Decolonizing Seal Trade

In 2009, the European Parliament and the European Council ratified a ban on seal product trade, which was actively promoted by animal welfare and environmental organizations. This was a response to commercial seal hunting in Canada, which was considered inhumane and against EU citizens’ moral foundations. The ban affected not only commercial seal hunting, but also Inuit in Greenland and the North-East coast of Canada. Seal hunting is a significant part of Inuit culture, identity, social structures, resilience – and economy. Proceeds from selling the seal skins enables Inuit to purchase supplies for hunting, which contributes to food security in rural Arctic communities. The EU seal trade ban does not limit the Inuit seal product trade: Inuit seal hunting is considered sustainable and humane. However, with the introduction of the ban, sales from the Inuit seal hunt dropped drastically and have not recovered. This thesis studies the impacts of the EU seal trade ban on the Inuit, Finnish citizens’ impressions of seal clothing and the abilities of design to decolonize these. These are embedded in the research questions: ‘How do the limitations on seal trade in Europe affect the Inuit?’ and ‘How do sustainability discourses define the Inuit seal trade?’ and studied through a literature review. The results for the third question, ‘How can seal clothing contribute to decolonizing sustainability and knowledges?’ are based on a literature review and a questionnaire that was conducted in 2017 and received 350 responses.
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\nThe structure of the thesis is organized with Charles S. Peirce’s semiotic methodology and the data is analysed with decolonial theories by Aníbal Quijano, Walter D. Mignolo and Tony Fry. The results of the thesis indicate that while for European Council and animal welfare organizations the EU sea trade ban was a question of morals, for Inuit it formed a question of cultural and human rights. These views are tied to location and culture. However, this study proposes that with Fry’s decolonial design theories, co-understanding of sustainabilities could be achieved by (i) designing seal clothing that ontologically decolonizes, and (ii) designing borderlands which make these points of view tangible and invite the stakeholders to re-evaluate the seal trade discussion by placing it in a cultural and geographical context.

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