9/26/08

"Inuit balk at Nunavut gold mine's English-only rule"

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/north/story/2008/09/26/inuit-mine.html

2 comments:

Fawn September 27, 2008 at 3:36 PM  

I saw this article online yesterday and wonder if the company is really more at fault for bad communication than anything. (Oh, the irony...) I kind of get why they would want English-only for radio communications where non-Inuks might need to stay in the loop. A complete ban of Inuktitut would be absolutely shameful, of course, and is exactly the type of thing that leads to racial tensions in a workplace.

Jackie S. Quire September 27, 2008 at 3:59 PM  

Fawn,

You are so right. This could have been done in a way that I never got ahold of the story. But it wasn't and so people got angry, and got the regional inuit associations involved... and then some pesky reporter got her hands on the story and....

Well the rest is history.

I think what some people were concerned about REALLY though is the unilingual Inuktitut people working at the mines. This clearly discriminates against them.

And with the recent passing of the Inuit Language Protection Act... it was just BAD TIMING.