TEXTE 25
COLLES ANGLAIS
Canadian distiller issues apology for ‘Inuit’ ads Ashifa Kassam Toronto
Friday September 16 2016
The Guardian
A Canadian gin company has apologised for offending Inuit people after advertising campaigns and branding involving cartoon Inuit characters and young women wearing parka-style costumes sparked complaints about cultural appropriation. Ungava, founded in Quebec in 2010, makes a gin infused with botanicals harvested from Canada’s north. A marketing video from 2013, “Discovering the Inuit”, showed cartoon Inuit characters paddling a canoe past igloos and polar bears while a man’s voice mimics Inuit throat singers and chants “Ungava”. This month, the video came to the attention of Ossie Michelin, an Inuk journalist, who was irritated by the use of Inuit imagery and some glaring inaccuracies. “If you know the slightest about Inuit, it’s that we use kayaks,” he said. “And throat singing is a woman’s thing.” The video has since been removed from the company’s YouTube page. Michelin joined a growing chorus of online voices taking aim at the company’s use of Inuit culture to sell its product. “The marketing department for this company was like, you know what, we need a shorthand to say north and cold and nature and we can’t be bothered to come up with our own recognisable symbols, so we’re just going to rip off somebody else,” he said. There have also been complaints that marketing the drinks in bars by employing woman in parka costumes equated to sexualising Inuits to sell alcohol. Writing on Twitter, Tanya Tagak, a throat singer, said the company was “mocking us and profiting off of us.” Franco Buscemi, who lives in Iqaluit, the capital of Canada’s Nunavut territory, also criticised the company’s “Inuit Survival Guide”, saying: “Here’s a tip... Don’t use Inuit as mascots to sell your products.” Ungava’s founder, Charles Crawford, said: “We are truly sorry that we’ve offended the Inuit community, as this was never our intent, nor does it align with our corporate values and beliefs. We are deeply sorry and we will do better.” The aim, he said, had been to pay tribute to the northern tip of Quebec, where the northern gin is made. “Ungava is proud of our ties to the Canadian Arctic, and our brand identity is intended to celebrate the individuality of the region.” He added that in the future the company would seek to gather feedback on its use of Inuit symbols. Stephen Puskas, an Inuk artist based in Montreal, said part of the problem was in the seemingly one-way relationship between the firm and Nunavik, the Inuit territory in Quebec where the botanicals, from cloudberries to juniper, were harvested. “How do Nunavimmiut [Nunavik residents] benefit from the plants harvested in their land and their identity and language used to sell this alcohol?” he asked. Puskas pointed to a 2013 interview in which Crawford said that each year the company hired the same two people in the region to handpick its botanicals. The interview noted that Crawford wasn’t sure of the two men’s names. Michelin called Crawford’s apology a good first step but asked if it would lead to any real change. “It would be so amazing if companies actually came to indigenous communities and established real and meaningful partnerships and used that as part of their branding,” he said. Until that happened, he said he remained sceptical. “This kind of stuff just keeps happening,” he said. “We get portrayed as these mythical creatures of the north as opposed to real human beings that have a real culture and would like to have some sort of say in how we are portrayed.” (597 words)
