Polar bear quotas: Did the GN screw up?

About five years ago, the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board published a widely-admired report called the Inuit Bowhead Knowledge Study.

This document collected the observations of Inuit hunters and elders living in many Nunavut communities, and helped to confirm that bowhead populations in the eastern Arctic are increasing. This, in turn, gave the people of Nunavut a solid base of written knowledge that they can point to whenever skeptical outsiders attempt to criticize Nunavut’s limited, but culturally important, harvest of bowhead whales.

Its greatest benefit, perhaps, is that it recognized the validity of Inuit traditional knowledge, or Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, and presents it in a way that allows the NWMB to honestly says that its bowhead management decisions are supported by a combination of IQ and Western science.

An earlier study on Inuit knowledge of the southeast Baffin beluga, which involved three communities, achieves a similar goal.

And even before that, in the early 1990s, the Environmental Committee of Sanikiluaq and the Canadian Arctic Resources Committee co-operated in the production of a report called Voices from the Bay, which collected Inuit and Cree observations of evironmental changes related to the James Bay hydroelectric project. Its purpose was different than the other two reports, but its greatest benefit was the same: it recognized the validity of traditional aboriginal knowledge, allowing it to be used in combination with Western science as a basis for policy decisions.

There is, therefore, a well-established way of gathering and presenting traditional aboriginal knowledge so that it can be used to make vital decisions. When it’s collected and organized well, traditional aboriginal knowledge can be decisive.

Unfortunately, there are many signs that the Government of Nunavut did not do this when, last December, they approved a substantial increase in polar bear quotas. The numbers vary from region to region, of course, and some regions saw no increases at all. But the total allowable Nunavut-wide harvest rose from 403 to 518 a year.

The NWMB recommended the numbers, which were worked out in a series of regional sub-agreements called “MOUs, based on information supplied by the GN.” The GN then “approved” the numbers that they had first recommended to the board.

In the Jan. 7 press release announcing their decision, the GN said they “agree to include Inuit Qaujimajaqutangit in decision-making,” but the ambiguous grammar of the sentence doesn’t make it clear whether they plan to do that in the future, or whether they’ve already done it.

That question is probably irrelevant now, and in a way, it’s already been answered.

That’s because the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is now asking Nunavut for more information about its polar bear management practices, and for the “traditional knowledge study” that was used to justify the quota increases. So far, Nunavut hasn’t given them anything, even though their GN’s decision was announced more than six months ago, and the MOU negotiation process spanned many years. The evidence so far suggests that no such study exists, that Inuit traditional knowledge about polar bears was never gathered in an organized manner.

If they get no credible information to evaluate, then it’s likely that U.S. officials will conclude that the Inuit traditional knowledge that was purportedly used to justify Nunavut’s quota increase is not valid. And they will likely impose a ban on the importation of trophies from Nunavut polar bear sports hunt into their country.

This won’t prevent Inuit from exercising their legal right to hunt polar bears within the total allowable harvest. But it will destroy an important source of income for those communities where people set aside some of their tags for southern sports hunters. On a Nunavut-wide basis, it’s estimated that these sports hunts are worth about $1 million a year.

When asked about this last January, Nunavut’s environment minister said he wasn’t concerned about U.S. reaction to Nunavut’s decision. “We have other people in the world besides Americans who would do the hunt,” he said at the time. The way things are going, Nunavut communities may get a chance to test that proposition quicker than they think.

The most serious issue, however, is that the credibility of Inuit traditional knowledge will suffer unneccessarily. We know that it’s a valid form of knowledge — but GN blundering may end up creating the opposite impression.

We already know that the GN’s wildlife division has been badly damaged by an ill-considered decision to move it to Igloolik, where two or three employees sit surrounded by empty desks. Did did this lack of capacity help produce a GN screw-up of the polar bear quota process? Stay tuned. We’ll soon find out. JB