To many, he's still ‘Hardly Know It.' That's particularly true in the North, the place that put him on the map. But it turns out Mowat put the North on the map, too -- so after 50 years, why do we still hate him?
By Tim Querengesser
Few knew it, but Robert Service wrote The Cremation of Sam McGee having yet to see the Klondike goldfields. Service knew it, though. By 1911, he was rich and soaked with guilt. With a birch-bark canoe, the former banker, who only moved to Dawson after the poems were published, set out to prove he could have been a sourdough, like his fictional characters Sam McGee and Dan McGrew. He’d use the longest way possible: the 3,200-kilometre “Edmonton Route” that meanders north along the Athabasca, Slave and Mackenzie rivers and then south, against the current, along the mighty Yukon. During the 1898 rush, this trail killed more Stampeders than any other. And indeed, as he paddled and pulled, Service nearly joined them in the icy riverbeds. He considered quitting, but wrote in his journal, “If you do . . . you’ll never respect yourself again.” Service eventually made it. Only then, after cheating death, did he consider himself authentic.
His guilt wasn’t unique. The North has forever condemned its successful writers as phonies. Perhaps because they spent so little time here compared to the status they gained from it, many Northerners have grudges with the heavyweights – Service, Jack London and even Dawson native Pierre Berton. Though they’re held in reverence elsewhere, the North assigns them an asterisk. Farley Mowat, the most successful of all, gets an asterisk the size of the sun. Considered a fudger-of-facts on both sides of the divide, he nonetheless has few detractors in southern Canada. But in the North, Mowat is largely seen as part villain, part buffoon. Speaking his name here pushes a button. “Oh, you mean Hardly Know It” some say, rehashing a nickname that’s 50 years old. Some scoff, or laugh, while those who support him steel themselves to argue in his defense.
All this is well-trampled dirt. In 1952, a review in the magazine The Beaver dismissed People of the Deer – Mowat’s debut, and his first of many books set in the North – as “totally erroneous.” This charge clung to him. It reached its nadir in 1996, when Saturday Night magazine ran a cover image of Mowat as Pinocchio. The accompanying story, titled “A Real Whopper,” meticulously documented the half-truths, omissions and fabrications in his Northern books.
So why reopen this debate? The answer can’t be avoided: Mowat is 88 years old, and declared 2008’s Otherwise his last book. At some point rather soon he will no longer be with us. That’s the sentimental answer. The serious one is that no other writer, even today, attracts to the North the audience and enthusiasm that Mowat does. Isn’t it time we shake the foundation of the grudge against him to see if it’s still solid?
Mowat always had eyes for the North. In 1947, aged 26, he traveled to the Barrens near Ennadai Lake, in the southwest corner of what’s now Nunavut. He came as a field biologist for the Arctic Institute of North America. But this was already his second trip to one of the remotest regions of the tundra. When he was 15, his uncle brought Mowat to Churchill, Manitoba, where they shot birds for scientific studies. Mowat’s second trip, though, had a much darker subtext. He’d just returned to Canada after the madness of the Second World War. As biographer James King writes in Farley, to the young Mowat the Arctic seemed “like a good place to run.” The war had ground his belief in Western society into dust. When reading Mowat’s first Northern books, the young man’s state of mind on this and a subsequent trip the next year to study caribou should be considered.
On both trips, Mowat encountered the story of a starving tribe of Inuit – the Ahalmiut, or caribou eaters. He heard through second-hand sourced that they were dying, under the nose of the government. The tale confirmed his dim views. So, as Mowat told the people’s stories in People of the Deer, first published in 1952, he added his beliefs on the cause of the famine. For a first book it’s remarkable – an accessible masterwork that captures Arctic geography in pure emotion. “It was a soft white nightmare that we were flying over,” Mowat writes of first seeing the tundra from a plane. “An undulating monotony of white that covered all shapes and colours. The land, with its low sweeping hills, its lakes and its rivers, simply did not exist for our eyes.” But Mowat knits a challenging accusation into the book. The Canadian government is declared indifferent to the Ahalmiut famine; other Northern institutions, like the Hudson’s Bay Company and the RCMP, are also criticized for their part in creating it.
After People of the Deer was released, Mowat’s indictment was passed around like a grenade. Some denied the Ahalmiut existed, though Mowat wasn’t the first to document the starvation. Mowat himself was called a “liar” in the House of Commons. His facts were quickly given energetic scrutiny and some were found lacking.
In the foreword to the second, 1974 edition of People of the Deer, Mowat addresses this directly. He writes that, when the first book was published, “it was impossible for me to obtain documentary corroboration for much of the story.” This was because the “Old Empire” of the North – the missions, the Mounties and the government – held the proof, he claims. “I was therefore forced to be somewhat circumspect.” For readers wanting the story without omissions, changed names or time and space distortions, the version given in The Desperate People – the 1959 follow-up to People of the Deer – “is the correct one.”
Of course, that incorrect first book had already changed Canada and the North. In the early ‘50s, People of the Deer was well received for a Canadian book, published in the Atlantic Monthly and, aside from a few harsh receptions, showered with glowing international reviews. Canadians were shifting their eyes north thanks to the Cold War and Mowat gave this newly discovered land a human face. A cause was born: Save the Inuit! The government jumped. By 1960, the surviving Ahalmiut were relocated to the coast of Hudson Bay. Whole towns were erected, and emergency food was shipped.
To some Northerners, Mowat’s ends justify his means. “There are people alive today who would likely be dead or not even be born if Farley Mowat had not written about the famines in the Keewatin region in the 1950s,” says Jim Bell, the outspoken editor of the Nunatsiaq News, in Iqaluit. “That is a legacy that can never be taken away from him.”
But the “Old Empire” mandarins in the North, as well as many Inuit, mostly noticed the errors. “It all stared with People of the Deer,” explains Jonquin Covello, a long-time Yellowknifer who once lived in the Keewatin, counted Mowat as a friend, and who’s now writing an English doctoral thesis on Northern literature. “People who’d been to Rankin and Ennadai said, ‘What is he talking about? He’s taken these people’s names and completely misrepresented them.’ It’s like any other piece of non-fiction or even fiction. If you recognize somebody you know you immediately say, ‘Well it’s not right. This guy’s an idiot.’ It always amazes me that Northerners are – how long ago was it, 1948? – still basing their opinions on things Farley said 50 years ago.”
John Goddard has nothing but fire for Farley Mowat and his facts. It was 13 years ago that he wrote the Saturday Night article that exhaustively catalogued Mowat’s entire mistruths. But even today, as I discuss with him Never Cry Wolf – Mowat’s book on wolves in which, he claims, he urinated around his camp like a wolf – Goddard laughs, bitterly. “People actually believed this happened when they read it,” he says.
He comes to the interview armed. In Otherwise, Mowat’s latest book, his main points are again illustrated, he says – that Mowat uses people in order to paint himself a hero, and that he fabricates. He points to quotes in Otherwise that are apparently drawn from Mowat’s Arctic journals. They are “totally made up,” he says. He then quotes a passage about Andy Lawrie, Mowat’s companion during his caribou monitoring in 1948, and one of his best friends. It’s now known, thanks to Goddard, that Mowat left Lawrie alone in the Barrens in order to see his wife in Toronto. In Otherwise, however, this fact is artfully reversed: It’s Lawrie who leaves for Toronto. To some this is perhaps just a detail, but to Goddard it’s part of a pattern. “This is one of the closest people in his life,” he says. “It’s disgusting to me.”
