Video
Counting on Caribou
Transcript
[Large numbers of caribou, both bulls and cows moving through a grassland area.]
We eat a lot of our own food we hunt.
[Caribou are starting to run]
We’re caribou hunters. We live off the caribou.
Caribou is our primary source of food and it's food that I enjoy eating.
On top of that I know where it's coming from. I know what's in it.
And I know the process that it's been through to get to the table.
It's ingrained in me, it's in my blood, my family has been doing it for, forever so...
Hunt with our dog teams. Hunt way out, way up there to head of the Noatak River.
Stay away about ten days to two weeks until they get a load of caribou to bring home to their families.
Buckland lives right in the middle of the winter migrating trail for the caribou. So like in November, December, January, February, March, we should have abundance of caribou throughout our hills because this is their route that they go through in their migrating trail here when they head south and up toward Koyuk here and on behind Shaktoolik area, where the mountains is rugged and deep snow, but our hills up here is just rolling hills.
There's not many trees, not many willows, just tundra and our caribou stay in that area for months just eating going back and forth.
That's why this is one of a good place to be as a Native person where, where, where food is abundant year-round.
When the caribou are running during the fall time the herd is heading south and they pretty much migrate right through this area between here and Kobuk and while there's plenty caribou going by whether it be mid-September or early October.
Hopefully before the bulls get in rut, we try to harvest as many as we could because that's our chance to stock that food for the winter.
Up here is where I usually hunt. Just walk up here a little ways and get my caribou. Migrate right through here and then over toward the other way.
I go up to that hill up there, and I take binoculars and I can see quite a ways back up toward the mountain and over the other side and see a bunch of herds sometimes coming.
There is four of us right now but sometimes we usually give them away to people in Kotzebue that sometimes that don't get meat. Share our stuff with other people.
I used to be able to go out and hunt myself when I was a little bit younger and I still could, but sometimes our friends and nieces bring us a whole caribou, sometimes three or four.
A lot of us have big families and with that many people to feed in the house, without a job, nobody can afford it being very expensive for groceries here in Selawik cause they have to fly it all the way in from Anchorage, Kotzebue.
If you have like at least two or three caribou, you probably have like 40 bags of you know just different things to cook where you know nowadays you order a meat package and the meat package is 500 something dollars and then on top of that you have to pay almost 200 dollars to have it shipped here.
Nowadays the price of gas is so expensive so when people announce on the VHF, you know we have caribou outside uh so and so's house and people go and they get it.
You see whole bunch of four-wheelers driving really quick you know because they want to get at least two, three meals. Nowadays that's very, very important because of the price of gas.
As a retired man I hunt for many widows so I get a lot of caribou and I produce food for many, many women that don't have their husbands there to hunt anymore. So I get maybe 30, 35 caribou a year.
I am content, you know, with what people give me.
If you don't have money, it's there, in the freezer.
Mixed. These are fats from caribous.
And this one is caribou meat. People come everyday eat. Our children, their children cause the food on the table all time, I never put away.
Our diet we caribou, caribou, moose and fish.
I got, here is your caribou. Here's some dried meat, caribou meat.
We just love to eat the head. The brains are good, the eyes are good, the tongue is good.
I would give them the best part of the caribou. Liver is the best breakfast you can ever have with hotcakes.
And this one over here is a caribou skin. Getting it ready to dry it up for a friend of ours that comes over. It's got nice fall time hair that they’re not thick like the winter ones.
It seems like it's harder to get caribou nowadays and I am speaking specifically for Noatak.
Growing up as a kid, August, we were bringing home the caribou, I mean that was our time. As time went on, September was the month, the first part of September, and now we're into the last part of September and that line between rut and good usable bulls, that are good for food, is we are kind of squishing that.
According to the temperature outside they are right on time. You know it's been hot, it's been warm for so long and they don't want to move. They’re lazy you know. They’re eating and now that it's starting to cool off a little bit, I guess they are finally starting to have the urge to move.
Our caribou, yeah, they should be here by now but they’re not. I think they had a late start further up north and the only answer I guess is just too warm I guess. Maybe that's what triggers them to move is the cold weather.
This fall when we were waiting for the caribou to come through our camp up at Ivik, mid-October is really late. Usually by mid-October the males are already in rut so all you have are the females and then you have to pick and choose with the females because you know, they are traveling with their young ones that they had last spring so you don't really want to get a mother either.
