by James Raffan
The culture, values and traditions of the native people amount to a great deal more than crafts and carvings. Their respect for the wisdom of the elders, their concept of family responsibilities, their willingness to share, their special relationship with the land—all of these values persist today, although native people have been under almost unremitting pressure to abandon them.
Native society is not static. The things the native people have said … should not be regarded as a lament for a lost way of life, but as a plea for an opportunity to shape their own future, out of their own past. They are not seeking to entrench the past, but to build on it.
In early April 2012, I headed to Inuvik. I padded in my mukluks from the main street toward the blue oil tanks by the river on Veteran’s Way, headed for the McInnes Branch 220 of the Royal Canadian Legion. A raven ahead of me on the road was kicking something along like a soccer ball. On closer inspection, it looked like a puppy that had succumbed to the cold.
It was two in the afternoon and the proprietor of Kunnek Resource Development Corp, a.k.a. Canadian Reindeer, Lloyd Binder—nickname Kunnek, meaning “reindeer”—was fed up. He had taken the rest of the day off to relax a bit before he returned to the endless battle of trying to keep Canada’s only reindeer-herding operation afloat. “They’re just north of town but they’re all spread out, some of them anyway. I have no idea where the rest of them are. And right now, I couldn’t give a shit. Come and have a beer,” he had said on a crackly cellphone.
Dressed in an old hoodie and sporting whiskers of varying lengths, Lloyd had something of a lived-in look. But his blue Sami eyes flashing through owlish specs on a round wind-polished face were fresh and credible. He took a long tug on his beer. “Yeah,” he said, lighting a cigarette (cupping his hands around the lighter as if it were windy in the Legion) and tipping back on a stacking chair, “I’m not entirely sure why I keep doing this, but I know it’s sure as hell not for the money or peace of mind.”
The lingering smell of smoke, two-stroke exhaust, and old beer amid the murmur of contented voices and canned country music took me back to my first nights in Inuvik back in May 1977, working a summer job above the Arctic Circle for the first time. That aroma brought to mind the Mad Trapper Lounge, where I heard Charlie Patagoniak for the first time, whining his way through the entire Hank Williams songbook, in Inuvialuktun. And, to add to that memory of Arctic romance was the image of bar fights spilling out onto the street at closing time. I’d sit on the boardwalk watching the drunks duke it out by the light of the midnight sun.
Inuvik in those days was aswarm with southerners animating Dome Petroleum’s drive to get the gas out from under the Beaufort Sea. The Committee for Original People’s Entitlement, founded in 1970 after the discovery of oil in the Mackenzie Delta, had made the government listen. And everyone’s interests in northern development had been sharply focused by the just-released Berger Report, which said there should be no pipeline until the indigenous peoples of the valley were equal beneficiaries of the proceeds.
Thirty-plus years later, I was back in Inuvik, still puckered up for a cold beer. It was winter outside Branch 220; still lots of snow around. The river was covered with ice and snow and more or less continuous with the land, leaving the shore marked by parked boats and barges dressed in the lopsided millinery of aging snowdrifts. But I could feel the strengthening sun on my face. And it was the lengthening day that had stirred the reindeer cows in Kunnek’s herd to move, as they did every summer.
But before they moved too far north toward their summer range on Richards Island, it was time to harvest a few animals. Kunnek had rounded up a portable abattoir somewhere down around Fort Smith and flown it up at great expense. He’d hired a couple of “rough butchers” (slaughterhouse workers) from Edmonton. There was a vet on standby from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. And he’d corralled a few locals to help with the cull. But the herd was so scattered, he wasn’t sure if they’d be able to get any animals to the processing facility on the north edge of town, let alone to markets in Alberta and beyond.
Having known Kunnek for at least a decade, I knew that he was only ever half serious when he threw up his hands in disgust. As the grandson of Mikkel Pulk, one of the Sami reindeer herders engaged by the Canadian government in the 1930s to drive 3,500 animals from the coast of Alaska to the Mackenzie Delta, he was made of tough stock. The Canadian government had learned that the people of the Mackenzie Delta had not been doing well since the signing of Treaty 11, and and even as far back as the First World War. To stave off hunger in the local indigenous populations when traditional game species went elsewhere, Ottawa decided to bring reindeer to Canada.
