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Ambassador Mary Simon awarded RCGS Gold Medal
ONE OF Mary May Simon's most vivid childhood memories is of her maternal grandmother, Jeannie, fiddling with the short-wave radio her family brought along as it moved from camp to camp in northern Quebec. Her grandmother sometimes dialed in the BBC when it played Inuit songs from Greenland. She gathered Mary and her siblings around the radio and told them that these were their "relatives who live in faraway lands." "That was the first thing I learned about Inuit," says Simon, in her office at the Department of Foreign Affairs headquarters in Ottawa, "that there's more than just us in Canada."
Simon's grandmother harboured the dream that one day Inuit from around the world would begin working together. Her granddaughter has helped make that a reality. As Canada's first ambassador for circumpolar affairs, Simon has successfully lobbied the seven other arctic nations of the world - the United States, Russia, Finland, Sweden,...