It was almost by accident that Goddard became an expert on Mowat’s errors. In the 1980s, he worked as a Canadian Press correspondent in the North. One day in Rankin Inlet, he says an Inuit man referred to Mowat as Hardly Know It. “I thought ‘What’s this?’ It sort of planted the idea in my mind.” There it sat until 1996, when Goddard looked deeper. What he found at the National Archives in Ottawa, he says, “astounded” him. It was a termination letter, dated 1948, addressed to Mowat from the Canadian government. In People of the Deer, Mowat doesn’t mention that he was canned. Instead, he speaks of himself as a noble writer and scientific explorer who visits uncharted Northern lands and discovers starving people. With this, Goddard knew he had a story. Later, he went to the McMaster University archives, to which Mowat had sold his Arctic journals. There he found dozens more inconsistencies.
The resulting Saturday Night article lists them with precision: the time Mowat spent in the North – and that he observed wolves – was overstated; the fact he never encountered a starving Ahalmiut in person was glossed over; many people accompanying him on his trips were omitted. Goddard also documented what appeared to be a pattern, by comparing what Mowat wrote in his journal to what he put into print. “Where the books show Mowat calling for government relief of the Inuit,” Goddard wrote, “his journal shows him fed up with [government] handouts [for the Inuit].” Could Mowat’s whole thesis that the government was indifferent be fiction, too?
The charges Mowat made, in Goddard’s view, required he get them right. As a reporter at the Toronto Star, Goddard lives in this black and white world. So, even today, far removed from the debate, he bristles when considering the pass people have given Mowat. On Bell’s argument that Mowat alerted the nation to the starvation, falsities and all, he disagrees. “By making those claims and doing that writing he got a lot of people worked up,” he says. “There was a lot of talk in Parliament and public debates, and it was a lot of energy spent on an entirely bogus point. That’s where the destructiveness comes in. It’s beyond me why people believe anything Mowat writes. It is so twisted, so distorted, so destructive, so anti-Canada and anti-North.” To Goddard, Mowat is the Ben Johnson of Canadian literature “except he didn’t get caught.” Despite the facts on Mowat being out, though, he believes Mowat will likely remain a hero. “Who’s going to care about that after 50 years of idolization?”
The only time I ever bagged school to read a book was on account of Farley Mowat. I was 11; the book was Lost in the Barrens. I still remember the basic plot if not its details, including thinking it weird that the characters had a cabin made of tree logs – weren’t they supposed to be lost . . . on the Barrens? But I didn’t put it down that day. And what stayed with me since is an interest in the North. Mowat was my entry point, even if I never credited him.
There’s a trend today in literature to attack non-fiction writers, from those who authored the great works of the past to the bestsellers on Oprah Winfrey’s book list. The list of those who’ve been, for lack of a better term, ‘outted’ as fabricators of facts is constantly growing. Mowat’s condemnation came before all this, but his comments on facts have done little good in the new environment. “Fuck the facts,” he writes in his introduction to his journals in the McMaster archives. When interviewed by Goddard 13 years ago, Mowat said he didn’t “invent.” But he later added, “I never let the facts get in the way of the truth!”
While the case of the North’s continued dismissal of Mowat may seem to be about the facts, though, it falls to pieces when you look at them. After reciting Mowat’s ‘Hardly Know It’ nickname, only a few people who I talked to could tell me why they said it. Fewer still had read his books. Yet everyone, from people at bookstores and museums to long-time Northerners, shared what appeared like a hand-me-down grudge. The condemnation is no longer about pure facts.
This point is amplified as I talk with Eric Anautalik on the phone from Baker Lake, Nunavut. Anautalik is an Ahalmiut. He was a baby during the starvation in the Barrens, though he has few memories of it. “My dad had no more energy because of starving,” Anautalik recalls. “I was still on my mother’s back, in an amauti. We were in mud hut and I remember my mom told us to eat the ‘white ones’ on the wall. It was some sort of plant and it gave us energy. That’s the only thing I remember.”
Fifty years later, Anautalik saw The Desperate People at the library in Baker Lake. He was startled. “The cover page is a picture of my mom and my sister.” This stirred emotions about his family. But as I ask Anautalik how he feels about Mowat, he isn’t sure. “Oh, it’s hard to say,” he says. “It’s something useful, I guess, if it’s the truth, if there’s a starvation and somebody’s gotta get help in Ottawa. That’s what they were trying to do, I guess. To tell you the truth, I never read the book.”
Thanks to the North’s feeling towards writers, it’s likely Mowat would have been considered a fraud whether he got everything right or not. For his faults he could have repented in the search for authenticity, like Service. Perhaps the North would have forgiven him then. But the truth is Mowat didn’t need to. People of the Deer and his following books on the North sparked mass interest in the place. Students still read them and are coaxed into dreaming of life beyond the 60th parallel. Fifty years on, has Mowat’s stock not been tarnished enough to allow us to accept him, exposed warts and all? We now have guides, such as Goddard, to warn us to read him for his stories and not his facts. So shouldn’t we thank him for turning people’s eyes Northward at some point soon? “We don’t have stories of our land,” Covello says, “except the ones that Pierre Berton tells and Farley Mowat tells. Those are the stories of our land, as far as I can see. And those are the stories that a lot of people love.”
To properly reconsider Mowat’s legacy in the North, you couldn’t do much better than retracing his steps. Writer and filmmaker Karsten Heuer has. Heuer lived in Inuvik for three years, then went on to shoot his popular documentary, Being Caribou, in the northern Yukon. In 2008, as part of his Finding Farley project, which will result in a film and book, Heuer – along with his wife and their two-year-old son – canoed and sailed from their home in Canmore, Alberta to Mowat’s summer home in Nova Scotia. Along the way they retraced Mowat’s literary trips, and encountered his baggage as they did. In Lac la Ronge, Saskatchewan, Heuer ran into historians who “really tore a strip off us for how we were holding up Farley to a high esteem because of all the things he hadn’t quite gotten right.” This encounter, so pointed, changed their perspective. As they headed north by canoe, “everything was thrown into doubt,” Heuer says.
The trio arrived at Nueltin Lake, where several of Mowat’s Northern books are set. “It very much felt like we had been there before,” he says. “We could literally use the description from Never Cry Wolf to steer ourselves from the ruins in this old camp where Farley based himself for a couple summers to the actual wolf den he describes in that book.” A wolf paid a visit to them the following day.
By the end of the trip, as they eventual found Mowat at his summer home, Heuer says his reverence had returned in full. Mowat “really captured the gist of these places, the sense of the people and the sense of the landscape,” he says. He considers Mowat somebody who takes “all sorts of artistic license” to create compelling stories, but does it in a “greater subservience to a greater truth beyond facts.” The two talked at Mowat’s home. “People never quite got what he was doing,” Heuer says. “I think he feels a little bit slighted because he’s been accused of not standing up to something he’s never portrayed himself to be.”
This article was originally published in Up Here magazine.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
A vision for Yellowknife
By Tim Querengesser
I've just returned from a live radio panel on the CBC. I was on air discussing Yellowknife's upcoming municipal election. As anyone who's done live radio will understand, I didn't get to say most of what I'd hoped to say. So, after reading Richard Florida and Spacing magazine, and pondering a Yellowknife of the future for an evening, I've decided to put my notes somewhere for people to read, disagree or agree with and to comment on.
