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.

Herding company shareholders Ellen (Pulk) Binder, left, chief herder Henrik Seva, Otto Binder and herd manager Lloyd 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 are 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's life has involved 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 has a life-long connection to the reindeer. It's part of him and he feels a strong bond with the animals that he was born with, grew up with during the summers as a teen along the Arctic coast corralling and marking the animals, and 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 its 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."

He's one of the last original reindeer herders in a long and storied history of a herd of animals that travelled long distances to call the Beaufort-Delta home 80 years ago on March 6.

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. At the time, the caribou harvest didn't yield enough to feed the expanding communities of Aklavik and Tuktoyaktuk.

Deal with Alaskan

In 1929, the Canadian government signed a contract with 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 located about 100 km north of where Inuvik would be established in the 1950s.

The Canadian government paid the 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. Factor 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, starting in western Alaska.

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 regions 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, Behr was in his sixties and retired in Seattle when the government and Lomen asked him to complete the task.

Hundreds escaped

Scotter wrote that Behr and a dozen men started the journey on Dec. 26, 1929 and drove the herd northeast into the mountains, a preferred route for Behr. However, the concerns that the herd would be difficult to control came true when hundreds escaped and tried to return to the home range near the Napaktolik region in Alaska.

Behr 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 herd from breaking into smaller groups.

This would be the beginning of a five-year journey for Behr that was predicted to only take 18 months to complete. This was a grand understatement by the government and Lomen, who had no clue what impact the terrain, weather and unpredictability of the herd may have on the time line.

According to historical research, a single ice storm in 1934 as Behr tried to navigate the herd across the frozen Mackenzie Delta delayed the herd's arrival by almost a full year. The deep-freeze temperatures and vicious winds scared the animals back to land and into a long roundup for Behr.

This storm closed the window on crossing as winter ended, and the weary herding crew chose to station the herd near Shingle Point on the Arctic coast to 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, Behr 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.

Government backs away

Laplanders - or Sami - stayed to teach the Inuvialuit how to look after the reindeer herd. At its peak, the original Reindeer Station, some 70 km north of Inuvik, was a small community. With a population of as many as 90 people, mostly herders and their families, it was a self-sustaining community with a post office, school, church and trading post.

The government was ill-prepared to operate such a project, Binder said, and was quick to get out of the business that didn't conform to the traditional lifestyles of the people in the region. The commercialization of the reindeer herd as an industry could have been successful and expanded, but Binder said the government didn't offer enough support to make it happen.

His father, Otto, had been give 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, 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. Ellen met her husband, Otto, who was born in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, but had moved to the region to herd.

Binder and his parents moved to Aklavik when he was six, only spending their 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 and working with the herd. 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.

Herd changes hands

It wasn't until 1998 that Binder's long connection with the reindeer herd came full circle. Binder, ready to leave his job with the territorial government for something different, was asked by previous owners 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. The family had originally tried to buy the herd in the 1970s, but it never materialized.

"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 herding 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.

Important task

It was never an option for him to fail at this business. Binder sees himself as carrying on a family legacy and dream that puts a lot of pressure on him. With the support of his parents, who have given financial support when they could, he's pushed through the dark days.

"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."