Tracking caribou from the elders to hi-tech.

• Author: Taylor, David
• Position: Inuit traditional knowledge combines with modern science to track caribou - Cover Story

The people of Nunavut are charting a new course for managing a precious resource by integrating traditional knowledge and modern science

In 1999 the land known as Nunavut will emerge from Canada's Northwest Territories as a new, semiautonomous territory, with an area more than five times as large as that of Germany. This will come after two decades of negotiation between the Ottawa government and Nunavut's roughly twenty-two thousand residents, nearly 80 percent of whom are Inuit. When it happens, Nunavut (the Inuktitut word for our land) will become the hemisphere's first aboriginally enfranchised territory.

Nunavut will start with one of the world's most remarkable systems for managing natural resources. Already the Inuit of Nunavut and the Dene (including the Dogrib and the Chipewyan) of the Western Northwest Territories have begun studies that combine the latest satellite data with traditional Inuit and Dene understanding of their environment. Communities are becoming involved in aspects of resource management that most industrialized countries leave to specialists. High school students are helping to collect weather data, for example, and research reports will present findings in everyday language. "We're a small people," says Inuit politician John Amagoalik, "but we have big ambitions."

Last October, researchers in the Northwest Territories released three remarkable reports that illustrated this approach, as well as the close connections among wildlife science, traditional knowledge, and the region's future. Two of the reports described studies that used satellite collars to trace the movements of one of the Territories' largest herds of caribou, known as the Bathurst herd, through its nearly nineteen-hundred-mile migration from Bathurst Inlet on the Arctic shore in Nunavut, southwest to Dogrib lands near the Great Slave Lake. The third report delved into a very different medium for information on caribou--the oral histories of the Dogrib and their knowledge of their surroundings, stretching back several thousand years. Together, these ongoing studies show how two very different ways of understanding caribou are being combined, like a pair of binocular lenses, to illuminate caribou behavior.

People have pursued caribou since the mid-Pleistocene Age: It is one of the oldest relationships humans have with another species. The barren-lands caribou of northern Canada, which live on the tundra's lichens, have provided aboriginal peoples with food, clothing, and shelter, as well as a cultural touchstone, since about the time Stonehenge was built. It stands to reason that they have learned a few things about caribou, including how to locate herds and their movement. But traditional Inuit and Dogrib wisdom about how to hunt, fish, and survive in the north is woven into nonlinear oral histories that often frustrate researchers trained in western scientific thinking. For several decades, western science has wrestled with how to handle this information.

The word caribou probably comes from the Micmac word xalibou, meaning "one that shovels," referring to the animal's concave hooves, which it uses to scoop snow away from the browse beneath. The Inuit call the animal tuktu; the Dogrib call it ekwo. Scientists are not quite sure why caribou migrate. Theories involve the seasonal availability of browse, danger from predators, harassment by mosquitoes, and weather. Calving grounds--open areas away from wolves and most insects--play a major role. Every spring, pregnant caribou start the trek toward these calving grounds, finding their way through deep snow and across rivers thick with ice floes. Besides being relatively free of predators, the calving grounds abound with lichens and, as snow melts, nutritious greening plants that encourage milk production in mothers.

The caribou is a source of cultural identity in the north, celebrated in Yellowknife caribou carnivals--among popular events like the Canadian Dog Racing Championships and the Northern Ugly Truck and Dog Contest--and involving long-held traditions in the preparation of certain dishes. For example, caribou roast, garnished with potatoes and onions, makes a hearty holiday menu; traditional dishes include aalu, made from choice parts of caribou, chopped and cooked with melted fat, a few drops of blood, and ptarmigan intestine, according to Ann Meekitjuk Hanson in The Nunavut Handbook.

The caribou's historic importance resonated again last September when, after three years of negotiation, a one-hundred-year-old Dogrib tipi made of caribou hide was welcomed back to the Northern Heritage Center in Yellowknife...