I was asked to ponder if Yellowknife mayoral and council candidates have a vision for the city, and if not, what sort of vision I'd like to see. Here's what I had in my notes.
Yellowknife needs a long-term vision. Big time. It needs a leader who can dream big and inspire people to join their vision and plant their lives here. Without it, people will move here with the booms and leave during the busts.
To achieve this, the mayor and city council should:
Embrace new ideas: Credibility in Yellowknife politics is often built through the length of time you've been here rather than your ideas. That's a problem. Consider that we have one of the youngest, most highly-educated demographic profiles of any city in Canada but an incumbent mayor in his 60s and only four of 16 council candidates younger than 40. Hmm.
Build the infrastructure of citizenship: Why does everyone love Folk on the Rocks? Other than the music, I think it's because it allows us to be Yellowknifers, together. We need more of that. The city should support cultural groups and organizations that are already struggling to make the city more entertaining, livable and recreational, despite the lack of support. How to improve? Build an arts facility that amateurs can afford (ever tried to rent NACC?) to host their events, from indie film premiers to comedy nights to photography exhibits. Further, embrace culture and lifestyle as ways to make Yellowknife a destination city. I'll come here for the work opportunities, sure, but I'll stay for the lifestyle and the sense of community.
Aspire to more: Dreaming big can sometimes lead to big things. Tromso, Norway, at 69 degrees north, has added 30,000 residents since the 1960s not through industrial development but through the soft stuff: they built a university, they marketed their quality of life and recreation, they concentrated on creating a more beautiful city. People move to places for that nowadays. Can we imagine a Yellowknife where people choose to live here but, say, commute to work somewhere in the south? At the moment the inverse is often true. Over in Whitehorse, it isn't. That needs to change.
Mix everyone together: Ever wondered why everyone in one of Canada's most walkable cities feels they need to own a car? We work downtown yet most of us live in suburban areas where there aren't any shops or other services. Many of these areas are homogeneous rather than mixed. Renters live in ghettos while homeowners live in relative splendor. Planning is at the root of a livable, enjoyable city. The cities most cite as great all share common things: they're walkable, they integrate residential space with coffee shops and bookstores and grocery stores, and they stay open. I live downtown and at night, it's my little kingdom: no one's there. How can you have life downtown if the lights go out at 6 p.m.? How can you convince people to come? Culture. Life.
Build a sense of ownership: Living downtown and loving all the benefits that brings, I'm tired of people complaining about how unsafe it is. It's only perceived this way because nobody comes downtown after they leave their office and drive home. Anywhere there are empty streets there will be a feeling of insecurity. On top of people coming to a vibrant downtown after work, we need civically minded people to take their city and improve it. Don't like downtown? Do something to help the people you'd like off the streets. A city of so many civil servants shouldn't struggle with such a concept so much.
I've just returned from a live radio panel on the CBC. I was on air discussing Yellowknife's upcoming municipal election. As anyone who's done live radio will understand, I didn't get to say most of what I'd hoped to say. So, after reading Richard Florida and Spacing magazine, and pondering a Yellowknife of the future for an evening, I've decided to put my notes somewhere for people to read, disagree or agree with and to comment on.
I was asked to ponder if Yellowknife mayoral and council candidates have a vision for the city, and if not, what sort of vision I'd like to see. Here's what I had in my notes.
Yellowknife needs a long-term vision. Big time. It needs a leader who can dream big and inspire people to join their vision and plant their lives here. Without it, people will move here with the booms and leave during the busts.
To achieve this, the mayor and city council should:
Embrace new ideas: Credibility in Yellowknife politics is often built through the length of time you've been here rather than your ideas. That's a problem. Consider that we have one of the youngest, most highly-educated demographic profiles of any city in Canada but an incumbent mayor in his 60s and only four of 16 council candidates younger than 40. Hmm.
Build the infrastructure of citizenship: Why does everyone love Folk on the Rocks? Other than the music, I think it's because it allows us to be Yellowknifers, together. We need more of that. The city should support cultural groups and organizations that are already struggling to make the city more entertaining, livable and recreational, despite the lack of support. How to improve? Build an arts facility that amateurs can afford (ever tried to rent NACC?) to host their events, from indie film premiers to comedy nights to photography exhibits. Further, embrace culture and lifestyle as ways to make Yellowknife a destination city. I'll come here for the work opportunities, sure, but I'll stay for the lifestyle and the sense of community.
Aspire to more: Dreaming big can sometimes lead to big things. Tromso, Norway, at 69 degrees north, has added 30,000 residents since the 1960s not through industrial development but through the soft stuff: they built a university, they marketed their quality of life and recreation, they concentrated on creating a more beautiful city. People move to places for that nowadays. Can we imagine a Yellowknife where people choose to live here but, say, commute to work somewhere in the south? At the moment the inverse is often true. Over in Whitehorse, it isn't. That needs to change.
Mix everyone together: Ever wondered why everyone in one of Canada's most walkable cities feels they need to own a car? We work downtown yet most of us live in suburban areas where there aren't any shops or other services. Many of these areas are homogeneous rather than mixed. Renters live in ghettos while homeowners live in relative splendor. Planning is at the root of a livable, enjoyable city. The cities most cite as great all share common things: they're walkable, they integrate residential space with coffee shops and bookstores and grocery stores, and they stay open. I live downtown and at night, it's my little kingdom: no one's there. How can you have life downtown if the lights go out at 6 p.m.? How can you convince people to come? Culture. Life.
Build a sense of ownership: Living downtown and loving all the benefits that brings, I'm tired of people complaining about how unsafe it is. It's only perceived this way because nobody comes downtown after they leave their office and drive home. Anywhere there are empty streets there will be a feeling of insecurity. On top of people coming to a vibrant downtown after work, we need civically minded people to take their city and improve it. Don't like downtown? Do something to help the people you'd like off the streets. A city of so many civil servants shouldn't struggle with such a concept so much.
Monday, October 5, 2009
The Curse of the Deer
Nearly 80 years ago, the Canadian government tried to nudge people in the Mackenzie River Delta toward a cash economy. Incredibly, the tool they used was a herd of reindeer. Now, after an epic trail drive, an abandoned town, a death, and one man’s frayed sanity, the herd – and its curse – remains
Story and photos by Tim Querengesser
On Richards Island, in a small trailer set beside a massive petroleum camp that looks like a Moon station on the empty tundra, Heinrik Sevä reclines in his cot. “Reindeer I see here is politics,” he says, sipping tea. “That part of it I don’t want. I love the work, but here reindeer belong to the Inuvialuit people.” Tonight the 58-year-old Sami herder is buoyant. For the past several days he’s been living in isolation, herding reindeer out on the empty plains of the Mackenzie Delta with only the trucks driving the ice roads for company. “We don’t make reindeer because it takes too long to cook,” Sevä says, offering me instant noodles instead. After we eat he talks about his culture late into the night. There are now only seven people living in his traditional Sami village in northern Sweden, he says. His father, now deceased, was “full nomadic,” herding reindeer and living in tents, but when Sevä was a boy he was shipped to residential school and disciplined for speaking his language. He emerged determined to retain his Sami-ness, a culture that he says, “is reindeer.” After years working as an electrician he bought his own herd but struggled. Then he learned a reindeer herd in Canada was on the verge of turning wild. He had offers to herd in Mongolia but said no. In 1999, he flew to Tuktoyaktuk.
