Paddling Nunavut's Kazan River

Lynda and I had paddled into the so called "Land of Little Sticks" from Wollaston Lake on two other canoe trips. On both of these trips, as we paddled across Kasmere Lake toward Nueltin Lake, we looked north into a long bay that stretches to the horizon. From our research we had learned that J. B. Tyrell in 1894 and Captain Thierry Mallet of Revillon Freres, travelling with Del Simons in 1926, turned into this very bay as they tracked upstream on the Little Partridge River toward Kasba Lake and the Kazan River. Not until J. B. Tyrell descended the Kazan, from Kasba Lake, did any European travel by canoe down this river. Along the length of Inuit Ku, Tyrell met resident Inuit, the so called 'People of the Deer', as he had the previous summer, when he descended the Dubawnt River. Tyrell visited their many camps, traded for dry meat, watched them spear deer at river crossings, had his Peterborough canoes surrounded by 23 skin kayaks on one lake, and collected stories and maps. In short, he was allowed a rare glimpse of these people, living as they had for about a hundred years along the Kazan, and as yet not suffering any ill effects from their rare contact with Europeans.

During this time, the Inuit's annual trips to faraway Brochet, or Hudson Bay, to trade their white fox pelts were peripheral to their day-to-day pursuits required to stay alive in their barrenland home, and they were thriving. During 1894, Tyrell encountered about 20 to 25 small camps of these Inuit from Ennadai Lake to his eastward portage from the Kazan to the Ferguson River north of Yathkyed Lake. He estimated the total population along the river at about 1000 people.

The sudden disappearance of the caribou herds, following freak winter weather conditions in 1915, caused widespread famine among the inland Caribou Inuit. By 1925, when the caribou herds started to finally return, the Inuit population was estimated at just 500 people. With fur trade posts moving nearer and nearer to the barrens during the early 1900s, the Inuit who lived along the Kazan River no longer had to travel to faraway Brochet or Churchill, to trade for Kabloona (European) trade goods. The white fox was in such demand, and so valuable, that the traders were more than prepared to travel to the Inuit to secure the soft white pelts.

From about the mid-1920s to the mid-1940s, this area had a very active fur trade. This was when the white foxes ran thick in the north, and the Hudson Bay Company, Revillon Freres, and many free traders and trappers actively sought them through their arctic ranges. Small trading outposts popped up along the Hudson Bay coast from Churchill to Chesterfield Inlet, in the Baker Lake area, and near the north end of Nueltin Lake as the various companies and independent traders tried to leapfrog past their competition to get nearer to the Inuit who trapped the white foxes. This competition resulted in an abnormal increase in white fox prices as each group tried to outbid the others.

By the mid-1950s, disease, famine, and a collapse of fur prices forced the government to relocate the Inuit to coastal communities. The relatives of these nomadic people now live in Arviat, Rankin Inlet, Whale Cove, and Baker Lake. All that remains of the rich Inuit history of the Kazan River are tent rings, meat caches, and the ever-present stone men the inuksuit high on the barren hills.