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When she got on the boat in Marathon, Ont., reporter Emma McIntosh didn’t know what she was in for. Its name, White Knuckles, should have been a warning sign. “Hah, that’s funny,” she thought to herself, certain she was usually pretty good on boats.
Then, it unmoored into the waters of Lake Superior. The boat weathered rough waves, dodging whitecaps — and Emma found herself, well, white-knuckling it.
“I was quickly humbled,” she told me, laughing.
Emma and photographer Christopher Katsarov Luna were out on the water this July, making their way to the Slate Islands, where a few of Lake Superior’s last caribou remain.
Before colonization drew settlers toward extractive industries like logging and mining, caribou from different sorts of herds weren’t uncommon sightings. As the forcible displacement of Indigenous communities began, the harm to the natural world and all that lived in it — caribou included — began to unfold.
“There’s something so deeply tragic about what’s happened to the Lake Superior caribou,” Emma told me.
Ontario has been slow to act on saving the lonely ungulates from habitat loss and hungry wolves, even though Biigtigong Nishnaabeg and Michipicoten First Nations have long had plans and urged the government to act on them.
Now, the caribou are so close to the edge that it’ll take a monumental effort to save them — something we have to learn from if other herds are to avoid the same fate, Emma told me. This is complicated by the fact caribou tend to live in places reliant on logging and mining — just look to herd declines in B.C. and Alberta — where people worry about the economic impacts of conserving land.
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