The reindeer herd moves across the tundra north of Inuvik during the winter season. - photo courtesy of Emilie Migeon ( www.lerenardetlarose.com ) |
Last of the original reindeer herders
Anniversary of the herd's arrival in 1935 is special for Lloyd Binder, who is now searching for somebody to inherit his business
Andrew Livingstone
Northern News Services
Monday, March 9, 2015
INUVIK
Failure isn't an option for Lloyd Binder. As the owner of the region’s long-standing reindeer herd and one of the few remaining connections to its initial arrival to the territory, the Inuvik man has given his life to keeping the herd sustainable.
Andrew Bahr, holding the reins of two reindeer, led nearly 3,400 deer across 2,400 km of tundra from Alaska to the Beaufort-Delta from December 1929 to March 1935 at the request of the Canadian government. - photo courtesy of the Anchorage Museum of History and Art.
Herding company shareholders Ellen (Pulk) Binder, left, chief herder Henrik Seva, Otto Binder and herd manager Lloyd Norman Binder, kneeling, visit with a yearling reindeer bull. - photo courtesy of Mike Beaudoin |
"You really have to commit yourself to maintaining the herd," he said. "It’s like having 3,000 kids and you have to take care of them all."
Inside the front door of Binder’s home is shelves and boxes full of frozen steaks and roasts. Outside in the front yard is a large band saw used to slice some 300 carcasses and 35,000 kg of harvested reindeer that will be sold to community members and others looking for traditional meat.
Binder has been surrounded by reindeer since he was born.
His parents met at Reindeer Station, the government-built community where herders and their families lived and cared for thousands of reindeer brought to the region in the 1930s to help stave off starvation. He’s a third-generation herder–his mother’s parents were some of the first people to come to Canada from Norway to help take care of the reindeer herd in the early 1930s.
The 63-year-old feels a strong bond with the animals that he grew up with during summers as a teen along the Arctic coast, he mused while corralling and marking the animals he has now managed for nearly 13 years.
"My interaction, it’s part of me," he said.
"It’s a real relationship where you are trying to get through each season and it's satisfying. It’s a powerful interaction. There’s a real satisfaction of achieving success at a challenging project. I was a natural sucker to take on the reindeer as a project."
On March 6, Binder remained one of the last original reindeer herders to celebrate the 80th anniversary of when the animals were first brought to the Beaufort-Delta.
3,400 reindeer across 2,400 km
In the mid-1920s, the federal government wanted to supplement the traditional food source of caribou because the nomadic herds had become unpredictable due to environmental changes leading to a reduced harvest.
In 1929, the Canadian government signed a contract with an Alaskan entrepreneur named Carl Lomen to send a herd of 3,400 reindeer from Naboktoolik, Alaska across the tundra to Reindeer Station, a herding community established about 100 km north of where Inuvik would be established in the 1950s. It would be a trip of almost 2,400 km. The Canadian government paid Lomen Brothers Reindeer Company $65 per reindeer at a total cost of $154,050 for the 2,370 reindeer that survived, according to NWT Archives documents from 1955. Factoring in inflation, it would have cost approximately $2.59 million today.
The expectation was the reindeer would arrive in the territory in 1931–an 18-month trek.
Their estimations were far from correct. The logistical difficulties of moving more than 3,000 reindeer across the challenging terrain of the far North was lost on the government and Lomen.
Andrew Bahr (or Anders Bahr) was chosen to guide the herd to the region. Bahr, a Sami from the Arctic region of Scandinavian Europe, had arrived in Alaska during the Klondike gold rush in the late 1890s and was considered the most dependable herder in the area. According to research published by George W. Scotter in 1982, Bahr was in his sixties and retired in Seattle when the government and Lomen asked him to complete the task.
'Arctic Moses'
Scotter wrote that Bahr and a dozen men started the journey on Dec. 26, 1929 and drove the herd northeast into the mountains, a preferred route for Bahr. However, concerns the herd would be difficult to control came true when hundreds escaped and tried to return to the home range near Napaktolik region of Alaska.
Bahr and his men had to move the herd in order to encourage the others to rejoin. The unpredictable winter weather and frigid temperatures made it challenging to keep the animals from breaking into smaller groups.
Bahr’s estimated 18-month journey was about to become a five-year journey. This was a grand understatement by the government and Lomen, who had no clue what impact the terrain, weather and unpredictability of the herd would have on the trip.