Tonight, 10 years after that decision, Sevä sits in the trailer slowly removing his reindeer- and seal-skin outerwear. I’m overcome with the ancientness of the scene; even the wind whistling through the trailer sounds timeless. As we talk about the future, though, Sevä becomes crestfallen. Reindeer have been a dream he’s pursued at the expense of many things, he tells me. He’s let go of hope of finding a wife. He’s given up drinking. He’s still struggling with being an immigrant. And now, he’s unsure whether to give up on the dream that brought him here in the first place. “This is like a job now,” he says, a touch bitter. “I see it as work, reindeer work.” Aren’t these reindeer part of you now, I ask? “No,” he says. “I have nothing more to prove. I was thinking I could help out these reindeer, but now I realize more and more it’s something I cannot change.”
When he arrived in the Mackenzie Delta, Sevä found its last reindeer herd. He then discovered the animals were a cursed treasure in a drama that had already swept him into its plot. After the deer made a journey in the 1930s worthy of any religious text, they’ve survived rather than thrived in the delta and divided the place itself into herds. In the largest camp are the locals, who view reindeer (near identical to caribou yet semi-domesticated rather than wild) as they do mission schools – as a harbinger of massive change. In the other group are immigrants from Europe and their progeny, who have dedicated their lives to herding after the strong encouragement, then near desertion of the Canadian government. The story of delta’s last herd is about that second group. They are the last tribe of reindeer people in Canada.
* * *
It’s a crisp April morning in Inuvik and I’ve come to the head office of reindeer herding in Canada – Lloyd Binder’s mottled home “Don’t bother taking your shoes off,” Binder says, at the door. “This is a working house.” After walking through a foyer filled haphazardly with boxed reindeer meat, I pass a room plastered with oversize pages from a book Binder co-authored, The Reindeer Herders of the Mackenzie Delta, and make my way up the stairs to the kitchen. In the room there is a meat slicer on a long table; a cutting board, meat cleaver and scissors hang from the walls; a smoldering cigarette reclines in an ashtray. On the white fridge door are notes scribbled in red marker; nearby is a large stack of empty Budweiser cans, and a beluga whale stomach, hung from a wire to dry. The green linoleum floor has worn though to the plywood in several spots. This house isn’t Binder’s – his sister owns it – but he doesn’t pay rent. We sit at the table. I have a coffee and Binder finishes his cigarette. “You can see my operation here is pretty basic,” he says.
Binder is the first and last descendant of the reindeer tribe in Canada, and he embodies the contradictions of herding in the delta like no one else. He was born in 1952, at Reindeer Station, the town the government built in the ‘30s for the project, located about 60 kilometres north of Inuvik. Growing up, his nickname was “quunek,” Inuvialuktun for reindeer. His mother, Ellen, is the daughter of Anna and Mikkel Pulk. In 1932 she and her parents arrived among the first wave of Norwegian Sami hired by Canada. It was here she met, Otto, Binder’s father, who was born in Cambridge Bay but came to the delta to be a herder. Growing up, Binder says his mixed-race family, “became a little tribe unto itself, because we were reindeer people.” That’s amplified today. His parents, uncles, aunts and a few siblings live on the same block and help with the business when they can.
Binder calls himself a “half-breed” and seems to understand himself as a partial outsider to both of his ethnic halves. Perhaps because of reindeer, though, he’s connected deeply with his Sami herding roots, evidenced by the Sàpmi flag sticker on his front door, his six trips to Norway and his “workable” ability to speak the language. He’s slightly pear shaped and typically wears loose-fitting t-shirts, navy workpants and black leather boots. His ice-blue eyes, sunk behind large glasses, are unmistakably shaped like an Inuk, yet reside in the compact, cherub-like face of a Sami. In conversation, Binder reminds of troubled kid – aloof, sometimes suspicious, yet on some level eager to connect. Talking to him on the phone can be a jarring experience – he answers with an abrupt “Lloyd.” My secret weapon today is reindeer. I tell him I’m interested and he melts, just a little. “Reindeer is what we do,” Binder says.
He has paid deeply for these connections. Since buying the herd along with his parents and a few other investors in 2002 – after 30 years working in construction and the civil service – his long dream of reconciling his reindeer past was realized, only to run against the delta itself. Bad feelings about reindeer run deep. During the project’s early days, Reindeer Station was largely closed to the locals, seeding the bitterness. “In effect it was a government village,” Binder says. In 1933, the reindeer grazing preserve, which Binder’s herd still uses, was created near Tuktoyaktuk, and locals suddenly required permits to use the land. Defiance took deeper root. Forced re-settlement and mission schools became facts of life. Reindeer herding was viewed as another force of colonialism. It’s only in this context that you can understand why, as Binder says of herding, “to the Inuvialuit, you may as well be a janitor.” As we talk, he shows me grizzly photographs of severed heads of reindeer, complete with coloured ear tags, left behind by poachers. “What we didn’t realize when we bought the herd is that there was a very large lingering resentment towards reindeer among the Inuvailuit, primarily in Tuk,” Binder says. What rubs him most, though, is that few locals now survive by hunting and trapping. Even if they tried, he says, they’d struggle – the caribou are ranging elsewhere these days. Still, people have a “mind block” against paying money for “country food” because of lingering memories of getting caribou for free, he says. “All of these things set you up for a really bad attitude towards reindeer. It was pretty naïve of me to think it’d be an easy go.”
Binder has nearly been broken by his dream. Herding reindeer in ideal conditions is rarely a cash cow, and in the delta it’s proven to be a money sink. He took on a large debt to buy the herd, which has now swollen to more than $300,000. He’s become tied to goodwill and grants, and lives “on the cusp of personal and corporate bankruptcy.” Everything he owns is breaking or broken, including some of his relationships. Even his ancient Ford pickup was given to him in charity. He bears evidence of this struggle, too: The right half of his front teeth are missing after a bridge came off. He says he hasn’t had the money or energy to get them fixed. “You’re treated differently as a toothless person, let me tell you,” he says. As we talk, he tells me former herd owner, William Nasogaluak, once told him, “This business is all about heartbreak.” It remains true. At 57, the only thing Binder owns anymore is a herd of 3,000 reindeer.
* * *
The next morning, after waking myself with a snore, Sevä and I scarf down a breakfast of fats – bacon, buttered toast and eraser-sized chunks of cheddar cheese. “I don’t think a vegetarian can survive out in the tundra,” Sevä says. I marvel at his curly toe boots and wolf fur mittens as we dress for the day. When we emerge into the morning sun, Sevä takes a large jerry can from the sledge behind his snowmobile and tops up his gas tank. Nearby I notice a black garbage bag with reindeer legs poking out: Sevä’s improvised freezer. “Ready to be a herder?” he yells. I eagerly mount my snowmobile.
