Now, the consulate carries even more weight, said Michael Byers, a professor at the University of British Columbia who has authored several books on the Arctic.<\/p>\n
“I’m only surprised it hasn’t occurred sooner, given the important connections between Greenland and Arctic Canada,” he added.<\/p>\n
He noted that Iqaluit, the capital of Canada’s northern territory of Nunavut, is only an hour flight away from Nuuk. Inuit in Canada also share a strong bond with Greenlandic Inuit \u2013 a bond underscored by Governor General Simon’s own Inuk roots.<\/p>\n
“Her visit is an affirmation at the highest level of the cultural and ethnic connections between Arctic Canada and Greenland,” Byers said. “It’s a very powerful statement.”<\/p>\n
Simon, who grew up in Nunavik in northern Quebec, is the first Canadian governor general to visit Greenland since 1982. But her exposure to the Arctic territory began decades ago, she said, when she would hear Greenlandic Inuit songs as a child through her grandmother’s shortwave radio.<\/p>\n
“She would say: ‘These are our relatives who live in faraway lands. We are all one people,'” Simon recalled at the annual Arctic Frontiers conference this week in Norway, shortly before her trip to Nuuk.<\/p>\n
Natan Obed, president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, which represents Canadian Inuit, told the BBC that the consulate is the result of years of advocacy by his community to forge closer ties.<\/p>\n
Obed said that around 50 Canadian Inuit will be arriving on a chartered plane from Montreal to Nuuk to attend Friday’s ceremony.<\/p>\n
Inuit in Canada, he said, feel the US threats against Greenland intimately due to their shared history of colonisation, as well as Trump’s own comments about Canada.<\/p>\n
“We do worry that the United States may return to its more serious overtures around annexing Canada and Canada being the 51st state, and we do worry that Inuit Nunangat, our homeland, is one of the pivotal reasons for the US to consider that sentiment,” Obed said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Now, the consulate carries even more weight, said Michael Byers, a professor at the University of British Columbia…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":411607,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[1397,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-411606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=411606"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411606\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/411607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=411606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=411606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=411606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}