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PETER KUJAWINSKI
NYT Syndicate
Thousands of years ago, every lake was like Great Bear Lake. So pure you could lower a cup into the water and drink it. So beautiful that people composed love songs to it. So mysterious that many believed it was alive. Today, of the 10 largest lakes in the world, it is the last one that remains essentially primeval.
Great Bear Lake straddles the Arctic Circle in the remote Northwest Territories of Canada. At more than 12,000 square miles, the lake is the eighth largest in the world. It is bigger than Belgium and deeper than Lake Superior, and it is covered in ice and snow most of the year. The surrounding area is wilderness too ” a sprawling land of untouched boreal forest and tundra, rivers and mountains.
The only human settlement on its shores is the town of Deline, population 503. This isolated community is mostly Sahtuto'ine, meaning the Bear Lake People. They are as connected to the lake as the name implies, and for practical, cultural, historic and even prophetic reasons, they are determined to keep it pristine.
Their efforts paid off in 2016. In March, the Great Bear Lake watershed was declared a Unesco Biosphere Reserve. Called the Ts'e1 Tu` Biosphere Reserve, it is the largest in North America, and the first in the world to be led by an indigenous community. Several months later, the Canadian government granted Deline self-government, ensuring local control in areas like language and education. It is the first time that an aboriginal government in Canada will represent everyone in the community, aboriginal and non-aboriginal alike. Taken together, the Unesco and self-government announcements reinforce Deline's ability to control what happens to Great Bear Lake.
David Livingstone, now retired after decades of working on environmental issues for the Canadian government in the far north, helped Deline apply for Unesco designation. To the Sahtuto'ine, Great Bear Lake is"not just a body of water; it's fundamental to their culture," he said."The folks in Deline consider the lake to be a living thing." Great Bear Lake is important to Livingstone as well."It is the last great lake of its size and quality on the planet," he said."It's like the Mona Lisa ” a world treasure."
It was late afternoon when the small plane dipped through a thick, low-lying cloud layer and I saw boreal forest ” part of a vast biome that stretches across northern North America and Eurasia ” as far as the eye could see. The plane descended toward a slender strip covered in white, Deline's single runway. It was a short drive from the airport to the hotel where I was staying, the community-owned Grey Goose Lodge. For such a tiny community, Deline has more tourist infrastructure than I expected, including a small handicrafts store in the hotel and an ambition to welcome the growing number of tourists who travel to Canada's north for a winter and wilderness experience.
The evening I arrived, I met with Morris Neyelle, a member of the new governing council, the K'aowedo Ke, as well as Danny Gaudet, a local businessman who was Deline's lead negotiator for self-government. Sworn in on Septtember 1, the new Deline Got'ine government is responsible for delivering an array of local programmes and services. Neyelle, 65, tall and soft-spoken, switches easily between English and North Slavey. He said self-government allowed the residents of Deline to preserve their way of life and to use these traditions to tackle modern problems. In the past, Gaudet added, people would look only to the national and provincial government for help. Now, Deline would decide what was best for its people. This included making their own decisions about economic development, such as elevating cultural tourism through the community-run Destination Deline programme."Just on tourism alone, we think we can probably put everyone to work in this town," Gaudet said.
People in Deline told me that the weather had been changing in recent years, and that the summer season was getting longer. The lake is taking longer to freeze, and it's melting earlier."Maybe we're in that era now where everything is changing," he said.
Late that evening, I walked along Deline's main street and tried to imagine hundreds of thousands of people coming to the area. It was hard to do. The night sky was overcast, and the temperature had dipped to minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 23 Celsius). Specks of ice from the freezing-up of Great Bear Lake filled the air. The flecks caused outdoor lights to reflect upward, creating optical illusions called light pillars that made it seem as if each light had become a searchlight aimed at the sky.
I walked off the road and into a thicket of boreal forest. Hoarfrost from the lake clung to every surface of the trees and bushes. It covered even the undersides of spruce needles. I was hundreds of feet from the shoreline, yet Great Bear Lake was everywhere ” in the air, on the ground and in the trees.
One elder I met was Charlie Neyelle, 72, Morris Neyelle's older brother and the elders' representative on the K'aowedo Ke. Charlie Neyelle is a spiritual and mental health guide for the community, and pushed for self-government and preservation of Great Bear Lake. I asked him a question I had posed to many people during my time in Deline: What does Great Bear Lake mean to you?
In response, Neyelle told me the water-heart story, about a Sahtuto'ine ancestor who lived around Great Bear Lake, in an area called Caribou Point. One day the fisherman set out four hooks. When the fisherman returned to check on them, a lake trout had broken one of the lines and taken the hook. This bothered the fisherman, because in those days, hooks were extremely valuable. So that night, he transformed himself into a losch, also known as burbot, a freshwater version of cod. The fisherman swam down to the middle of the lake to look for the hook and heard a booming sound. There, at the bottom, he saw a gigantic beating heart. All the species of fish ” trout, whitefish, pickerel, herring, suckers ” faced the heart, surrounding and protecting it. He swam back to shore after seeing this, and the following morning when he went to check on his three hooks, he found three trout. One of them had the hook he had lost the day before dangling from its mouth.
When the fisherman saw the water-heart, he realised Great Bear Lake was alive, Neyelle said."The lake gives life to the universal: grass, insects, willow, everything." Some in Deline believe that the water-heart at the bottom of the lake gives life to all of the lakes, oceans and rivers in the world. For the Sahtuto'ine, this belief underscores not only why Great Bear Lake must be protected, but also why its protection is of global importance.
During my last days in the area, I went exploring with a Deline resident, Leeroy Andre, his wife, Diane, and his 18-year-old daughter, Whitney. We would leave at sunrise and plunge into the boreal forest, following trails and old seismic lines. In the distance lay the frozen sheet of Great Bear Lake, and beyond, thick rolls of mist rose toward the sun, evidence of open water at the edge of the horizon. In North Slavey, this mist is called tah-tzeleh.
It is a land of ptarmigan and marten, musk ox, caribou, moose, wolf and bear. One day, after we had been out four hours, we came across a huge abandoned beaver lodge at least 6 feet high and twice as long. Around then, despite my wearing several layers, a parka and other gear, the cold started after me. It crept up from the ground onto my snowmobile. It cracked the rubber of my boots and shouldered inside. If I concentrated, I could feel ice crystals forming in my toes. When we started moving again, the cold took on the shape of a blanket and patiently tried to cover my shoulders and back.
At sunset, the moon appeared like a slender comma above the trees, glowing in the blue-black sky. We drove through marshmallow mounds: berry bushes covered in snow and hoarfrost for most of the year before they emerge in the summer and grow leaves and berries as fast as they can.
Dark came quickly, and we sped across yet another small lake connected to Great Bear Lake. The snowmobile's headlight illuminated a blizzard of snowflakes as shiny as diamonds, as if the land were showing what true wealth looked like.
The northern lights appeared like a hallucination across the star-filled sky. For hours they moved in slow motion above me, as the land seemed to recede and I faced the cosmos. If a recent scientific theory proves correct, somewhere out in space is the origin of the earth's water, which fills Great Bear Lake and gives us life.
This connected with something I was told when I first arrived in Deline. To the Sahtuto'ine, Great Bear Lake is not just a lake. They are part of it and it is part of them. No longer does this seem like a belief unique to their culture ” it sounds like a universal truth. The water from Great Bear Lake flows in our veins, too.
