MONTREAL—Richard Pamak retains a mystical memory from many years ago of migrating caribou passing near his community of Nain, in northern Labrador.

Just a young man, it looked to him like the mountains themselves were moving.

“As a young hunter in my late teens and early twenties I saw caribou herds pass by when the numbers were up at 600, 700, 800,000,” said Pamak, who is Inuit and an elected member of the self-governing Nunatsiavut Assembly.

When Pamak founded a family of six, their main source of protein was harvested caribou meat — every part of the animal was put to use. In doing so, he was carrying on a tradition that connected his generation of Inuit to the many that came before it.

“The caribou is such an important part of our lives. It brought food to our table. It brought us clothing. It brought us so much more and to see that lost . . . ,” he said, trailing off.

“It's going to be a long time before the Labrador Inuit can recover and get access to the caribou again.”

The latest population estimates put the migratory George River herd, named for the body of water that runs 600 kilometres north along the Quebec-Labroador border, at less than 9,000, down a precipitous 99 per cent from its peak of 800,000 in the 1990s.

A second herd, named after the Leaf River — which runs from near Hudson Bay to Ungava Bay in northern Quebec — is also in peril. From an estimated population of 430,000 in 2011, its population is feared to be as low as 160,000.

The Newfoundland and Labrador government banned hunting of the George River herd in 2013, one year after Quebec. Quebec's Ministry of Forests and Wildlife has said it will also prohibit sport hunting for the Leaf River herd starting in February 2018.

So far, neither of the herds have shown signs of improvement.

The gravity of the situation prompted representatives of the seven Cree, Innu and Inuit nations residing in northern Quebec and Labrador to set aside long-standing differences and agree last week to a conservation strategy aimed at managing the diminishing resource.

The plan is premised on the assumption that the declines are cyclical and temporary, caused by limited access to food and the proliferation of predators like bears and wolves.

It limits non-Indigenous and commercial hunting activities to periods when the caribou populations are high, and sets out a management strategy that allows for limited Indigenous hunting when the caribou are in decline or recovering. The conservation plan includes kill limits, mandatory reporting and agreements designed to usher the herd and those who rely on it through times of scarcity.

Prof. Steeve Côté, director of the Ungava Caribou research program at Université Laval in Quebec City, said it was an important deal and a significant accomplishment.

“If you would have asked me three years ago if they would have been successful in doing that, I would have been really doubtful,” said Côté.

While most Indigenous hunters have respected the bans enacted by the Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador governments, the Innu have tended to continue hunting, arguing that their ancestral rights trump any government edicts.

Newfoundland’s Department and Fisheries and Land Resources said 13 individuals and one business have been charged with illegal possession of George River caribou since the hunting ban took effect. The business pleaded guilty to the charges while the cases involving individual hunters are ongoing.

Chief Tshani Ambroise of the Matimekush-Lac-John Innu band in Sherfferville, Que., said caribou hunting has been greatly curtailed in the last four years, but it continues.

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“What’s important for me is to do community hunts in order to maintain the culture and teach our young people enough to continue our cultural traditions, to continue to traditions left to us by our ancestors,” Ambroise said.

That is a controversial decision among both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people worried about the future of the herds and the rate at which they are being harvested.

“Right now, acceptable . . . is zero,” said Côté.

At a maximum, he said, each community could hunt one or two male caribou for cultural purposes without having a detrimental impact on the herd’s survival.

“It’s very sad for them because I know they need that … but it’s just not possible any more.”

Tony Chubbs, president of the Labrador Hunting and Fishing Association, said the decline of the caribou has had a broad impact. In the 1980s and 1990s, the abundance of the herd supported a commercial caribou harvesting operations in several cities in Labrador.

Now, even the sport hunting and outfitting companies have ceased operations, delivering a blow to the tourism sector. Big game hunters are now turning to the supermarket for their meat — and paying sky-high prices — instead of their personal chest freezers.

“Right now we’ve gone five years without being able to harvest animals,” said Chubbs. “A generation of hunters are already gone that no longer experience caribou.”

It’s more dire for Indigenous communities, where disappearing caribou threaten not only the food supply but an identity, said Chief Rodrigue Wapistan of the Nutashkuan Innu band in northern Quebec.

“The caribou is an emblem for us. It’s subsistence, first of all. It’s also for what we call the Innu aitun — the practice of our culture and traditions,” he said.

“We make a lot of things with the skin of a caribou. For the elders, we make drums, we use it for mittens, for clothes. The bones are use to make grease, even today … It’s like Canadians use a cow. Our cow is the caribou.”

Just a week ago, Wapistan said he went out caribou hunting with two others from his community, returning with three animals

“We shared them with the community … for a community feast. That’s what we do,” he said. “In the Innu Nation of Quebec, there’s a notion of respect and sharing that runs through our veins.”

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