Hunters and Bureaucrats

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Paul Nadasdy

Hunters and Bureaucrats:

Power, Knowledge, and
Aboriginal-State Relations
in the Southwest Yukon
© UBC Press 2003

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Printed in Canada on acid-free paper ∞

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Nadasdy, Paul.
Hunters and bureaucrats : power, knowledge, and aboriginal-state relations
in the southwest Yukon / Paul Nadasdy.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-7748-0983-3

1. Indians of North America – Yukon Territory – Government relations. I. Title.

E78.Y8N32 2003 971.9′100497 C2003-911105-9

UBC Press gratefully acknowledges the Wnancial support for our publishing
program of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry
Development Program (BPIDP), and of the Canada Council for the Arts, and
the British Columbia Arts Council.

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian
Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to
Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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Dedicated to the people of
Burwash Landing, Yukon
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 Contents

Illustrations / viii

Acknowledgments / x

Introduction / 1

1 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country: An Overview / 27

2 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All, It’s More a Way of Life” / 60

3 The Politics of TEK: Power and the Integration of Knowledge / 114

4 Counting Sheep: The Ruby Range Sheep Steering Committee and the
Construction of Knowledge / 147

5 Knowledge-Integration in Practice: The Case of the Ruby Range

Sheep Steering Committee / 181

6 “Just Like Whitemen”: Property and Land Claims

in Kluane Country / 222

Conclusion / 263

Notes / 271

References / 291

Index / 303
 Illustrations

Maps
16 The Kluane Region, Yukon Territory
18 Languages spoken in the Yukon
164 Yukon Game Management Zone 5, with subzones

Photographs
13 Burwash Landing in summer. Photo by author.
13 Burwash Landing in winter. Photo by author.
14 Joe and Luke Johnson on Printers Creek above Kluane Lake.
Photo by author.
14 Joe Bruneau on the Kluane River. Photo by author.
30 Burwash Landing, 1922. Yukon Archives, C.B. Tidd Collection #7206.
33 The coming of the Alaska Highway. Burwash Landing, 1942. Yukon
Archives, R.A. Carter Collection #1515.
35 Douglas Dickson hunting by skidoo on Arch Creek. Photo by author.
41 Joe Bruneau and Bob Johnson on a trip up the Donjek River into Kluane
Park. Photo by author.
43 Our Lady of the Rosary Mission, Burwash Landing. Photo by author.
57 Sam Johnson, Sr., Moose Johnson, and Phil Temple (a local outWtter) in
1965. Photo from the private collection of Joe and Sandy Johnson.
69 Agnes Johnson Wshing for whiteWsh at Long’s Creek. Photo by author.
69 Peter Johnson and Gerald Dickson preparing to set a Wshnet under the ice
on Kluane Lake. Photo by author.
70 Kathleen Johnson cleaning grayling at Swede Johnson Creek.
Photo by author.
70 Michael and Edward Johnson skinning a moose near hunting camp at
Mile 1120, Alaska Highway. Photo by author.
72 Dennis Dickson repairing his trapping cabin at Onion Creek.
Photo by author.
 Illustrations ix

73 Kathleen, Edward, and Michael Johnson at hunting camp, Mile 1120,

Alaska Highway. Photo by author.
77 Lorraine Allen and Agnes Johnson cutting moose meat, Burwash
Landing. Photo by author.
107 Gerald Dickson on a moose lookout near the Donjek River. Photo by
author.
151 Dall rams. Government of Yukon photo.
152 Jimmy Johnson and Thomas Dickson with Dall sheep shot for food, ca.
1920. Yukon Archives, Jessie Joe Collection 92/26 #4.
153 Luke and Simon Johnson butchering Dall sheep above Koidern River.
Photo by author.
241 Sign on the Alaska Highway marking the boundary of Kluane First Nation
Traditional Territory. Photo by author.
255 Copper Joe and Gene Jacquot, date unknown. Yukon Archives, Their Own
Yukon Collection 00/37 #64.
Acknowledgments

Mary Jane Johnson was working in the Kluane First Nation OfWce back in
1995 when I Wrst approached the Kluane First Nation (KFN) for permission
to conduct research in Burwash Landing. She was interested in my project
and helped me get the permission I needed to proceed. She then helped
me to establish myself in Burwash when I was a stranger whom nobody
knew. Subsequently, she left the village to return to school, Wrst in Prince
George, British Columbia, and then in Edmonton, Alberta. In the spring of
1998, a month or so before I left the Yukon to begin writing this book, she
sent me a letter that began like this:

It is time for you to leave, but you are now a part of who we are. It is not
so much the people that will hold you close, but the land has tied your
heart. Later you will remember driving to Onion Creek over the hard packed
snow with the biting wind on your nose, forehead, and cheeks. You’ll
remember looking out over Kluane Lake and seeing a land that is like no-
where else on this Earth. There are an endless amount of things that will
bring memories, but one thing you’ll know – you are a part of the land.