The drive was supposed to take eighteen months. It actually took five years. In the preface to Arctic Exodus, Dick North wrote, “Called by many persons familiar with the livestock industry the most spectacular trail drive in the history of North America, the five-year hegira of three thousand reindeer under the guidance of Laplander Andrew Bahr (known later as ‘The Arctic Moses’) was to win a permanent niche in the lore of the North as one of the great feats of modern times.”
Through North’s book and several others published over the years, as well as through films like Marc Winkler’s Tundra Cowboy, the story of the great Alaskan drive and the creation of the Mackenzie Delta reindeer herd was well publicized, even if it was not well known. What was not present in the public consciousness was the details, the shifting fortunes and cruel ironies of the politics behind the incentive to move the animals in the first place. Nor was it well known what happened when the reindeer finally got to the forty-seven-thousand-square-kilometre Mackenzie Delta Reindeer Grazing Reserve in the east of the sprawling delta. Kunnek had lived this history. He was a player in it. And, in spite of the setbacks, he continued to push to see that reindeer would have a future in the continuing evolution of the people and processes in the Mackenzie Delta.
In previous years, Kunnek had taken me with him as he and his crew moved the herd from its winter range near Jimmy Lake on the mainland, up and across the ice road from Inuvik toward Tuktoyaktuk and onto the summer range on Richards Island. One hard cold day, I had done my level best to keep up with him as we bumped over windswept winter tundra at high speed on snowmobiles. In the end, we had run out of gas. But Kunnek just said, “I’ll be back. Do some sightseeing.” And without more said than that, he was off. He came back in a couple of hours with two jerry cans of gas he’d known were stashed somewhere not too far away. Back in business, we caught up again to the herd and watched an amazing fog of seething, moving life rise over the herd as the animals mosied and jostled ahead of our sleds, exhaling hot moist breath en masse into minus-forty air.
Another time I watched from a distance on the Arctic prairie as Lloyd rode the range, doing his best to cut infiltrating caribou from the herd. We had hot meals at a Petro-Canada exploration camp at Swimming Point. Lloyd talked, I listened, and some of what I heard ended up in radio documentaries and magazine articles about his most unusual occupation.
In the late nineteenth century in Alaska, after the introduction of the rifle and in concert with intensifying whaling activity in the Bering Strait, the coastal peoples along the strait and the Chukchi Sea were starving. That was when the Presbyterian Church, in a venture initiated by Rev. Sheldon Jackson and supported by the U.S. Congress, raised $2,000 and brought reindeer across the Bering Strait from Chukotka. Reindeer herding was readily taken up by the Inupiat on the coast of Alaska, but also by non-Native Alaskans like the Lomen brothers of Nome (from whom the Canadian government would eventually purchase the animals that were herded to the Mackenzie Delta).
By the mid-1920s there were more than half a million reindeer in Alaska. Because the American government was concerned that the Inupiat might get squeezed out of the reindeer business by non-Native businessmen, it passed the Reindeer Act in 1937, which restricted reindeer ownership to Native Alaskans.
It struck me that in Alaska and in the Macken
zie Delta, reindeer herding was a government-initiated activity; in the U.S., it was even a government-sponsored economic activity. Russia and Scandinavia had a much more organic evolution of the domestication of ungulates, going back thousands of years, but reindeer herding in Alaska was only a century old and in Canada it was four decades younger than that. Both industries were reactive, intended to alter the ecology and economy of the North in an effort to undo changes wrought by the incursion of southern appetites.
It was the growing southern appetite for petroleum that etched the Mackenzie District in national, indeed international consciousness. The discovery of oil at Norman Wells in 1920 prompted the Canadian government to send representatives up the Mackenzie River to see if it might settle with the Dene, who lived along its banks, about getting unfettered access to this valuable resource. Treaty 11, the last of the numbered treaties in Canada, was signed by all parties in 1921.
