Honoured guests, elders, delegates, with a special thanks to Audrey [McLaughlin] and the Steering Committee for the excellent work and leadership in preparing this conference. What a pleasure it is for me to be here with you today. It is quite an exceptional experience to look out over the room and see so many familiar faces from across the circumpolar region. My sincere greetings to all of you.

I have been asked to share with you today some of my experiences, both personal and professional, and how I came to be appointed Canadian Ambassador for Circumpolar Affairs, and more recently, Canadian Ambassador to the Kingdom of Denmark. As a matter of fact, I just moved and took up my post in Copenhagen only three weeks ago.

To begin I would first like to talk to you about some of background on my "beginnings" in Kangiqsualujjuaq on the western shores of Ungava Bay in Nunavik.

I was born in Arctic Quebec, now known as Nunavik, in the small village of Kangiqsualujjuaq on the western shore of Ungava Bay. My mother is Inuk and my father, from the south, was managing the local Hudson Bay Company post. I spent my adolescence in the North, living a very traditional lifestyle. We camped, lived on the land, hunted and gathered food, made our own clothes and, most importantly, maintained an active connection with our Inuit heritage and language.

Part of my cultural tradition, as an Inuk, is the strong bonds that are created across the generations. Some of the most influential and most enduring are those that are created between elders and youth. My maternal grandmother, Jeannie, certainly one of the most important people in my life, was my teacher and mentor. My own mother took on that role later in my life and her influence continues today.

They both instilled in me a boundless energy for learning and self-improvement. They also taught me to always be proud of whom I was and at the same time to keep my mind open to other points of view. From my father's side of the family, I had the good fortune of learning about the "south" and the "non-native world" from a man who had a profound love and respect for the North, its people and its natural beauty, but who also recognized and valued what the South could offer his family.

These influences have served me well as my people and I were propelled through a period of intensive and rapid change. In the late 1940s, when I was born, government had just "discovered" us and thus began the move off the land to centralized communities, the relocation of families, the delivery of government health and social support programs--in short the effort to keep us in one place so we could be better administered. Now, fifty years later, Inuit are part of the political fabric of Canada.

As I grew older, however, I quickly found that there was one system in Canada for "white people"...