I ride in Sevä’s white-wash, flying down the great Mackenzie at well more than 100 km/hr. Through the clouds I occasionally spot him huddled beneath his machine’s windscreen. His traditional green poncho and mittens flap in the frigid wind. The view is surreal. I wonder to myself, Is this a dream? I conclude that it is, for both Sevä and for me – though for him it’s about to end. After a few minutes we come to the snowmobile tracks he left on the land after leaving the herd yesterday, and like Hansel and Gretel we use them to re-trace his route back. After 10 minutes we’re there – except I don’t realize it. Looking at reindeer in the Mackenzie Delta is like looking at caribou: They blend in. The herd stands before me atop a gentle ridge and dig in the snow to graze in a flat. I remove my helmet to hear the cotton-in-your-ears quiet. The question floats back: Am I dreaming?
I now have an enviable problem. A writer is supposed to remain detached, but that’s impossible if you’re herding the last reindeer herd in Canada, remnants from a bizarre scheme from the reindeer-transplant crazed near the turn of the century. Screw detached: I’m giddy and engaged. I drive toward the reindeer and spook them forward as if my snowmobile has an invisible plow. As Sevä concentrates on the main herd, I pick up the stragglers, stopping mere feet away for a moment to marvel at their majesty as they root through the snow for food. But in this dream there’s a heavier feeling, too. It’s as if I’m looking at ghosts, or bringing old photographs of forgotten things to life with my eyes. I realize these reindeer could disappear in a snap. And I realize what Sevä meant about them belonging to the Inuvialuit. They will ultimately decide whether they remain or disappear.
We stop for some tea and to let the animals rest. Sevä pulls out the sandwiches I made this morning with Klix canned meat and cheddar cheese – the fatty treats of the trailer pantry. “So, what do you think?” he asks, with the warmth of a friend. “You want to stop writing and start being a herder?”
* * *
Reindeer are not indigenous to Canada but thrive wherever caribou do. They belong to the same deer species but form a different subspecies, distinguishable by shorter legs, heavier rumps and white spots. Reindeer are more sedentary and can become quite comfortable around people, making them ideal candidates for animal husbandry – which the Sami have practiced for centuries. In the circumpolar Arctic there are an estimated 1.4-million domesticated reindeer, the majority of which range in Russia. In Alaska, their numbers once hit 640,000 but now have shrunk to 30,000, with 20 dedicated herders. At its peak, the delta herd grew to nearly 10,000 deer. Because of their tameness and unmatched ability to adapt, reindeer have convinced many a frontier dreamer that they can become the cattle of the North. They have been transplanted in Iceland, Greenland, Alaska and, strangely, the South Georgia Islands off the southern coast of Argentina. In Canada they have been imported to the Mackenzie Delta, Baffin Island, the Belcher Islands, the South Slave region of the NWT, Newfoundland and Quebec. Despite early success few of these projects have flourished over the long term.
The last of these Canadian herds is in the delta. It’s fitting they survive the longest, as they endured an epic journey to get here. In 1929, the Canadian government bought 3,000 deer from the Lomen Brothers, a massive reindeer-meat company on the west coast of Alaska, for $195,000. The price included delivery, and that was no small catch. The deer were driven west for 2,400-kilometres across the breadth of Alaska and northern Yukon – swollen rivers, tundra plains, the Brooks and Richards mountains and finally, the icy Mackenzie Delta. A Sami herder named Andrew Bahr, later known as “Arctic Moses,” led the march. Expected to take 18 months, the journey eventually took five years. In 1935, Time lionized Bahr, calling the drive “the greatest man-managed animal trek in history.”
The idea had come from Alaska too. In the 1890s, after whales were decimated by over fishing, fears of mass starvation amongst the Inuit prompted the United States government to buy reindeer from Siberia, hire Sami herders on contract and set up herds. The results were promising. So, in the 1920s, when migration changes saw the Bluenose caribou leave the delta, the Canadian government copied the plan. The government’s goal was a reliable source of food for people, but hoped reindeer herding would further push aboriginals away hunting.
As Dick North writes in Arctic Exodus, at the time the idea for reindeer in the delta was hatched, the Montreal Gazette reported, “If success can be achieved after the reindeer have been introduced . . . a new era may be opened up for Canada’s northland. A meat industry of great proportions may be developed . . .” Indeed, Erling Porsild, one the architects of the Canadian reindeer experiment, had estimated 250,000 deer could be supported without impacting the native caribou. What the dreamers couldn’t develop was a warm reception the reindeer industry. Transplanting animals in a place that’s depended on indigenous animals for thousands of years meant changing the people in a flash. Consider that many aboriginals were given jobs on herds and asked to ski out to the animals, something they’d never done. A few intrepid people tried to make a go of it, but most of the Inuvialuit herds lasted a few years at most. The reindeer were the proxy in a bigger battle, over culture.
* * *
Inuvik is a project, much like the reindeer that live to its north. Bureaucrats created the town in hopes of solving a problem. Today, set along the lazy valley of the spindling Mackenzie River delta, Inuvik serves as a link between the area’s hyper-modern future and its ancient past, with Inuvialuit prints sold in galleries next to oil and gas companies advertising their “readiness” for a pipeline. The constant question in such a place is what comes next? And to ponder that, explicitly for reindeer, I go to their past: Ellen and Otto Binder.
I meet Ellen first. Inside the small house she shares with Otto, there is a near museum-sized collection of artifacts of her Sami family in Canada. She shows me a photograph taken in 1930, in Germany. In it stand her parents. They were members of a cultural tour formed by the German government that featured Sami people and their reindeer. Had it not been for that trip, Ellen says, her mother once told her they might not have moved to Canada.
But they did come, 78 years ago, “fulfilling their dreams,” she says. “It was the dirty ‘30s. It was tough times all over the world.” And the Canadian reindeer project was sold to Sami, “as a mission of mercy.” Of course, that wasn’t exactly what they found when the arrived with their newborn girl, Ellen. And no one told them they’d be moving to the most remote part of Canada. Perhaps the same story can be said of the thousands of Sami that have moved like global nomads wherever governments have tried to transplant reindeer.
“Reindeer is what brought us here,” Ellen says. She adds that Sami people never leave a mark where they go, and can thus disappear without a trace. “It would be nice to be more optimistic that there will always be a herd,” she says, noting the pipeline and the lifestyle mean there likely won’t be. “Lloyd will give it one last hurrah.”
“It’s hard for my boy Lloyd,” Otto adds the following day. I visit him in the hospital where he’s recovering from the flu. “I guess he’s doing if for mom and dad. We keep telling him when you work with reindeer you don’t make money. Sometimes I feel like we should drive them to the mountains. It’s an interesting life but it’s coming to an end.”
* * *
Binder’s phone rings. “Lloyd,” he answers. There’s a pause. “Regular 20 pound box? Oh, saddle roasts. Okay I’ll bring one by.” This is Binder’s business in a nut – a cottage industry (last year he slaughtered 120 animals) serving Inuvik with the wraith of bigger potential constantly looming overhead. Is there really potential in reindeer, I ask? “Absolutely,” Binder says. “The reality is the caribou aren’t going to be here soon.” He’s sold 1,200 kilograms to local governments to feed his newest market – elders. “A lot of the elders are happy to get a replacement at a reasonable price.”