She was right. I can still feel the wind on my face, see the lake, and
vividly recall hundreds of other sights and sensations from the time I
spent in Kluane country. Just as Mary Jane predicted, I do feel a powerful
connection to the land; but, as she herself and many others took pains to
impress upon me, the land is inseparable from the people. I cannot recall
my experiences on the land without at the same time reliving the friend-
ships that made those experiences possible. The people of Burwash Land-
ing gave me something far more precious than “data”; they accepted me
into their lives and offered me friendship. As a result of their incredible
patience and generosity, I not only learned something about life in Kluane
country but also about myself and what is important in life. This book
could not have been written without the help of many people, and it is a
pleasure to have the opportunity to thank them here.
 Acknowledgments xi

Everyone in the village treated me with respect and kindness, and I am

grateful to them all for their time and patience. There are some, however,
to whom I owe a special debt of gratitude. To begin with, I would like to
thank Joe and Sandy Johnson, who gave me a place to live and made me
feel like family. Agnes Johnson and Joe Bruneau, too, welcomed me into
their family and, through their kindness and hospitality, helped me to
think of Burwash as home. Thanks also to Gerald Dickson, who is a true
friend, whether at the pool hall, in the ofWce discussing land claims, or out
in the bush. His dedication to his language and culture is an inspiration.
Sharon and Elodie Kabanak also befriended me early during my stay,
always treated me as a friend, and continue to ask me when I am next
coming home to Burwash. I would also like to thank all of the Dickson
brothers then living in Burwash: Douglas, Dennis, Dickie, and Cecil, who
treated me as a member of the community and shared literally hundreds
of stories with me as they attempted to win all my money at poker. I owe
a special thanks to Douglas and Dennis, who put up with my less-than-
expert bush skills and took me along on numerous hunting trips and out
onto the trapline. From them I learned much of what little I know about
hunting, trapping, and living in the bush. Others, too, took me out regu-
larly onto the land and shared with me their knowledge and experience:
Joe Johnson, Bob Johnson, Joe Bruneau, Agnes Johnson, and Gerald Dick-
son. To all of them, I say thank you.
I also spent a great deal of time working in the Kluane First Nation
OfWce, and a number of people there helped make that work enjoyable as
well as productive: Shawn Allen, Robin Bradasch, Mary Ann Carroll, Ger-
ald Dickson, Bertha Doris, Donalda Easterson, Mark Eikland, Bertha John-
son, Bob Johnson, Diyet Johnson, Joe Johnson, Liz Johnson, Mary Jane
Johnson, Elodie Kabanak, Monique Martin, Chris Noble, Geraldine Pope,
and Paula Short.
I owe a special thanks to the elders who shared some of their memories
and experiences with me: Grace Chambers, Dick Dickson, Moose Jackson,
Frank Joe, Jessie Joe, Thomas Joe, Dorothy Johnson, Grace Johnson, Jessie
Johnson, Lena Johnson, Margaret Johnson, Peter Johnson, Kluane Martin,
and Sue Van Bibber.
There were many others in the community who were generous with
their time and friendship: Louis Bouvier, Stan Bradasch, Wendy Brough,
Ken Burns, Sharon Buyck, Tim Cant, Christabelle Carlick, Janice Dickson,
Orion Doris, David Dubois, Mary Easterson, Charlie Eikland, Dan Eweshon,
Juniper Groves, Bonnie Jean Joe, Johnny Joe, Derek Johnson, Edward
Johnson, George Johnson, Gloria Johnson, Hughie Johnson, Kathleen
Johnson, Katie Johnson, Keith Johnson, Kirk Johnson, Lillian Johnson,
Luke Johnson, Math’ieya Johnson, Michael Johnson, Sam Johnson,
Simon Johnson, Ernie Martin, Justina Michel, John Obermeyer, Willie
xii Acknowledgments

Sheldon, Peter Upton, Sam White, and Helen and Ollie Wirth. Each in her
or his own way helped me to understand a little bit about what it means
to live in Kluane country.
Sadly, a number of the people named above have since died, but I will
never forget them.
There are many people outside of Burwash, too, who helped me. I’d like
to give a special thanks to Will Jones, Norman Easton, Dave Croft, and
Alice Hartling for their friendship, hospitality, and interesting conversa-
tions. I would like to thank Diane Strand in the Champagne and Aishihik
Heritage OfWce, Ruth Gotthardt and Greg Hare in the Yukon Heritage
OfWce, Jennifer Ellis at the Yukon Conservation Society, and the staff of
the Yukon Archives for their help and interest along the way. I would also
like to thank the Yukon Department of Renewable Resources, especially
Jean Carey, Bob Hayes, and Barney Smith. They may disagree with some of
what is contained in this book, but they have always been friendly, help-
ful, and willing to talk things over. I am also indebted to Keith and Debbie
Carreau, David Dickson, Liz Hofer, Bob Jickling, Duane West, and the
other members of the Ruby Range Sheep Steering Committee (most of
whom I have already mentioned elsewhere) for allowing me to participate
in their meetings and sharing with me their time and their thoughts on a
very difWcult process. I owe a special thanks to Barney Smith, who put a
great deal of time and effort into reviewing what eventually became Chap-
ters 4 and 5 and who provided me with thoughtful comments. Again, we
may disagree on some issues, but I appreciate his interest in my work and
his willingness to maintain a dialogue about a very difWcult topic.
Many other people were kind enough to read all or parts of various
incarnations of this book and to provide me with useful comments and/or
kind encouragement: Sara Berry, Julie Cruikshank, Norman Easton, Eliza-
beth Ferry, Siba Grovogui, Sarah Hill, Eric Rice, Barbara Schmitt, Daniel
Todes, Katherine Verdery, Ron Walters, Marina Welker, and an anonymous
reviewer. Others gave me food for thought and/or encouragement along
the way, including Jason Antrosio, the Hicks family (David, Maxine, Paul,
and Emma), Roberta Jewett, Kent Lightfoot, Roger Magazine, Emily Mar-
tin, Rolph Troulliot, and David Wood. I would also like to thank my col-
leagues in both the Department of Anthropology and the American
Indian Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, for pro-
viding me with a friendly and supportive atmosphere in which to revise
this manuscript for publication, with special thanks to Sissel Schroeder
and Jason Yaeger for their help with the maps. Thanks also to all the folks
at UBC Press for helping to make this book a reality.
This book could not have been completed without generous support
from the Wenner Gren Foundation, a Canadian Studies Graduate Fellow-
ship, the National Science Foundation, OfWce of Polar Programs – Arctic
 Acknowledgments xiii