According to historical research, a single ice storm in 1934, as Bahr tried to navigate the herd across the frozen Mackenzie Delta, delayed the herd’s arrival by almost a full year. The frigid temperatures and vicious winds scared the animals back to land and into a long roundup for Bahr.
This storm closed the window on crossing as winter ended and the weary herding crew chose to set up camp near Shingle Point on the Arctic Coast and wait for the following winter.
On March 6, 1935, after a seemingly easy trek across the frozen region, moving from island to island with the herd, Bahr and some 2,370 reindeer finally arrived at Reindeer Station. Of the reindeer that arrived, more than three-quarters of them were born on the five-year journey.
He would become known as Arctic Moses, and is still recognized by his people as one of the great herders in their modern history.
Laplanders–or Sami–stayed to teach the Inuvialuit how to look after the herd. At its peak, the original Reindeer Station boasted a population of 90 people.
Mostly herders and their families, it was a self-sustaining community with a post office, school, church and trading post.
Government backs away
The commercialization of the reindeer herd as an industry could have been successful, but Binder says the government didn’t offer enough support to make it happen.
His father, Otto, had been given his own herd in the 1940s and was set up near Husky Lake, but without a proper summer grazing range it was doomed to fail.
"The project didn’t give enough support for community-based or individual herds," he said. "The government was quick to get away from it."
By 1969 the original station was abandoned and its buildings and residents relocated to either Tuktoyaktuk or Inuvik due to a short vegetation season, the movement of the herd and more modern herding techniques. In 1974, the herd was sold to Canadian Reindeer Ltd.
Binder was born in 1952 at the original Reindeer Station. Growing up his nickname was quunek, Inuvialuktun for reindeer. His mother, Ellen, was the daughter of Anna and Mikkel Pulk, who in 1932 were among the first wave of Norwegian Sami hired by the Canadian government to manage the herd when it arrived. It was there Ellen met her future husband Otto, who was born in Cambridge Bay, but had moved to the region to herd.
Binder and his parents moved to Aklavik when he was six-years old. The family only spent summers working with the herd, a time he said he viewed as a vacation from community living. It was a chance for him to spend time with his grandparents, who were still living at Reindeer Station. When he reached his mid-teens, he spent his summers at Richards Island helping with herd management, including corralling, castration and marking of the animals.
Back in the family
It wasn’t until 1998 that Binder’s long connection with reindeer came full circle.
Ready to leave his job with the territorial government, he was asked by the previous owners of Canadian Reindeer Ltd. to come in and manage the herd with the idea of taking it over.
Binder was asked to handle the land access issues that had come up when the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation had become owners of the land through their claims agreement.
Binder said it took four years of negotiations, securing financing and environmental assessments before all was said and done. Binder, along with a group of investors that included his parents, purchased the herd and have taken care of it for the last 13 years.
"We’d always dreamed of owning it," he said. "My father, especially. It had been a big part of his life and I’m happy he got to see we’ve turned the corner a little and there is hope."
It hasn’t always been a good financial situation, Binder said. Times have been tough. Binder said up until eight or so years ago the market for reindeer meat was limited. Caribou were still plentiful and hunting restrictions and natural resource management weren’t as strict as they are today. But times have changed, and Binder said business has been improving.
In fact, they’re looking at ways to extend their season by a few weeks on each end to reduce predation on the herd by wolves and bears.
"We lose up to 1,000 head a year and we want to be able to reduce that if we can," he said.
Finding someone to take the reins
It was never an option for him to fail at this business. For Binder, he’s carrying on a family legacy and dream that puts a lot of pressure on him.
"Even in hard times they told me never to give up on it," he said.
"It’s always been about my parents. I couldn’t fail at it. People have said I’m crazy for not just giving up, but it’s important to me and to many people."
Binder knows he can’t manage the herd forever. He figures he has about 10 years left in him, but admits that might be an optimistic time frame.
He worries about what will happen when he can’t care for the herd anymore. He worries more about whether someone can throw out the traditional business management style to operate the business.
"It has to have some business aspects to it, but the major difference is when you are in tough times, if you’re a regular businessperson, you’d just liquidate the herd. But you can’t do that. It would just be done with and the herd would be gone. The business model today doesn’t work with reindeer husbandry."
Finding someone who is willing to give their life to keeping the herd in the region is the most important part of the future success.
"We need to find someone to work their way in as chief herder and look at taking it over," he said.
"That occupies a lot of my thinking about the future."
