Deer in the headlights
Aboriginals, whites and the clash over caribou. By Tim Querengesser
The caribou Bill Erasmus shot that day was born in Nunavut. It foraged for lichen in the summer before crossing the Barrenlands into the Northwest Territories for the fall, where it took shelter among the trees. Then, in the spring, it began returning to its birthplace on the coast of the Arctic Ocean. It had retraced this oval route each year. But that day in late January, its path crossed an ice-road 110 kilometres north of Yellowknife. Erasmus was there, waiting.Not long after he dropped the animal, Erasmus – grand chief of the NWT’s Dene Nation – saw a plane droning overhead. He was waiting for that, too. The pilot spotted him, along with other Yellowknives Dene hunting in the area. NWT wildlife officers were alerted, and before long they came driving along the ice road, intercepting Erasmus and the others. “They gave me a piece of paper that said they’d contact me in the future,” Erasmus says. Then the officers confiscated 17 of the caribou the group had killed and drove off.
The hunters were breaking territorial law by harvesting Bathurst caribou in a vast no-harvesting zone – a Switzerland-sized tract of land north of Great Slave Lake that the government had recently deemed off-limits. In killing the caribou, Erasmus pitted his aboriginal hunting rights against this ban. And with the caribou seized, the showdown was now destined for a court trial that, as of press time, had yet to be resolved. “Their actions were not justified,” Erasmus says. “We were out hunting for food. We don’t believe they have authority to prevent us hunting without agreement from us. In other words, we give them authority.”
As Erasmus and dozens of others have shown, when the right to hunt is threatened, aboriginal people defend it tooth and claw. But the NWT isn’t backing down. That’s because last year its caribou survey found the Bathurst herd to be in freefall, having plummeted from 186,000 animals in 2003 to just 32,000 in 2009. When the survival of a caribou herd is threatened, the government is obliged to act.
The bridge between the two sides – hunting rights and wildlife protection – is what’s called a co-management board, a group composed both of aboriginal and government experts. Yet the board for the North Slave region, called the Wek’èezhìi Renewable Resources Board, was struggling to resolve the dispute. Its work creating a management plan for the Bathurst herd was progressing at a pace that lagged miles behind the developing problem. In fact, when the sizable Dene winter cow-hunt was just weeks away, the board had postponed its next meeting for several months.
“Things weren’t moving quickly enough,” says Jan Adamczewski, a longtime biologist with the NWT. Adamczewski was one of many people advising territorial environment minister Michael Miltenberger about what to do next. Eventually, citing a crisis, Miltenberger enacted the ban at the beginning of this year. He then referred the resulting challenge over who has ultimate authority over aboriginal hunting to the territorial Supreme Court. “We wanted to do it through the co-management process. We’re as committed to it as anyone,” Adamczewski says. “But it tends to sometimes work a little bit slowly.”Ah, co-management. Back in the 1960s, as the political and regulatory machinery of the modern North was being assembled, the goal was aboriginals and non-aboriginals working together. Disagreements would be resolved through dialogue; diktats from on high and defiance from down low – lingering patterns of colonialism – would slowly disappear.
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