-Andrew Bertrand and his family do not wear fur coats, although furs surely would help to ward off the cold that scoffs at the moldering cardboard and tattered plastic enlisted to tuckpoint their wilderness cabins 50 miles south of here.
It is not for lack of opportunity that they have made this choice. The Bertrands, Slavey Indians whose forebears survived for centuries in the isolated bush along the border of the Northwest Territories and British Columbia, annually trap scores of beavers, martens and lynxes.
The pelts eventually become luxurious coats sold in swank urban stores that the family can scarcely imagine, in places such as Toronto and New York and Paris that they likely will never see.
Nor do they shun fur out of moral objections to killing animals for fashion. The Bertrands, vaguely aware that people in cities thousands of miles distant raise such objections, say they are mystified by them.
For the Bertrands, not wearing fur is simply a matter of economics. They say they can`t afford to.
”If it`s a really badly damaged pelt, maybe we`ll keep it for a hat or something,” said Andrew Bertrand, 34, his gaze fixed on several of his young nieces and nephews playing outside in torn shirt sleeves on a near-freezing fall morning.
”But anything we can take to sell, we sell. There is no other way to get money so we can continue to trap and survive.”
As Bertrand matter-of-factly explains it, each year`s trapping income-his father, Francis, 65, had an especially good season last year, making about $6,000-just about pays off the previous year`s bills for supplies bought on credit at the nearest Hudson Bay outpost, in Ft. Liard, north by boat along the placid Liard River.
It is a precarious and circular subsistence, sadly familiar to the estimated 100,000 Dene and Inuit natives who continue the struggle to preserve their vanishing cultures in isolated settlements across Canada`s vast north.
On lands they once owned indisputably-lands now the subject of complex legal claims lodged against the federal and provincial governments that took them over-the Indians persist in traditional ways of hunting and trapping in the face of a rapidly encroaching modern world.
But as the winter trapping season approaches, the future looks especially bleak to the 500 Slavey Indians of Ft. Liard, a band of the Dene Nation who live scattered in wilderness clearings along the Liard River. Their problems and fears largely are unknown by the outside world, even as it squeezes them harder from every direction.
To the west, the natives say, oil and gas pipelines that bisect their trap lines have polluted their traditional fishing lakes. The younger Slavey have had to come up with a new phrase in their native language to try to explain to their elders the appearance of seismic lines all around them, narrow clearings bulldozed through the bush by geologists in search of oil deposits.
The phrase is ”me che ne et te ne,” which means ”trail made by a truck.”
Just 10 miles south of the place where the Bertrands live, clear-cut logging operations sanctioned by the British Columbian government are felling vast stands of forest, causing the wildlife that long has sustained the Indians to disperse ever farther.
The Slavey have a new phrase for this, too, which translates ”place where there are no more trees.”
And from the urban centers far to the southeast, the isolated Indians hear the strange new drumbeats of a strengthening animal-rights movement that would shut down their fur trade. Words in Slavey to describe this phenomenon have eluded them so far.
”We don`t understand what the noise is about, but we know one thing: If you shut down trapping, people up here are going to suffer a lot more than the animals do,” said Fred Berreault, 54, a cousin of the Bertrands and, like his father and grandfather, a trapper all his life.
”People here don`t go to school. They live in the bush, and they have big families to support. You shut down trapping, and what will we live on? We can`t just eat berries.”
There is nothing simple about the existence the Bertrand family has carved out of this unforgiving wilderness, although the fresh moose carcass hanging from a pole and the sweet wood smoke rising from old iron stoves might suggest a stereotypical vision of Indian bliss.
It took high-powered rifle shells, at 75 cents each, to kill that moose. It takes gasoline, at $2.50 a gallon in that remote region, to power the motorboats and snowmobiles necessary to reach the ever-receding game stocks, and costly parts to repair the machines when they break down.
Charter plane flights, at $500 or more, frequently are necessary to take furs to outside markets when the prices offered by the fur buyer at the local Hudson Bay store are too low. Grocery staples and clothing are as much as 30 percent more expensive than in the urbanized south.
The inescapable pressures of the modern world, born of the first visits of 17th Century European fur traders to North America, long ago forced Canada`s wilderness Indians to succumb to a cash economy. The need for modern equipment to pursue their traditions binds them inextricably to that economy. And domestic skills have been lost as contemporary life overtakes them.
