As the Arctic Council approaches its 30th anniversary, it does so in a far more uncertain political environment than the one in which it was created. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has fractured cooperation among Arctic states, and more recently, tensions over Greenland have unsettled allies after repeated statements from U.S. President Donald Trump about acquiring or annexing the island.
For Chief Bill Erasmus, former national chief of the Dene Nation and international chair of the Arctic Athabaskan Council, those developments form the backdrop to a much longer story — one that stretches back to when he first entered politics in the late 1980s.
Born in 1954 and raised in Yellowknife in Canada’s Northwest Territories, Erasmus was first elected national chief of the Dene Nation in 1987 and went on to serve for nearly three decades in the role. His path into leadership, he said, was not something he initially sought.
“You know, I started as a young teenager sitting in and watching our chiefs and our leaders and getting to know the history and asking questions and doing research and feeling comfortable with issues,” he said. “I didn’t want to be a chief. I was never there to be in charge, but then people asked me to be their leader and so I had to consider.”