Though Binder’s near horizon looks a bit brighter, perhaps this is just another light in an endless tunnel. Writ large in reindeer experiments around the world is initial success, which seeds hope, then a slow withering failure that punishes any who hold on. Consider the challenges. Meat is the main product and can supply the local market without much infrastructure. Moving up to national distribution requires massively improved facilities for slaughtering, packaging, refrigeration and shipping – not to mention good marketing and bureaucracy gymnastics. Taking that international requires more again. Reindeer Station had a slaughterhouse that could process 100 carcasses a day; out on Richards Island, Binder says his two man crews can process four animals in a 12-hour day. The other potential product is antler velvet. Several Asian countries swear by the stuff as a health supplement, and both male and female reindeer grow antlers. Unfortunately, Canadian velvet imports to Korea have been crippled since 2002, when Chronic Wasting Disease was found in Elk herds in Alberta. The Arctic also has an incredible number of predators – wolves, bears, lynx. Even ravens kill reindeer, pecking out the eyes of fawns then attacking them in groups. There’s the ever-present threat of caribou luring reindeer away and turning them wild. And it’s the North, so any equipment required will break down in the cold.
That he has failed against these odds should allow Binder a kind of ultimate peace, a time when it’s okay to lay down his arms. But Binder has been galvanized into a reindeer-or-nothing attitude. Without the animals, his life would be without its gravity. He’s still hot about what his parents faced as a result of the reindeer project. “It’s run them to the ground,” he says, bitterly. And as he says, as a herder his retirement savings are held in reindeer. But as we talk, I sense the real drive is to make something positive come of tragedy. Binder is a man who defines his life by his family and seems haunted by the events that have touched it through herding. In 2003, he tells me, his cousin Hiram went missing while working with the herd. “It was December 24 and I got a call from Hiram,” Binder says, dragging deeply on a du Maurier and slugging back a mouthful of Budweiser. “There was a blizzard. My father told him to stay put. But there was no call from him the next day. There was no call the next day again. We thought we’d make it for sure but we just didn’t have the equipment and had to turn back. On the third day we finally made it. There was no fire in the cabin, snow was blown over the door, the cellphone was dead. No Hiram. We did a full-scale search with helicopters and Rangers. We found his skidoo, but no Hiram. We haven’t found him yet. I feel responsible. I can’t figure out why he went out,” he says. He looks at me for a while then continues to smoke his cigarette.
After a while I ask, ‘Why are you still doing this?’ “What’s kept me going is not my virtue,” says the head of Canada’s last reindeer tribe. “I’m bull-headed and ignore people. Maybe if it weren’t for those character flaws I would have fallen through years ago. Reindeer herding is not rational. It’s a point of lifestyle and pride. It’s an affinity I’m cursed with, not blessed.”
On Richards Island, in a small trailer set beside a massive petroleum camp that looks like a Moon station on the empty tundra, Heinrik Sevä reclines in his cot. “Reindeer I see here is politics,” he says, sipping tea. “That part of it I don’t want. I love the work, but here reindeer belong to the Inuvialuit people.” Tonight the 58-year-old Sami herder is buoyant. For the past several days he’s been living in isolation, herding reindeer out on the empty plains of the Mackenzie Delta with only the trucks driving the ice roads for company. “We don’t make reindeer because it takes too long to cook,” Sevä says, offering me instant noodles instead. After we eat he talks about his culture late into the night. There are now only seven people living in his traditional Sami village in northern Sweden, he says. His father, now deceased, was “full nomadic,” herding reindeer and living in tents, but when Sevä was a boy he was shipped to residential school and disciplined for speaking his language. He emerged determined to retain his Sami-ness, a culture that he says, “is reindeer.” After years working as an electrician he bought his own herd but struggled. Then he learned a reindeer herd in Canada was on the verge of turning wild. He had offers to herd in Mongolia but said no. In 1999, he flew to Tuktoyaktuk.
Tonight, 10 years after that decision, Sevä sits in the trailer slowly removing his reindeer- and seal-skin outerwear. I’m overcome with the ancientness of the scene; even the wind whistling through the trailer sounds timeless. As we talk about the future, though, Sevä becomes crestfallen. Reindeer have been a dream he’s pursued at the expense of many things, he tells me. He’s let go of hope of finding a wife. He’s given up drinking. He’s still struggling with being an immigrant. And now, he’s unsure whether to give up on the dream that brought him here in the first place. “This is like a job now,” he says, a touch bitter. “I see it as work, reindeer work.” Aren’t these reindeer part of you now, I ask? “No,” he says. “I have nothing more to prove. I was thinking I could help out these reindeer, but now I realize more and more it’s something I cannot change.”
When he arrived in the Mackenzie Delta, Sevä found its last reindeer herd. He then discovered the animals were a cursed treasure in a drama that had already swept him into its plot. After the deer made a journey in the 1930s worthy of any religious text, they’ve survived rather than thrived in the delta and divided the place itself into herds. In the largest camp are the locals, who view reindeer (near identical to caribou yet semi-domesticated rather than wild) as they do mission schools – as a harbinger of massive change. In the other group are immigrants from Europe and their progeny, who have dedicated their lives to herding after the strong encouragement, then near desertion of the Canadian government. The story of delta’s last herd is about that second group. They are the last tribe of reindeer people in Canada.
* * *
It’s a crisp April morning in Inuvik and I’ve come to the head office of reindeer herding in Canada – Lloyd Binder’s mottled home “Don’t bother taking your shoes off,” Binder says, at the door. “This is a working house.” After walking through a foyer filled haphazardly with boxed reindeer meat, I pass a room plastered with oversize pages from a book Binder co-authored, The Reindeer Herders of the Mackenzie Delta, and make my way up the stairs to the kitchen. In the room there is a meat slicer on a long table; a cutting board, meat cleaver and scissors hang from the walls; a smoldering cigarette reclines in an ashtray. On the white fridge door are notes scribbled in red marker; nearby is a large stack of empty Budweiser cans, and a beluga whale stomach, hung from a wire to dry. The green linoleum floor has worn though to the plywood in several spots. This house isn’t Binder’s – his sister owns it – but he doesn’t pay rent. We sit at the table. I have a coffee and Binder finishes his cigarette. “You can see my operation here is pretty basic,” he says.
Binder is the first and last descendant of the reindeer tribe in Canada, and he embodies the contradictions of herding in the delta like no one else. He was born in 1952, at Reindeer Station, the town the government built in the ‘30s for the project, located about 60 kilometres north of Inuvik. Growing up, his nickname was “quunek,” Inuvialuktun for reindeer. His mother, Ellen, is the daughter of Anna and Mikkel Pulk. In 1932 she and her parents arrived among the first wave of Norwegian Sami hired by Canada. It was here she met, Otto, Binder’s father, who was born in Cambridge Bay but came to the delta to be a herder. Growing up, Binder says his mixed-race family, “became a little tribe unto itself, because we were reindeer people.” That’s amplified today. His parents, uncles, aunts and a few siblings live on the same block and help with the business when they can.
Binder calls himself a “half-breed” and seems to understand himself as a partial outsider to both of his ethnic halves. Perhaps because of reindeer, though, he’s connected deeply with his Sami herding roots, evidenced by the Sàpmi flag sticker on his front door, his six trips to Norway and his “workable” ability to speak the language. He’s slightly pear shaped and typically wears loose-fitting t-shirts, navy workpants and black leather boots. His ice-blue eyes, sunk behind large glasses, are unmistakably shaped like an Inuk, yet reside in the compact, cherub-like face of a Sami. In conversation, Binder reminds of troubled kid – aloof, sometimes suspicious, yet on some level eager to connect. Talking to him on the phone can be a jarring experience – he answers with an abrupt “Lloyd.” My secret weapon today is reindeer. I tell him I’m interested and he melts, just a little. “Reindeer is what we do,” Binder says.
