I went North with the Hudson’s Bay Company in April of 1969, a young guy of 19 with a lot of curiosity about Inuit and the Arctic. I was also a kabloona, or white man, embarking on a journey that would shape me for the rest of my life.

My preliminary interview was at the Hudson’s Bay Company fur-buying warehouse in my home town of North Bay, Ontario. My brother had been doing some trapping while at high school and we sometimes went in to the HBC to buy a trap or two, or sell a few of his furs there. So I was familiar with the place.

I guess I passed the test, and next thing I was off to Winnipeg for more paperwork, a medical, and a bit of dental work. Then it was off to Cambridge Bay on Victoria Island, at 69° North, or about 3° above the Arctic Circle. I flew with the district manager in the company’s DC3 on skis. We got weathered in at Churchill, Manitoba for a couple days along the way.

Cambridge Bay was a larger regional centre by then, and I was mostly involved in retail sales to the Inuit, commonly called Eskimos at the time.  Inuit were going through big changes then, moving in from camps to the settlement where there was a store, church, school, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The transition from igloos to wooden houses, and from dog teams to snowmobiles, was well under way. Unfortunately there was a lot of drinking at the time, in part because of the cross-cultural shocks, and I got tired of that aspect pretty quick.

SEE ALSO: Animal rights agenda anti-human, harms nature. By Larry Simpson for Truth About Fur.

In Amundsen's Footsteps

After ten months I got an opportunity to move to Gjoa Haven, a small community of a couple hundred people on King William Island, near where John Franklin’s ships were subsequently found on the ocean bottom. I liked Gjoa Haven, which was named after Roald Amundsen’s ship Gjøa, which over-wintered there early in the 20th century. Both Cambridge Bay and Gjoa Haven have Inuktitut names now - Iqaluktuuttiaq and Uqsuqtuuq - and it is considered respectful to call the people Inuit, not Eskimos.

Gjoa was where I got my real appreciation of Inuit as denizens of the frozen land and seascape. There was virtually no drinking there, and I was able to get to know some of the people there very well.

I was manager-trainee which kept me busy doing everything from retail sales to book-keeping, and buying fur and carvings. I learned to grade white fox, ring and harp seals, wolf, and polar bear skins. We had an SSB radio to communicate with Cambridge and other communities as necessary, and we had an airplane once a week, a Twin Otter on floats or skis depending on the season.

Char, Geese, and Ptarmigans

I had a tent out by the river where I would spend weekends fishing for arctic char and hunting for Canada geese. In winter I went out with Inuit on occasion to check their fox traps. I bought myself a 15 HP Olympic snowmobile and I would go out hunting ptarmigans on the flat terrain in the area.

One could get lost very easily there so I had to be careful about whiteouts that could come up quickly. But generally I would be with Inuit friends, who were always happy to take out a kabloona like me and show me their ways. The relationship between employees of HBC, or Bay Boys, and the local people had always been quite good in the area. There were some Here Before Christ and Hungry Belly Company jibes that came with HBC having no competition, but generally things were fair.

I looked forward to getting out on a caribou hunt and finally I got my chance. Three Inuit hunters and I travelled over ice and land for the first day until we stopped at a likely looking spot with good drift snow and built an igloo. It was fascinating to observe and pitch in. It was done just in time as the weather turned nasty and we were in there for 24 hours. One of the hunters had found an owl nest with eggs so he took two, leaving the rest to hatch.  Those were cooked in our tea on a primus stove inside. There was a drip, drip, drip from the uppermost point as things warmed up.

I recall one incident in particular in that igloo that summed up the importance of sharing everything. My companions observed me brushing my teeth and spitting out into a little hole I'd made in our snowy floor. They asked if they could use my toothbrush to do the same. My kabloona upbringing said absolutely not, but of course I had to consent!

SEE ALSO: Amazing facts about fur: Dressing for the Arctic. Truth About Fur.

Winning Some Respect

As the weather cleared we were on the move again. We spotted some caribou and I downed one, while the Inuit were stalking some others. One was wounded and I was instructed to finish it by inserting my knife into its brain. Well, that was a bit hard, but it won some respect from my co-hunters. Back into another igloo for the night, we gorged ourselves on boiled and fried caribou meat. I had noted that very little of each caribou went to waste. The antlers were kept for carving, the skins for clothing, and virtually all the meat, even the contents of the caribou’s stomach that had the consistency of spinach.

Our final stop on this re-provisioning quest was a stop at an isolated DEW Line station where about a dozen kabloonas were attached to their radar screens for incoming Russian bombers and missiles. There was a canteen there, and after a bit of an icy welcome (very security-conscious in those days) we were allowed to purchase some cases of pop and chocolate bars, precious cargo as supplies of these in Gjoa were gone until ship-time in August. The cases of pop were wrapped in our sleeping bags and caribou skins in an effort to get them home before freezing.

