Women’s participation in decision making - Environmental and Human Security in the Arctic - page 211

being unceremoniously ejected from office by community petitions. Often
these disputes are more a result of the council system's inability to accom-
modate cultural approaches to governance rather than being about the
performance of the chief and council. In many communities, public meetings
may include complaints of the failure of elected politicians to 'communicate
effectively' with constituents. Often such instability might be rectified by
clan or traditional 'family' representation in political institutions rather than
majority vote contests, or the use of 'assemblies' to canvass community mem-
bers on significant issues.
Some colonial institutions work towards achieving accommodation
with Indigenous institutions. For example, one tribal council has an Elders
committee that has developed the convention of choosing a Grand Chief
before delegate voting takes place. This practice, though often criticized by
proponents of individual rights, has not yet been overruled by voting del-
egates. Often elected leaders of colonial institutions practise Indigenous
political culture, regularly meeting with community leaders and recognized
Elders to seek advice and so build consensus and cohesion in accordance with
Indigenous political practice. While at the level of political decision-making
the colonial and Indigenous are not mutually exclusive, the technologized and
bureaucratic structure of implementation institutions render indigenization
efforts much more problematic.
As a result, the focus on political systems in the North has progressively
turned to the issue of indigenizing foreign institutional structures required
by self-government and land claim agreements. Public belief in the political
legitimacy of these foreign institutions often rests upon the success or failure
of a government to be perceived to be indigenized. In Nunavut, the GN has
come under increasing criticism for its inability to reach its target of having
Inuit as 85 per cent of public service employees. Land claim governments
in the NWT have run into the same problem, with the Inuvialuit Regional
Corporation, for example, recently being criticized for having over 85 per cent
non-Inuvialuit employees in its various organizations and businesses, twenty
years after the land claim creating it was initially signed. Other land claim
governments face similar situations as they sign on to agreements predicated
on their ongoing financial dependence on Canada to implement agreements
and underwrite their economic development. This is compounded by the
fact that land claim agreements, far from restoring dispossessed lands and
resources, instead extinguish rights and ownership to lands and resources that
could form the basis for Indigenous economic independence and self-suffi-
ciency. Land claims restore small measures of political and economic control
to Indigenous peoples, but they have not successfully addressed underlying
sources of poverty and the attending social suffering that continue to plague
communities in all regions of the NWT and Nunavut. One needs only to look
at the social statistics in any land claim region to see that this is true. The
failure of land claim agreements to 'fix things' in communities underscores