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Book Review
| The Culture of Hunting in Canada. Edited by Jean L. Manore and Dale G. Miner. Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, 2006. x + 276 pp. Illustrations, notes, tables, bibliographies, and index. Cloth $85.00, paper $32.95.
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| The focus of The Culture of Hunting in Canada is the longstanding conflict between non-Native, so-called "recreational" or "sport" hunters and their biologist/wildlife-management allies on one side, and Native "traditional" or "subsistence" hunters and their supporters, many of whom are academics in fields like anthropology and history, on the other side. The book's chief editor, Jean L. Manore, includes seventeen essays that are about evenly divided between the two ideological positions. |
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The authors are a diverse group, and include college teachers of Native studies and history, as well as self-described naturalists and research consultants. Many of the essays have bibliographies that are embarrassingly incomplete. For example, only one of the pro-Native position writers includes Shepard Krech III's The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (W.W. Norton, 1999), which might have tempered their portrayal of Canadian Natives as natural ecologists. |
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In the first paragraph of the preface, editor Manore sets the tone for the pro-Native position essays that follow by giving the reader the false impression that non-Aboriginal hunters wish to deny the First Nations any right to hunt, when what they actually want is to stop them from hunting in ways that threaten the long-term survival of target species. She continues this biased approach in the ntroduction with the assertion that the debate between non-Natives and Natives comes down simply to "sustenance and survival, or recreation and enjoyment" (p. 1). |
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In other words, sport hunters supposedly hunt only for trivial reasons, while Natives need to hunt for "subsistence," a term with sacred connotations that is used repeatedly by Manore and others to convey the impression that Natives kill wildlife mainly for their own food, in order to survive. In reality, they often hunt commercially, to supply the lucrative "Native crafts" industry, and demand special hunting privileges to kill walruses for their tusks, male narwhals for their "unicorns," polar bears for their hides, and ringed seals for their skins, leaving most of the meat to rot. |
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If one understands how the largely unregulated Native hunting of nongame species that have a low reproductive rate can threaten the health of an ecosystem in the way that regulated sport hunting for sustainable game species like snowshoe hares and white-tailed deer does not, one could conclude that non-Native hunter-conservationists are justified in their opposition to this type of hunting. Instead, some of the pro-Native position essayists employ the well-worn Marxist paradigm to claim—with very little supporting evidence—that sport hunters are not motivated by concerns over ecological degradation but by the "prejudices of class and race" (p. 58). Supposedly, their real aim is to monopolize wildlife for themselves and keep Natives from getting their fair share. |
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Despite the efforts to trivialize sport hunting and denigrate the motives of those who engage in it, the personal commentaries of the non-Native hunters argue persuasively that they have a deep respect for the species they pursue and that hunting is just as central to their lives as it is to any Native hunter. These essays are the most original part of a book that, despite its flaws, should be read by everyone with an interest in Canadian wildlife and the humans who hunt it. |
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John F. Reiger is professor of history at Ohio University-Chillicothe. The third, revised and expanded, edition of his American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation appeared in 2001 (Oregon State). |
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