A couple of kilometres from the community, we caught up with a dog team heading back from a hunt. We were two snowmobiles pulling loaded kamotiks (sleds) travelling at five times the speed. Our mode was more efficient in terms of time, if you were lucky enough to have one of the few wage jobs in the community. But as it was pointed out to me, you can eat your dogs if you get lost on the land, but you can’t eat your snowmobile. And those dogs can alert you and fight for you if you are attacked by a polar bear that can easily stand up and knock down your igloo to get at the goodies inside.

Treasured Memories

This first caribou hunting trip with three Inuit made for some good instruction in local customs and some treasured memories to this day. One of the hunters with me, Uriash Pokenak, later became a Member of the Legislative Assembly when the “new” Nunavut Territory was created in 1999. On a more sombre note, one of my colleagues from this hunt, Frank Sheeotinoak, was lost a few years later in a boating accident when he fell out of a boat in a rough ocean.

I spent three years with the Hudson’s Bay Company and it was good to me.  I lived in five Arctic communities and did relief management in two Dene communities in northern Alberta. Good training, good fellowship, and good memories. I have a lasting appreciation of the traditional ties of our indigenous peoples to the land that has sustained them for so long.

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The animal rights movement claims to be motivated above all by the desire to save animals – each and every one of them – from harm at the hands of humans. It also claims to support conservation efforts since it is in the wild that all animals should be living out their long and happy lives. In reality, its agenda is more anti-human than pro-animal, and its impact on true conservation efforts has been nothing but negative.

I grew up in northern Ontario with lots of fishing and hunting and some trapping in my extracurricular activities. Later I went to work in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, first with the Hudson’s Bay Company, then with Inuit cooperatives, and finally with the Department of Environment of the Government of Nunavut.

My day-to-day contact with Inuit educated me about respectful and sustainable use of wildlife resources. I saw over three decades in the far north (I am now retired) how the animal rights agenda harmed the Inuit, driving them into industrial and less-sustainable alternatives and self-esteem-crippling welfare. It became clear to me that the animal right activists, those that play a leadership/ideological role, do not care about people.

And when you consider how their activities ultimately remove responsible users/stewards from the environment, it is evident that they do not care that much about species wellbeing or ecosystem preservation. Their focus is on the individual life, and the life of a rat or a rabbit is equal to that of a person – actually more than equal, as humans are considered to be tainted and therefore not welcome to participate in this conversation.

Animal rights activists, as opposed to real environmentalists, hate when you point out that their campaigns are anti-human rather than pro-animal.

When I first left the north to complete my masters degree, I picked up pretty quick on what has been happening on our university campuses. I learned that capitalism and profit were dirty words. Even if Russia was falling from grace by that time, there was still faith that China and Cuba would reveal socialism as the true salvation.

Then, when I returned much later to begin a doctorate, I learned that it was now cool to be anti-globalist – and that term seemed to include anything touching on business that could lead to a profit or at least a surplus. There was little interest in discussing what kinds of enterprise might be acceptable, even Inuit Cooperatives or Hunters and Trappers Associations which help people to sustain their traditions and mixed economies at the community level in remote areas. The rigidity of thought was frightening.

Stifling Intellectual Atmosphere

The intelligentsia found in the social sciences departments of universities were a major part of the problem; they were rarely interested in stimulating real dialogue about the complex subject of human use of wildlife resources. The articles selected for student reading, the research topics accepted by graduate committees, the entrenched simplification of bad capitalist/Western society/man as wildlife user made intellectual conversations in the university community quite predictable, in an extremely stifling atmosphere.

I came to see a disturbing affinity between the animal rights movement and the anti-capitalist cum anti-globalist mindset so prevalent on campus. Both pushed an agenda no less extreme and unreasoning than those who endorse a kill-anything-that-moves or pure capitalist ideology – except that the latter gave way to more adaptable and sustainable forms long ago.

Interesting how both "anti" camps (anti-harvest and anti-capitalist) need to demonize their opponents. I guess the complexities of real life make it more difficult to mount fund-raising or political campaigns?

SEE ALSO: WHY IS FUR SO CONTROVERSIAL AND WHY SHOULD IT MATTER?

Real World Is Not Disney

Yesterday the title of a storybook caught my eye.  It was The Childhood of Young Animals which looked at the early stages of animals of different species. The animal rights folks must be smiling to see young animals called "children". Luckily, my 5-year-old son seems to have an admirable ability to distinguish between the fantasy content of storybooks and Disney movies and the real lessons of the world.

Too bad the animal-rights proponents cannot do the same. If they could, they would have more respect for aboriginal and rural peoples who live outside the highly industrial and urbanized mainstream. And they might save true environmentalism from being discredited by their own sensationalistic and misleading rhetoric.

Except to a very few people, a rabbit or a rat are not equal to a human being, because the rabbit and the rat will never see the big picture, and will never feel any responsibility for other animals except their own litters. True, most human beings will never sacrifice their child's life for an animal of another species. But they will educate their young to protect the continuation of wildlife and nature in general – because our own future survival depends upon it.

Adapting to the realities of life on this planet requires careful thought and reasoning, feedback and new insights, compromise and adjustments to thought and practice. These, unfortunately, are not qualities that animal rights activists have shown much interest in developing.