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Book Review
| Game in the Garden: A Human History of Wildlife in Western Canada to 1940. By George Colpitts. Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, 2002. x + 205 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $75.00, paper $29.95.
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| In recent years, environmental historians have written a great deal on nature conservation and wildlife preservation in North America. Frequently, they have focused on the disappearance and extermination of big game and on measures to protect these species from wholesale extirpation. The irony, as John Reiger makes clear in his classic American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation (Winchester Press, 1975), is that wildlife protection measures were taken by the very people who killed these creatures for sport, namely the elite European and Euro-American hunting lobbies who encouraged the founding of national parks as breeding reserves and the enactment of strict game laws to secure the plentiful survival of their favored trophy species. |
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Colpitts acknowledges the importance of such studies, yet he himself follows a fundamentally different approach to wildlife in western Canada. Rather than consider game at the elevated level of the international sporting elite and its membership of predominantly absentee city dwellers, he examines the issues at a grassroots level of settler communities, of the people who lived locally but perpetuated a European mindset toward the native animals and the need to manage them. In an admirably fine-grained and multi-faceted analysis, Colpitt tells the story of how the newcomers' grappled with the wildlife as an integral part of regional settlement history and of the changing economic and social fabric of pioneer communities. |
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In five chapters the author takes us through the twists and turns of the demographic settlement move westward, from the early part of the nineteenth century to 1940, showing a kaleidoscope of different and successive encounters with wildlife by fur traders, settlers, farmers, and others. Centering his account on uniquely Canadian responses, Colpitts explores the sharing of wild meat among Indians, fur traders and trappers; the transition from sustenance hunting to farming and agriculture; the extermination of the buffalo; game ordinances and the prohibition of hunting for food; the promotion of immigration; the myth of superabundance; conservation strategies of the first game and fish protection agencies; the marginalization of the aboriginal occupants; and many other aspects. |
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Colpitt's account "from the bottom up" of wildlife in the so-called "Unexploited West" significantly enriches our understanding of the social forces that impinge upon the issues of nature preservation. My only disappointment upon completing the reading of his well-researched account was that the knowledge, plight, and rights of the indigenous peoples, the First Nations, have not been given adequate attention. I should have wished for more on their traditional relationship to the native fauna and how settlement disrupted this. Indigenous peoples lived sustainably with wildlife for millennia and all along practiced what Colpitts offers as a solution to the problem of disappearing wildlife, namely that we expunge the antiquated Romantic boundary between domesticated animals and wildlife, reincorporate the latter into human society, and let "game in the garden." I applaud Colpitt's plea to allow for an interdigitating of wildlife and civilization in order to retain what is left of the last remnants of the wild prairies, wetlands, and boreal forests and their nonhuman inhabitants. By all means, let us open the fences we have erected between nature "out there" and the enclaves of settler society with its fenced off private estates, urban sprawl, asphalt roads and industrial wastelands. But what if we threw a garden party for wildlife and nobody came? More activist language might be appropriate to express the urgency of the environmental and wildlife crisis of western Canada where long before 1940, industrial wealth extraction, in cahoots with settler society's federal, provincial and local governments, pursued a policy that has led and is leading to the extermination of wildlife, its habitats, and of the indigenous cultures that depend on them. We see this dark Texas-like policy today with the international oil and gas industry assault on the traditional territory of the Lubicon First Nation, whose plight began in 1899 when they were excluded from Treaty 8. |
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In spite of these misgivings, I warmly recommend this book to environmental historians as a rich and detailed study of wildlife and social history in western Canada and as a valuable resource for other case studies. |
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Karen Wonders is a research fellow at the Institute for the History of Science at Göttingen University who has written on habitat dioramas, wildlife art, and hunting iconography. Her current work in environmental art history is on gender readings of Arctic landscape illustrations. |
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