“The most important animal”

KUUJJUAQ — More than 200 participants gathered in Kuujjuaq last week for the 9th North American Caribou Workshop.

Among the many topics on the agenda were the relationship between humans and caribou, traditional knowledge, the impact of human activity on caribou, and conservation efforts.

Caribou have been “the most important animal for our 80 million ancestors,” noted keynote speaker Bryan Gordon of the Canadian Museum of Civilization. Gordon said he considers caribou, because of their great numbers, to have been more important to human history than horses, cows and even the large wildlife herds of Africa despite the fact that Stone Age cave artists rarely drew the animals.

“Caribou were most likely considered so ‘normal’ to the people then that they didn’t deserve wall-space, or the painter’s attention, in the same way that we wouldn’t exhibit a picture of a pi a on our living room wall today,” Gordon said.

While Nunavik’s George River herd used to be world’s largest, the Taimyr Peninsula herd in Siberia now numbers more than one million animals.

Wildlife biologists say the population of the George River herd, once as high as 900,000, may have fallen to 200,000. They say the decline is part of a natural cycle.

Among the many elders who addressed the conference was Johnny George Annanack of Kangiqsualujjuaq.

Annanack, who was born in 1925 in Tasiujakuluk, north of Kangiqsualujjuaq, offered a personal account of caribou hunting as a youth, when he and his father would travel by dog sled, sometimes as far as Labrador.

John Shecanapish, an 81-year-old Naskapi elder from Kawawachikamach, shared his worries about the caribou population’s decline and health problems.

Kenny Blacksmith, the former deputy grand chief of the Grand Council of Cree, underlined the importance of scientists and hunters working together to improve knowledge about caribou.

“In as much as we respect and understand the need for scientific data, and the technical approach of studies taken, we believe traditional knowledge to be all insight and understanding gained from life’s experiences…and it is of equal importance,” Blacksmith said.

The conference was organized by the federal and provincial governments, as well as by representatives from the Makivik Corporation, Naskapi and James Bay Cree.

With files from Quentin van Ginhoven