Encountering Moose in a Changing Landscape: Sociality, Intentionality, and Emplaced Relationships

ABSTRACT

Drawing on research among Cree and Métis hunters, we consider how moose enter into situated relationships with humans, other beings, and one another. Moose engage in communicative acts exhibiting embodied intentionality and a relational theory of mind. Moose intentionalities and subjectivities are partly knowable to hunters through the co-constructed perceptual lens that develops as moose and humans make homes together in a shared landscape – a ‘domus’ as David Anderson puts it. Moose reward humans who deeply engage with them, sharing knowledge of moose life/death projects, intraspecies connections, and localised environments – in the hunting context and sometimes in other contexts as well. Moose and those who hunt them attempt to approach, engage, outwit, and beguile one another. In documenting both this contact zone and aspects of moose interiority and perception (umwelt), we contribute more-than-human knowledges from Indigenous people of northern Canada to theories of mutualistic relationships, entanglement, and emplacement.

KEYWORDS:

• Moose
• Cree
• Métis
• human–animal relations
• domusw

Acknowledgements

William S. Houle, Andrew Orr, and Peter Thunder provided translation and facilitated some of the interviews drawn from here. Rhonda Laboucan shared her interview transcripts, as Joseph Cardinal did with his research files. In addition to these people and the participants already named in the article (as well as other participants who are left nameless), we thank the following individuals for their suggestions, assistance, comments, and insights: David Anderson, Craig Campbell, Regna Darnell, Sonia Dickin, Carly Dokis, Pamela Downe, Jennifer Gerbrandt, Patricia McCormack, Joanne Muzak, Tatiana Nomokonova, Sara Schroer, Laura Siragusa, James Waldram, and three anonymous reviewers. We particularly thank one reviewer who read the revised article as well as the first draft, for their ideas and suggestions.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We wrote this article in a somewhat experimental fashion, through multiple drafts, as an advisor (Westman) collaborating with students and a postdoctoral fellow. Westman and Joly provided most of the ethnographic material. Westman, Joly, and Pospisil wrote most of the theoretical sections. Westman, Joly, and Wheatley analyzed most of the secondary literature on moose and wrote those sections. We each played a role in writing and editing of the article. Westman wrote and presented the first draft for a session organized by Mary Bucholtz at the AAA meetings in 2015.

2 Crees (nehiyawak) constitute the largest grouping of First Nations people in both Alberta and Canada. An Algonquian language, Cree (nehiyawewin) is the most widely spoken Indigenous language in Canada. People in northern Alberta speak a subdialect of Plains Cree (Westman & Schreyer 2014). Métis are a constitutionally recognized Aboriginal People. Their heritage includes elements of European (i.e., fur trade) and First Nations cultures. Métis people in northern Alberta generally speak/spoke Cree or related creoles. In many cases, Métis people in northern Alberta were and remain closely associated with First Nations communities. Most First Nations people in Alberta have hunting and other rights protected under treaties whereas Métis people do not. The hunting and land rights of Métis Peoples are increasingly being clarified by the courts, consultations, and negotiations.

3 In this paper, we draw on ideas of entanglement evoked by Dussart and Poirier (2017) in their ‘invitation’ of ‘nonhumans into the equation – as agents in the becoming and the unfolding of whatever is entangled and with their own practices and “relative autonomy”’ (11). In this way, through agential entanglements in landscapes and embodied knowing, animals and humans learn together, ‘growing (with)’ (Joly, forthcoming, quoting title) and ‘becoming-with’ (Haraway 2008: 4) each other. In drawing on these authors, we also consider the ‘ontology of co-becoming’ among Yolŋu people, as articulated by Sandie Suchet-Pearson et al. (2013, quoting title), in which ‘all the humans and non-human beings … are constantly in a process of becoming, becoming and emerging together in particular times/places and through particular entangled relationships’ (189). See also Tanner (1979), Brightman (1993), Ghostkeeper (2007).

4 Westman has worked in northern Alberta since 1996 and has conducted fieldwork in communities of Bigstone Cree Nation, Peerless Trout First Nation, and Woodland Cree First Nation. Joly began working with the Fort McMurray Métis for her doctoral fieldwork in 2013, and actively conducts research with and for Métis, Cree, and Dene Nations across northern Alberta. Pospisil is a PhD Candidate who recently completed doctoral fieldwork at and around Lac La Ronge, Saskatchewan. Wheatley, for her MA research, conducted multi-sited fieldwork with members and employees of Mikisew Cree First Nation. Each of the communities where we have worked is home to both Cree and Métis people. We have each worked with both Métis and First Nations communities and individuals.

5 While Westman’s (2017) book chapter was largely focused on the political and ontological matters underpinning the contemporary experience of Cree moose hunters, the current article is more focused on the broad range of Cree and Métis people’s encounters with moose, and the knowledge that hunters and Elders hold about such encounters.

6 People could enter into negative cycles of reciprocity by violating taboos, not sharing meat, or mistreating the animal. Robert Brightman (1993) provides extensive information about positive and negative aspects of human–animal relations and other ontological engagements among Cree people (cf. Hallowell 2010).

7 Here, we use Haraway’s (2008) concept of a contact zone to imply a meeting, across species lines, through which reciprocal learning can occur.

8 See Sandlos (2007), Campbell (2004), on how conservation discourse has impacted northern Indigenous people throughout the twentieth century in the western Subarctic. Additionally, public archives in western Canada (e.g., the Provincial Archives of Alberta) contain significant resources that would permit a rich analysis of wildlife managers’ negative views of Indigenous hunters during the post-WWII period. In the PAA holdings, provincial wildlife managers discussed the possibility that subsistence moose hunting by Indigenous people was threatening moose populations and the hunting/tourism revenue moose represent. Prior to 1982 (when Aboriginal and Treaty rights achieved constitutional protection), finding a way to suspend treaty hunting rights on the grounds of ‘wanton slaughter’ (Campbell 2004, quoting title) was frequently the main policy recommendation made in such wildlife management reports. Hunters remained ‘on the margin’ (Sandlos 2007, quoting title) in terms of political power.

9 As Anderson (2017) points out, such incidents of cursing animals must be understood in their historical context, but are not necessarily evidence of an overall disappearance of Indigenous ethics of respect, even fear.

Additional information

Funding

Funding assistance for the primary research by Westman as described in this article was provided by the European Research Council, the University of Aberdeen, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the University of Saskatchewan, the University of Alberta, the Jacobs Research Funds (the Whatcom Museum), the Northern Scientific Training Program (Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development), the First Nations Resource Council, and the Alberta Historical Resources Foundation.