The heavy freezer door opens to reveal a scene of indiscriminate slaughter. A heaping mass of caribou blood, bone and hair is piled upon the cold metal floor. From metal racks above, stiff caribou heads stare down at the grisly mound of rib upon spine upon tendon, as they await their fate in summer stewpots.
“Oh sure we use the heads,” says Bertha Mackenzie, a plucky receptionist from the Yellowknives Dene First Nation, as she holds open the door. “We use everything. Even the unmentionables.”
To an outsider, it’s a horrifying sight. To Ms. Mackenzie and other locals, who use the freezer as a food bank to serve a community of 300 rabidly carnivorous souls, it’s the empty space around the pile that elicits horror.
“Usually they’re stacked so high you can’t walk in here,” says Ms. Mackenzie, surveying the frozen corpses.
Once a marvel of natural perseverance, the herd that winters around Great Bear and Great Slave lakes is now a great natural mystery, declining at a unknown rate and for unknown reasons. Alarmingly low caribou counts recently prompted the Government of the Northwest Territories (GNWT) to impose a hunting ban throughout the range of the Bathurst caribou, an area twice the size of New Brunswick. While the government argues that the drastic measure was necessary to save the species, the Yellowknives are taking the issue to the territorial Supreme Court later this month, contesting the government’s authority over First Nations hunting and the challenging the government’s very legitimacy.
The spark for this escalating biological and legal issue came in September. With the ice beginning to form on local lakes, local hunters began preparing for an annual hunt of caribou that takes between 8,000 and 10,000 animals. Then Environment Minister J. Michael Miltenberger received some shocking numbers: For every 15 Bathurst caribou counted in 1986, there was one in 2009. Between 2003 and 2009 alone, the population had plummeted from 128,000 to 32,000. Government biologists estimated the herd would disappear within five years.
It is the same sad fate that has, to some degree, befallen nearly every caribou species worldwide in recent years.
Across the tundra, the formidable Beverly herd has declined from 200,000 a decade ago to below 10,000 today. And in Siberia, reindeer numbers have dropped by the hundreds of thousands.
But only around Yellowknife is the political climate so combustible, and the caribou so important, that loss can undermine an entire system of government.
“It’s a politically complex region,” said Mr. Miltenberger, listing off various First Nations in the area that have established, or are close to establishing, self-government – therefore placing them beyond the purview of the GNWT on many issues. That recent trend has destabilized the territory’s already ambiguous governmental grip. Under the terms of the GNWT Act, the government’s authority is delegated by Ottawa, rather than being constitutionally entrenched. The federal government also retains control over Crown lands and non-renewable resources in the territory. It’s a combination that results in the government’s authority constantly being questioned, and its financial independence constantly foiled.
And it’s why Mr. Miltenberger’s ban went over like a match to kindling.
“As soon as I heard about that ban I immediately went out to bag myself a caribou,” said Jonas Sangris, a former chief and hunter, who received a warning from wildlife officers. “They confiscated some of my meat, but I think they will live to regret it,” he said, predicting victory in the resulting legal battle.
Mr. Sangris will appear at a Supreme Court hearing on May 18 where his lawyer will argue that he has a treaty right to hunt and fish and suggest the ban may be a government ploy to assert powers it is slowly losing to First Nations governments.