He has paid deeply for these connections. Since buying the herd along with his parents and a few other investors in 2002 – after 30 years working in construction and the civil service – his long dream of reconciling his reindeer past was realized, only to run against the delta itself. Bad feelings about reindeer run deep. During the project’s early days, Reindeer Station was largely closed to the locals, seeding the bitterness. “In effect it was a government village,” Binder says. In 1933, the reindeer grazing preserve, which Binder’s herd still uses, was created near Tuktoyaktuk, and locals suddenly required permits to use the land. Defiance took deeper root. Forced re-settlement and mission schools became facts of life. Reindeer herding was viewed as another force of colonialism. It’s only in this context that you can understand why, as Binder says of herding, “to the Inuvialuit, you may as well be a janitor.” As we talk, he shows me grizzly photographs of severed heads of reindeer, complete with coloured ear tags, left behind by poachers. “What we didn’t realize when we bought the herd is that there was a very large lingering resentment towards reindeer among the Inuvailuit, primarily in Tuk,” Binder says. What rubs him most, though, is that few locals now survive by hunting and trapping. Even if they tried, he says, they’d struggle – the caribou are ranging elsewhere these days. Still, people have a “mind block” against paying money for “country food” because of lingering memories of getting caribou for free, he says. “All of these things set you up for a really bad attitude towards reindeer. It was pretty naïve of me to think it’d be an easy go.”
Binder has nearly been broken by his dream. Herding reindeer in ideal conditions is rarely a cash cow, and in the delta it’s proven to be a money sink. He took on a large debt to buy the herd, which has now swollen to more than $300,000. He’s become tied to goodwill and grants, and lives “on the cusp of personal and corporate bankruptcy.” Everything he owns is breaking or broken, including some of his relationships. Even his ancient Ford pickup was given to him in charity. He bears evidence of this struggle, too: The right half of his front teeth are missing after a bridge came off. He says he hasn’t had the money or energy to get them fixed. “You’re treated differently as a toothless person, let me tell you,” he says. As we talk, he tells me former herd owner, William Nasogaluak, once told him, “This business is all about heartbreak.” It remains true. At 57, the only thing Binder owns anymore is a herd of 3,000 reindeer.
* * *
The next morning, after waking myself with a snore, Sevä and I scarf down a breakfast of fats – bacon, buttered toast and eraser-sized chunks of cheddar cheese. “I don’t think a vegetarian can survive out in the tundra,” Sevä says. I marvel at his curly toe boots and wolf fur mittens as we dress for the day. When we emerge into the morning sun, Sevä takes a large jerry can from the sledge behind his snowmobile and tops up his gas tank. Nearby I notice a black garbage bag with reindeer legs poking out: Sevä’s improvised freezer. “Ready to be a herder?” he yells. I eagerly mount my snowmobile.
I ride in Sevä’s white-wash, flying down the great Mackenzie at well more than 100 km/hr. Through the clouds I occasionally spot him huddled beneath his machine’s windscreen. His traditional green poncho and mittens flap in the frigid wind. The view is surreal. I wonder to myself, Is this a dream? I conclude that it is, for both Sevä and for me – though for him it’s about to end. After a few minutes we come to the snowmobile tracks he left on the land after leaving the herd yesterday, and like Hansel and Gretel we use them to re-trace his route back. After 10 minutes we’re there – except I don’t realize it. Looking at reindeer in the Mackenzie Delta is like looking at caribou: They blend in. The herd stands before me atop a gentle ridge and dig in the snow to graze in a flat. I remove my helmet to hear the cotton-in-your-ears quiet. The question floats back: Am I dreaming?
I now have an enviable problem. A writer is supposed to remain detached, but that’s impossible if you’re herding the last reindeer herd in Canada, remnants from a bizarre scheme from the reindeer-transplant crazed near the turn of the century. Screw detached: I’m giddy and engaged. I drive toward the reindeer and spook them forward as if my snowmobile has an invisible plow. As Sevä concentrates on the main herd, I pick up the stragglers, stopping mere feet away for a moment to marvel at their majesty as they root through the snow for food. But in this dream there’s a heavier feeling, too. It’s as if I’m looking at ghosts, or bringing old photographs of forgotten things to life with my eyes. I realize these reindeer could disappear in a snap. And I realize what Sevä meant about them belonging to the Inuvialuit. They will ultimately decide whether they remain or disappear.
We stop for some tea and to let the animals rest. Sevä pulls out the sandwiches I made this morning with Klix canned meat and cheddar cheese – the fatty treats of the trailer pantry. “So, what do you think?” he asks, with the warmth of a friend. “You want to stop writing and start being a herder?”
* * *
Reindeer are not indigenous to Canada but thrive wherever caribou do. They belong to the same deer species but form a different subspecies, distinguishable by shorter legs, heavier rumps and white spots. Reindeer are more sedentary and can become quite comfortable around people, making them ideal candidates for animal husbandry – which the Sami have practiced for centuries. In the circumpolar Arctic there are an estimated 1.4-million domesticated reindeer, the majority of which range in Russia. In Alaska, their numbers once hit 640,000 but now have shrunk to 30,000, with 20 dedicated herders. At its peak, the delta herd grew to nearly 10,000 deer. Because of their tameness and unmatched ability to adapt, reindeer have convinced many a frontier dreamer that they can become the cattle of the North. They have been transplanted in Iceland, Greenland, Alaska and, strangely, the South Georgia Islands off the southern coast of Argentina. In Canada they have been imported to the Mackenzie Delta, Baffin Island, the Belcher Islands, the South Slave region of the NWT, Newfoundland and Quebec. Despite early success few of these projects have flourished over the long term.
The last of these Canadian herds is in the delta. It’s fitting they survive the longest, as they endured an epic journey to get here. In 1929, the Canadian government bought 3,000 deer from the Lomen Brothers, a massive reindeer-meat company on the west coast of Alaska, for $195,000. The price included delivery, and that was no small catch. The deer were driven west for 2,400-kilometres across the breadth of Alaska and northern Yukon – swollen rivers, tundra plains, the Brooks and Richards mountains and finally, the icy Mackenzie Delta. A Sami herder named Andrew Bahr, later known as “Arctic Moses,” led the march. Expected to take 18 months, the journey eventually took five years. In 1935, Time lionized Bahr, calling the drive “the greatest man-managed animal trek in history.”
The idea had come from Alaska too. In the 1890s, after whales were decimated by over fishing, fears of mass starvation amongst the Inuit prompted the United States government to buy reindeer from Siberia, hire Sami herders on contract and set up herds. The results were promising. So, in the 1920s, when migration changes saw the Bluenose caribou leave the delta, the Canadian government copied the plan. The government’s goal was a reliable source of food for people, but hoped reindeer herding would further push aboriginals away hunting.
As Dick North writes in Arctic Exodus, at the time the idea for reindeer in the delta was hatched, the Montreal Gazette reported, “If success can be achieved after the reindeer have been introduced . . . a new era may be opened up for Canada’s northland. A meat industry of great proportions may be developed . . .” Indeed, Erling Porsild, one the architects of the Canadian reindeer experiment, had estimated 250,000 deer could be supported without impacting the native caribou. What the dreamers couldn’t develop was a warm reception the reindeer industry. Transplanting animals in a place that’s depended on indigenous animals for thousands of years meant changing the people in a flash. Consider that many aboriginals were given jobs on herds and asked to ski out to the animals, something they’d never done. A few intrepid people tried to make a go of it, but most of the Inuvialuit herds lasted a few years at most. The reindeer were the proxy in a bigger battle, over culture.
