Our arctic caribou experts, students your own age who live in Alaska and Canada's Northwest Territories, are ready for your questions about caribou. Here are some questions we asked Ilitsiijaqturvik School teacher Orin Durey of Baker Lake, NWT. We hope his comments will help you form questions of your own. Send your questions to: jn_expert@informns.k12.mn.us
Be sure to participate in this week's CHALLENGE QUESTIONS in which you're asked to compare food prices in the arctic to those at your local store.
From Orin Durey, Ilitsiijaqturvik School: Sustainable Use of Caribou
Q. How much does your community depend on caribou? What % of your diet is caribou at each time of the year?
It depends on the time of year and the availability of the caribou. Last year, for instance, there were caribou hanging around all winter. In fact, when the Beverly and Qamanirjuaq Caribou Management Board met here in April, the Indians were stunned at how close the caribou were and how they hung around all the time. There are estimates that it would take Cdn $19 million to replace all the country food used in the Territories each year.
Q. How many people can one caribou feed? A. At one sitting--about 10 or 15.
Q. How do you use each part?
A. We could write a book on this. Do you mean different ways of cooking? The delicacies are considered the tongue, the liver and the tenderloin (the meat right along the backbone).
Q. What food do you buy at the store and how much does it cost? A. Traditional families here are probably buying half their food from one of the two stores--the Northern, or the Coop. . 5 kg of stir fry beef (like stewing beef) costs Cdn$9.20. A litre of milk (about the same as a U.S. quart) is Cdn$3.90.
Q. Where are the hunting pressures greater, on the caribou's wintering grounds or calving grounds? A. Hunting pressures will be greater anywhere where the herds are close to a population centre. Modern snow machines allow hunters to range out to a 200-mile radius from any community.
Q. Are managers concerned about over harvesting? A. Yes, the entire population of all the caribou herds combined in the NWT in the late 1950's was about 250,000 animals. That was the low ebb. Now there is plenty of education and enforcement of the hunting regulations. Plus there is the article I sent you previously describing the planned commercial hunt on Southampton Island. That's necessary to keep the herd from crashing. (If the population gets too high the caribou will deplete their food source and die off anyway.)
Q. What other foods do you harvest at each time of the year? A. A lot of people pick berries in August and early September. There are a number of muskox killed each year, but the hunters have to go 200 miles northwest to find them.
CHALLENGE QUESTIONS 1) How much do you pay at your local store for:
a) .5 kg of beef?
b) One litre of milk?
2) What % of your food do you grow or obtain from hunting?
3) What does "sustainable use" mean?
Please send your answers to: jnorth@informns.k12.mn.us
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