Qikiqtarjuaq condemns last season’s narwhal closure

DENISE RIDEOUT

QIKIQTARJUAQ — At a recent meeting in Qikiqtarjuaq, hunters blasted wildlife officials for shutting down last season’s narwhal harvest, saying the closure took much-needed income away from the community.

About 40 harvesters gathered in the hamlet gymnasium March 2 to demand that the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board explain why Qikiqtarjuaq was accused of overhunting narwhals.

“If we don’t have any quotas, how can we be overharvesting?” one hunter asked.

That sentiment was echoed during most of the six-hour NWMB community meeting.

In 1999, quotas on the Qikiqtarjuaq narwhal hunt were lifted as part of the NWMB’s three-year project to transfer management of the harvest over to the community.

That meant harvesters were free of the unpopular quota of 50 narwhal per year.

Under the community-management system, the local Hunters and Trappers Association was supposed to set up and enforce the harvest’s rules.

But in the autumn of 2000, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, acting on reports that a high number of narwhals were being struck and lost, shut down the harvest a week before its scheduled end.

Not surprisingly, the DFO official attending the meeting came under intense fire, as harvesters demanded to know why his department came into Qikiqtarjuaq last October and stopped the hunt.

Hunting numbers skyrocket

Keith Pelley of the DFO said that part-way through the 2000 harvest, fisheries officers learned that 113 narwhals had already been landed, 40 had been struck and sunk, while another 82 had been lost.

With another week to go before the harvest’s end, DFO decided to take action.

“DFO are responsible for conservation and protection. We felt if the harvest would have continued for another week, we thought there would be even more narwhals lost,” Pelley explained.

Ben Kovic, chair of the NWMB, defended the DFO’s decision.

“There are some problems in this community,” Kovic said. “We were told you have overharvested narwhal in this community.”

But the Qikiqtarjuaq harvesters told a different story.

They described a scene where outsiders swooped in to the small Baffin community and shut down one of their main industries — for no legitimate reason.

“The harvesters in the community know exactly what to do with the narwhal and not to overharvest them,” said hunter Koalie Kooneeloosie.

Kooneeloosie, who was chair of the HTA during the 2000 harvest, said DFO was wrong to close it down.

“Although we don’t have any more quotas we still are careful not to overhunt,” he shouted at the wildlife-board members.

Hunters need the money

Harvesters also told of the severe effects of the early closure.

In a community with high unemployment, the narwhal harvest provides a source of income to many families. Narwhal blubber and tusks are valuable commercial commodities. A harvester can make up to $700 for selling a 7-foot-long tusk.

“Unemployment in the community is very high and it was very uplifting to see hunters get some money at least,” one harvester said.

Kooneeloosie and other harvesters suggested that community-based management has been rife with problems right from the start.

He said a lack of communication between the HTA and the wildlife board left harvesters unclear about how many narwhals they could actually hunt.

There was also much confusion with the hunters’ reporting system. One of the conditions of community-based management is that the HTA set up a system to record the numbers of all animals struck, landed and lost.

One harvester said the reporting system is foreign to Inuit.

“There were no laws we had to follow when we were growing up,” he told the NWMB.

Others said some double-reporting was mistakenly happening, where two hunters who struck the same whale were both recording it. They said that may have accounted for the high numbers of narwhals reported to have been struck.

In the end, NWMB chair Ben Kovic said the board would attempt to communicate better with the local HTA to fix some of the apparent problems.

Despite Qikiqtarjuaq’s alleged overhunting in 2000, the harvest for the upcoming season isn’t threatened.

“There’s no intentions for the harvest not to go ahead this year,” the DFO official said.

Still, Kovic said, Qikiqtarjuaq hunters should make every effort to conserve the narwhal stock.

“We have to be careful. If we see any problem with the harvest, DFO or the federal government can stop us if we are harvesting too many,” Kovic warned.

The NWMB’s meeting in Qikiqtarjuaq was part of a seven-community tour to get input on ways to improve the community-based management systems for narwhal and beluga.