Market Scene : Reindeer Herd Sits on the Horns of a Dilemma : The animals’ antlers have made William Nasogaluak wealthy. But he is under fire from fellow Eskimos and the Canadian government.

Meet William Nasogaluak, the only man in the village of Tuktoyaktuk ever to own a Cadillac.

And not just any Cadillac. Nasogaluak’s is a trim, air-conditioned, navy blue Coupe de Ville with plush, powder-blue upholstery. It is worth noting that Tuktoyaktuk, an Eskimo village on the mean shores of the Beaufort Sea in the Northwest Territories, has no roads. A dealer shipped Nasogaluak his dream car down the Mackenzie River by barge.

Nasogaluak stashed away the money for his car--along with a 22-foot pleasure boat, a pair of helicopters and a Nashville-class collection of steel guitars--as the proprietor of Canada’s largest and most successful reindeer herd. Reindeer may not be native to North America, but Nasogaluak has figured out how to make them thrive on Canada’s trackless northwestern wastes and how to turn a very nice profit by selling their antlers to big-spending Asian herbalists, who dispense pulverized antler preparations as aphrodisiacs.

Nasogaluak, who swears he never touches the various love potions himself, has been head of Canadian Reindeer Ltd. and its 10,000-odd animals since 1978.

In a part of Canada where employment is scarce, where life on the dole is what most people know and where the government has desperately tried to promote private enterprise, Nasogaluak has created jobs and turned his handsome profit without a dime of public subsidy. In a country where poverty among Indians and Inuit--as the Eskimos prefer to be called--is a source of national embarrassment, Nasogaluak stands out as an exemplar of the successful native businessman.

And in a world where fortunes are all too often made by raping the environment, Nasogaluak’s reindeer are the very stuff of a green, clean, renewable-resource economy. They do no known damage to the tundra and jibe nicely with traditional native ways, and their lopped-off antlers--which is where the serious money is--grow back on schedule every year.

You might assume that people in these parts would consider William Nasogaluak the next best thing to Father Christmas. But, alas, he is instead mired in reindeer-related lawsuits that have dragged on for the better part of a decade. His neighbors admit that they poach his animals with impunity, feasting on illicit reindeer steaks.

Worse yet, not one but three levels of government--those of Canada and the Northwest Territories, as well as the native-led public body that oversees land use around Tuktoyaktuk--have all reviled Nasogaluak to the point where he says they’re threatening his livelihood and he’s thinking about slaughtering the herd.

“It’s a sordid story,” says Doug Billingsley, Nasogaluak’s business adviser, a white man who lives in the western Arctic town of Inuvik and commutes to the range by Cessna.

Adds Nasogaluak: “There’s no future for reindeer now. We just have to fight to survive. The only guys winning today are lawyers.”

How did Nasogaluak’s reindeer--animals usually associated with elves, sleighs and uncut good cheer--fall into this sorry state? Their story is one of luck, greed, envy and clashing ideologies. For while the Canadian north at first glance does not seem an arena for class warfare, the controversy over Nasogaluak’s reindeer comes down to a casebook chapter on a private fortune warring with the public good--or anyway, what Nasogaluak’s enemies say is the public good.

“It’s like one of those vendettas you read about in the wild, wild West,” says Gunther Abrahamson, one of a series of consultants hired by the federal government over the years to figure out what to do about the reindeer.

Or a Horatio Alger story, maybe. William Nasogaluak has been puffed up across Canada as an “Eskimo millionaire,” but his origins are as simple and anonymous as those of any of the 30,000 Inuit who populate the Canadian north.

He was born in a log cabin, on an island where the vast Mackenzie River delta meets the Beaufort Sea. He shared his parents’ primitive shack with six brothers and four sisters, in a village with no streets, constabulary or electricity.

He started out in the world as a heavy-equipment operator on a DEW Line site, one of the 22 radar stations the United States and Canada built in the far north in the mid-1950s to keep vigil for the first signs of a Soviet missile strike.

“They had one salary for natives, and they had another salary for white people coming from down south,” he recalls. “They paid us $200 a month, and they paid white people $850 for doing the same job. I’m not bitter about anything. These are true facts.”

