People of the Deer (34 page)

The Eskimos are in a hard-to-get-at spot that lacks adequate facilities.

This report is typical of the publicity white men of this continent have given to our efforts to assist the arctic natives, and as such it deserves close examination. But such an examination quickly dispels the impression of our benevolent zeal as guardians and protectors of the Eskimos. It appears as a shameless effort to avoid the blame for a great and continuing evil, an effort to lay our conscience at rest.

The second paragraph of the release makes brave reading if you are not aware that the “plans” mentioned were those concerning the fishery at Nueltin... and if you are not aware that these plans came to nothing, and no further attempts to “rehabilitate” the Ihalmiut have been implemented as I write this, in December of 1951.

The third paragraph is even more startling, for it states that first reports of starvation amongst the Ihalmiut were not received until the spring of 1950. It is difficult to understand how the reports written by Andy and myself, and submitted in 1947 and 1948 directly to the government branch responsible for Eskimo administration, could have been forgotten. Nevertheless they must have been forgotten, as was Franz's report in the spring of 1947, and as was the action taken by the government itself in that year. Much has evidently been forgotten.

In the event of these discrepancies coming to light, however, the final paragraph provides an explanation, and an excuse. “The Eskimos are in a hard-to-get-at spot that lacks adequate facilities.” It is not our fault, then, if all our good intentions fail. Our consciences may rest at ease—we've done our best.

Perhaps. But my conscience will not rest. I have spoken of the debt I owe the People, and this debt alone would prevent me from accepting oblivion as the answer to the problem of what fate awaits our native races. Refusing to accept this answer, I have written this book in an attempt to give form and substance to the voices which spoke to me from the graying rock heaps under Kinetua. The People lent me their eyes so that I might see what white men have tried not to see. Now I, in turn, have lent the People my voice so that white men shall hear the words the Ihalmiut cannot speak for themselves.

It may be that I have spoken too late and so have done no more than to remember the great days of a race which is gone. But the story of the Ihalmiut is not theirs alone, since much of what I have written about them holds true for many thousands of Indians and Eskimos across the whole length and breadth of the continent.

If I have only succeeded in writing an epitaph for the Ihalmiut, perhaps their tragedy can nevertheless be made to bear fruit—though it be bitter fruit. Perhaps it will help us to look, with a new honesty, into the lives of those who dwell by hidden rivers and by the frozen coasts, and in the depths of forests. If this should come to pass—then I will have paid my debt.

It is not enough to have chronicled the destruction of certain men. It is not enough to have been harshly critical of my own society and to have described the injustices and the crimes of stupidity and omission which must lie at our door. There remains the question of what can be done so that the tragedy of the Ihalmiut will not become the fatal pattern for all those who dwell within the cold sweep of the North. Solutions to this problem may be complex, but any solution must be based on one primary act.

We must first of all—and immediately—help the Eskimos and Indians escape from their now chronic condition of malnutrition and even outright starvation, and we must do this not as a dole,
but by helping them to feed themselves.
Charity is as fatal to a primitive people as it is to civilized ones. The continuous giving of basic sustenance brings about a dependency which is often mortal to the spirit. Furthermore, the kind of food we have so far provided for native peoples has not been food, but rather a slow poison which destroys the body through malnutrition almost as certainly as outright starvation would. No, we must not give “food.” What we must do is to
give the natives the means of procuring their own food from the land which is theirs.

It should be clear enough that flour and baking powder are no substitutes. The northern lands do not themselves provide foods of this nature. The kind of food they can provide is
meat.
The question is: how can we ensure that the northern people have meat—in plenty?

Let us see what has happened to the once abundant supplies of red meat in the North. The fate of the deer has been the fate of all. Some of the most important animals have already almost vanished: the muskoxen, the narwhals and right whales. As for the rest, they have all been terribly diminished so that the land and sea no longer raise their food crop for men as they once did. The land has been bled so freely that it now can lay just claim to that ominous name—the Barrens. The sea, too, has been bled, and is being bled. The sealing fleets along the eastern coasts have done yeoman work; the whalers have long since destroyed the great mammals which once came into Hudson Bay and into all the narrow waters at the top of the continent, and with the passing of the whales whole tribes of Eskimos have also vanished.

Nor is the bloodletting at an end. The walrus which were once the most important of the sea beasts to the coast Eskimos have been seriously reduced in numbers, largely by the RCMP, by traders, and by missionaries who annually slaughter fantastic numbers of walrus in order to feed dog teams that are three or four times as big as they need to be. At Churchill a commercial plant to process white whales—“beluga” they are more often called—was established as recently as 1949 with full government approval. The meat of these beasts is to be shipped south to feed foxes on our fur ranches, or to provide fertilizer for our gardens. On the islands of the arctic many Eskimos have been forced to subsist largely on fish because of the disappearance of sea mammals, and now even the fish are being taken from them. In 1949 a new fishery was opened by Nova Scotian ships in an area where the Eskimos were almost completely dependent on fish. Had it not been for the presence of army personnel, who took a determined stand against this flagrant robbery, this fishery, which was also fully sanctioned by the government despite the outraged protests of several arctic specialists, would have brought famine to these Eskimos.

The picture is the same throughout the North. When any financial advantage can accrue to us through the destruction of the lifeblood of the northern people, we do not scruple to destroy. The authorities talk of “conservation” while at the same time one branch of government is accepting thousands of dollars from sportsmen to fly them—in government planes—to the heart of the caribou country where they can kill the people's food for sheer sport alone. The authorities enact game laws which reserve the dwindling numbers of meat-producing wild animals for “recreational” use by white men—for sport and trophy hunting—while effectively denying the use of these animals to the native people who need them for sheer physical survival.

