Indigenous trapper and community leader honoured by Ducks Unlimited Canada

William “Lupoo” Cook remembered as passionate and selfless

Opaskwayak Cree Nation, October 1, 2025 – A bronze plaque honouring an Indigenous trapper and community leader from northern Manitoba was unveiled today by Ducks Unlimited Canada (DUC), its conservation partners, family and friends.

A resident of Opaskwayak Cree Nation until his passing in the early 2000s, William “Lupoo” Cook fished, hunted and trapped in the sprawling Saskatchewan River Delta (SRD) north of The Pas and became an active voice for conservation and local hunters (*Lupoo is pronounced LAH-poo).

“Billy cared about nature and his trapping heritage,” recalls Chris Smith, DUC’s retired Head of Conservation Programming for Boreal, who first meet Cook in the early 1980s, when he was president of the local trappers’ association. “Billy became a key contact for us with guidance on what was important for the First Nations people.”

DUC became active in the SRD in 1940 to preserve habitat within one of North America’s largest freshwater deltas. Comprised of 81% wetlands and shallow waters, the SRD provides provides important wildlife habitat for many species and is recognized internationally as an Important Bird Area. The wetlands remove greenhouses gases from the atmosphere and store an estimated 161 million tonnes of carbon – a natural solution to mitigating climate change.

The plaque celebrating Cook will be installed along William’s historical trapline in the Saskeram Wildlife Management Area, which spans 97,041 hectares (239,785 acres) within the SRD and has been used for generations by hunters, fishers and trappers.

“He was a lifelong fisherman,” says long-time friend and former neighbour Alvin Merasty. “Spent a lot of time on the Saskatchewan River. When trapping was a thing, Billy and his son would be out on the trapline, every spring. And moose hunting in the fall. Lived a typical trapper-hunter-fisherman lifestyle.”

Merasty says Cook was nicknamed the Singing Fisherman and a popular face at local events. “People would ask him to sing at their weddings. He was like a mini-celebrity. But he was humble. I never knew him to be disrespectful to anyone,” says Merasty.

“He used to take care of everybody,” says son Hank Cook, named after his dad’s favourite singer Hank Williams Sr. “When people got married, he always did something. He’d get them some moose or some fish. Even the elders, he used to take care of them. That’s what he used to do.”

The Lupoo Crossing plaque celebrates Cook’s commitment to conservation and his community, with the inscription reading in-part, “His spirit will forever be a part of land.” That spirit lives today in everyone who knew William “Lupoo” Cook.

“I remember Billy was harvesting waterfowl and he had lost some of his decoys,” says Smith. “I knew the area where he had been hunting and, during an inspection of that particular marsh, I did find a decoy. A bluebill (Lesser scaup), carved out of local wood. When I tried to return it to Billy, he told me he had made it himself. He said, ‘You should keep it’. I still have that decoy on my fireplace mantle.”