Social Science, and the Northern Research Institute at Yukon College, all of
which helped fund the research upon which Hunters and Bureaucrats is
based. The School of American Research in Santa Fe and the University of
Michigan Department of Anthropology each supported me for a year,
enabling me to complete the bulk of the writing. This book has been pub-
lished with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences
Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Finally, I thank my family, Gabor and Phyllis Nadasdy; John Nadasdy;
Scott, Denise, and Julia Newman; and Beth, Billy, Emily, and Matthew Kar-
powic for putting up with me over the years and never doubting that I
might one day Wnish. Last but not least, I would like to acknowledge Mari-
etta Nadasdy, whose early inXuence still shapes my view of the world.
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Hunters and Bureaucrats
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Introduction

What is the proper relationship between the Aboriginal peoples of North

America and the nation-states that encompass them? This profound moral
and political question has occupied European and American moral phi-
losophers and social scientists at least since the debates of Bartolomeo
de Las Casas and Juan Ginés Sepúlveda in 1550. Though the nature of
Aboriginal-state relations in North America has changed signiWcantly
since the sixteenth century, the continuing realities of institutional dis-
crimination and ongoing struggles over land and Aboriginal rights across
the continent indicate that it remains a burning political and ethical issue.
Aboriginal peoples and their supporters continue to criticize the United
States and Canada for pursuing policies that they view as discriminatory
and/or assimilationist. In some cases these policies have been intention-
ally and explicitly discriminatory/assimilationist; in others, well-intentioned
policies have resulted in negative consequences because paternalistic gov-
ernment ofWcials thought they knew what was best for Aboriginal peoples
and did not bother consulting them.
Given the increasing politicization of indigenous peoples and today’s
climate of “enlightened” race relations, many states are seeking to restruc-
ture their relationship with the Aboriginal populations within their borders.
In Canada, efforts are underway to develop processes that more fully and
fairly incorporate Aboriginal peoples, as distinct peoples, into the Canadian
state. These efforts, which include the negotiation of land-claim and self-
government agreements and the cooperative management (co-management)
of local resources (especially wildlife), are intended to improve the posi-
tion of First Nations1 peoples by granting them a signiWcant role in their
own governance and a say in the management of local land and resources.
On the face of it, these efforts to redeWne Aboriginal-state relations are a
vast improvement over the explicitly assimilationist policies of the past. In
this book, however, I argue that land claims and co-management are
something of a mixed blessing for First Nations peoples. For, while such
2 Introduction

processes do indeed provide them with real tools for protecting their lands
and do give them at least some control over their own lives, the very act
of participating in these processes has had an enormous impact on their
way of life. The overall consequences of First Nations participation in
these processes are subtle and difWcult to assess.
To begin with, Aboriginal-state relations in Canada are now premised on
the notion that Canada, the provinces/territories, and First Nations should
interact with one another on a government-to-government basis. This has
entailed a number of far-reaching changes in First Nations societies. To
begin with, First Nations peoples have had to learn completely new and
uncharacteristic ways of speaking and thinking. To participate with gov-
ernment biologists in the co-management of wildlife, for example, they
have had to learn to speak the unfamiliar languages of wildlife biology and
bureaucratic resource management (see Chapters 3, 4, and 5), while to
participate in land claims negotiations they have had to learn to speak
the Euro-North American legal language of property law (see Chapter 6).
But First Nations peoples have had to do more than simply learn the
Euro-American languages of wildlife management and property law and then
translate their own understandings of the world into those bureaucratic/
legal languages.
First Nations peoples have also had to completely restructure their soci-
eties by developing their own bureaucratic infrastructures modelled on
and linked to those of the governments with which they must deal. This
reorganization has included the adoption of Euro-Canadian political insti-
tutions and the creation of a bureaucratic infrastructure – both of which
were prerequisites for sitting down at the table across from government
wildlife managers and land claims negotiators. Indeed, land claims nego-
tiations, co-management, and other elements of the new relationship
between First Nations peoples and the state simply would not be possible
without the bureaucratization of First Nations societies. This bureaucrati-
zation must be recognized for what it is: an essential aspect of the new
structure of Aboriginal-state relations in Canada.
As a result, in many ways First Nations ofWces across Canada now resem-
ble miniature versions of federal and provincial/territorial bureaucracies.
They are staffed by Wsh and wildlife ofWcers, lands coordinators, heritage
ofWcers, and a host of other First Nations employees who deal regularly
with their bureaucratic counterparts in federal and provincial (or territo-
rial) ofWces. This bureaucratization of First Nations societies has had a num-
ber of far-reaching effects. Most signiWcantly, many First Nations people
now have to spend their days in the ofWce using computers, telephones,
and all the trappings of contemporary bureaucracy. This necessarily takes
them off the land and prevents them from engaging in many of the activ-
ities that they continue to see as vital to their way of life. Day in and day
 Introduction 3

out, they have to think, talk, and act in ways that are often incompatible with
(and even serve to undermine) the very beliefs and practices that this new
government-to-government relationship is supposed to be safeguarding.

