'As an Inuvialuit, it's an honour': Tuktoyaktuk hunters reflect on beluga harvest

Katrina Cockney was near tears recounting her "majestic" first beluga hunt that she recently embarked on alongside her husband and son.

"I was really excited," she said, showing videos of her family on the boat and successfully shooting a beluga whale near Tuktoyaktuk, N.W.T. 

"As an Inuvialuit, it's an honour ... Being able to practice what our ancestors did."

Cockney says more women should experience it for themselves.

"I've always helped my family prepare the whale, but I've always wanted to experience it myself," she said.

"In my younger generation, we've always chosen to prove that you know women can be equal to men and you don't have to be a man to go hunting," she said. 

Tuktoyaktuk carver Roy Cockney Jr. said this season's beluga harvest kept him busy on dry land.

"The boys went whaling and I waited at the camp," he said. 

"I filled up their freezers with dry fish, whitefish, muktuk and dry meat — it is a good summer."

Cockney Jr. says he used dried whale and other harvested animal bones in his carvings, carvings that got him accepted to his first Great Northern Arts Festival in Inuvik. 

Enoch Pokiak, also from Tuktoyaktuk, similarly uses all parts of harvested animals.

He and his family went whaling earlier in the month of July near Hendrikson Island, by Tuktoyaktuk.

He is currently in the process of preparing muktuk and making the uksuk, whale oil.

He says that growing up, nothing from a harvest went to waste including bones which would go to the dogs.

He's decided not only to prepare it for his Inuvialuit family and community members but to share with tourists. 

This spring, he and his wife Amanda started up tourism operator Polar Pack Arctic Adventures, named after an earlier business of his father's in Tuktoyaktuk.

In their tours, they bring samples of their own harvested foods such as beluga, fish, goose, berries, with some bannock. He said if he is unable to go out he reimburses other Inuvialuit for their harvests.

"I grew up sharing and I just like to share with the tourists too, show them how we eat and how we live off the land. And what it's like for them to have a taste of the North."

He said regularly hunting and fishing with his family demonstrates the value he's learned living in the northern community, of sharing with others. He says that's why they chose to incorporate that experience with tourists, not just between Inuvialuit.

Pokiak is motivated to bring back the traditional knowledge and connection to the land and animals, as a form of healing from intergenerational trauma.

He's inspired by his late father Randall Pokiak, the first Chair of the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation.

Pokiak said his father, a residential school survivor, retaught himself lessons from the land. He has since advocated to preserve and share that knowledge with others.

"Up in the North, we all like to share, and we're just like a big family," he said.

"And that's what more of the world needs, is getting together and sharing and passing down the knowledge."