While the young Nasogaluak was suffering that indignity, the Canadian government was conducting experiment after failed experiment with reindeer. Missionaries had first brought the animals from Siberia to Alaska in the 1890s, as part of a jobs scheme for the natives there. Clever promoters in Nome soon figured out that by shipping the occasional Dasher or Dancer down to a place like palmy Los Angeles for a Christmas parade, they could attract consumer attention and get people to give reindeer meat a try.

By 1919, Alaska’s imported reindeer were said to be worth more than the $7.2 million that the U.S. government had paid to snap up Alaska itself from czarist Russia in 1867. The Canadian government began to want a reindeer herd too.

Canada had its own poor and hungry native peoples to consider; overhunting in the Mackenzie Delta region had all but wiped out the indigenous caribou that had once been their mainstay. Officials in faraway Ottawa deemed reindeer an acceptable substitute for the caribou, since the two subspecies are close cousins. And reindeer offered a potential advantage: They can be herded; wild caribou cannot.

With visions of meat, milk, clothing and even transportation for the needy Inuit dancing in their heads--no one had a notion about the antlers yet--the Canadian officials bought 3,000 reindeer from Alaska in 1929. They dedicated an 18,000-square-mile preserve and banned reindeer and caribou hunting on its lichen-encrusted reaches. Then they set about turning the hunter-trapper Inuit of Canada into herdsmen, just like the Lapps of Scandinavia.

“To make it successful, you had to change people’s way of life,” says Rosemary Cairns, a historian who is writing a book on the reindeer. “You almost had to change the very nature of the people.”

Surprise, surprise: That was more than the government could do. Reindeer problems erupted from the moment the beasts arrived in the Mackenzie Delta. The officials tried lending out mini-herds of 800 reindeer apiece to families, promising eventual ownership if the new stewards did well. But the animals insisted on running back together, igniting disputes over who owned which animals, who had the right to this or that piece of the range and who could lay claim to such profits as might be realized.

Compounding these problems, reindeer-husbanding practices of the day required the Inuit to stick close by their herds, Lapp-style. But the Inuit were used to roving over vast reaches of the tundra as hunters and trappers. They didn’t like staying in one place--especially for the pittance that reindeer meat then fetched.

By the mid-1960s, every Inuit family that had tried its hand at herding had given its complement of reindeer back to the government in frustration. The animals that had seemed so promising half a century earlier were now costing Ottawa tens of thousands of dollars a year to maintain.

What to do? The government called in the first of many reindeer consultants. “Privatize,” came the response, so officials sold the herd to one Silas Kangegana of Tuktoyaktuk for the distress-sale sum of $45,000, or about $4.50 a head. (The price per beast might in fact have been a little more or less, since the exact size of the herd by that time is disputed.)

So eager was the government to unload the reindeer that it even advanced Kangegana the purchase price and--significantly--threw in indefinite grazing rights on its huge reindeer preserve.

Kangegana ranched for a few years but eventually so wearied of reindeer-punching that he too decided to sell. Luckily for him, another local man wanted to try his hand: William Nasogaluak, who by now had tired of the Soviet threat in the skies and come back from his DEW Line labors, eager to go into business for himself.

Nasogaluak picked up the whole privatized reindeer corporation in 1978 for $219,000: the animals, the infrastructure, the goodwill and--he insists--the grazing rights on the government preserve.

He had also picked up a savvy business partner: Doug Billingsley, who up till then had been chief of economic development for the Northwest Territories.

As the man in charge of finding economic opportunities for the government, Billingsley had learned something about reindeer that neither the feds nor the Inuit knew: Herbalists in South Korea were willing to pay as much as $50 a pound for select reindeer antlers--far more than the priciest gourmet shop in all Vancouver would ever shell out for reindeer meat.

When Billingsley quit his government post and teamed up with Nasogaluak in the reindeer venture, his international economic savvy proved the perfect complement to Nasogaluak’s native understanding of wildlife management. Before long, Canadian Reindeer Ltd. had hired a South Korean to train its crews in the fine, if gory, art of antler harvesting (the horns have to be cut just so, to keep the much-prized blood from leaking out or congealing); they had built the necessary feedlot chutes and corrals, and they had launched a business with a multimillion-dollar potential.

And so was crowned the Reindeer King of Tuktoyaktuk.

