About
They Have to Hear Us: Canada's Duty to Consult Inuit
“The North is a frontier, but it is a homeland too.... And it is a heritage, a unique environment that we are called upon to preserve for all Canadians. The decisions we have to make are not, therefore, simply about northern pipelines. They are decisions about the protection of the northern environment and the future of northern peoples.”
--Justice Thomas Berger, 1977, Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Report
They Have to Hear Us is a 10-part documentary series exploring resource extraction in Canada’s arctic and the Crown’s constitutional duty to consult Inuit. From the 1974 Berger Commission to Baffinland’s Mary River mine expansion in 2021, we look at Inuit rights now and in the future.
Zacharias Kunuk was born in 1957 in a sod house on Baffin Island not far from where the Mary River iron mine operates today. At age nine Zacharias’s family was forcibly relocated to the government settlement of Igloolik where he was educated in English and became one of Canada’s leading activist filmmakers. Now a grandfather, still a hunter, in this series Zach asks several pointed questions from an Inuit Elder’s point of view. How did his community get from where they were before to where they find themselves now? How can tensions between a multinational mining economy and ecological sustainability be resolved in a hunting wilderness region warming at three times the global average? What does meaningful consultation look like in the 21st century?
For generations Inuit have been told their future is mining jobs or no jobs. Is this true? Does the Duty to Consult only give people the right to refuse? Or does it extend the right to choose something else instead? Without last century’s colonized style of resource extraction, could Inuit create a different post-colonial economy in an arctic reshaped by Truth and Reconciliation, climate change and new digital technology? They Have to Hear Us is an activist filmmaker’s search on behalf of his ancestors and grandchildren for other choices Inuit still could make for another future.
