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TREATY DECLINED HOW INUVIALUIT CHOSE REINDEER OVER PAYMENTS ALMOST 100 YEARS AGO WORDS BY Charles Arnold PHOTOS FROM the Anglican General Synod Archives, Inuvialuit Regional Corporation and O.S. Finnie/Library and Archives Canada
When the Inuvialuit Final Agreement (IFA) was signed in Tuktoyaktuk on June 5, 1984, one of the people who proudly signed his name on the document was Mark Noksana, the Committee for Original People’s Entitlement’s negotiator for Tuktoyaktuk. The ‘Western Arctic Claim – Inuvialuit Final Agreement’ is a ‘modern’ or ‘comprehensive’ land claim that stands in contrast to ‘historic’ treaties that include the socalled ‘numbered’ treaties between the Crown and First Nations in some other parts of Canada. However, according to Mark Noksana and others of his generation, the negotiations that led to the IFA were not the first time that government and the Inuvialuit discussed entering into a treaty. Originally from Alaska, Mark Noksana had come to Canada when he was hired to help drive a herd of reindeer that had been purchased by the Government of Canada to the Mackenzie Delta area. The reindeer and the herders left Alaska in December 1929, and after many delays arrived in the Delta in March 1935. During a stopover at Shingle Point on the Yukon coast, Mark Noksana heard from people there about William Mangilaluk, and about his role in having the reindeer brought to the Delta. In testimony that he gave in 1976 to the Berger Commission, which was surveying people’s opinions on a pipeline, Mark Noksana recalled through an interpreter: “I used to ask [people] around […] Shingle Point, ‘What you guys ask for reindeer for?’ Well, some of them told me [about a] man in Tuktoyaktuk by the name of William Mangilaluk, [a] chief […]
“I happened to meet that man there before he died, chief William Mangilaluk. […] he told me [people from the] government came down [to Whitefish Station and to Tuktoyaktuk] and [asked] him if he want [treaty] money, like Indians. […] He says he didn’t say nothing. He just going to think about it. “[Mangilaluk had] heard of some reindeer in Alaska […] There was no caribou at all here in Tuktoyaktuk […] No caribou at all at that time. So the chief […] asked the government if he could get the reindeer for the Eskimos. […]. He says money’s no good to him. That’s what he told me. He said he’d rather get reindeer so he can have meat all the time for the new generation coming, so they can have reindeer meat all the time in Tuk area here. […] So the government back in Ottawa decided they would go to Alaska, buy […] reindeer and drive them from there. I was one of them, four years with them. That’s what happened.” (Thomas Berger, Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland, 1977).
The passage of time obscures memories, and the paucity of detailed written records in official archives makes it difficult to verify some of the things Mark Noksana talked about. What we can say is that the treaty William Mangilaluk referred to was Treaty 11, which the Government of Canada and the Dene residing in the territory “along the Mackenzie River and the Arctic Ocean in the Dominion of Canada” entered into in 1921. Although the understanding of the intent and the legitimacy of the treaty continues to be debated, it was the government’s position that, in return for the Dene surrendering their rights to land both in the treaty area and elsewhere in Canada, the government was to make payments each year of $25 to each ‘chief,’ $15 to each ‘headman’ and $5 to others.
