Almost 50 years have passed, but Lucien Ukaliannuk clearly remembers the day the RCMP came for his family's sled dogs.
"We went to Iglulik in a boat and let our dogs off first," Mr. Ukaliannuk said through an interpreter. "They were roaming free. The next thing we knew, they were all shot. The police purposely went out to shoot dogs, everybody's dogs. The government and the police were the law. They could do whatever they wanted."
Long a topic of both academic debate and campfire discussion, a purported RCMP policy of slaughtering Inuit sled dogs has become a volatile social issue in the North.
Inuit leaders in Ottawa and across several far-flung communities have demanded independent inquiries into what they believe was a conscious police strategy of forcibly corralling Inuit into settlements by removing a vital ingredient of their nomadic life, their sled dogs.
They believe that bureaucrats wanted to see their children in centralized communities, where it would be easier to supervise their activities and deliver education and health-care services.
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