But, as Sangris will relate, Great Slave Lake is and always has been bountiful, nourishing, resilient. Over the decades and centuries, Great Slave Lake has been plundered for fish, polluted by mines, and had its inflow disrupted by southern damming for hydroelectric power. Its greatness is also dwarfed by the vast natural landscape surrounding it. To the southerner and the settler, Great Slave Lake is giant yet unassuming, overshadowed by Canadian sisters Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario. “That’s the lifestyle they used to live, eh? Now, everything changes.” If you’re hungry, there’s all kinds of animals.
The elders told Sangris that on the water, “You’ll never starve. In the winter, he says, they’d look for “fish, caribou, stuff like that.” In the spring it was muskrat and beaver-“little animals.” People travelled by snowshoe, dog team, canoe, snowmachine. The Sangris family still went out on the lake, though. When Sangris returned for good after eight years, everything was different. The families netted fish, set snares-“good life.” That was until residential school in Fort Smith. But some people do.”īorn on these rocky shores, the third of seven children, Sangris tells you how three families built houses about six kilometres out from Dettah, a Yellowknives Dene community half an hour’s drive from Yellowknife. “When it gets rough you don’t go out there. Nearly all his life, Sangris has lived with the lake in his sightline. “It’s a huuuuge lake man,” says Jonas Sangris, your captain, the Virgil to your Dante, and a former chief of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation.
And you’re only 10 minutes out from town. Nature doesn’t move over, bow down, or make space for you here-it swallows you up. If you squint your eyes, the seam between water and sky disappears. To the southeast, the lake unfurls-incomprehensibly vast and deep-toward a hazy horizon. To the north, the water licks at the moss-dusted rock of the Canadian Shield. The gigantic sky is the bluest version of itself, and the craft cuts across the soft water like a knife through warm butter. The 22-foot Harbercraft pulls away from a boat launch in Dettah, NWT, on a windless evening in July and glides toward the maze of outcrops, inlets, islands, and coves through which the ancient bank of the North Slave gives way to Great Slave Lake.
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