[Female caribou swimming across the river with her calf and making soft calling sounds to it]
This time of the year we'd have caribou hang or you don't have to worry about freezer space and right now the weather is really rainy and wet and warm so yesterday we were having to work in the rain, trying to put away caribou that my sister got.
We can't keep it out as long as we'd like to just because it's not cooling off.
One of my main concerns really right now is climate change. It's really important I think to identify anything that you notice with the weather and climate change we have, especially out here in Northwest Arctic because we are just seeing so much changes and we can't follow the calendar anymore for our subsistence activities.
We can't predict our hunting seasons, especially during the spring which could be a safety issue with snow machining and boating. We've lost some individuals due to the quick changes in the ice thickness and overnight changes at times.
I'm really concerned about our migration of the caribou because they depend on their vegetation, their food out here.
The biggest impact is the humans. We have so many airplanes dropping off hunters in front of the migrating caribou that are impacting where the caribou are gonna migrate to, so they don't go to the villages like they normally do.
Noatak in the last five years, they’ve had three years where they did not get caribou in the fall, which is scary. So food security is a real problem.
Caribous used to come around here right, I could see caribous from my window. They would hunt right across here, not too far from our village. And now when these white men start coming, it's like we have hard times these hunters start going way up to get caribou.
And here comes the plane and just chase the caribous, which is not good. That's why the caribous they never come down that much. Not like before. We used to have a lot of caribous.
It's very important that they come near Ambler so I don't have to travel very far but I know it's very important for like Kiana, Noorvik and Kotzebue villages also I mean.
There's a lot of sport hunters that come around. Get flown up there to wherever they see caribou and be dropped off by the airlines. I think that disrupt the migration route to the caribou so nowadays it's getting kind of hard for us to go along the river where we used to go.
We have many influences that play into us not getting certain subsistence foods. Hunters from outside to get their trophy caribou or whatever. That's impacted our area of hunting a lot. I would say in the past ten years we don't have the big migrations that we used to have.
They are either chased further back into the backcountry. That makes it hard for us that don't have airplanes or can't afford the gas.
Costs are a lot for fuel now and that influences a lot of people getting out there and doing their hunting.
A lot of the people go up to Onion Portage from Kotzebue to get their caribou and that's 500 miles or so away.
It is hard, with the caribou, just because that's about the only staple I really have besides fish.
That's what really makes me scared because everywhere we go up here, soon as caribou start coming toward where the Natives are going to hunt, they start dropping off the hunters. 100's, 100's, 100's. Day in and day out. Caribou go a different way.
Who's going to be impacted most? The Native folks.
Our ability to have food is very much in jeopardy.
When ANILCA states, that one of their biggest protections is the subsistence use of food by Native people.
They have the data showing which way the caribou move with maps. All you have to do is verify by hiring a biologist in the fall with an airplane and if you can start seeing the migrations weaving off these camps, then you know it's impacting.
The one that worries me most is the development in the Kobuk area.
The proposed road is from Fairbanks through the Waring Mountains. And we're way over here. But it will surely affect us because of the road and the caribou migration from Kiana, from Ambler, through Noorvik and to our area and they have to re-route and where they will re-route it will be harder for us to go hunt caribou.
This is the worst thing we could ever do. Within a few years, every RV and every car or truck with a trailer will be bringing their boats up into the Kobuk River Delta.
We have to be very cautious as to what we approve because the impact by the drop-off hunters is bad. The worst is going to be a road.
A road is going to destroy our way of life very quickly. You know I caution our people that if you don't make a wise decision on this, your children and your great grandchildren will not have a way of life. It will be all gone.
This area should be preserved for hunting and gathering and fishing and make sure our lands are protected and not make it open to outside hunters. We can't depend on the state or federal dollars to come in and feed us. Our land and resources are very important to us.
We've been here 1000's of years and we want to find ways to preserve 'em.
We have to take that time and effort to teach others what we know to make sure that our kids, our grandkids and others learn about our way of life and respect it, and live it, enjoy it, breathe it, share it.
Usually if we get a fat one it's at least a couple inches or more of fat on its back so...
And this one over here is caribou drying. We call paniqtuq. Eskimo word for dry meat, paniqtuq.
Otherwise we become a people of the past and last time I checked I'm still Inupiat, I'm still here, and whatever I can do to perpetuate that to others, then it's important.
Description
Caribou are an important resource for people in Northwest Arctic.
Duration
17 minutes, 18 seconds
Credit
Sarah Betcher
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