HARVESTING FOOD FROM LAND AND SEA TO SURVIVE
Life can be harsh in Salluit, yet Christopher Curtis found beauty, hope and optimism. This is Part 3 of a seven-part series
SALLUIT Michael Cameron sparks the ignition on his snowmobile and the machine comes roaring to life.
He zips toward the shore before squeezing the accelerator and making a break for the sea. The village begins to disappear from his rear-view mirror. Soon there is only ice, snow and the rocky coastline for miles.
In Salluit, freedom is a full tank of gas and the sound of a four-stroke engine revving into the horizon. The snowmobile, to Cameron, is an indispensable part of his job.
As the game warden in Salluit, Cameron enforces the hunting regulations that apply to the region’s Inuit. Though much of his job is administrative in nature, he spends chunks of his workweek navigating the tundra to check in on hunters and fishermen.
Hunting and fishing in the North are not mere leisure activities. The meat harvested from the land and sea account for at least 50 per cent of the food supply for most families in the region. Because the cost of a typical grocery bill in remote Nunavik can run a family twice what it would it down south, hunting and fishing are at the core of the region’s economy.
“This is how you feed your family, how you feed your community,” Cameron said. “The set of skills you need to survive out here take a lifetime to master. I’ve been at it for decades and I still learn every time I go out.”
One researcher says inflated food prices are one of the major factors behind poverty rates in the north.
“Inuit pay the same sales tax we do. So when they ’ve spent 75 or 100 per cent more on a bag of groceries, they’re also paying 75 or 100 per cent higher sales tax,” said Gérard Duhaime, an anthropologist who studies food insecurity in Nunavik.
“So you have a region of the province where poverty rates are four times what they are in the rest of Quebec, and they’re being squeezed every week by this exorbitant grocery bill. It’s no wonder hunting and fishing are so crucial to surviving in Nunavik.”
Adamie Papigatuk says he learned to shoot standing on the deck of a Peterhead, struggling to keep the shotgun steady as he pointed it toward a herd of seals.
“It was pretty hard. You’re trying to shoot a small dot, the boat is rocking and you want to impress your father,” said Papigatuk, Salluit’s town manager. “I really wanted to get my first seal, so my father gave me a .20 gauge shotgun. It was sort of cheating, but it’s a big deal to get that first one.”
By the time he was a teenager, Papigatuk and his friends would scale the mountains on the edge of Salluit to track fowl, mainly geese, owls and ptarmigan.
Most children in Salluit are taught to fire a .22 calibre rifle by their 10th birthday.
And with enough practice, an Inuk teenager can track, shoot and carve apart a 400-pound caribou in under an hour.
But the stability of that ecosystem is threatened by dramatic changes to Nunavik’s environment. A 2013 study spearheaded by Université Laval found that 89 per cent of the “suitable area” for caribou in Quebec, Labrador and Ontario could disappear within 60 years.
A combination of warmer-thanaverage summers and shorter winters have eroded the caribou’s habitat. That is already having a devastating effect on populations. Further upending the ecosystem are the access roads and mine shafts built to sustain nickel extraction in the region.
Though there remain an estimated 199,000 caribou in the Leaf River herd — which roams from the expansive tundra between the east coast of Hudson Bay and Ungava Bay — its population has dropped by 64 per cent in the past six years.
In an effort to stave off extinction, Quebec’s wildlife ministry has announced a ban on sport hunting of the herd for 2018 and 2019.
The trend is even more alarming within the province’s other major group of caribou: the George River herd.
With fewer than 9,000 caribou remaining, its population is down 98 per cent since 2001.
“When the caribou start to go, you have to wonder what’s left for the wolves that hunt them to eat,” said Steeve Côté, one of the caribou study’s authors.
“And when the wolves don’t hunt caribou, the foxes don’t get to pick at the carcasses and it goes on down the line like that, affecting everything in the ecosystem.
“Of course, this jeopardizes the way of life that sustained the Inuit and the Innu for generations. … Hope is not lost, but the herd is still declining. Survival and recruitment have slightly improved, but we need stronger increases.”
The stakes are unimaginably high for Cameron’s family, his village and his people. Hunting and trapping is what sustains life in the North, but it’s also a central part of who Cameron is.
His father is a Scottish immigrant who came to northern Quebec to work as a fur trader for the Hudson Bay Company more than 50 years ago. His mother, an Inuk, did her best to steep Cameron in the language and practices of the Inuit, but the boy’s mixed heritage made it difficult for him to gain acceptance.
“It took a few years to get to know people and be accepted even though my mother’s from here,” Cameron said. “You get the double whammy of racism. You’re too much of an Inuk to be considered white, you’re too white to be considered an Inuk. It was a tricky thing to navigate as a kid.”
He was well into his teens the first time his uncle let him fire a shot. They’d walked past the cliffs along the water and into the highlands to stalk owl on a spring afternoon in the 1980s.
On their way home, Cameron’s uncle handed him the .12 gauge.
“But he didn’t tell me how I’m supposed to hold it or how it might kick,” Cameron said.
“He just handed me the gun and said, ‘Take a shot.’ It was a pump action and I wasn’t sure. So I took the shot. I hadn’t steadied it against my shoulder, so the recoil was enough that I got jolted and took three steps back and fell down. It left a pretty good bruise on my shoulder.”
Cameron’s proficiency as a hunter has come along since the days he couldn’t hold a rifle straight. Now his job is to oversee the hunt; to make sure people use safe practices, to make sure no one’s poaching wildlife and to make sure no one gets stranded in the wild.
“Telling someone they can’t hunt beluga out of season, that’s not always easy,” Cameron said. “This is people’s livelihood. I’ve had my life threatened more than once, and it’s not like the people doing it didn’t have access to firearms.”
On an ordinary Wednesday afternoon in February — one where the temperature dips to -40 C — his job entails driving up the 12-kilometre fjord that leads to the Hudson Strait.
The snow drifts have picked up by the time Cameron parks his machine near the water’s edge.
High winds brush up a cloud that narrows visibility to just a few metres in every direction.
But even amid the blinding snow, he can see where the ice breaks off and floats into the water.
Standing this close to the verge, Cameron feels the sea moving beneath his feet.
Somewhere in the distance, just a few hundred kilometres across the strait, Baffin Island has also been swept up in the storm. And, just beyond that, the Arctic Circle and then, further still, the very northern tip of the planet.
“You feel like you’re just a speck of dust at the edge of the universe,” Cameron said, flashing a smile. “This is one of my favourite places to be. In the whole world.”
Out here, he says, the ice could give way and the sea would swallow every bone in his body, every cubic inch of the snowmobile, and they would lie in a cold, wet grave for all eternity. There is a beauty in accepting his place at the mercy of something so powerful, Cameron says.
“Mother Nature, if she wants to take you, she’ll take you,” he said.
In a few moments, Cameron will scan the coastline to see if any hunters are trapped or need help. He’ll stop and inspect a fishing net that has been dug into a fissure in the ice. When he gets back in town, he’ll walk into the community freezer, a building where fish, goose, caribou and seal meat is stored, and make a mental note of how much food remains.
And tomorrow, he’ll meet up with a platoon of Canadian soldiers to lead them on a five-day excursion across the tundra.
For now, Cameron is content to enjoy his place in the cosmos.