It also explains why he’s trapped in his office sorting out how to shrink three levels of government into one. His job is to “listen to what the land wants, listen to what the lake wants, listen to what the animals want,” and make decisions using scientific data and the Sahtuto’ine Dene people’s giant body of knowledge on the area’s ecology and biodiversity, amassed over eons. Outside Bezha’s office, men wrestle the imposing antlers off a moose they’ve hunted, women slice fresh red meat from a caribou leg for a funeral, and on what UNESCO calls “the last pristine Arctic lake,” people motor small aluminum boats to their nets, where glittering trout await.

To keep the lake thriving, in 2005 a working group of elders, young leaders, stakeholders and representatives from the federal and territorial governments created “The Water Heart,” a watershed management plan explicitly informed by the Sahtuto’ine Dene’s deeply held spiritual belief that Tudzé, a sacred water heart, beats at the bottom of the lake. Its critical life force connects all living things and must be honoured and protected for eternity. The Water Heart later was included in the region’s Sahtu Land Use Plan, which prohibits development in core protected areas and creates buffer zones where limited development can occur, providing it doesn’t threaten the
lake’s ecology.

With these efforts to regain governance and stewardship over their traditional territory, the Sahtuto’ine Dene of Délı̨nę have created what is possibly the most cohesive and comprehensive Indigenous-led water conservation plan of modern times — one that UNESCO held up as a model for the rest of the world in March 2016, when Délı̨nę became the first Indigenous community to achieve UNESCO biosphere reserve status for its management of the Great Bear watershed. The Tsá Tué Biosphere Reserve, which spans more than nine million hectares — an area the size of Maine — and has a core protected area of two million hectares, is the largest in North America and the first in Canada’s North. While the designation is more an award of excellence, it endorses and promotes Délı̨nę’s management tools internationally as the gold-star standard for balanced relationships between humans and the biosphere.

Gina Bayha helped initiate Délı̨nę’s UNESCO application in 2013. When elders learned of the 669 biosphere reserves in UNESCO’s global network, they insisted Délı̨nę apply. “I’ve never heard Elders being so forceful before — they’re usually so kind and patient,” she says. The fact the biosphere designation holds no regulatory teeth didn’t diminish their stridency.

“They didn’t care about enforcing rules. They wanted a strong voice, and I said, ‘What’s the point?’ And they said, ‘If other people hear our stories, it’s sharing, it’s networking.’ It’s sharing how they’ve lived this way so long, their connections, not just to the water, but to the air, the animals.”

Bezha says Ayah’s doomsday divination and the belief in Tudzé, the sacred water heart, underpin his people’s sense of urgency to keep the lake writhing with trout, cisco, whitefish and Arctic grayling while sustaining species such as muskox, wolves, caribou and wolverines. “People will say, ‘Oh these are just legends,’” says Bezha. “Not so. It’s our history, the Dene history, and there’s a lot more to a lot of the things they’re talking about.”

The Water Heart management plan stresses the interconnectedness of all things and the necessity of caring for the world and all its people — Dene and non-Dene alike. The Elders profoundly understand this, many of them having unwittingly carried the uranium used in the atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki — events Ayah had also prophesied prior to 1942, the year his people began working at the federally owned Eldorado Mine at Port Radium on Great Bear Lake’s eastern shore. There, they hauled dusty sacks of radioactive material without protective clothing or warning of the harm it could do. Many died of cancers. Decades later, survivors travelled to Japan to apologize, but the entire painful era, including ongoing remediation at the mine and in the lake — and the failure of the government to safeguard workers from health risks — strengthened Délı̨nę’s resolve to control what happens in their homelands.

Délı̨nę needs to convey such history, along with the hundreds of encyclopedic entries unilingual Elders have in their heads about trails and burial sites or the ecology of a bay during fish spawning or caribou migratory habits, so future generations can integrate that knowledge into biosphere management. Using a combination of geographic information systems, Google Earth and software that allows you to simultaneously see and hear a Sahtu Dene language place name along with its English translation, the Dene Mapping Project is doing just that. “It’s a linguistic gold mine here,” says Phoebe Tatti, a Délı̨nę native with a master’s degree in language and education who heads the project. “Each one of the 250 place names we have so far is associated with a story or a legend as to how the name came about.”

That innovative approach to conservation education is part of why Délı̨nę’s biosphere bid is backed by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the U.S.-based public-policy non-profit. Pew is helping Délı̨nę develop eco-tourism and meet its UNESCO obligation to research and monitor water quality and wildlife populations — especially dwindling caribou herds.