Theoretical Context
Many scholars have examined the relationship between modern nation
states and the Aboriginal peoples within their borders. In recent years,
most have described this relationship as the product of colonialist and
neo-colonialist policies of exploitation and forced dependency (e.g., Dyck
1985; Fleras and Elliott 1992; Jaimes 1992; Perry 1996; White 1983). These
scholars have viewed Aboriginal peoples and their lands as constituting
a “Fourth World” of “internal” colonies (as opposed to the “external”
colonies of the “Third World”). They argue that state policies acting in
combination with market forces have gradually transformed Aboriginal
societies that were once independent and self-sufWcient into impoverished
and disempowered populations that are now heavily dependent upon the
state for their economic and cultural survival. A number of scholars
(Coates 1985a; Dryzak and Young 1985) and Aboriginal people themselves
(Bigjim and Ito-Adler 1974; Manuel and Posluns 1974) have made this
argument explicitly for Canada and Alaska.
Convincing though they are, such accounts tend to oversimplify the
situation. In the Wrst place, despite dramatic changes in First Nations soci-
eties, First Nations peoples continue to regard themselves as quite distinct
from mainstream (White) North American society and to subscribe to a
whole constellation of beliefs, values, social relations, and practices that,
to a large extent, do set them apart from that society. This is a testament
to First Nations peoples’ successful “resistance” to the forces of the market
economy and the state. But it is much more than that. First Nations
peoples have not merely managed to preserve their culture in the face of
difWcult odds (indeed, as we will see, many of their beliefs and practices
have in fact changed as a result of contact with Euro-Canadian society – as
they must have changed before that as well); rather, they continue to live
it. By this I mean that they continue to use the very cultural meanings and
practices they are trying to “preserve” as a basis for interpreting and act-
ing upon the world – including in their interactions with Euro-Canadian
people and institutions. We cannot hope to understand Aboriginal-state
relations without taking this into account.
Second, a straightforward story of colonial domination fails to take into
account the complex nature of the modern nation-state itself. Though
scholars have long treated “the state” as if it were a monolithic entity,
some have begun to question this assumption. Following Philip Abrams
(1988), they have begun to view the state as more of a process than a
“thing” (e.g., Anagnost 1997, Borneman 1992, Corrigan and Sayer 1985,
4 Introduction

Gailey 1987, Gilbert and Nugent 1994, Verdery 1995). Such work has
demonstrated that what we call “the state,” far from being a uniWed entity
capable of coherent action, is in fact an illusion, “an ideological artefact
attributing unity, morality and independence to the disunited, amoral and
dependent workings of the practice of government” (Abrams 1988: 81).
Rather than viewing the state as a thing, then, we do better to see it as an
ideological project, one that confers legitimacy upon the complex con-
stellation of government institutions and processes that have many differ-
ent (and often contradictory) agendas and interests. As it turns out, this is
consistent with how people actually experience state power, since they
must deal every day with the competing – sometimes contradictory – in-
terests and agendas of various agents of the state. It is therefore more accu-
rate to think of state power itself as emerging from the complexity of state
processes and people’s day-to-day interactions with those processes rather
than as a quality possessed and wielded by a monolithic state-as-entity. It is
people’s interactions with these agents and their often conXicting agen-
das, rather than some grand design conceived of and implemented by “the
state,” that gives rise to people’s ideas about the state’s legitimacy (or ille-
gitimacy). From this perspective, it is clear that to portray Aboriginal-state
relations as the result of colonialist and/or neo-colonialist policies of
exploitation on the part of “the state” is to oversimplify what is in fact a
much more complex situation.
Some anthropologists have sought to counter these tendencies by con-
centrating on the historically speciWc ways in which different hunting
peoples have been incorporated into the institutional structures of the
states that encompass them (e.g., Leacock and Lee 1982; Peterson and
Matsuyama 1991). Those anthropologists concerned with Aboriginal-state
relations in the North American Arctic and Subarctic (e.g., Feit 1979, 1982,
1991; Langdon 1986; Scott 1984, 1988) have focused on land claims agree-
ments and/or processes of wildlife management as the principal mecha-
nisms of articulation between northern hunting peoples and the state. This
book builds on such works by viewing land claims and co-management as
aspects of a new phase in the ongoing process of state formation in Can-
ada. As such, they are not merely redeWning relations between aboriginal
people and an entity known as the Canadian state; rather, they are con-
tributing to the production of the illusion of the state, which, as Abrams
(1988: 76) puts it, “is Wrst and foremost an exercise in legitimation – and
what is being legitimated is, we may assume, something which if seen
directly and as itself would be illegitimate, an unacceptable domination.”
Accordingly, I examine not so much land claims agreements and co-
management regimes in themselves as the assumptions underlying them
and the effects on First Nations people of engaging in these processes at all.
Pierre Bourdieu’s (1991) thoughts on language are a useful place from
 Introduction 5

