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Book Review
| Hunters at the Margin: Native People and Wildlife Conservation in the Northwest Territories. By John Sandlos. Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, 2007. xxiii + 333 pages. Illustrations, notes, tables, bibliography, index. Cloth $85.00.
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| The decline and near-disappearance of the North American plains bison population in the second half of the nineteenth century is generally considered to be, along with the extinction of the passenger pigeon in the same era, one of the great crimes against wildlife and environment committed by newcomers to this continent. The buffalo hunters of the American plains are seen as environmental villains, as are those who wantonly shot the passenger pigeons. It would seem logical then, when it was realized that there was still a small population of wood bison in the Northwest Territories, that any attempt to protect and conserve the species must be viewed as entirely benevolent. |
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But, as John Sandlos's book shows, nothing in environmental politics is ever that simple. The difficulty with conserving the remnant bison population in the Northwest Territories was that the indigenous people of the region depended on them for food and clothing, and hunting the animals was important to their culture. The parallel with today's Inuit and the seal hunt is of course striking. The central theme of the book is the conflict that arose when government wildlife officials and others tried to apply conservation and game management techniques to the bison, in the face of indigenous attempts to continue their age-old harvesting practices. Inevitably the Dene and Métis hunting techniques were seen as old-fashioned, primitive, and wasteful by the officials schooled in the modern disciplines of biology and zoology. What began as an attempt to preserve a species, however, inevitably took on the coloration of a social experiment. And, as Graeme Wynn points out in his useful and lengthy introduction, "the Dene, Cree, and Inuit, whose lives depended, in many ways, upon the animals that roamed the North, resisted such strategies by voicing dissent, ignoring instructions, and disregarding the law" (p. xvi). |
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The book is full of nuggets of interesting information, for example a table giving an account of criminal convictions for hunting bison or possessing bison meat in or around Wood Buffalo National Park between 1898 and 1944. There were only seventeen convictions, not many for forty-six years, and several family names are repeated, (though only one man was a repeat offender): Desjarlais, Beaulieu, Gibot, Pamatchakwew. The sentences seem extremely harsh by modern standards: two months, four months, six months in jail, and almost all at hard labor, with the alternative of fines ranging from $300 to $600, a very large sum for those days. The government was clearly in earnest about changing the lifestyles of these people. |
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The only thing that detracts from this book, and the thing that makes it a work for specialists rather than the general reader, is its prose style. Like many doctoral dissertations, which this presumably was in its first iteration, the book is crammed with detail about what one deputy minister wrote to another, and it is written in a formal style that is earnest but leaden. The book's theme is an important one, and one hopes that the author will popularize it with lighter prose in articles for a wider readership. |
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William R. Morrison is professor of history at the University of Northern British Columbia, and the author of True North: The Yukon and Northwest Territories (New York: Oxford 1998), Strange Things Done: Murder in Yukon History (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University, 2004), and Land of the Midnight Sun: a History of the Yukon, rev. ed. (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University, 2005). |
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