Although the Inuit of the Mackenzie Delta were not part of the Treaty 11 process, they were affected by government intervention and the beginnings of exploration and development in the Mackenzie Valley. By the mid-1920s, government agents realized that there was little game in the area, and it looked much like the coast of Alaska twenty years earlier. The government became concerned that the people of the Mackenzie Delta were slowly starving to death. And so, following the apparent success of the American model, the Canadian government set aside a grazing reserve, built Reindeer Station (where Kunnek was born in 1952) on the edge of these lands, purchased a herd from the Americans, and drove it into place.
But the problems that extended the drive from eighteen months to five years were doubled and redoubled when the herd finally got to Canada in March 1935. The original idea was to set up a main government-owned herd, portions of which—perhaps a thousand animals at a time—could be turned over to interested Inuvialuit families, each of whom would be assigned winter and summer ranges within the main reindeer reserve. Between 1938 and 1954, six such locally owned herds were established, but all of these, after early success, eventually declined.
By 1964, all of the Mackenzie Delta reindeer were back in government control, and the Canadian government had just completed building the model northern town of Inuvik, with modern buildings on stilts in the permafrost and water and sewer lines running in heated aboveground “utilidors.” Inuvik was sited on the east bank of the river because there were worries about the ground underneath the town of Aklavik, on the other side of the river, being washed away by flooding and erosion.
By the early 1970s, as the oil and gas exploration boom was in full swing and hope was reviving for the future of the Mackenzie Delta, the Canadian government had other things on its mind. Any lingering affection it might have had for the reindeer business was long gone. Finally, in 1974, the government sold the whole operation—the animals and the rights to the Mackenzie Delta Reindeer Grazing Reserve—to Silas Kanagegama, a man who had for a time been chief herder. Kanagegama gave it a good shot but ultimately fell short of making the business viable as a private enterprise.
Four years later, in 1978, Kanagegama flipped the operation to William Nasogaluak, a hunter and trapper from Tuktoyaktuk who, after some early problems with cash flow and finding markets, found success selling meat and, like the Alaskans, connecting with antler buyers in the Pacific Rim. Kunnek still found it in his heart to laugh when he told me about Nasogaluak ordering a navy-blue Cadillac Coupe de Ville with air conditioning and plush powder-blue upholstery that he had barged to Inuvik from Hay River. “He did very well. Between 1974 and somewhere around 1980, the herd grew from five thousand to nearly thirteen thousand animals. But that’s when the story gets really complicated.”
Representatives of the Canadian and territorial governments, knowing by now that existing treaties and the long-standing policies of assimilation—the horrors of which had crystallized around the whole history of residential schools—needed to be replaced by fresh foundational documents, sat down with the leadership of the Committee for Original People’s Entitlement in Inuvik and began hammering out what became the Inuvialuit Final Agreement. Fortunately for the Inuvialuit of the Delta Region, this agreement transferred ownership of the lands of the Mackenzie Delta Reindeer Grazing Reserve from the Crown to them. Unfortunately for William Nasogaluak, who was Inuvialuit but essentially a private businessman, the new land claim agreement meant that he was now expected to pay fees for the privilege of grazing his animals on their established summer and winter ranges. Compounding the complexity of the situation, the ownership change also removed any worries, on the part of locals, about federal consequences for poaching the Crown’s reindeer. More “two-legged wolves” were born. Nasogaluak’s business began to falter.
Just as he was starting to think about getting a dairy operation going and wondering what the tourism potential of the herd might be, the federal government began issuing oil and gas exploration permits throughout the grazing lands. With the signing of the Inuvialuit Final Agreement in 1984, they handed off the ownership of the land, leaving him more or less alone to fend for himself.
In time, the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation, which oversaw the management of the land claim monies and resources, sued Nasogaluak, who in turn sued the federal government for failing to protect his grazing rights through the process and finalization of the Inuvialuit land claim settlement. “It was a mess,” said Kunnek. “But, being a glutton for punishment, that’s when I thought it might be an excellent time to quit my job and get into the family business.”