which to begin such an inquiry. He argues that all speech acts must be
understood as a product of the relationship between a person’s “linguis-
tic habitus” and the “linguistic Weld,” or “market,” that constitutes the
speaker’s audience. If a speaker wishes to successfully produce discourse in
a particular Weld, then he or she must observe the forms and formalities of
that Weld. This leads to a process of “self-censorship” in which speakers
modify their linguistic production according to how they expect their
utterances to be received in the particular linguistic Weld in which they are
interacting. That is, whenever people speak, they must adapt their speech
to the demands of the linguistic Weld that is their audience.
In addition, Bourdieu argues that some ways of speaking are suppressed
while others are legitimized as “ofWcial,” or “formal,” solely by virtue of
their relations to the institutions of state power. The legitimacy of some
ways of speaking (along with the corresponding suppression of others) is
produced and maintained through institutional means such as formal
education. Those whose linguistic habitus is most compatible with these
ofWcial linguistic Welds automatically possess substantial “symbolic capi-
tal” since their particular ways of speaking are linked to and legitimated by
state power. They can easily transform their linguistic competence in these
ofWcial linguistic Welds into concrete political action. Those who are not
competent in these ofWcial Welds, however, are at a distinct disadvantage.
Not only is their access to state power severely limited by their relative
incompetence in the ofWcial linguistic Welds, but, to the extent that they
even accept the “rules of the game” and participate in the ofWcial discourse
at all, they also help to realize the symbolic power of the dominant classes
and so tacitly comply with their own domination. Thus, every linguistic
interaction both expresses and helps to reproduce a particular set of social
and political relations.
Bourdieu’s argument has clear implications for understanding the
new structure of Aboriginal-state relations in Canada. If Aboriginal peo-
ples wish to participate in co-management, land claims negotiations, and
other processes that go along with this new relationship, then they must
engage in dialogue with wildlife biologists, lawyers, and other government
ofWcials. First Nations peoples can of course speak to these ofWcials any
way they want, but if they wish to be taken seriously, then their linguistic
utterances must conform to the very particular forms and formalities of
the ofWcial linguistic Welds of wildlife management, Canadian property law,
and so forth. Only through years of schooling or informal training can
First Nations people become Xuent in the social and linguistic conven-
tions of these ofWcial discourses. Those who do not do so are effectively
barred from participation in these processes, condemned, as Bourdieu
(1991: 138) put it, “either to silence or to shocking outspokenness.” But
even those who do expend the necessary time and resources to become
6 Introduction

linguistically competent in these ofWcial Welds seldom attain the same

level of linguistic competence as the government ofWcials whose habitus,
arising from their middle-class Euro-North American upbringing, is more
compatible with the forms and formalities of the state-sanctioned ofWcial
discourse. This puts most First Nations people at an automatic disadvan-
tage vis-à-vis lawyers and biologists in participating in land claims negoti-
ations and co-management – processes that, as we have seen, are ostensibly
about empowering First Nations peoples. By agreeing to play by the “rules
of the game,” First Nations peoples tacitly acknowledge the legitimacy of
that game, thus taking for granted the unequal power relations within
which they are embedded.
In agreeing to play by the rules of the land claims and co-management
games, however, First Nations peoples are not merely agreeing to engage
with government ofWcials in a set of linguistic Welds in which they are at a
disadvantage. They are also agreeing to abide by a whole set of implicit
assumptions about the world, some of which are deeply antithetical to their
own. For example, in Chapters 3, 4, and 5 I show that, in order to play
a meaningful role in the co-management of local wildlife, First Nations
peoples not only have to learn to talk the language of wildlife biology but
they also have to become proWcient at (and comfortable with) thinking
and talking about animals as numbers. As I show in Chapter 2, this goes
against many First Nations people’s most cherished assumptions about the
nature of animals and animal-human relations. Similarly, I argue in Chap-
ter 6 that to engage in land claims negotiations, First Nations peoples must
not only learn the language of Euro-Canadian property law but they must
also become adept at speaking and thinking about land as “property,” a
notion that is incompatible with many of their assumptions about the
nature of land and their relationship to it.
One would expect, however, that once First Nations peoples had
become proWcient in the ofWcial linguistic Welds of wildlife management
and property law they should be able to question the implicit assumptions
of the dominant discourse and explain and defend their own assumptions.
Why do they not do this? As it turns out, they do. This book contains
numerous examples of First Nations people challenging the assumptions
of the dominant discourse in a language that government ofWcials can
understand.2 Unfortunately, nothing ever seems to come of these chal-
lenges. The question we must ask, then, is why not?
To answer this question, it will be useful to begin with Max Weber’s writ-
ings on the nature of bureaucracy. In his essay on bureaucracy, Weber
(1946: 196-244) analyzed the form and function of state bureaucracies,
and this book bears out many of his arguments. My analysis of the rela-
tionship between the growth of a Kluane First Nation bureaucracy and the
rise of a money economy in the region (Chapter 6), for example, supports
 Introduction 7

