Keeping Them in Their Sights Although Inuit may not be allowed to hunt the cari- bou, they can still experience sharing the landscape with these magnificent animals. The Torngat Secre- tariat has begun a pilot project that brings together elders with youth, who together go out and track— but not kill—caribou. The youth can therefore gain the skills associated with crossing the land while fishing for char and hunting for permitted game such as seals, ptarmigans, ducks and geese. Others have argued for allowing a minimal cul-
tural hunt that would take very few animals but give young Inuit the opportunity of traversing their homelands, seeing the reality of the kill, tasting the meat and learning how to use the rest of the animal. “Even one experience as a child would last a whole life,” said Flowers. While the Inuit in Labrador reluctantly agreed to
the hunting ban at the time, they came to feel that their knowledge and opinions went mostly unheard by the provincial government. If and when the sta- tus of the ban is reconsidered, Inuit and other Indig- enous peoples want political authorities to accept
the validity of their way of knowledge and greater involvement in future decisions about managing the herds. The Inuit have been here season after season, year after year, generation after generation. A non-Indigenous researcher, by contrast, might come north once every few years. “Western science has a conceit that it is the only
way to understand the world, but it is only 500 years old,” said Ashlee Cunsolo, vice-provost of the Labrador Campus and dean of the School of Arctic and Subarctic Studies at Memorial University in Happy Valley-Goose Bay. “Indigenous peoples have spent thousands of years observing their environ- ment, learning about it, adapting to it and caring for it as an integrated whole,” said Cunsolo. “For thou- sands of years, the land gave birth to people and car- ibou, and they grew up together.” One example of how the Inuit are developing and expressing their own understanding of the caribou came recently in the form of a film called “HERD: Inuit Voices on Caribou.” Indigenous residents of the Nunatsiavut and NunatuKavut regions in northern Labrador initiated the project to highlight
Inuit elder John Winters likes to make his caribou carvings in the early morning light to see them clearly and remember his hunting days. “They remind me then of all the caribou,” he said. “It still keeps the memory alive.”
Judy Voisey teaches young Inuit how to prepare traditional foods such as fish, game and berries but can no longer demonstrate the myriad ways to cook caribou meat. She said, “We’re losing traditional ways, and the loss of a food, a cultural food, is just as high of an importance as language, as craft, and art, and all the rest of it.”
Nicholas Flowers regrets missing the experience of hunting caribou. He said, “At any age, a hunter takes great pride and joy in bringing back caribou meat for the elders and feasting in the community.”
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WINTER 2022 AMERICAN INDIAN
BOTTOM LEFT: COURTESY OF THE HERD PROJECT; PHOTOS BY DAVID BORISH, COURTESY OF THE HERD PROJECT (3)
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