Udloriak Hanson is Special Advisor to Mary Simon, President of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK), the national organization representing Inuit from Nunavut, Nunavik in Northern Quebec, Nunatsiavut in Labrador and the Inuvialuit region of the Northwest Territories.
From 2007 to 2010 she was Senior Policy Liaison at Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. (NTI), the land claims organization representing Nunavut Inuit, and she remains NTI’s Chief Negotiator on devolution.
From 2005 to 2007, she led the development of Nunavut’s Qaujisaqtiit Society, the territory’s first consortium of Inuit non-profit organizations. She has also served as executive assistant to the Government of Nunavut’s Minister of Sustainable Development and as NTI’s Director of Business and Economic Development, where she negotiated multi-lateral agreements between NTI, the Government of Canada and the Government of Nunavut and assisted in the development of Nunavut’s first Economic Development Strategy.
Ms. Hanson has significant experience representing Inuit interests with regard to policy development. She has facilitated workshops for the Arctic Council’s Permanent Participants, and has authored and co-authored articles on Arctic governance and Inuit, including an article on the implementation of the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement in the forthcoming issue of the Arctic Review on Law and Politics.
She is a member of the Board of Directors for ArcticNet, a Laval University-based Network of Centres of Excellence of Canada, and Arctic Peoples and Security co-chair for the Munk-Gordon Arctic Security Program, a four-year multi-dimensional international program to improve public policy in the Circumpolar Arctic.
She previously served as a member of the steering committee of the Arctic Governance Project, an alliance of indigenous leaders, researchers and policy workers to frame the critical issues of governance in the Arctic and devise innovative responses for a sustainable future.
Ms. Hanson is an Inuk born and raised in Iqaluit, Nunavut. She has undergraduate degrees in business administration and education and is a frequent guest speaker, nationally and internationally, on issues affecting Inuit across Canada.