Working with the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation, encouraged by his mother, Ellen (Mikkel Pulk’s daughter), and father, Otto Binder, and using his own family funds supplemented by an additional business development loan from the government of the Northwest Territories, Kunnek became the owner and manager of the herd in 2002, knowing that his parents were there for advice and moral support. But by this time, to his surprise and disappointment, there was a palpable sense of resentment toward the whole idea of reindeer herding, which many of his neighbours viewed as just another spoke in the wheel of colonialism. “Accidental hunting” became a serious threat to the herd, he explained, “especially when the herd is close to town or winter road.”
Ten years later, Kunnek had persevered. He had faced just about every problem a reindeer herder in any other place in the circumpolar world might have encountered: truck strikes on the winter road, market problems (chronic wasting disease found in elk in Alberta effectively ended any Asian interest in reindeer antler products from Canada), continued predation by two- and four-legged hunters, the death of his cousin Hiram, who was working by himself trying to contain the herd during a particularly wicked winter storm, problems with finding helpers at roundup time, overlap with oil and gas exploration activity, cash flow, and so on. And over the years he connected and reconnected with his relatives and fellow herders in Sápmi, both in northern Norway and Sweden and in his Jimmy Lake cabin, near the winter range of his herd northeast of Inuvik.
When I talked to Kunnek, whether in person or on the phone or via email, he was often chuntering on about something. But it was his absolutely irrepressible optimism that somehow always poked through. The image in my mind’s eye during these conversations was of the man himself, during my 2012 visit, kneeling on an idling snow machine on a snow-covered hill on the high ground east of the delta, north of Reindeer Station. The crust of the snow all around us had been broken where, through the night and the previous day, his animals had used their sharp hooves to get access to the still green and lush lichen beds below.
We had picked up this trail and had been following it for some time. Ahead in the distance, on the ice of Parson Lake, a shifting peppered pattern on the snow emerged. That was the herd, making its way north and east to the summer range on Richards Island. Beyond that was the orange glow of a gas flare burning from a thin stack that stuck up above the horizon into an uncertain sky. It was chilly, even by northern standards, and the two-hour journey from Reindeer
Station had dusted his face and collar and the ruff of his parka with hoarfrost. His was not an easy path, but it was the one Kunnek had chosen, for better or worse. During a break from the driving, we stopped. He pulled a mangled cigarette package out of his parka pocket, lit one, and said with a smile, “Beats the shit out of an office any day.”
20: THE ATANIGI EXPEDITION
By the next time I ventured north of the Arctic Circle, later that year, the solstice had passed. It was late June and I was on the shore of the Coppermine River. Thirty-four-year-old Kenny Taptuna was washing the dishes in a collapsible green sink. We were on a cross-cultural canoe trip with teens from Toronto and from the Nunavut hamlet of Kugluktuk, which sits at the mouth of the Coppermine on the Arctic Ocean. The adults were expected to take a turn now and again with camp chores; on this chilly evening, the wash water felt warm on our hands. After the flurry of a typical canoe-tripping day, it was a chance to chat quietly by the lingering light of the Arctic summer sun.
Kenny lifted a dripping plastic plate from the grey dishwater and passed it over. “This trip is significant to me, personally,” he said, “but it’s also important to our community. What we’re doing is historic. We are the first from our community, the first Inuit from Kugluktuk to have actually paddled the Coppermine River, which has been our back yard as long as people have been around the area.” The town was originally named after the river; it was called Coppermine until 1996.
The Coppermine River valley breathed all around us. Evoking memories of Lovozero or Bayaga, sapphire-blue lupins swayed contentedly among the pastel boulders along the bank, soaking up the sun and making seeds, as Kenny and I talked and watched. Our eyes wandered from the dishes to the river and to the green hills beyond. A flight of tundra swans lifted on an easterly breeze and circled up and over our heads, the squeak of their wings hanging on the thrum of mosquitoes and the quiet clatter of our own making. That day, I saw majestic birds in a remote wilderness setting. Kenny saw beauty too but he was also eyeballing lunch: perhaps roast swan sandwiches with a chaser of hot sugared tea.