Weber’s claim that “the development of a money economy ... is a presuppo-

sition of bureaucracy” (204, emphasis in original). Similarly, Chapters 3
through 5 bear out his claim that bureaucracies inevitably give rise to
“experts” whose “objective” intellectual authority threatens or even dis-
places the authority of the pre-bureaucratic “masters” (read: “elders”) of
“older social structures” (216). Evidence that bureaucratization may be
leading to social stratiWcation in Burwash Landing (see Chapters 3 and 5)
also supports Weber’s idea that there is an inherent tension between
“bureaucracy” and “democracy” (224-28, 230-32). For the purposes of my
present argument, however, another of his claims about the nature of
bureaucracy is particularly relevant.
Perhaps Weber’s most important argument concerning the nature of
bureaucracy is that it entails the institutionalization of “rationality”:

Bureaucratization offers above all the optimum possibility for carrying

through the principle of specializing administrative functions according
to purely objective considerations. Individual performances are allocated
to functionaries who have specialized training and who by constant prac-
tice learn more and more. The “objective” discharge of business primarily
means a discharge of business according to calculable rules and “without
regard for persons” ... [Bureaucracy’s] speciWc nature, which is welcomed
by capitalism, develops more perfectly, the more bureaucracy is “de-
humanized,” the more perfectly it succeeds in eliminating from ofWcial
business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional
elements which escape calculation. This is the speciWc nature of bureau-
cracy and it is appraised as its special virtue. (215-16)

First Nations bureaucratization has indeed entailed the development of

administrative functions and “calculable rules” for dealing with the land
and animals. As Weber would have predicted, this allows First Nations
bureaucracies to function “without regard for persons.” The speciWc iden-
tities of First Nations bureaucrats are irrelevant; as long as the Wsh and
wildlife ofWcer, for example, performs his or her job correctly, it does not
matter who he or she is. This “rationalization” of how First Nations peo-
ples deal with the land and animals is essential for their participation
in land claims negotiations, co-management, and other such processes
because it allows federal and territorial (or provincial) bureaucrats (who
are responsible for negotiating and implementing these processes on
behalf of their respective governments) to interact with their First Nations
counterparts according to the “calculable rules” within which they already
function and “without regard for persons.” In other words, it makes
government-to-government relations between First Nations, Canada, and
the provinces/territories possible.
8 Introduction

Habermas (1989), Latour (1987), Marcuse (1964), and others have

pointed out, and Weber himself ultimately came to realize (Tambiah 1990:
153-54), however, that, despite their adoption of a consistent set of rules and
the institutionalization of purposive-rational action, modern capitalism
and science, like all cultural systems, are ultimately grounded in sub-
jective values, which themselves derive from non-rational sources. So,
although modern Euro-Canadian bureaucrats pursue their objectives
“rationally,” those objectives are themselves based on subjective values
and non-rational assumptions about the world. Furthermore, the rational-
ization of bureaucratic and scientiWc functions serves to legitimize the
assumptions underlying bureaucratic objectives. This, in turn, obscures –
and in effect legitimates – the non-rational assumptions that underlie the
whole system.3
Thus, by accepting and adapting to governments’ bureaucratic approach
to Aboriginal-state relations, First Nations peoples also tacitly accept the
assumptions about the nature of land and animals that underlie the rules
and functions of that bureaucracy. Though First Nations peoples can and
do voice their disagreements with these assumptions (as I show in this
book), very little comes of their protests because, within the context of
contemporary bureaucratic wildlife management and land claims negotia-
tions, decisions/concessions simply cannot be based on anything other
than Euro-North American assumptions about land and animals. As I
show in Chapters 3-5, when First Nations peoples make claims about ani-
mals as intelligent social beings, they get nowhere because government
biologists and resource managers, regardless of their own personal beliefs
or understandings, simply cannot implement management decisions based
on such alternate conceptions of animals. Similarly, I show in Chapter 6
that government negotiators cannot take negotiating positions based on
any conception of land other than that of property.
It is not only government bureaucrats who are constrained by the
implicit assumptions underlying the rules and forms of government
bureaucracy. First Nations bureaucrats too, to the extent that they accept
the rational rules and functions of Euro-Canadian style bureaucracy, must
tacitly accept the underlying assumptions that accompany them (e.g.,
about the nature of land and animals). Like Euro-North American bureau-
crats, they are constrained by the “calculable rules” of bureaucracy and the
implicit non-rational assumptions about the nature of the world upon
which these rules are based. So long as they accept the existing bureau-
cratic contexts of land claims negotiations and co-management, they can-
not do otherwise. There are simply no acceptable bureaucratic rules or
functions that allow First Nations peoples as bureaucrats to act upon the
land and animals according to their own alternate conceptions of them.
And, to the extent that they accept the existing bureaucratic rules and
 Introduction 9

