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Researchers say mining, not Indigenous hunters, should be focus in caribou management

A research article published last Wednesday asserts that Indigenous hunters aren't to blame for caribou population declines, specifically that of the Bathurst herd, and that the GNWT should be regulating mining, and its impacts on the land, rather than harvest amounts.

"Undermining subsistence: Barren-ground caribou in a 'tragedy of open access'" was published in Science Advances, authored by three Canadian academics with ties to the North.

"As caribou populations have declined in recent years, the governance response has almost exclusively focused on curbing Indigenous subsistence harvesting," states the report, going onto say the evidence behind this tactic has never been explicit.

A research article released last week argues that the dominant narrative behind barrenground caribou population decline has unfairly placed the blame on Indigenous hunters. Robert Berdam photo

At the same time, mining development is being encouraged.

Dettah Chief Ed Sangris agrees with this thrust of the report. He said Dene people have been doing everything they can to help manage the herds, cutting back on hunting and obeying new hunting zones, but said the government has stayed on a path that prioritizes development.

"We are making a sacrifice," said Sangris. "Why isn't the government following along that idea?"

In 2009, the GNWT implemented a ban on hunting barrenground caribou as herds shrunk. While hunting bans have been dialed back to what the GNWT perceives as sustainable strategies – such as not hunting in certain zones – the population trend for most herds has still been downward.

GNWT ungulate biologist Jan Adamczewski said the characterization of the GNWT in the article is "an incomplete picture."

"It's a little unfortunate that paper's authors didn't choose to look a little more closely at the way we've been doing things for the last 10, 20 years because it is a big difference from what was going on back in, say, the '70s or '80s," said Adamczewski.

The study details self-regulation practices among Indigenous groups in the NWT – particularly the Lutsel K'e Dene First Nation, the Gwich'in and the Inuvialuit – and then tracks recorded harvest data beside population data, going back to the 1980s.

The trend the authors describe is one where less caribou are harvested when populations are low, which they state was the result of Indigenous groups voluntarily switching to other food sources, based on traditional knowledge.

There is a theory that caribou populations cycle every few decades to peaks and lows, with some traditional knowledge backing that up, but recorded data doesn't exist to prove or disprove this.

The authors state something changed in the 1990s, when large-scale development began to build the diamond mines in the central Arctic, right in the range of the Bathurst caribou.

"Indigenous communities have repeatedly raised concerns about the cumulative impacts of development on caribou in the Bathurst range," said John Sandlos, one of the co-authors and a professor of history at Memorial University in Newfoundland.

Sandlos said these concerns have not been respected enough in environmental reviews, nor have the cumulative effects of multiple mines been examined.

Adamczewski said that since self-government agreements were signed by the Tlicho, Sahtu Dene and the Inuviauluit over the past two decades, the GNWT has been legislatively bound to co-manage herds with them.

"Decisions about harvest or predators or land use, they're not made by the GNWT on its own," he said. "Those days are long gone. We have a number of herds that have dropped to fairly low numbers and there are harvest restrictions in place for all of them, but in most cases the lead on those actions were taken by co-management boards."

The main tool for management, he said, is the Wildlife Management Advisory Council, an arms-length board, whose membership is 50 per cent Indigenous, which advises cabinet on wildlife management decision-making. He said the approach is collaborative, and is improving.

There might be more consideration of land impacts going forward with the development of the GNWT's Bathurst Caribou Range Plan, currently available online and open to public input.

The focus of the plan is on managing natural and human-caused impacts to the land in the caribou range, and the consequences of those impacts on caribou and people who rely on caribou for hunting.

Adamczewski said there are 21 groups at the table contributing to that plan, including Aboriginal governments. The plan lists the central arctic, where the NWT's diamond mines are operating, as an area of particular concern.

One of the main intents of the article is shifting what the authors perceive to be a dominant narrative that Indigenous hunting is the major factor in caribou population decline, said co-author Brenda Parlee, a Canada Research Chair in the Department of Resource Economics and Environmental Sociology.

"The assumption," said Parlee, "which you sometimes see in the media, that communities are hunting unsustainably and putting a resource so important to their food security and culture at risk – you have to step back and say, 'Why would people do that?' And the reality is people aren't doing that."

She readily said there are occasional instances of hunters not following community rules, and both she and Sandlos admit – and Adamczewski agrees – that the full picture of what is causing the caribou decline is not known to anyone, including what exactly are the impacts of development, but she said the self-regulation of caribou hunting by Indigenous populations deserves to be known and respected.

Adamczewski disagrees, however, that the impacts of hunting on the herd have been low.

"We're not trying to suggest and we never suggested that harvest was the main reason for the Bathurst decline," he said, "but you can have situations where, let's say there's a declining natural trend and the harvest is still large because the herd is quite accessible and under those conditions then harvest can be a significant part of the decline."

He said the GNWT believes this happened between 2006 and 2009 with the Bathurst herd, which had retreated to a smaller range as it shrunk, but was still accessible on winter roads.

"You can take 5,000 caribou from a herd of 350,000 (and the impact is) pretty small. That's a little over one per cent. But when that herd is down to, say, 32,000, then that becomes quite an important factor."

News/North did not hear back from Lutsel K'e Dene First Nation Chief Darryl Boucher-Marlowe by press time.