Caribou - Qalipuey
Rangifer tarandusNORTH-EAST & MARITIMES NORTH AMERICA
(Extirpated 1912 - Reintroduction Failed 2006)
As part of its programme of cultural, social, and traditional family genocide* of the Original people, "Canada", a colonial corporation representing the British Crown in North America, exterminated the Caribou in the 1800s by the hundreds of thousands in the Maritimes (Mi'kma'ki). The Original people (L'nuk - Mi'kmaq) had been dependant on the Caribou (Qalipuey) for millenia pre-colonialism. To avoid starvation, many of the Original people moved to the West (Quebec) and South (New England and Eastern Seaboard) when the Caribou were slaughtered.
It is thought likely that Caribou related to the Indigenous Caribou of Wunamakik ("Nova Scotia") are the boreal small Kespek (Gaspé) population. These animals were listed by COSEWIC as Endangered in 2002.
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After the completion of the railway in 1898, the deliberate extermination of the main food source of the Mikmaq was brought to Ktaqamkuk (the newcomer's Newfoundland):
"... By all accounts the slaughter [by settlers and sportsmen] was appalling. Population figures for the caribou stocks can only be approximations, but it is estimated that the herds fell from 200,000-300,000 in 1900 to near extinction by 1930. The effect on the Mikmaq was catastrophic. Caribou meat had always been a mainstay of the Mikmaq diet, and with the decline of the herds it became much more difficult for families to live in the interior and to follow traplines. As a result, the 20th century brought new challenges and new hardships for the island's Native people." -- Reference
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Note
* The definition of the crime of genocide includes "... deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part..."
Links
Caribou and You | CPAWS
MountainCaribou.ca
(100817) copy & distribute freely
