Inuit singer Tanya Tagaq may be best known for her breathtaking throat singing, and for her collaborations with high-profile acts from the Kronos Quartet to Björk, but this week the Nunavut native became the target of a Twitter firestorm after posting a "sealfie" on Twitter.
The controversy began when Ellen Degeneres, working with Samsung, took a "selfie" with top celebs at the Academy Awards, and aimed for it to become the most retweeted post ever. In exchange for the massive publicity, Samsung offered to donate over a million dollars to the charity of Degeneres' choice.
Degeneres chose the Humane Society of the United States, one of the most prominent critics of Canada's commercial seal hunt.
In response, Inuit people who rely on seal meat and fur for subsistence posted "sealfies" — photos of themselves wearing seal fur — in protest.
Tagaq's sealfie shows her baby daughter lying next to a dead seal.
Soon after, Tagaq found herself in a Twitter firestorm, with people writing things like "Pretty SICK 2 take a pic of a baby laying next 2 a bludgeoned baby seal then actually POST it 4 all 2 see" and another saying that Tagaq's children should be taken away from her. (That tweet has since been removed.) Another [warning: graphic image] showed a bloody baby seal with Tagaq, while other messages contained death threats.
“It became quite hurtful,” Tagaq told CBC News. “Right now, actually there's a woman who has my picture up on her Twitter and the things that people are saying about myself and my baby. It's just complete harassment. It's not OK.”
The Inuit seal hunt differs from the Newfoundland hunt in that it's a significant source of food and clothing for the Inuit people, and is a necessary economic driver, unlike other seal hunts that are primarily for the commercial fur industry.
To illustrate the necessity of the seal hunt in her home territory, Tagaq tweeted a photo that illustrates the extreme cost of food in the north.
The Humane Society makes the same distinction, and Thursday released a statement saying that the organization does not oppose the Inuit seal hunt.
We are campaigning to end the commercial seal hunt, which occurs in Atlantic Canada and is almost entirely conducted by non-aboriginal people. We take no issue with the Inuit subsistence seal hunt, which occurs in a different part of the country, is much smaller in scale, targets different species of seals and occurs for very different reasons. For that reason, we have worked very closely with governments around the world to ensure exemptions for products of traditional Inuit hunts in prohibitions on trade in products of commercial seal slaughters. The EU ban, for example, exempts products from Inuit hunts. Canadian Inuit seal products are not on the European marketplace today simply because the Canadian government has failed to certify them. This is not surprising, given Inuit subsistence sealing has long been used to defend the commercial slaughter, and certifying Inuit seal products would show a clear distinction between the two--which would not be in the interests of the Canadian government or commercial sealing industry.
The anti-sealfie backlash has also led to a deluge of support for Tagaq, who is currently on tour in Europe.
You can continue to follow the debate on Twitter using the hashtag #sealfie. Also, listen to Tagaq's full-length interview on CBC's As It Happens.
by Jennifer Van Evra via Electronic RSS
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