Interview with Darius Elias

Darius Elias, a Gwich’in native, was born and raised in Old Crow, Yukon. At 13, he moved to Whitehorse for school although he lived much of his youth hunting, fishing, and learning traditional ways on the land with his grandmother. After earning a Renewable Resources and an Aboriginal Businesses Management diplomas, he spent nine years as a National Park Warden for Vuntut National Park. Today, he is a Member of the Yukon Legislative Assembly and raises 4 children with his wife Tina. He is pictured here with his son, Bohdi.

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I have tried to be articulate in so many different ways to so many different crowds at so many different levels from elementary school to the parliament of Canada. So I’m just gonna start by telling a story. I’m in Crow Flats in the spring and the snow is melting. I’m with my Grandmother Mary Kassi, she ‘s passed on now and I’ve been here since March. It’s June now and we’ve harvested our Caribou. She is explaining to me how important the Caribou are to us in Gwich’in. As I’m playing around in our traditional area and she says, “Sonny, you gotta go to school. You can’t come here next year.”

I remember the pain I was going through when she told me that. I thought about it all year until March of the next year. I couldn’t go because I had to go to school. She sat down and passed down to me that I will lead someday, and that I have to learn the western society. “You have to learn the other way,” she said, “so you can talk like they talk and so you can write what they write.” I know now why she did that. I know how important it is now that she made the decision to stop me from going to Crow Flats. It was for the caribou. It’s for our culture. It’s for our very survival. So we were packing up dry meat getting ready to go and I didn’t see Crow Flats again for ten years.

That’s when the journey began for me. I grew up in a very traditional way. I spent the first years of school from September to February with my mother in Old Crow and Whitehorse because she traveled around a lot. Come March I came to Old Crow to live with my Grandmother and my uncles. Even today, there is no road access. The closest road is the Dempster Highway, 170 kilometers to the south of us. We are a fly-in community of about 301 people on a hot day in June. A jug of milk cost twelve dollars, a loaf of bread costs five bucks, and a pound of butter costs about six seventy-five. We all live in small log cabins and live off the land.

At our winter camp, my grandmother and I trapped muskrats under the snow and lived in an eight-by-ten wall tent. We gathered firewood and we slept on the ground when it was forty below outside. I didn’t think of it as hardship, it was just the way it was. When I was raised, I was on the tail end of the use of dog teams. I still remember going to Crow Flats by dog team before snow machines were in heavy use. I was taught land-based skills by my uncles. They taught me how to read and talk to the wildlife, the water, and the weather.

My grandmother lived out on the land the majority of her life. I moved around with her in the springtime from Happy Lake to Zelma Lake. She had so much trust in her dog team. I was six or seven years old and she would talk to the dog in Gwich’in and the dog would take off and take me over five frozen lakes and stop at the spring camp. She would come behind. I remember sitting in the middle of a big white lake with a bunch of clinging pots and pans with no one in sight. I look back on it now and it is quite an incredible life I have.

When I was 11 or 12 years old I was allowed to hunt because I always wanted to but my family had strict rules for young guys. Finally one fall, my birthday is in March, I came up to Old Crow and my grandmother took me aside while cooking bannock in late August she said, “You can go Caribou hunting now.” I remember not being able to sleep all night.

The next morning, my uncles got ready, we had something to eat and drink, and we started walking. That walk was so hard because there was no road to Crow Mountain. I couldn’t wait to get to the mountain. Just before we got to the fireplace, my uncle Harvey said, “Look, right there, in the trees!” there was a bull Caribou standing. My heart was pounding and I was shaking, and I remember trying to load that 30-30. He must have seen the look on my face because he said, “Calm, calm.” as he was trying to calm me down. And that Caribou gave himself to me. He stopped, looked at me and he turned sideways. He gave himself to me.

