The 2014 Academy Awards will probably be best remembered for the selfie taken by Bradley Cooper with host Ellen Degeneres, Brange, Jennifer, Meryl, Jared, Cate and the beautiful Lupita Nyong’o. It was the selfie that crashed Twitter™, a picture re-tweeted more than three million times. Holy smokes.
According to website digitaltrend.com, Oscars™ sponsor Samsung, ever grateful for the product placement of its Samsung Galaxy Note 3, donated $3 million to two charities of Ellen Degeneres’ choice. The charities were St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital and The Humane Society of the United States, one of the harshest critics of the Canadian seal hunt.
What? The seal hunt? Come off it, Ellen. Really? You want to bring the seal hunt into this? Now?
Nevermind. Seventeen-year-old Killaq Enuaraq-Strauss of Iqaluit has a message for Ellen.
“I’m hurt, I’m disappointed, but I’m not mad,” she says in a must-watch heartfelt video message to Ellen, going on to say she’s a big fan of Ellen’s and has eaten seal “more times than she can count.”
Inuit filmmaker, Alethea Arnaquq-Baril takes it one step further.
“An idea that my hilarious friend Laakkuluk Williamson came up with: post a picture of yourself wearing sealskin and send it to [Ellen] by twitter with the hashtag #sealfie,” she blogged.
Don’t send Ellen a “selfie”. Put on your sealskin mitts, hats or boots and send her a “sealfie.”
Your Working Girl has never understood what happens to the otherwise intelligent, well-tempered, rational people, some of who are friends and acquaintances, when it comes to the seal hunt. They seem to lose it – their mind, that is. They are perfectly coherent one minute and become merciless avengers of a mammal they have never met the next.
Goodness knows, all this hating the seal hunt has it’s taken its toll. If Greenpeace had used its resources to help protect the East Coast cod fishery instead of hauling Brigitte Bardot out to an ice pan, we might have an East Coast fishery today.
People, young and old, who live in communities that have relied on the seal hunt for hundreds of years are debased, including the young women mounting the #sealfie campaign.
Now, with no small amount of humour and grace, they are reaching out from the Canadian Arctic to respond to a celebrity who is pumping millions of dollars into an organization that wants to end their way of life.
The #sealfie campaign is gathering steam. A group of 30 did a #selfie at Four Corners in Iqaluit yesterday. But, as luck should have it, there are probably not, Your Working Girl ciphers, three million people worldwide who can legitimately send a #sealfie to Ellen. But to give Killaq, Alethea and Laakkuluk some morale support and Your Working Girl thinks, their due, her Gentle (and sensible) Readers might consider re-tweeting the firm but generous messages fine young people are posting to the rest of the world.
Not to do so, to her, seems a crying shame.
Your Working Girl 
Leave a Reply