Iqaluit hunters prepare to net bowhead whale
Six boats and 24 hunters plan to set off Aug. 14
Members of the Amaruq Hunters and Trappers Association pose on Aug. 5, 2022, following a successful bowhead whale harvest about 15 kilometres southwest of Iqaluit. The association is planning another bowhead hunt next week. (Photo by Bill Williams, Special to Nunatsiaq News)
There will be “maktaaq everywhere” on Iqaluit’s shore on Aug. 14 if members of the Amaruq Hunters and Trappers Association manage to catch their first bowhead in four years.
An unidentified member of the Amaruq Hunters and Trappers Association prepares whale meat following a hunt of a bowhead whale near Iqaluit in August 2022. The association is planning another bowhead hunt next week. (Photo by Bill Williams, Special to Nunatsiaq News)
Twenty-four hunters of all ages are set to take part in the hunt next week.
“We have lots of people involved — a lot of young people,” said Naulaq Inookie, chair of the association’s qalugiaq planning committee, which is co-ordinating the hunt.
The last bowhead hunt in Iqaluit was in 2022. Inookie participated in the hunt before that, in 2018. Bowhead hunts are regulated by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
The group plans to use six boats, each with a four-member crew. They are not necessarily looking for the biggest bowhead they can find.
“It can take a week to butcher a big one,” he said. “We’ll be looking for a nice small whale so it won’t take long to butcher up.”
The hunters will examine their prey before striking to ensure the animal is not too “vicious,” Inookie said.
“That’s to make sure it doesn’t attack any boats. There are some whales that are aggressive,” he said.
If successful, the hunters will pull the whale up on land at the breakwater near the downtown.
“There’ll be maktaaq everywhere down there — that is if we catch one,” Inookie said.
Every part of a bowhead is edible, Inookie said, including the skin.
“It can feed a lot of people,” he said. “We’re going to cut it up and share it with the community and other settlements in the Qikiqtaaluk region.”
Hunting a bowhead whale costs an estimated $120,000, which goes toward equipment, payment to crew, food and fuel.
The City of Iqaluit granted the association $10,000 last week to assist with the expense of the hunt and the food distribution that would follow.
Donations from Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., Qikiqtani Inuit Association, and Baffin Fisheries Coalition covered the remaining $110,000 cost, Inookie said.
It should be “MukTuk” for Bowhead and “Maktaaq” for Narwhal and Beluga.
There , she blows !!!
Nunavut can take up to 5 Bowhead Whales per year, and it is likely the population could sustain even more harvesting.
However, it seems to me based on what you see from social media each summer that Nunavut only takes 1-3 whales a year based primarily on the success or failure of local fund raising efforts.
With an average Bowhead yielding 30,000lbs of food, at an apparent cost of $120K, that is $3/lb cost for this fresh food. This is 1/3 to 1/8 the cost of heart clogging hamburger in Nunavut.
We could be missing out on at least (and probably more than) 60,000lbs (or 500 caribou’s worth) of highly nutritious and desirable food per year.
With such a low cost and nutritious food available, why are we not hunting them as much as we can?
These hunts should not be funded on an ad hoc basis. There should be guaranteed funding from NTI to do 5 hunts a year, and if allowed, even more. They should make it a duty of HTOs to conduct these hunts.
They have the money. They should be using it, especially for underutilized species such as this.
Iceland just expelled 21 anti-whalers. They are doubling down on their traditional hunt.
Let the anti-whalers be damned, or are there too many of these at Iqaluit decision making tables now?
What happened last time Iqaluit got a bowhead? Even with 8000 residents, a good amount of meat ended up being spoiled because they couldn’t harvest it fast enough. Let’s hope we’ve learned from that and history doesnt repeat itself.
Iqaluit should be banned from harvesting Bowheads after they wasted the last one.
Nets should be banned. Nets are hybrid culture. Hypocritical to our youth.