BEHCHOKO/RAE-EDZO - Behchoko elders vowed on Thursday to continue hunting caribou despite the recent hunting ban, and blasted their chiefs for not involving them in discussions on caribou management with the territorial government.

Elder Phillip Dryneck blasts the GNWT and the Tlicho chiefs for not including community members in discussions around caribou restrictions. - Andrew Livingstone/NNSL photo

Phillip Dryneck was one of many to criticize Joe Rabesca, grand chief of the Tlicho First Nation, and community chief Clifford Daniels for not keeping them up to date on the caribou issue, specifically pointing to the lack of consultation with community elders.

"Why didn't our community chiefs tell us about this?" Dryneck said of the shock among community members when they heard about the ban after it was announced on Dec. 17. "The people that live by the caribou should have been consulted. It's a very, very terrible thing to happen."

Morris Lafferty spoke passionately in Dogrib about how little community members knew about the planned ban, which took effect Jan. 1, questioning how the chiefs handled the situation.

"We were never informed this would be happening," Lafferty said. The chiefs "were supposed to be speaking to us and informing us. I question our chief. We're really not updated with what is going on with the caribou."

Daniels told News/North before the meeting that it was going to be a "venting session" for elders. Any anger raised over the controversial ban should be directed at the territorial government, he said.

"This (ban) isn't something I supported and I didn't want to see it happen," Daniels said, adding during meetings with the Department of Environment and Natural Resources in December the only thing they could agree on was subsidizing hunters who want to travel outside the restricted area covering most of Tlicho land. "We agreed to subsidize hunters, but nothing else. This is all the GNWT."

Leon Lafferty, former MLA for North Slave and chief of Behchoko prior to Daniels, said the no-hunting zone is forcing Tlicho people to hunt other herds, particularly the Bluenose East herd which is predominately hunted by Sahtu residents.

"You've divided all the aboriginal people," Lafferty said, adding the elders know the caribou in a way scientists don't, and should be included in the process.

Lance Schmidt, superintendent of the North Slave region and the lone Environment and Natural Resources (ENR) bureaucrat in attendance, took the brunt of the elders' anger. He admitted the department recognizes the hardships the ban is putting on the communities and that the chiefs from the four Tlicho communities didn't agree with the ban. The department, he said, is willing to spend a quarter-million dollars to fund community and individual hunts by providing charter planes to transport hunters and their caribou carcasses and fuel for snowmobiles.

"We felt we had to put these measures in place to save our caribou," Schmidt said of the alarming decline of the Bathurst herd, now said to have only 32,000 animals in it, compared to more than 150,000 three years ago.

Schmidt said ENR had intended to keep these measures in place for only three months, but the final recommendations from the Wek'eezhii Renewable Resources Board on what should be done about the declining herd isn't expected until sometime in the early spring. The board's recommendations were originally expected at the end of February.

"We didn't want another 5,000 to 7,000 caribou harvested out of (the herd)," said Schmidt.