300-Year Tradition : Canada’s Trappers Savor the Renewed Demand for Furs

A Dog Rib Indian trapper with a sack of 200 muskrat pelts made his way past the dry goods and stereos to a rear counter in the Hudson’s Bay Co. store in this settlement on Great Slave Lake.

He doesn’t need to say a word to the manager, who examines the furs and peels off $770 in cash.

The Indian smiles as he stuffs the bills into his jacket. Thanks to a resurgence in the fur coat industry from Toronto to Tokyo, it was the best price in years.

Near the store, two more Indians have brought in 330 muskrat pelts from trap lines in the snow-covered bush of Canada’s sprawling Northwest Territories.

Live Close to the Land

“It only took us a week. We set 150 traps,” said Leon Weyallon, 26, unloading snowmobiles and sleds outside his government-subsidized house.

His wife was watching a soap opera on color television while an older woman was scraping pelts and turning them inside out on stretch-boards for drying. A crucifix and photos of priests hang on the wall.

Despite satellite TV from Detroit and Catholicism brought by missionaries, most of the 1,500 Dog Ribs in this largest Indian town in the Territories still live close to the land, trading with Hudson’s Bay as their ancestors did 300 years ago when the white man first came in search of furs.

The trade in beaver, fox, marten and other furs provides a livelihood for about 100,000 trappers across Canada, including many of the 27,000 Indians, Inuit (Eskimos) and half-caste Metis in the isolated communities of the Arctic North where other sources of income are scarce.

Ban on Fur Imports Urged

Although fur prices are good this season, Indians below the tree line and Eskimos above it are increasingly worried about animal-rights and conservation groups campaigning in Europe and America to stop the killing of wildlife and alleged “inhumane” trapping.

It’s a complaint few natives understand.

“I never met an Indian opposed to trapping,” said Chipewyan Chief Felix Lockhart of Snowdrift, a hunting community near Great Slave Lake.

With slogans such as “Fur is the ultimate sadist symbol,” the International Fund for Animal Welfare and similar groups urge governments to ban fur imports and shoppers to switch to synthetics.

Income Dropped Sharply

There is a precedent. With glamour from Brigitte Bardot, and gore from pictures of white-coated harp seal pups being clubbed to death, the European Economic Community felt compelled in 1983 to impose a ban on seal skins--used to make fur coats and leather goods.

The decision deprived Newfoundland sealers of one-third of their income and forced 1,500 Inuit hunters onto welfare. Within three years, annual income for the 800 Inuit of Pond Inlet on Baffin Island fell from $23,100 to $5,000 to $3,850.

The Canadian government halted the killing of harp pups, but when it approved a hunt for adult seals off Newfoundland this spring, protests renewed.

Indian and Inuit hunters fear for their livelihoods and cultures.

‘We Don’t Hunt for Fun’

“Our way of life has been going on for hundreds of years. Did they just discover that animals had rights?” asks Joe Rabesca, chief of the Dog Ribs, part of the 9,000-member Dene Indian Nation.

“We don’t hunt for the fun of it,” argues Jack Anawak, director of the Keewatin Inuit Assn. along Hudson Bay.

Born in an igloo and now a successful businessman, Anawak, 36, still takes his rifle out caribou hunting. “My method is no more cruel than somebody slaughtering a pig or a chicken running around with its head cut off.”

Peter Ernerk, president of the Keewatin Inuit, said North Americans and Europeans have been conditioned to think that meat comes from grocery stores and clothing from textile mills. “They no longer appreciate the origins of such basic necessities.”

Nothing Thrown Away

Most Indians and Eskimos still prefer “country food” such as caribou, Arctic char, seal and walrus to canned and processed goods from the south.

The Dene eat beaver and muskrat.

“We don’t throw anything away,” Rabesca said. “Lynx tastes like turkey. The meat augments average trapping incomes of $5,000.”

Natives also use their harvest to make parkas and mukluks (Arctic boots) for protection in the long winter when temperatures dip to 40 below zero.

“People will always wear fur and I’m one of them,” said Eliza Lawrence, a Dene member of the Territorial legislature for Great Slave Lake East.

Industry Was Wiped Out

Red Pedersen, a Dane who arrived in the Territories in 1953 as a Hudson’s Bay manager and is now minister of Renewable Resources, said the European seal boycott wiped out a $2-million industry.

Fur became Canada’s founding industry when King Henry IV of France signed a trapping agreement with Samuel de Champlain in 1602. The lucrative trade drew England’s King Charles II to grant a charter to his cousin, Prince Rupert, establishing the Hudson’s Bay Co. in 1670.

To preserve the $460-million industry, in which most of the 4 million wild pelts harvested annually are exported, the government is financing lobby groups, running courses in efficient trapping and spending $1.1 million to develop traps that will kill animals quickly, lessening their pain.

The counterpropaganda campaign is paying off, Pedersen said. The Swedish Parliament recently defeated a bill to ban the import of trapped furs after Canada presented its case.

‘Furs Back in Style’

Even more important, designers in America, Europe and the Far East are choosing furs again and finding buyers.

“Furs are back in style and there are new markets opening up,” said Toronto wholesaler Jack Kuretzky, 66, whose company produces 200 fur coats a week. “This is the best year the trappers have ever had.”

Hudson’s Bay fur buyer Joe Desmond backed that up. He said marten is fetching $115, compared with about $8 in 1972, and top-quality lynx, the wildcat with a soft and thick, gray coat, is worth $1,100.

Kuretzky said the demand for fur garments in Japan is second only to the United States, where sales hit $1 billion last year for the first time. In Toronto, the boom translates into 10,000 jobs at 200 companies buying, dressing, manufacturing and retailing furs.

“We are using animals for survival, just as Europeans use money to survive,” said one Inuit hunter in Rankin Inlet, 1,000 miles north of the nearest big city. “There’s nothing else here.”