Andy Carpenter

Building a Selfless Legacy

“Iwas just about gone,” said Andy Carpenter, “The doctors in Edmonton told me I did not have very long to live if I came home. But I knew if I was going to die, I wanted to agreement in Canada. Andy is unrelenting and selfless when it comes to wildlife and land conservation; this description is etched right onto his Wallace Goose award. “I guess when I get started with anything, I don’t like to quit,” Andy laughs. He learnt resilience early on in his life. Born in a boat at Sea Otter Harbour to Fred and Lucy Carpenter, Andy lost his mother when he was very young, and attended residential school in Aklavik. His formal education ended at grade five. “My dad had a white father. It was a bit different growing up. We used to be called names and get beat up. But my dad and granddad taught us to try our best in everything we do. We lived a traditional life. I can speak Inuvialuktun. We wintered in Sachs Harbour to trap, and traveled in the summer by our schooner, the Northstar, to pick up supplies in Aklavik.” be near family. They sent me to the hospital in Inuvik, and after a month there, I was ready to come back to Sachs Harbour. Now I even go on the land with them. The doctors said I would never be able to do that. I felt better once I came back to my family.”

“I liked trapping, we made a good living with it. We always tried to make money, so we can have a better life. My wife Winnie and I had eight kids, and things cost a lot when you have a big family. In Sachs Harbour, we’ve always loved the land, and we still do a lot of hunting. But we were taught as kids to respect the wildlife, so I don’t hunt just for the fun of it. I only hunt what I’ll use.” In the early seventies, Andy became head of the Sachs Harbour Hunters and Trappers Association, and he protected the land and wildlife at Banks Island from the oil industry by working out an agreement between the community, the Government of Canada and the private sector. It limited industrial activities to the winter months.

This initial agreement became the basis of the Territorial Land Use Regulations. To protect caribou and muskoxen habitats, he also helped establish Aulavik National Park, an area of 12,000 square kilometers on the arctic lowlands. He helped preserve the calving grounds of the Porcupine caribou herd, areas spanning the Northern Yukon and Mackenzie Delta, by legislating the establishment of Ivvaik National Park through the Inuvialuit Final Agreement. Non-native activities that could harm the wildlife were thus kept to a minimum, and the Inuvialuit could still carry out subsistence hunting.

Andy, resilient in his seventies, is celebrated in the ISR as a family man and an activist for Inuvialuit rights. He is a key negotiator for the Inuvialuit Final Agreement, the first comprehensive land claims

Andy’s passion for wildlife made him take on all the reading and learning he needed to become an effective leader. He recounts the ups and downs of COPE’s negotiations with the government. COPE (Committee for Original People’s Entitlement) was essential for uniting the voices of the Inuvialuit, when they needed to negotiate with the government of Canada for their land and human rights. “I was still a trapper then. It was the end of the trapping season, in 1976, when COPE needed someone to be a negotiator. My wife Winnie was a field worker for COPE. I thought I would give it a try, and go back to trapping when the season starts again.”

“But when the time came, oil companies were coming up North, and we had to have the negotiations done before they got too much control. We broke off from the ITC (Inuit Tapirisat of Canada), because development was not affecting the Eastern Arctic as much then. I found I wanted to lead. Bob Delury, our chief negotiator, and Nellie Cournoyea, co-founder of COPE expected a lot of me, and sometimes I had to go negotiate with other groups by myself. We worked with the North Slope Indians a lot, and traveled to Ottawa regularly.”

“COPE started up in Inuvik. At first, people welcomed us when we visited their homes, but after awhile, they felt that we were giving them the same information too regularly, and they started losing interest. They shut their doors to us. There were also a few that were against settlement for a while. We had to go back and forth between the people and the government, interviewing the people to find out about land use, wildlife, and what they could give up.”

“At first, we sent a team of twenty people to Ottawa. COPE didn’t have much money when we started, so we had to keep the costs down, staying in cheap hotels, paying out of our own pockets sometimes. The government wanted to give away as little as possible, and Bob Delury kept us working to guess what the government was going to say next, to figure out how we were going to respond. We negotiated mainly about the amount of land, the wildlife and the settlement monies. We finally signed an Agreement in Principle with the Liberal government in 1979, but the Progressive Conservative Party came into power and negotiations stalled once more.”

“We had to wait for the Liberals to come into power to start negotiating again. By then the Indian Affairs ministers had been changed five times. We had to inform all the communities about what the agreement contains. We lost some of our negotiators along the way. We had negotiators from each settlement, Agnes Semmler, Robert Kuptana, Nellie Arey, Renie Arey, Tommy Gordon, Mark Noksana and Edward Ruben. I was there right until the signing.” at

“Nellie Cournoyea was at the signing. She was instrumental to the negotiation of the land claim. She was Minister of Information and Minister of Renewable Resources at that time, working from within the government to help us. The day of the signing took place in Tuktoyaktuk, on June 5th, 1984. It felt good. It had taken so long to get there.” The final agreement served as a reference for other land claims groups.

The implementation of the Final Agreement, setting up boards such as the Game Council, and representing the Inuvialuit at WMAC (Wildlife Management Advisory Council) meant Andy no longer had personal time. “It was a huge life change. I didn’t trap anymore. I had to travel all over the world. At first, it was exciting. Sometimes, I was not able to come home to my family for a month. But my family was supportive, and I had the support of the communities when I was in these positions, so I felt welcome in every settlement I visited.” Andy served as founding Chair of the Inuvialuit Game Council for ten years, and also asVice-chair of WMAC.

There used to be friction between the US and Canada regarding polar bears. Sport hunting was banned in Alaska, the Inupiat can hunt as many bears as they want for subsistence, but they cannot have sport hunts nor can they sell the fur hides. They thought we weren’t protecting the bears in Canada. We made a good presentation and from then on we started getting their respect. They learnt that we had a quota system, and that not many bears were taken. The Inuvialuit and Inupiat started managing the bears together, this has a long-term influence on the maintenance, use and conservation of this resource.” Today, Andy’s son Larry is the Chair of WMAC and Duane Smith, President of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference cites Andy as his one of his mentors. Duane also modeled the Inuvialuit - Inupiat International Beluga Management Agreement after the Polar Bear Management Agreement.

In the past five years, Andy has taken on the position of the mayor of Sachs Harbour, while also sitting on the board of IDC. He remains pragmatic when finding solutions to problems. “It’s a small community to be a mayor of, and there isn’t much that I can do,” he said. “The main thing I worked on as mayor was to get the RCMP up here. For a long time there weren’t any. It just cost too much money for the government to have the RCMP up here. Later on, because of the international sovereignty issues that are in the news these days, there was more talk. Now, the RCMP are stationed in Inuvik, and every two weeks they will rotate some members of their staff up here.” He retired last year due to declining health.

Today, he has received over twenty prestigious awards, including the Roland Michener Conservation Award, the ITK Lifetime achievement award, and the Parks Canada Award. The latest award he received is the 2005 NAAF award for Environment. Andy understands how crucial it had been for the Inuvialuit to struggle for rights as a people, having gone through it first hand. He encourages younger generations to revisit the Inuvialuit Final Agreement. “I think people should look at it again. Things change through the years, and the agreement is a living document that adapts, but we have to know how to create change. It would be good if more people could understand and get involved. When you are working, and you go forward with confidence, you will be rewarded.”