The view out the window as I write all Groundhog Day is cold, grey and gloomy. Out west, I doubt that Prairie Rose, the local groundhog, bothered to emerge from her den and, if she did, she certainly didn’t see her shadow.
Thus, according to legend, we have no idea how much winter we face. I’m guessing we have considerably more than six weeks of winter ahead. We haven’t had much yet, and I believe that if we don’t get winter when we should, we’ll surely get it when we shouldn’t, like on the May and July long weekends. Also, as I type, a new form of winter doldrums diversion is taking place: the first of two three-day cow elk “hunts” in February at Canadian Forces Base Suffield by 125 lucky licence and tag holders for each three-day session, drawn from more than 15,000 applications. Each licence holder will have two tags, meaning that, ideally, 500 pregnant cow elk could be killed. “Ideally,” because, in addition to an earlier hunt, this is all about desperate measures to reduce the drastically out of control herd of between 6,000 and 8,000 elk on the base.
Several readers have expressed outrage at hunting pregnant elk in February, asserting that just the chasing them around in the cold and snow will cause them to abort. To which, I’m sad to write, the military would reply: “Good! Every dead elk, no matter how old, is a good elk.” But that controversy is calm compared to the tsunami of outrage from readers who say they have heard that natives are killing huge numbers of trophy bull elk on the base and asking how this could be, why, how, etc.
The huge CFB Suffield elk herd is the result of the military having planted 220 head on the base in 1997-98. As you’d expect, after 18 years in ideal habitat, with no predators and no hunting, there are many hundreds of huge 300- and 400-inch trophy bulls on the base, never previously allowed to be hunted. Meanwhile licensed, non-native Alberta hunters can wait 10 years to draw a tag to hunt trophy bull elk anywhere else in the province.
After having heard from people who actually give their names, who were there, saw and heard and even took forbidden pictures on the base, I have to report that, as at Jan. 20, officers at the checkpoint were reporting that more than 400 bulls had been killed by approximately 62 native shooters.
An anonymous poster on The Alberta Outdoorsmen website claims to be a native who participated in the January proceedings at Suffield, and personally killed six bulls ranging from three-by-threes (points) to a seven-by-seven, “because bulls were all I saw.”
“We, as First Nations,” the poster goes on, “were asked by the military to come and kill elk! Not to hunt, but to kill elk! ‘Kill what you need to feed your community.’” The OU poster echoes what other witnesses have told me about the road hunting: surrounding a herd and blasting off in all directions. “This was a massacre; someone is going to be killed there,” he writes. The whole sorry story, from planting the elk against good advice in the first place, to the current War on Wapiti, to reserving trophy bulls for natives to hunt for food, will no doubt upstage everything, including the election of a new executive, at the 86th annual conference of the Alberta Fish and Game Association in Lethbridge Feb. 19 to 21.
If I could attend, I’d no doubt once again have to deliver the same soothing sermon I’ve delivered at AFGA conferences in the past, starting with reading the gospel according to the Natural Resources Transfer Agreement, as enshrined in the British North America Act, now the Constitution Act, i.e. the constitution of Canada:
“In order to secure to the Indians of the Province the continuance of the supply of game and fish for their support and subsistence, Canada agrees that the laws respecting game in force in the Province from time to time shall apply to the Indians within the boundaries thereof, provided, however, that the said Indians shall have the right, which the Province hereby assures to them, of hunting, trapping and fishing game and fish for food at all seasons of the year on all unoccupied Crown lands and on any other lands to which the said Indians may have a right of access.”
That’s part of the deal made when Canada transferred the natural resources of our “territory,” including wildlife, to Alberta. As interpreted by the courts since, it means that if you invite natives to hunt on your land to hunt for food, most of the provincial Wildlife Act will not apply to them.
CFB Suffield is federal land. If anyone is to blame, it is the military for the invitation to a stupid, insensitive act of reverse racism. As always, sermon ends with this: if our natives ever lose their hunting rights, the rest of us will have lost ours long before.
Bob Scammell is an award-winning columnist who lives in Red Deer. He can be reached at bscam@telusplanet.net.