Finding
them proved difficult. Kuglugtuk is one of the least traditional
of northern hamlets. Nearby mines meant the local Inuit had
access to cash employment long before anywhere else in the Arctic.
“There’s a lessening amount that are on-the-land
people,” says Webb. “Of the young people coming
up, there’s maybe 25 per cent who have been taught anything
by their elders, and they’re our next generation of guides.…
The rest of them couldn’t find their way to the airport
unless they took a taxi.”
To help compensate, Webb now runs
a guide-training camp every couple of years. Most of the graduates
end up taking paid employment in the mine or with government,
but a few become guides. And though the camps don’t really
pay for themselves directly, they’re a part of doing business
in the North. “You got to be friends,” says Webb.
“We try to say [to people in Kuglugtuk] that Jeez, we’re
supposed to be businessmen. We’re not missionaries, we’re
not the government. I burned my goddamn Santy Claus suit. They
got the biggest laugh out of that. But we’re generous
to a fault.”
Donald Havioyak, a former manager
of the local hunters and trappers association and now Kuglugtuk’s
member of the Nunavut legislature, confirms that Webb has had
a positive impact on the community. “Fred Webb does well
for us, obtaining these jobs for people that go out hunting,”
Havioyak says in his sing-song Inuit accent. “I know,
too, he’s developing a summertime thing, for sportfishing
and birdwatching, expanding so he can operate tourism year-round.”
Tourism. In all his years guiding, it’s the one quarry
Webb could never snare. In the North, he now offers two ecotour
trips a year, but filling spaces has been a tough sell. Potential
clients, he says, can’t seem to understand that a photography
safari is every bit as expensive to operate as a hunting trip,
minus the hunting licensing fees.
So why does he keep trying? “All
these years we haven’t been blind to the fact that history
and culture and the anti-hunting sentiment and all that shit
is against us,” says Webb. And even at age 67, even with
a heart that’s grown a little wonky, Webb is not about
to give up. Years of disappointment have at least sharpened
his sense of who he wants as clients. It’s definitely
not the do-it-yourselfers, who aren’t “gonna spend
a goddamn dime.”
| THE
ESSENTIAL FRED WEBB |
 |
| A
lifetime of guiding is sure to have produced a wealth
of backwoods yarns, and Fred Webb certainly doesn’t
disappoint. To date, he’s compiled two collections
of tales from the field: 1997’s Home from
the Hill (left) and 2000’s Campfire
Lies of a Canadian Hunting Guide. Both books
are liberally spiced with Webb’s penchant
for telling it like he sees it and, as such, make
for compelling reading for anyone interested in
hunting and fishing in the wilds of Canada. Copies
of both books can be ordered directly from California-based
Safari
Press. Contact: 1-800-451-4788 |
|
Nor
does he want mass tourism of the kind you see in Churchill,
Manitoba, on the Hudson Bay coast. “You get enough people
coming at a cheap rate and you’re defeating the purpose,”
he says. “That big river up in Alaska where they have
platforms so you can sit and watch the brown bears eating the
salmon, the bears have become as warped mentally as the polar
bears in the dump in Churchill. The concept of the wilderness
has all gone Disney.”
What Webb wants for his ecotours
is the same thing he wants for his hunts: small, elite groups.
“You need a limited number of people,” he says,
“which has a limited impact on the wilderness and a limited
impact on the resource, and you need a big goddamn price to
do it.” And at long last, he thinks he may have found
just the right target market: Japanese tourists.
The way Webb sees it, they already
fly to Yellowknife to take in the northern lights, so why not
fly them farther north, up to his base in Kuglugtuk, where the
lights are even prettier? While there, he’ll show them
some local archeological sights and take them to an Inuit camp
where they can sleep in igloos, ride a dogsled and watch Inuit
women make parkas and mukluks. Call it non-consumptive tourism;
call it adventure, cultural, historical and photographic tourism.
Just don’t call it ecotourism.
Fred Webb hates the flippin’
word.
|
