An Indigenous Group in Quebec Tries to Keep the Caribou Alive

The caribou emerged from the spruce trees in the distance, unmistakable with its creamy white neck and huge antlers. Behind it, the autumn sun was setting on a low mountain range and faintly illuminating a forest lake in a picturesque Canadian moment.

In the dying light, the animal looked as majestic as it does on Canada’s quarter — and just as motionless. In fact, it wasn’t a living creature after all, but a life-size fiberglass replica from a store along one of Quebec’s main highways.

“It was love at first sight,” said Jean-Luc Kanapé, explaining that he had bought it because caribou had nearly disappeared from the ancestral lands of Mr. Kanapé’s Indigenous group, the Innu, in remote Quebec. “I wanted people to be able to see what it looks like, because when I talk about the caribou, sometimes it’s as if I’m talking about a ghost.”

Until a couple of generations ago, thousands of woodland caribou roamed the forest where Mr. Kanapé’s statue now stands.

Today, maybe 200 are left.

This herd and two smaller ones are now the subject of an acrimonious dispute between the Canadian and Quebec governments over how to protect one of the country’s iconic animals.

The woodland caribou — whose populations are native to Canada and are considered a barometer of the health of its boreal forests — are at risk of becoming extinct or endangered as logging, mining and other human activities have shrunk their natural habitats.

The woodland caribou, as well as three other subspecies, are found across northern Canada and its northernmost reaches, though their populations have declined significantly.

Smaller than moose but larger than deer, caribou have thick coats and grow hooves that allow them to walk through deep snow and break ice to look for food. They are also found in Siberia and Northern Europe, where they are called reindeer.

The Canadian government, which is responsible for the protection of at-risk species, threatened this summer to use emergency measures to protect the three herds in Quebec. It said that the Quebec government had been too slow to come up with a plan to save the herds, which are on the verge of disappearing.

Quebec said that the federal government’s plans would devastate logging towns and leave thousands of people jobless by limiting logging. The two sides remain deadlocked.

The caribou occupy a central role in the history and culture of the country’s First Nations and Inuit.

“The caribou gave us everything,’’ said Raphaël Picard, 75, an Innu author and former chief of the Innu of Pessamit, a reserve on the northern coast of the St. Lawrence River, about 400 miles northeast of Montreal. “We use everything of the caribou — to clothe ourselves, to make tools and drums, its meat, its fat, everything.’’

The Innu of Pessamit are seeking to create a protected area where the remaining 200 caribou can continue to live freely — and eventually make a comeback. They say it is critical to move quickly with the plan, which the Canadian government has spoken of approvingly but which has been met with silence by the province, to save the 200-caribou herd from the fate of the two other smaller herds.

The population of the smaller herds — in two regions west of Pessamit — had fallen into the low two-digits in recent years. The provincial authorities captured the animals and put them in large pens in 2020, and in 2022, hoping to rebuild the herds. But it is not clear when, or if, the caribou will ever be released into the wild.

“The caribou can’t be made prisoner,” Mr. Picard said. “Its autonomy and way of life must also be protected.”

In captivity, the caribou will be stripped of its nature, he said, adding, “It’ll lose its quietude."

The woodland caribou was listed as a threatened species in 2003. According to the Canadian government, there are 34,000 left across the country. Of those, about 6,100 to 7,400 are in Quebec, according to the Quebec government.

Clockwise, from top left: a logging truck at a gas station in the Pessamit region; logging in Pessamit; legs from hunted caribou donated by Cree communities hanging from a tree to honor them; and territory proposed to become a protected area to ensure the survival of the 200 or so caribou still alive.

Under a 2012 plan to save the woodland caribou, the Canadian government has negotiated with provincial governments to come up with protection strategies.

Early this year, Quebec announced 60 million in Canadian dollars (about $43 million) to protect two local herds. But it has yet to draw up a comprehensive plan despite pledging to do so in 2016 — prompting the Canadian government’s threat of an emergency decree that would set aside protected land for the caribou.

The Canadian government threatened to invoke emergency measures because of what it said was the Quebec government’s “absence of a strategy” and “the imminent threat” to the three herds. Quebec’s environment minister said it was “irresponsible” for the federal government to do that without considering the social and economic impact on communities dependent on logging.

Quebec has Canada’s biggest logging industry after British Columbia.

Loggers have organized protests over the Canadian government, and Boisaco, a company that operates in the forests where the 200 caribou live, denied that the animal was threatened.

In Quebec, the conflict is seemingly irreconcilable: Both the caribou and the logging industry need vast old-growth forests to survive.

The 200-caribou herd — called Pipmuacan after a lake of the same name — numbered as many as 10,000 two generations ago, according to the Innu of Pessamit. But as its population declined precipitously, the Innu stopped hunting the animal 15 years ago.

The Innu, as well as the Canadian government and environmentalists, say that the main reason behind the caribou’s disappearance is the increase in logging in the region.

At his base camp in the forest about 30 miles northwest of Pessamit, Éric Kanapé, 55, a biologist and a cousin of Jean-Luc, said that he had witnessed the caribou vanish over time as loggers have gotten closer and closer. Parts of his ancestral land are now bordered by areas cut by loggers.

New logging roads have made the area accessible to animals from the south, including a fierce predator of the caribou.

“Before we never saw moose here, or wolves,” Mr. Kanapé said. “Now, moose are everywhere, and the wolves hunt both moose and caribou.”

Forest fires tend to be rare in the region because of the proximity of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and a comparatively rainy climate, with some forests not having experienced fires in seven centuries, said Louis De Grandpré, a Canadian government forestry expert who has been working with the Innu of Pessamit to protect the caribou.

These old-growth forests are coveted by the logging industry, which has moved further and further north in search of more timber, Mr. De Grandpré said. Once cut, they are replaced by new forests, which lack the lichen and plants that allow caribou to thrive.

“The landscape has been changed in a way that natural disturbances wouldn’t have,” Mr. De Grandpré said.

In 2017, worried that the caribou would disappear and impoverish Innu culture, Jean-Luc Kanapé, who bought the replica, began living most of the time in the forest to keep track of the herd.

The caribou, he observed, tended to return to areas where they were born.

“But those areas have been logged, so it makes it very difficult for baby caribou to survive there,” Mr. Kanapé, 50, said.

Three years later, in 2020, the Innu of Pessamit drew up a plan to establish a protected area for the caribou of about 680,000 acres — or 45 times the size of Manhattan — inside their ancestral lands. They sought to limit, though not ban, logging.

As the Canadian and Quebec governments clash over how to protect the caribou, the Innu hope for good news for the 200-caribou herd, said Adélard Benjamin, who oversees natural resources projects for the Innu of Pessamit.

“We hope to see the caribou here,” Mr. Benjamin said. “Not just on the quarter.”

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