functions of co-management and land claims, it is difWcult for them to

question the legitimacy of these processes or the implicit assumptions that
inform them.
For this reason, I argue that the current restructuring of Aboriginal-state
relations, which on the surface appears to be empowering to First Nations
peoples, may in fact be having exactly the opposite effect. Although on
the surface land claims and co-management seem to be giving Aboriginal
peoples increased control over their lives and land, I argue that these
processes may instead be acting as subtle extensions of empire, replacing
local Aboriginal ways of talking, thinking, and acting with those speciW-
cally sanctioned by the state.
This is not to say that these imperialist aspects of land claims and co-
management are intentional or even conscious. On the contrary, I believe
that many government ofWcials are well-meaning and genuinely inter-
ested in granting First Nations peoples a meaningful role in their own
governance and the management of local resources. Instead, I argue that
the processes of land claims and co-management themselves, in both con-
ception and practice, are incompatible with certain First Nations beliefs
and practices. Indeed, the negative consequences of land claims and co-
management that I describe in this book are subtle enough that few schol-
ars or government ofWcials seem to have noted them. As a result, when
bureaucrats (whether federal, provincial, territorial, or First Nations) en-
counter difWculties in their attempts to co-manage wildlife or negotiate/
implement land claims agreements, they tend to put the blame on a lack
of technical expertise (e.g., “We’ll get it right when we Wgure out exactly
how to do it”) and/or selWsh political interests on the part of others (e.g.,
bad faith in negotiations). In Hunters and Bureaucrats, however, I argue that
many of the problems with the new relationship between First Nations
peoples and the state are inherent in the structure of those relations them-
selves and in the assumptions underlying land claims and co-management
rather than in a lack of technical expertise or in the speciWc individuals
participating in these processes.
One theme that runs throughout most of Hunters and Bureaucrats
involves the question of “knowledge”: what is it? How is it produced and
legitimized? And how do people use it in political struggles over land
and resources? I focus on these questions because a great deal of the cur-
rent debate surrounding efforts to restructure Aboriginal-state relations in
Canada is framed explicitly in terms of “knowledge.” There is widespread
recognition that First Nations peoples possess what has come to be known
as “traditional knowledge,” a kind of knowledge about the land and ani-
mals that is distinct from that of most Euro-North Americans. Regardless
of whether they are engaged in land claims negotiations or trying to
jointly manage wildlife, Euro-North American “experts” are keenly interested
10 Introduction

in appropriating and using this newly recognized (by government ofW-

cials) form of knowledge. Wildlife biologists and resource managers want
to tap into the knowledge of First Nations elders and hunters in the hopes
that their extensive knowledge about local land and animals will help them
to better manage wildlife populations. Government lawyers, on the other
hand, are trying to translate First Nations peoples’ land-based knowledge
and practices into the European language of property so as to formally
codify them in land claims agreements. It is widely believed by scholars,
government ofWcials, and First Nations alike that, by incorporating First
Nations peoples’ knowledge into existing processes of resource manage-
ment and land claims, First Nations interests in the land and animals can
be adequately and fairly addressed. Although these various processes of
“knowledge-integration” seem, on the surface, to be very different from
one another, it will become apparent over the course of this book that
they all actually share a similar dynamic. They all take for granted existing
power relations, focusing on the incorporation of First Nations cultural
elements into existing Euro-Canadian institutional contexts, without ever
questioning the appropriateness of such a project in the Wrst place.
Michel Foucault (1980) has argued that knowledge and power are in-
separable. Referring to a single force or entity that he dubbed “power/
knowledge,” he maintained that institutional power arises at least as much
from the ability to shape discourse as it does from the use (or threat) of
coercive force. By deWning what it is possible to think, powerful institu-
tions (like state agencies) often do not need to resort to force to shape
people’s behaviours. In his essay on the nature of power, Eric Wolf (1990)
distinguished between two forms of power that are directly relevant to
an analysis of power/knowledge. The Wrst, which he called “tactical,” or
“organizational,” power, is the ability of an actor or “operational unit” to
“circumscribe the actions of others within determinate settings” (586).
Thus, the organization and structural setting of people’s interactions
makes some kinds of actions possible while rendering others impossible
and even, sometimes, unthinkable. The second form of power that is rele-
vant here he called “structural power.” This form of power “shapes the
social Weld of action so as to render some kinds of behaviour possible,
while making others less possible or impossible” (587). Structural power
not only operates within a given organizational setting (as does tactical
power) but it also organizes (and makes possible) those settings them-
selves. Thus, he argues that structural power shapes our very ideas about
how the world is organized: “The maintenance of categories upholds
power, and power maintains the order of the world” (593). The knowledge-
integration with which I deal in this book, occurring as it does in speci-
Wc bureaucratic settings, is subject to the exercise of both tactical and
structural power. Consequently, I view knowledge-integration, as it is now
 Introduction 11

occurring in land claims and co-management processes throughout the

Canadian North, as a political process that cannot be understood except in
relation to these forms of state power.
As we will see, many scholars have examined the role of “knowledge” in
various aspects of the changing relationship between Aboriginal peoples
and the state in Canada (especially in the process of co-management).
Few, however, have considered the links between this knowledge and
broader relations of power as described by scholars like Foucault and
Wolf. To understand why, it is useful to again consider Bourdieu’s (1991)
perspective on the production of linguistic knowledge. He argues that con-
ventional approaches to the study of social relations (in his case, linguis-
tics) tend to assume their objects/domains of study without considering
the historical and political conditions of their creation, as such. As I de-
scribed above, he claims that some languages, dialects, and ways of speak-
ing are suppressed while others are legitimized as “ofWcial,” or “formal,”
solely by virtue of their relation to state power. He then goes on to argue
that, because of their legitimacy, these ofWcial ways of speaking become
the only acceptable ways of talking about and analyzing those very lan-
guages, dialects, and ways of speaking that they marginalized or replaced
in the Wrst place. This process of linguistic knowledge-production implic-
itly treats its product, linguistic knowledge, as if it were objective and
politically neutral, despite the preponderance of social scientiWc scholar-
ship linking knowledge intimately with power. Julie Cruikshank (1998: 50)
argues that Bourdieu’s concerns about the production of linguistic knowl-
edge are equally applicable to the study of traditional/indigenous knowl-
edge because “indigenous knowledge continues to be presented as an
object for science rather than as a system of knowledge that could inform
science.” As a result, she maintains that, “if we are going to be involved
in investigating the proliferation of ideas about a topic as complex as
indigenous knowledge ... we need to concern ourselves with the social
conditions under which such knowledge becomes deWned, reproduced and
distributed (or repressed and eliminated) in struggles for legitimacy” (49).
As Bourdieu himself points out, such investigations cannot be carried
out in the abstract. Precisely how knowledge is produced, legitimated,
marginalized, and/or eliminated depends on historical factors and can
only be determined empirically. Furthermore, this process can only be un-
derstood in connection with the power relations – both tactical and struc-
tural – that underlie it. In this book, I examine some of the bureaucratic
processes that have been transforming the relationship between the peo-
ple of the Kluane First Nation and the Canadian state (speciWcally the
processes of co-management and land claims negotiations). I focus on the
new forms and conWgurations of power and knowledge that are emerging
from these processes, paying particular attention to how they serve to tie
12 Introduction

