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In vulnerable caribou populations, protecting calves from predators and their mothers from hunters are the keys to restoring their numbers to sustainable levels.
obert Watt shot his first caribou when he was eight years old. A small group from his Inuit community of Kuujjuaq in northern
Quebec had traveled upriver toward the conflu- ence of the Larch and Caniapiscau Rivers to hunt the animals. The memory of that day almost four decades ago still lingers. “The air was crisp and cold,” recalled Watt. “You could see your breath.” Caribou have been an intrinsic part of life for Indigenous peoples in the Arctic and sub-Arc- tic regions of North America, including the Inuit, whose villages pepper Greenland, northern Can- ada and Alaska. The animals were a primary source of meat for food, hides for clothing, and antlers for tools, but hunting them also transcended genera- tions as well as bonded families and communities. Watt’s father taught his son how to shoot a rifle.
Others from his community showed him how to skin and butcher the carcass and how to use its meat, hide, bone and antlers. To mark the special event, that first caribou also became a gift to his “maker”—the midwife who attended his mother at Robert’s birth. His mother invited all the women in his extended family to a feast. They sat around eat- ing and telling stories. “Your maker makes you feel special,” he said. “They were proud of me. I was on
top of the house, throwing gifts to the guests. It was a rite of passage.” Inuit people see caribou as fellow inhabitants
of the same landscape, closely integrated with the humans who follow and hunt them. The cari- bou are part of their identity. So if they are gone, part of them and their culture also disappears. Yet during the past 30 years, caribou numbers around the circumpolar world have been declining, not only in North America but in Siberia and Scandi- navia as well.
Broken Bonds When Watt was a boy during the 1970s, lots of car- ibou roamed the landscape. Migrating tundra car- ibou covered the hillsides and flowed right past towns like Kuujjuaq in Quebec and Rigolet and Hopedale in Newfoundland and Labrador. Num- bers of the animals were low in the 1950s and 1960s but then rose. Between the 1950s and the 1990s, for instance, the George River herd, which his- torically ranged from northern Quebec to Labra- dor, expanded from 15,000 animals to more than 800,000. Others of Canada’s several dozen herds of tundra and woodland caribou have remained more or less stable while others have varied.
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WINTER 2022 AMERICAN INDIAN
PREVIOUS SPREAD: PHOTO BY DAVID BORISH, COURTESY OF THE HERD PROJECT; PETER MATHER
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