I was about fifty yards away. I was so proud. You couldn’t wipe the smile off my face. My uncle said, “Well, you cut it up.” So I cut it up the way I watched him do it one thousand times. I made a few wrong cuts. It took me a little longer. I was so proud coming down packing it. When I got down, my grandmother said, “You gotta give it all away.” I had to go around and give a piece to everyone and tell them it was my first one.

Everyone was so happy and my grandmother had a big supper at the house. People were coming by at all hours eating soup and meat.

In terms of formal education, I went to college for four years for a business diploma. Then I went to get my pilot’s license and I came home for the spring and my grandmother got wind of this; I will never forget that tongue lashing. She said, “What are you doing? Don’t you remember what I told you? What are you doing trying to go around flying planes? You get back to school and learn something about looking after the land.” In 1995, I finished a business diploma and then a natural resources program in Whitehorse in1998. When I came back to Old Crow, I came back with a family.

I got to walk a lot of places and go see things that haven’t been seen for a long time like caribou fences. I took elders up there that haven’t been there in years and they broke down emotionally. They told us everything, like flowers in the springtime. They just bloomed. There are seven known fences and I have been to all of them. Even through the years of archeology focusing on two or three fences, we found a lot of interesting data there. I listened to a tape of Lazarus Charlie saying that he heard through his great grandfather that the Thomas Creek fence went all the way to the Firth River. I looked for evidence for this every time I went there and one day I found it with Lance Nukon my young apprentice and I got chills up my back.
I followed the wing of the fence and you could barely see cut stumps under a foot of moss and between the tussocks. I think I walked 17 kilometers that day. The fences were made of all natural materials: Trees, willows, and rocks. Lots of the trees were cut and lots were built tripod style. They used a lot of the natural slope. It was pretty labor intensive harvesting technology that ended just before the repeater rifle came out or traded up on Herschel island

There were strict rules when the caribou fenced was used. It was taken down in the spring migration and used during the fall migrations unless there were times of hunger. Basically it looked like an airplane if you look at an airplane from the top. That was the outline of it. Families would harvest the caribou there until they had enough. There were caches on the sides called shaws and they were impenetrable by grizzly bears or wolverines. At the corral, right at the tip, the harvesting took place. Once the harvesting happened, every bit of blood was removed because it was disrespectful for the next caribou to smell their own blood.

I tried to strike a balance between our traditional lifestyles and how it is out in the world. So now I’m a politician. We are the richest people because we are still able to live off the land and there can be no monetary value put on that. I fight for that. When it comes to education, and I have always said before that all our greatest resources is our land, water, wildlife, language, and our culture. But I know it is very important to have a balance between the traditional lifestyle and that the knowledge for a vast number of things.

In the same fashion that I have learned, I will pass on the lessons to Johnny and Bohdi, my sons and Rachael and Heather, my daughters. I explain the importance of the caribou. Many of our people have said that our hearts and chests are half caribou and half Gwich’in. We are part of one another, our blood flows through each other. I started eating caribou when I was in my mother’s womb, that’s where it starts, it’s a part of our structure, it’s a part of our biology.

I explain to the rest of our country the importance of community. We are one big family really. Everyone looks after each other; everybody lends a helping hand. We come together, we eat together, we work together and try to make the community a better place to live. The community is very close knit. So when babies are born, we celebrate together. When people die, we mourn together.

Using a traditional education in a manner that is complementary to western society is especially important today. I find myself addressing global warming today and how these changes affect traditional living. I find myself talking about this steadily. Some elders have told me that mother earth is trying to cleanse herself from the destruction that humans have caused. It is like the immune system has kicked in. I have seen it around here, and is just as simple as walking on the clear ice. About twelve years ago, I was walking with an Elder Irwin Linklater. He stuck a stick down a rat house ( a hole in the ice) and pushed it down once, then pushed it down again and said, “hmm.” As he pulled it back up he said that he had done that since he was a kid and he could maybe push it in 2 inches at the bottom of the lake. Now there was a foot and a half of mud was on that pole.