”It was easier for my grandfather,” Fred Berreault said as he reached for a small $2-jar of store-bought jam, kept on a tabletop with other perishables because there are no refrigerators.
”They didn`t have to buy all these things from white people. They didn`t need the gas and the snowmobiles because the animals were closer.
”Now,” he continued in a voice betraying less anger than resignation,
”they take the gas from our land, send it south, then truck it back up here to sell to us.”
For families such as the Bertrands, who say they shun an array of available social welfare programs for reasons of pride and independence, fur provides the only way to earn the cash they need.
But if the issues are complex in the wilderness, they are no simpler in Toronto, home to a burgeoning North American animal-rights movement that is moving aggressively to fight the commercial use of fur.
Motivated by fundamental moral concerns over the killing of animals for human adornment and buttressed by evidence that many fur-bearing animals do appear to die inhumane deaths at the hands of some fur trappers and fur ranchers, the animal-rights groups say they are preparing an international public relations campaign to persuade consumers to shun furs during the fall and winter fur-buying season.
”Wearing fur is quite simply a moral issue,” said Michael O`Sullivan, Canadian representative of the World Society for the Protection of Animals, the leading international antifur organization.
”Society cannot justify the commercial killing of wildlife because it`s of pretty questionable social value.”
Fur sales are a $75 million business annually in Canada, and the commercial fur industry, backed by various federal and provincial government agencies that promote the wildlife harvest, surprisingly has not rallied to the defensive.
To answer charges that trapping is inhumane, the industry has striven to persuade wilderness trappers to abandon old-style leghold traps, with their ominous steel teeth, in favor of new ”quick-kill” traps that are supposed to break an animal`s neck with a spring-loaded device.
The industry has put forward scientific studies, scorned by animal-rights groups, that purport to show that commercial harvesting does not imperil wildlife populations. And where all else has failed, the industry has sought openly to portray the antifur groups as radicals and kooks.
Into the middle of this heated propaganda war the Indian has been thrust by both sides. Although wild-caught fur accounts for only about 15 percent of the world fur market, the balance being ”ranched” fur from animals raised on commercial farms, it comprises about half of Canada`s fur exports, and beleaguered Indians make powerful symbols for either side.
The fur industry emphasizes the damage that will be done to native trappers if the antifur movement is successful. For its part, the antifur movement cynically suggests that the Indians are being used by an industry that, as O`Sullivan says, ”has never done natives any favors,” having made them financially dependent on a fur-buying system over which they exert no control.
Canada`s major native organizations, meanwhile, have formed their own group, Indigenous Survival International, to speak for them. They resent what they see as the pious morality of the animal-rights groups and at the same time fear that the fur industry ultimately will sacrifice their interests to expediency.
”These urban people are asking the native people who live closest to the land to give up their way of life, and for what? To appease their own consciences,” said Cindy Gilday, a Dene Indian who recently moved from Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, to Toronto to run Indigenous Survival.
”Respect for animals is nothing new for native people, although it is new for people in the cities who have destroyed all the wildlife around them.”
Gilday worries that the fur industry eventually might agree to a ban on fur trapped in the wild, both to appease animal-rights groups and to deprive them of their most powerful propaganda photos that show wild animals caught in traps, chewing on their own legs to escape.
”Wild-caught fur is the only area our people are involved in and the only area where the industry can give without losing too much,” she said.
Such sophisticated debates in the cities still seem very far away to the Indians at Ft. Liard, although Andrew Bertrand, in a new role as a part-time wildlife officer and trapping instructor for the Northwest Territories, attempts to explain them.
So far, Bertrand said, his Indian brethren are willing to trade in their traditional leghold traps for newer varieties. While they reason that doing so might cool the hostility of the antifur groups, they are making the switch primarily because the new traps are more effective and are less likely to damage an animal`s pelt, Bertrand said.
His father, Francis, however, speaks for most when he expresses his frank bewilderment over the whole issue.
”A lot of people say it`s cruel to kill animals,” he mused in his native Slavey, translated by his son. ”But out here you see animals with diseases and starvation, and they die a lot worse deaths in the bush than in traps. Trapping makes a balance in nature. It prevents overpopulation and starvation.
”It was the white man,” he added finally, ”who came here for fur in the first place. And now he doesn`t want it anymore?”