* * *
Inuvik is a project, much like the reindeer that live to its north. Bureaucrats created the town in hopes of solving a problem. Today, set along the lazy valley of the spindling Mackenzie River delta, Inuvik serves as a link between the area’s hyper-modern future and its ancient past, with Inuvialuit prints sold in galleries next to oil and gas companies advertising their “readiness” for a pipeline. The constant question in such a place is what comes next? And to ponder that, explicitly for reindeer, I go to their past: Ellen and Otto Binder.
I meet Ellen first. Inside the small house she shares with Otto, there is a near museum-sized collection of artifacts of her Sami family in Canada. She shows me a photograph taken in 1930, in Germany. In it stand her parents. They were members of a cultural tour formed by the German government that featured Sami people and their reindeer. Had it not been for that trip, Ellen says, her mother once told her they might not have moved to Canada.
But they did come, 78 years ago, “fulfilling their dreams,” she says. “It was the dirty ‘30s. It was tough times all over the world.” And the Canadian reindeer project was sold to Sami, “as a mission of mercy.” Of course, that wasn’t exactly what they found when the arrived with their newborn girl, Ellen. And no one told them they’d be moving to the most remote part of Canada. Perhaps the same story can be said of the thousands of Sami that have moved like global nomads wherever governments have tried to transplant reindeer.
“Reindeer is what brought us here,” Ellen says. She adds that Sami people never leave a mark where they go, and can thus disappear without a trace. “It would be nice to be more optimistic that there will always be a herd,” she says, noting the pipeline and the lifestyle mean there likely won’t be. “Lloyd will give it one last hurrah.”
“It’s hard for my boy Lloyd,” Otto adds the following day. I visit him in the hospital where he’s recovering from the flu. “I guess he’s doing if for mom and dad. We keep telling him when you work with reindeer you don’t make money. Sometimes I feel like we should drive them to the mountains. It’s an interesting life but it’s coming to an end.”
* * *
Binder’s phone rings. “Lloyd,” he answers. There’s a pause. “Regular 20 pound box? Oh, saddle roasts. Okay I’ll bring one by.” This is Binder’s business in a nut – a cottage industry (last year he slaughtered 120 animals) serving Inuvik with the wraith of bigger potential constantly looming overhead. Is there really potential in reindeer, I ask? “Absolutely,” Binder says. “The reality is the caribou aren’t going to be here soon.” He’s sold 1,200 kilograms to local governments to feed his newest market – elders. “A lot of the elders are happy to get a replacement at a reasonable price.”
Though Binder’s near horizon looks a bit brighter, perhaps this is just another light in an endless tunnel. Writ large in reindeer experiments around the world is initial success, which seeds hope, then a slow withering failure that punishes any who hold on. Consider the challenges. Meat is the main product and can supply the local market without much infrastructure. Moving up to national distribution requires massively improved facilities for slaughtering, packaging, refrigeration and shipping – not to mention good marketing and bureaucracy gymnastics. Taking that international requires more again. Reindeer Station had a slaughterhouse that could process 100 carcasses a day; out on Richards Island, Binder says his two man crews can process four animals in a 12-hour day. The other potential product is antler velvet. Several Asian countries swear by the stuff as a health supplement, and both male and female reindeer grow antlers. Unfortunately, Canadian velvet imports to Korea have been crippled since 2002, when Chronic Wasting Disease was found in Elk herds in Alberta. The Arctic also has an incredible number of predators – wolves, bears, lynx. Even ravens kill reindeer, pecking out the eyes of fawns then attacking them in groups. There’s the ever-present threat of caribou luring reindeer away and turning them wild. And it’s the North, so any equipment required will break down in the cold.
That he has failed against these odds should allow Binder a kind of ultimate peace, a time when it’s okay to lay down his arms. But Binder has been galvanized into a reindeer-or-nothing attitude. Without the animals, his life would be without its gravity. He’s still hot about what his parents faced as a result of the reindeer project. “It’s run them to the ground,” he says, bitterly. And as he says, as a herder his retirement savings are held in reindeer. But as we talk, I sense the real drive is to make something positive come of tragedy. Binder is a man who defines his life by his family and seems haunted by the events that have touched it through herding. In 2003, he tells me, his cousin Hiram went missing while working with the herd. “It was December 24 and I got a call from Hiram,” Binder says, dragging deeply on a du Maurier and slugging back a mouthful of Budweiser. “There was a blizzard. My father told him to stay put. But there was no call from him the next day. There was no call the next day again. We thought we’d make it for sure but we just didn’t have the equipment and had to turn back. On the third day we finally made it. There was no fire in the cabin, snow was blown over the door, the cellphone was dead. No Hiram. We did a full-scale search with helicopters and Rangers. We found his skidoo, but no Hiram. We haven’t found him yet. I feel responsible. I can’t figure out why he went out,” he says. He looks at me for a while then continues to smoke his cigarette.
After a while I ask, ‘Why are you still doing this?’ “What’s kept me going is not my virtue,” says the head of Canada’s last reindeer tribe. “I’m bull-headed and ignore people. Maybe if it weren’t for those character flaws I would have fallen through years ago. Reindeer herding is not rational. It’s a point of lifestyle and pride. It’s an affinity I’m cursed with, not blessed.”
Monday, September 28, 2009
Don't let your domain-name expire
Lessons learned the hard way on the internet can create embarrassing, maddening consequences. Take my name. It used to form a direct link to my writing portfolio and blog on the internet: If you could spell it, you typed my first and last name in your browser and then added .com at the end. And then, in a few seconds, my namesake web page appeared.
But no longer. No, I got lazy and allowed my domain name to expire. What could happen? I figured: It's my name. No one else would want the mouthful of vowels led by the least-liked consonant in the alphabet that is my surname. Well, I was wrong. Turns out some creepy imp out there in the internet cloud has bought my domain name (which I think, by rights, is mine -- most of it is on my birth certificate, after all) and plunked a bunch of nonsensical garbage on it. What his or her purpose is, I don't know. All I do know is that I feel a touch ripped off.
So, to read anything I've had published in magazines and newspapers, you'll have to come here, to timquerengesserblog.com. As always, I hope you enjoy it. -Tim
But no longer. No, I got lazy and allowed my domain name to expire. What could happen? I figured: It's my name. No one else would want the mouthful of vowels led by the least-liked consonant in the alphabet that is my surname. Well, I was wrong. Turns out some creepy imp out there in the internet cloud has bought my domain name (which I think, by rights, is mine -- most of it is on my birth certificate, after all) and plunked a bunch of nonsensical garbage on it. What his or her purpose is, I don't know. All I do know is that I feel a touch ripped off.
So, to read anything I've had published in magazines and newspapers, you'll have to come here, to timquerengesserblog.com. As always, I hope you enjoy it. -Tim
Houseboat Days
By Tim Querengesser
The bliss and perils of life on Canada’s northern waters.
Published in Maisonneuve. Read it here . . .
The bliss and perils of life on Canada’s northern waters.
Published in Maisonneuve. Read it here . . .
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