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The killing of the bears
by Alex Tizon
Seattle Times staff reporter
RIVERS INLET, B.C. - The bones of grizzly bears litter the town dump in scattered
piles. A skull here, a jawbone there. A rib cage picked clean by scavengers. Teeth as long as a grown man's fingers.
The first of the grizzlies were shot in September after they broke into trailers on the west end of the village. In October, six more were killed, and by mid-January, the tally had reached 14.
Nobody in this tiny native village of 80 souls wanted it to come to this. Something had gone terribly wrong. Natives and grizzly bears had coexisted peacefully for centuries in this lush, wild country on the central coast, 250 miles northwest of Vancouver.
Every fall, as far back as human memory reaches, the bears would pass through the
village on the way to the Wanuk River to eat salmon. Villagers had no record or recollection of a bear ever harming a person. "There was respect," said tribe member Jeanette Chartrand Smith. "The bears left us alone and we left them alone."
But this year, virtually no salmon returned to the Wanuk or any other river in the
region. The inlet's sockeye run, once the third-largest in the province and the main
food source for natives and bears, had collapsed.
Scientists call it an ecological disaster, with the usual culprits suspected: overfishing, a warming ocean, and the destruction of salmon habitat. But the investigation is just beginning. Canadian fisheries officials began meetings this month in Vancouver to plot a study and recovery plan, if recovery is even possible. Meanwhile, villagers fear an important aspect of their ancient way of life may be coming to an end.
Even before the tribe could absorb the magnitude of the collapse, the bears began
showing up. Instead of passing through as usual, the animals raided porches and
back yards and trailers, clawed windows and doors and refused to be scared away.
They showed an uncharacteristic boldness. At one point, nine grizzlies wandered the village, going from house to house.
After the first several bears were killed and skinned, the natives confirmed what was suspected. The animals were starving. Said villager Donovan LeBlond: None of the grizzlies "had enough fat to fill a coffee cup."
Long history of men and salmon
Rivers Inlet has been home to the Oweekeno pronounced Oh-wuh-kee -no) First Nation for thousands of years. The tribe, which at its height numbered as many as 2,000, lived off the salmon that once returned to the inlet by the millions.
The heart of the region is a 38-mile-long lake, after which the tribe is named, located four miles east of the inlet. At least 17 rivers feed into the lake, many of them unnamed. The lake and inlet are connected by the Wanuk River, on whose north bank sits the last remaining Oweekeno village.
Wars and smallpox decimated the Oweekeno, who belong in the same linguistic group as the better-known Bella Bella nation to the north. What Oweekeno culture survived the 1800s was destroyed by a spectacular fire in 1935. All the traditional long houses burned along with the tribe's sacred objects and heirlooms.
Today, the village of Oweekeno, not found on most maps, is made up of 22 homes in varying degrees of disrepair, all connected by a single dirt road that runs roughshod along the Wanuk. Phone lines reached the village only five months ago. Until then, two radio phones served the entire village.
The only way in and out is by bush plane or boat. The nearest town of any size - Port Hardy, population 5,000 - is a 45-minute plane ride or three-hour boat ride across the Queen Charlotte Strait.
Logging and tribal administration provide what few jobs exist, which is why only 80
people continue to live here. Many receive government support. But most of the 220
registered Oweekeno have moved away for school or livelihood or adventure in
the big city, Vancouver.
One thing that hasn't changed for the tribe members who remain is their dependence on salmon. Villagers consume up to 3,000 salmon a year, much of it smoked or
canned for the winter. This year, the Oweekeno have no winter salmon supply. Instead they've relied more on store-bought foods, which are flown in from Port Hardy at 60 cents a pound or shipped by barge for 18 cents a pound. Transport can easily double the cost of groceries.
Like everywhere else in North America, salmon numbers have dramatically declined along the British Columbia coast. The days of 3.4 million salmon returning to Rivers Inlet have long gone. The inlet hasn't had a commercial fishery since 1994, and the village has only one commercial fisherman left.
But even in the past five years, as many as 35,000 to 60,000 sockeye have returned -
enough to feed the people and bears of Oweekeno Lake. This year, only 3,500 sockeye returned to the inlet. Tribal fishery manager Tom Gottselig said the number is "at extinction level." Brian Pearce, a member of the federal task force in Vancouver this
month, described the situation as "pretty dire."
But it wasn't until a Vancouver environmental group, the David Suzuki Foundation, publicly decried the shooting of grizzly bears that federal officials began taking notice. The tribe had been trying to get the attention of the government since summer - with no response.
"The grizzly bear in North America is like the gorilla in Africa," said Jim Fulton,
director of the Suzuki Foundation and a former four-term member of Parliament.
"They're magnificent animals that evoke emotion in people, and they are, in many
ways, under a sentence of death."
Starving bears invade town Nobody wanted to shoot the bears. Grizzlies were prominent in the tribe's culture: in songs and stories, carvings and totems and names. According to oral histories, one of the most exalted traditional dances was called the Grizzly Bear Dance, although no one remembers now how to do it.
Before this year, wildlife biologists estimated between 150 and 220 grizzlies lived in the Oweekeno Lake region. While this is considered a healthy number, grizzlies as a whole are classified a vulnerable species in British Columbia.
Once every few years, the tribe would be forced to kill a nuisance bear, but the bears and humans of the region generally regarded one another with mutual respect.Villagers got used to seeing the animals lumber through town in the fall on the way to the Wanuk.
The bears would fatten up on sockeye - each must gain an average of 300 pounds -
before returning to the mountains to hibernate in December.
Donovan LeBlond remembers the day in September when he realized something
had changed. "I was watching TV with my kids when I heard nails scratching on the window," LeBlond says. "I thought it was one of the dogs. I looked outside and saw a bear, a small one, standing on my porch. I panicked because I thought the mother
might come up and try to get in."
Outside, a sow and her two cubs rooted around the yard. LeBlond shouted and slammed his front door to scare the bears away, but the animals didn't budge. He
loaded a rifle and watched through the window.
He noticed right away something was wrong. A pack of dogs snapped and growled at the cubs, and the sow did nothing. A mother grizzly normally would not tolerate such affronts to her young.
The villagers, on the other hand, tolerated the bears for weeks. Finally, after the
bears had broken into several trailers, the decision was made, reluctantly, to shoot
them. The only one in the village with experience in such matters was Frank Hanuse, a 60-year-old wisecracking, leathery-faced elder, nicknamed "Fugg," who unhappily agreed to do the job.
"They're coming to the village because they're hungry," said Hanuse, gloomily. "They're innocent. They haven't done anything wrong except be hungry. It's hard to put an animal down just for that. continued
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Mature grizzlies can weigh anywhere from 500 to 1,500 pounds, but the bears that
invaded the village were scrawny, weighing no more than 300 or 400 pounds - small
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