ITK announces main campus of Inuit Nunangat University will be in Arviat, Nunavut. Watch livestream here.

“One of the driving forces of the strength of our society is our knowledge and our education. So having a university in Inuit Nunangat is going to be another step that we need to secure our country,” said ITK President Natan Obed.

Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, Inuit Circumpolar Council, Inuit Treaty Organization leaders and other Inuit delegates travelled to Kalaallit Nunaat in February to show support for Kalaallit sovereignty and self-determination and to celebrate the opening of the Canadian Consulate in Nuuk.

“We understand that we are increasingly in the centre of a geopolitical fight that is not necessarily around our culture or our society, but is in our homeland, in our back yards,” Obed said.

“No other nation states can come to us and tell us what we should have done, or what we have to do to maintain sovereignty over our homeland. We do that ourselves, and we’ve articulated that again and again over the past 200 years,” said ITK President Natan Obed

“We’ve heard almost a complete absence at the global stage about Inuit, and the term ‘Inuit’ to describe Greenland’s people, or even in conversations around Canadian sovereignty,” Obed said.

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“The best thing we can do to counter that is to invest in our homeland, invest in our communities, invest in our people.”

“We see every day other global actors acting with more urgency to assert dominance and power over the Arctic”