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| Aqqualuk Lynge, Chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council |
Tuesday, February 7
4:30–6 pm, Filene Auditorium, Moore Hall
Aqqaluk Lynge, Chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, is a world leader, poet, and teacher. He is the leading voice of the circumpolar Inuit peoples of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Russia, and he has devoted his life to advocating for basic human rights for all indigenous peoples. Greenland is on the front line of climate change, and Lynge is a central figure in the debate about how northern societies will adapt to rapid environmental and social change. “Climate change is not just a theory to us,” he says. Of particular interest to our own community, Lynge was instrumental in the success of Dartmouth’s NSF IGERT graduate training grant proposal to the National Science Foundation on Polar Environmental Change.
Lynge grew up in a small coastal Greenland settlement, attended school in Denmark, and returned to Greenland with a passion for poetry, politics, and improving the welfare of all Greenlanders. In his youth, he emerged as a prominent leader, forming the IA Party in Greenland, which set his homeland on the path from Danish colonial rule to home rule and currently self government. His long involvement with the Inuit Circumpolar Council (twice as president) places him at the center of critical policy issues that will define the future of the Inuit and of the Arctic environment that sustains them. He is perhaps the most recognized Greenlander in the international arena.
Sponsored by the Dickey Center for International Understanding and the Tucker Foundation and made possible by a gift from Marina and Andrew Lewin ’81