Nasogaluak has sweet memories of those early years when he camped out on the tundra for days at a stretch, sleeping in tents and shacks in the filthiest of Arctic weather, traversing the enormous grazing preserve by snowmobile, rounding up strays and warding off wolves.

“It was a way of life,” he says today.

And a profitable one. By sawing the antlers off every reindeer in the spring, Nasogaluak added more than $1,000 to the value per animal. Suddenly the reindeer that nobody knew what to do with had become an inexhaustible jackpot. Nasogaluak had the herd appraised in 1983; the animals were worth $4.5 million.

Nasogaluak began making big-ticket purchases, adding gear and luxury goods to his homestead that would have been conspicuous even at the South Fork Ranch of “Dallas” fame, to say nothing of humble, frozen Tuktoyaktuk.

He says today that he needed some of the expensive equipment--like the helicopters--for his ranch, and that his accountant advised him to buy other items as business tax write-offs.

However sound that financial planning may have been, though, Nasogaluak’s new shopping habits rubbed his neighbors the wrong way. People began to talk about the old days, when a caribou hunter returning home with a kill would put on a feast for his village. Nasogaluak, by contrast, shipped his reindeer meat off to distant markets.

Enter the Committee for Original Peoples’ Entitlement, or COPE, an Inuit group active in the western Arctic. At about the time Nasogaluak was building his empire, COPE was filing a collective-ownership claim to the traditional Inuit lands around the Beaufort Sea.

The federal government settled the claim in 1984, marking a giant stride for the Inuit of the western Arctic--known as Inuvialuit--who won the right to control huge tracts of land. But Nasogaluak was not so lucky. The federal negotiators ignored his grazing rights and transferred the choicest parts of the reindeer preserve to his native brothers.

The social reformers of COPE were certainly not the sort to doff their fur hats to a businessman--even if he was a native himself. COPE’s successor group, the Inuvialuit Regional Corp., began sending Nasogaluak bills for $13,000 per season, for running his reindeer on the people’s land.

Nasogaluak refused to pay, arguing that he too is a native and that he had bought the grazing rights, free and clear. He produced the original sales agreement as proof.

But sharp-eyed government lawyers noticed that the grazing rights were mentioned in the preamble to the sales agreement--not in the agreement itself. Their niggardly argument has left Nasogaluak in legal limbo ever since--a man with 10,000 reindeer and nowhere to park them.

Convinced that his activist-opponents wouldn’t stop until the lucrative reindeer had been “deprivatized” and turned over to the people once again, Nasogaluak entered negotiations to sell the herd to the Inuvialuit Regional Corp. The corporation offered $850,000--about a fifth of the appraised value. Nasogaluak scrapped the sale. The corporation went to court, seeking an injunction to get Nasogaluak and his animals off the land.

About this time the territorial government stepped in.

A powerful, popular former COPE activist named Nellie Cournoyea was now the territorial minister of renewable resources. She was of the mind that the reindeer had been brought to Canada for the people in the first place and ought still to be used for the collective benefit.

As renewable resources minister, Cournoyea drew up legislation ending the ban on caribou hunting on the reindeer preserve. For the hunters of Tuktoyaktuk, the new law was a bonanza. No one but a practiced taxonomist can tell a reindeer from a caribou, so the new hunting law effectively meant that hunters could bag reindeer to their hearts’ delight. Animal by animal, Nasogaluak’s herd began to dwindle.

Nasogaluak was driven to a dark conclusion: “It’s a government plot,” he says, explaining that he thinks officials wanted to bring wealth to the Inuit without spending any money--so they are playing Santa Claus with his reindeer.

“I was set up, eh?” he says. “It took a long time to realize it.”

Federal officials declined to comment on the great reindeer imbroglio, saying the matter was in litigation; officials of the Inuvialuit Regional Corp. also refused to comment, saying there was no point in talking since reporters too often side with Nasogaluak. Territorial officials said they were willing to lay out their case but failed to do so.

That’s where the matter rests today: The popular Cournoyea has gone on to become the government leader of the Northwest Territories. Nasogaluak has taken up ancient Inuit drumming to soothe his nerves. And various legal actions over the reindeer languish unpromisingly in the courts.