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For
centuries, seal hunting has been a major economic activity linked to the
cultural core of the Indians, Inuit and Euro-Canadians living along the shores
of the cold water seas (Arctic, Labrador, Gulf of St. Lawrence) of Canada. In
the last two regions traces of this activity have been found in prehistoric
sites dating to 8,000 years ago. And it has never stopped until today. It is the
kind of information you can find in an issue of the review Recherché
Amerindian's au Québec published last year (vol. XXXII, no 1,2003) under the
joint editorship of Michel Plourde, an archaeologist, and myself, social and
cultural anthropologist. The eight texts of this issue are concerned with many
topics on seal hunting through the years: the species looked for, the seasons of
exploitation, the social organization of the hunt, the uses of the parts of the
animals (meat, blubber, skin, bones, teeth, claws), the tools and crafts used
for the hunt, the marketing of the products, etc.
(For more information: www.recherches-amerindiennes.qc.ca).
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Personally, my long time interest since 1965
for the subject of sealing has been centered on the North Shore of the Gulf of
St. Lawrence, a region of the province of Quebec of about one thousand
kilometers long that extends from the mouth of the Sanguinary river to the
frontier with Newfoundland-Labrador. This is a region where what I call " a
seal economy " has been developed and pursued by the first inhabitants at
the Archaic period and also at later periods by Inuit coming down the Labrador
coast and finally by the French and English people at the colonial period. The
exploitative technology has also changed at the period of contact, from the use
of harpoons with stone and iron heads in birch bark canoes and seal skin kayaks
to the use of guns, rifles, even nets set as a " seal fishery " since
the beginning of the 18th Century, to the clubbing of the young on the ice
fields with sticks by crews of schooners in the second part of the 19th Century. |
The exploitation of seals - mainly the harp
seal- was the main reason for the establishment of many fishing posts and later
fishing communities on the Lower and Middle parts of the North Shore and the
migration of peoples of different origins : from the valley of St. Lawrence
river just below Quebec city, the Magdalen Islands, Jersey, England and even
Boston. On the Upper North shore sealing was also an important seasonal activity
in the Godbout/Pointe-des-Monts and Tadoussac/Les Escoumins areas.
In the last few years I have done fieldwork
with the seal hunters of Les Escoumins/Essipit/Bergeronnes, three neighbouring
communities inhabited by about 2,500 Euro-Québécois and 200 Innu Indians on a
reservation. In this area, at Bon Désir more precisely, an archaelogical site
dug a few years ago shows evidence of seal hunting by Indian people 8, 000 years
ago. Today, sealing is still practiced on a professional basis by a small group
of about ten to fifteen hunters in some years. I have had the opportunity to go
hunting with some of them just to observe how it is practiced since I am not a
hunter myself. Harp seal (Pagophilus groenlandicus) is the only species hunted
from the middle of December to April, that is, during its period of migration in
the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Only old and young adults are killed, mainly males,
since the females go the ice fields in February to give birth to their pups.
As the sea is free of ice most of the winter in
this part of the coast, outboard motor launches of about 7-8 meters long are
used to look for seal herds of sometimes many hundreds of individuals or just a
few at other times. The hunting crew is composed of only two persons: the
shooter and the operator of the motor. The seals are killed instantly in the
water by the shot of a rifle to the head. The shooter and the operator combine
their efforts to draw the kill - a weight of about 100 kilos - into the boat.
Depending on the capacity of the boat, approximately 20 to 30 seals can be
embarked in one trip, but that rarely happens, because of the many hours it
takes to kill the seals one by one in open water. In some good years up to 2,000
seals have been killed but in the last few years the catch has dropped to only a
few hundred, mainly because of the climate conditions: windy days are more and
more common, according to the hunters.
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