The wood frogs that were used to be very plentiful in the lakes behind Old Crow are not so plentiful. The caribou migrations have changed, the caribou patterns have changed, and we are seeing a lot more parasites on the caribou and we are seeing insects we have not seen before. Also, there are pelicans arriving. The vegetation is growing up the side of the mountains. On the coastal plain, the dwarf birches are just invading from the mountains at a very rapid rate which is also alarming. The weather patterns are especially noticeable.

We see summer clouds in December, the fluffy clouds. It rains in December and causes havoc amongst the animal population. The cycles are not as consistent as they used to be. It doesn’t get 50-60 below anymore; it’s to the point where it is causing people their lives. My grandmother and an elder were walking across a stretch of river that they have walked across the same weekend their entire lives to go fish. She fell through and drowned. We had to find her underneath the ice, luckily we found her. That same stretch of ice for 70 years, they trusted it and now we can’t do that anymore. When we go out in the bush, we don’t know if we are going to encounter an overflow or an open lake, so people are hesitant to go out. If so, they have to go with a group of people to make sure they are safe. Things are changing, everything.

I have tried to avoid the topic of permafrost melting because I get emotional. But, I just went up to Crow Flats two weeks ago to a lake at the center of my family’s traditional area I spoke of earlier, Zelma Lake. My grandmother protected it like I will never forget. This lake is very central to our family and recently the permafrost melted on the South end of the lake. It drained catastrophically to the point where it emptied. It’s gone. I paddled around that lake with my grandmother in a little canoe many memorable times. She taught me so much on that lake, our whole family from generation to generation lived on that lake and now it’s gone.

I will end with another story about my grandmother. When I was a little kid, she talked to the land and the animals and to the weather sometimes. A raven was flying by one day and she was a hard teacher. She stopped me and she didn’t say anything and she put her hand up in the air and talked to the raven in Gwich’in. Translated, she said, “Raven, tell us when the caribou are coming and we will give you the Caribou’s eye.” She watched the Raven and nothing happen. The raven just flew away.

Later on that day, she did it again. Much to her delight the raven circled us and flipped over three times in the air and flew off. Immediately, she looked at me and told my uncles, “Get ready, the caribou are coming soon.” That night, at about 2 in the morning, the caribou arrived. So she did what she said was going to do. She put a caribou’s head on the ice for the crow to eat its eyes. That relationship is thousands of years old. That belonging to the land, to the water, to the wildlife, and to your natural environment is thousands of years old.

I went to crow Flats the other day just to fill my tanks I tell people. It replenishes us in a way I can’t explain. Sometimes it feels a part of my soul because you get vulnerable if you don’t join your mind and body with the land. And even that short three days that I went up there to smell the earth and listen to the birds and touch the water and drink the water and walk the land, I refilled my tanks again enough to be strong and finish my job. You can’t explain that.

You have to come live with us for a year and live through one cycle of the caribou to just get a glimpse of what it is to be Gwich’in. Those kinds of things we continue to battle for. Ironically, man’s burning of fossil fuels is affecting our lives a lot and more quickly. It is a bit ironic that the 200 years that fossil fuels have been burned [elsewhere] is a double whammy here. So the battles are increasing, but we will fight on. We will always battle on.

The loss on our sense of our belonging to land, if it should perish, that would impoverish man kind to no end. If big oil succeeds and gets in the calving grounds, the caribou die, and the Gwich’in culture is gone. Another indigenous people on this planet will cease to exist. Over what? Over what? Over 200 years of man’s hunger for fossil fuels versus the existence of another aboriginal people. We have a living language. We have a living culture. Thank goodness we have our isolation and we are able to pass this down. That is what we are fighting for, for that to be alive. I want to look my great grand kids in the eye and know that I have done a good job, that they will continue to be Gwich’in, that the calving grounds are protected, and that our life as a people continues for thousands of years more.