.

"When you think about the effects of contaminants on the North, and many coming from outside countries, we're powerless," she said. "But we're going to tell our story, how it frightens people, how it's all about our land and our life, and tell it on a very technical level as well."

"We're trying to show that aboriginal people are the ones most affected by the land and so there are similar concerns for aboriginals around the world," Meakin said, citing an example of how both Canadian and South American women have had their breast milk tainted by pesticides.

Meakin said the Canadian government delegation at the Nairobi conference also includes an aboriginal representative, Carole Mills, from the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs. Mills, of Dene and Inuvialuit parentage, was invited to cohost the UN's Indigenous Peoples Caucus.

"Aboriginal people all over the globe live close to the land -- we are, so to speak, on the front line in the war with toxic chemicals," Mills said in Nairobi. "Although our concerns may vary, our issues are fundamentally the same."

Nairobi is the second in a series of three conferences aimed at producing a charter on international chemical management by 2001.

"We want it to be on chemical elimination, but it will be chemical management," said Meakin.