In support of the decimation of the mammals in the North, certain experts claim that the Eskimos and Indians must, in the long run, learn to eat our food if they are ever to become part of our way of life. This justifies the wanton destruction of the arctic food. But does it? Eskimos and Indians will always live largely in the North, and so they will always be able to maintain their eating habits as they are, providing there is meat to eat. More important, they will always
need
the specific nutriments found in fat and meat. It is senseless to say the northern natives
must
change their diet—as senseless as suggesting that our race should abandon the basic products of our land in favor of strange foods to be imported from a far-distant region.

The question is, what can we do to restore the food we have stolen from the mouths of the northern peoples? And the answer is that we can do everything needful. The caribou provide a clear example of what might be done. If it were possible to overrule the selfish interests of white men, it would be relatively easy to make the Barrens plains again produce the food which men must have if they are to survive in that land. At the moment, and by the tacit admission of the government, the deer are close to the fatal level beyond which a further reduction in numbers will doom them to extinction. But they have not yet passed the point of no return. They could still be preserved, and I know this to be true, for I spent two years studying this problem in the field and as a scientist. There are enough deer left so that, if given full protection, the species could stage a quick comeback, and there is no good reason why this resurgence should not take place. The true value of the caribou lies not only in their contribution to the well-being of the Barrens Eskimos, but in the fact that they are of equal importance to the continued survival of about forty thousand high-forest Indians, and to the majority of the eight thousand surviving Eskimos across the whole Canadian arctic. All modern Eskimos are descended from caribou-hunting people, even though many Innuit now depend largely on the products of the sea. In fact, almost all Eskimos of our time would willingly and gratefully turn to the deer for their support, if the deer were available.

Unlike the buffalo, who were fated to become extinct because they contended with us for lands we coveted, the deer live in a land no settler will ever wish to seize. The Barrens will never grow wheat or beef cattle. They will grow one food crop, and one alone—the deer. The Barrens can support a tremendous population of deer, perhaps as high as five million head. Once they were this numerous, and in order to return to this high level they need only protection. Not from wolves, not from the legitimate and normal appetites of the natives, but from us. Directly, they need protection from white trappers and hunters, and indirectly they need protection from the manufacturing companies who make a good part of their profits from the sale of astronomical amounts of ammunition, and from the sale of repeating rifles. If we were to place an absolute prohibition on the killing of deer by white men, and if we were to restrict the sale of ammunition and the types of weapons sold to the natives, the deer would do the rest. We should go farther and absolutely prohibit sport hunting of any species of animal in any region where these species could contribute to the well-being of native peoples. There might well be a period of increased hardship while the Indian and Eskimo hunters adjusted to a limited killing potential, but they are not fools, and they
would
adjust so that their kill became a valid one.

The futile and expensive stopgaps that we now advocate would no longer be required. The idiotic system of paying bounty on wolves would not be needed. The periodic disease epidemics which wipe out overly large populations of natural predators in the North would do the job for us, as it has always done. Nature can, and does, manage this control very well. We are the one predator she cannot control. We must control ourselves.

Many agents of government have complained sadly that it seems impossible for the Indians and Eskimos to accommodate to the modern world.

The Aklavik Eskimos at the mouth of the Mackenzie River are an exception. Fortuitous circumstances (not any direct help from us) gave those people a fair chance to adapt themselves to our way of life—and they made the most of their opportunity. But why have not all the northern natives been as successful? Because men with starved bodies have starved minds as well. Starved intellects do not respond well to difficult tasks, and the adjustment of a primitive race to our civilization is exceedingly difficult. But well-fed men are capable of understanding, and of coping with new and unfamiliar problems. The Eskimos stand out as being particularly adaptable people with a remarkable aptitude for absorbing new ideas, mechanical and otherwise. Freed of the incubus of malnutrition and its handmaiden, disease, our Eskimos are capable of quick and sane adjustment to the conditions of the white man's world, as the Aklavik people have abundantly demonstrated.

They cannot, of course, step from igloo into office overnight even supposing that this was what they wished to do. The northern natives as a whole can be
made
part of our scheme of things only by the expedient of employing them as brute labor—“slave labor” would be a better term—and in many cases this is what we have attempted. The better answer lies in a gradual transition, based on a solid foundation of economic independence of a sort that is compatible with the present knowledge and experience of the people.

It sounds like a tall order, yet a
solution to it has been known to the governments of Canada and the United States for the last thirty years,
and was actually developed
by
them! I am referring to the Reindeer Grazing Scheme, which was originally begun in Alaska, and which was copied by the Canadians. In brief the plan was to import Asiatic reindeer—very similar to caribou—and to train natives to act as herdsmen. Each native village was to have its own herd, and these herds were to make the people independent as far as a supply of protein was concerned, while at the same time providing them with a salable cash crop.

The scheme developed rather strangely. In Alaska it fell into the hands of certain white men who exploited it for their own gain. In Canada it was begun purely as an experiment, and has remained no more than an experiment limited in its effects to a tiny handful of Eskimos near the Mackenzie Delta. Nevertheless it has shown that it could be an answer to the problem of economic independence for every Eskimo in Canada. There is only one really valid reason why it has not been extended. It has been strenuously opposed by important interests whose voices are clearly heard in high places. These opponents, the strongest of whom are connected with the beef industry, have held the field with their contention that Canada could not afford a reindeer industry. Yet it can be easily demonstrated that the initial cost of extending the reindeer industry—and “industry” it could well be—would be rapidly repaid, both in direct returns and in the indirect returns which would result from the money we might save, and which we now largely waste, in blind efforts to assist the Eskimos with charity.