Essay

Churchill, Manitoba, on the edge of Hudson Bay, has faced some pretty unique and challenging circumstances in recent years.  In March of 2017, it was hit with a snowstorm that lasted for 97 hours and left drifts of snow over 20 feet high in some places. 

That spring, as the snows from the winter melted, it washed out the railway that connects Churchill to Southern Manitoba in 24 locations.  The railways stayed closed for a year and a half as the owners stalled on the repairs, only to eventually sell the rail line before it was fixed.  It was only open for 17 months before the COVID-19 pandemic hit and caused further isolation and economic hardship in the town.  From 2018 to 2022, many businesses in town worried about their future, and people moved from Churchill as living costs increased and opportunities were limited.

These crises coincided with Churchill’s surging global profile as a northern tourism destination, offering unique land-based experiences, especially the fall polar bear season, when the bears gather on the coast waiting for the ice to freeze up.  Over the past 10 years it has made international destination lists, featured as the hotspot of the year in publications like the New York Times, Expedia and The Lonely Planet. This publicity has enhanced the tourist economy in Churchill, and enabled continued investment in Churchill by the province.  It has also made Churchill a magnet for other organizations focused on polar bears, like the ENGO Polar Bears International, which built a new headquarters in town. 

In 2018, right after the railway stopped, Churchill was the site of a mural festival that saw 18 murals painted in the region related to the natural environment that surrounds it. The festival was organized by the PangeaSeed Foundation, which has run similar festivals in other coastal towns across the world.  PangeaSeed’s mission is to use art to motivate people to action and help care for oceans that are under threat.  In Churchill, many of the images were focused on Polar Bears and Belugas, the two animals at the centre of Churchill’s tourist industry.  The murals have become another stop for potential tourists, alongside tundra buggy tours, boating with belugas, dog sledding, and shopping in town.  

This mural, painted by Jason Botkin, is titled Little Duck Lake and it is based on the story of the dispossession of the Sayisi Dene First Nation in Northern Manitoba.  It points to how the Sayisi Dene were removed from Little Duck Lake by the federal government because there was a belief that the Dene were responsible for the decline in caribou numbers in the area.  Specifically, there was a photo published of caribou antlers at Little Duck Lake that caught the attention of the provincial conservation office.  This photo was believed to be proof of the wanton slaughter of caribou by the Dene, visual evidence that something drastic needed to happen to ensure the wildlife destruction did not continue.

Because of these fears, and firmly within the ideological bounds of contemporary settler-colonial dynamics, the Dene were forcibly relocated in 1956 to Churchill. This offered them no way continue their traditional form of livelihood.  There they were provided with barely livable housing on the outskirts of town in a place that became known as Camp 10.  The conditions in Camp 10 were so deplorable that by 1973, half of the 250 residents that had been relocated had died. 

The mural highlights the original justification for this relocation with the stylized antlers on the right side of the building.  On the left there is an image of a Dene elder, whose back half, around the corner, is a fish. 

In the middle of the mural is a quote from Sayisi Elder Betsy Anderson, “There was a time when all the people and the Animals understood each other and spoke the same language”. The Sayisi Dene, prior to their displacement, were still living a way of life that had been refined by their traditions and beliefs.  Anderson’s words implicate the colonial approach to wildlife that blamed the Dene lifestyle for normal changes in Caribou population and migration patterns. Western conservation ideas were key to this dispossession of land.    

This is an important mural to have in Churchill – some Sayisi Dene still reside in town, and the legacies of Camp 10 are still felt by other Indigenous groups who faced similar marginalization.  It also offers an opportunity for tourists to think through the relationship between environmental crisis and colonialism, noting the ways conservation science was used to achieve the aims of a colonial government. 

However, complicating this story is a significant unacknowledged parallel between the management of polar bears and the story of Little Duck Lake and the fear of caribou decline.  Around the same time as provincial wildlife managers were concerned with the Dene’s hunting of caribou, the federal government implemented a quota system for Inuit hunting polar bears.  This quota system has continued ever since.  In recent years, the Inuit territory of Nunavut has taken over control of that quota system. 

The Nunavut Wildlife Management Board forms its plans through active consultation with Hunters and Trappers Organizations across the Territory and the work of its own scientists.  This is a wealth of knowledge, and much of it speaks to the ways that climate change is having dramatic impacts on the Arctic, reshaping the ecological patterns of the North. Inuit have long been leaders in sounding the alarm around climate change, and Inuit also have been partners with scientists who are documenting the changes in the North. 

In 2018 the board increased the quota allowance in parts of the North, saying that the experience of their hunters has taught them that in these territories the bears are plentiful enough, and they are sometimes a danger to people. 

This increase has caused a significant reaction among polar bear conservation groups, with one of the leading polar bear scientists in Canada claiming that “there is a reasonable chance that the last polar bear in Canada will be shot by an Inuk hunter.”  These comments belie a racism  that has sometimes motivated conservation approaches.  While it would be reasonable to debate the accuracy of different methods of estimating polar bear populations, this comment asserts that Inuit hunters are incapable of recognizing long-term patterns of polar bears. It does not merely see things differently, it insists upon the inability for Inuit hunters to manage the territory that they live in and are rightsholders of.   

Similar to the story of Little Duck Lake, western conservation science is mobilized to discredit Indigenous knowledge systems.  Indeed, Inuit scientists and hunters have long claimed that western conservationists have ignored their insight into polar bear management.  And of course we have to look no further than the banning of seal hunting as an example of the imposition of conservation on Inuit lives and livelihoods.

Importantly, these challenges to Inuit authority were not motivated by an overt allegiance to the colonial dynamics at play, nor a recognized racism, but rather by the empathy for an animal and a faith in an epistemological worldview that eclipses Indigenous insight. They were trying to conserve nature in an ecological crisis. Yet, at the same time as this worldview discredits the knowledge systems, it also works to undermine Indigenous jurisdiction and their rights over the landscape.  Environmental conservation becomes another method of colonial dispossession.      

The mural, Little Duck Lake could be a tool to think through the types of consequences that come from the collaboration between colonialism and conservation.  It can help us think about how the stories that we tell about animals are rarely just stories about animals.  And it might help us to remember that in these stories about animals, whether they are caribou or polar bears, animals have, as Paul Robbins suggests, a constituency – a group that finds their interests aligned with that animal.

The challenge here is whether the experience of Churchill as a tourist destination can make clear what those constituencies are.  It is certainly getting harder and harder to ignore the existence of colonialism in Churchill, and Indigenous tourism is a large part of making that conversation possible.  But in an industry built upon empathy for polar bears and the slow but persistent recognition of climate change, it can be hard to explain the complicated dynamics that might turn empathy for an animal into the justification for colonial jurisdiction.  Without understanding those dynamics, Little Duck Lake becomes, like so many other stories of colonialism, something that only happened in the past.