Kluane people ever more tightly into the institutional structures of the
state. But I do not mean to imply that the replacement of First Nations
peoples’ social relations, practices, beliefs, and values with those of gov-
ernment bureaucrats is a foregone conclusion. Indeed, as I argue through-
out the book, many First Nations peoples are successfully maintaining
their own distinct beliefs and values in the face of the pressures of bureau-
cratization; and no doubt they will continue to adapt to changing circum-
stances, interpreting and adapting to the contingencies of bureaucratic life
in their own unique ways. In fact, Kluane people are quite determined to
do so. As we shall see below, they did not originally choose to bureaucratize
their society or to engage with government experts in the Euro-North
American languages of biology and property rights. These practices were
forced on them, sometimes quite brutally, by powerful outsiders who
invaded their territory in the 1940s and imposed on them foreign values
and institutions. Kluane people are well aware of this history and very
consciously seek to maintain their beliefs and values in the face of such
pressures. For this reason, I focus also on how Kluane people themselves
react to, and conceive of, the changing forms and conWgurations of power
that accompany the Kluane First Nation’s new relationship with the fed-
eral and territorial governments. Before doing so, however, I brieXy de-
scribe Kluane country and introduce the people who are the subject of
this book. I then brieXy describe the nature of the research upon which
this book is based.

The Country and People

–
Lù’àn Mä n Keyi: Kluane Country
Burwash Landing is a small village on the northwest shore of Kluane Lake
in the mountainous southwest corner of Canada’s Yukon Territory. Sur-
rounded by boreal forest, the village is located on the Alaska Highway
approximately 170 miles (280 kilometres) northwest of Whitehorse, the
territorial capital. It has a population of about seventy people, most of
whom are status Indians4 and members of the Kluane First Nation (KFN).
There are approximately forty-Wve houses in the village, along with the
KFN ofWce, a garage, Wre hall, wash house, and community hall. Mail is
delivered by truck three times a week to a small room in the KFN ofWce
building, which functions as the post ofWce. There is also a small store on
the highway that is generally open only in the summer. Finally, there is
the Burwash Landing Resort, a motel/restaurant/bar that caters mostly to
highway trafWc (though many locals frequent the restaurant and bar). The
resort, too, usually closes down for at least part of the winter.
Kluane Lake, the largest lake in the Yukon Territory, dominates the land-
scape. Nearly forty-Wve miles (72.5 kilometres) long, it is fed by glacial
Burwash Landing in summer, 2002.

Burwash Landing in winter, 1996.

Joe and Luke Johnson on Printers Creek above Kluane Lake, July 2000. The
Kluane Range and Kluane Park are in the background.

Joe Bruneau on the Kluane River, July 1999.

 Introduction 15

creeks, and in the summers the silt suspended in its waters turns it a strik-
ing shade of light blue. From November until early June, however, the lake
is covered by a huge expanse of ice that can reach a thickness of Wve feet
(1.5 metres) or more. To the south and west of the village is the Kluane
Range, a line of 7,000- to 8,000-foot (2,100- to 2,500-metre) mountains
that rise abruptly off the 2,500-foot (762-metre) Xoor of the Shakwak
trench, a wide valley that runs from Kusawa Lake (far to the southeast)
northwest to the Alaska border and beyond. Behind the Kluane Range are
the even taller peaks of the Donjek Range, and behind them are the tow-
ering heights of the St. Elias Mountains, among the highest mountains in
North America5 and the largest non-polar ice Welds on earth. To the north
and east of Burwash and Kluane Lake lie the Yukon Plateau and the lower
and much more gradual slopes of the Ruby and Nisling Ranges. Beneath
the mountains is a vast country of muskeg and black spruce. Hundreds of
small lakes dot the landscape, connected by swamps, sloughs, and icy
creeks. Stands of white spruce can be found along the mineral-rich river
banks, and patches of willow, cottonwood (balsam poplar), and quaking
aspen cause the hillsides to glow a brilliant gold during the brief autumn
of late August and early September.
The vegetation supports a rich variety of wildlife: moose, woodland cari-
bou, mountain sheep and goats, lynx, wolves, coyotes, brown and black
bears, snowshoe hares, arctic ground squirrels, and a range of other north-
ern fur bearers.6 In the lakes and creeks one can Wnd lake trout, whiteWsh,
grayling, northern pike, burbot, inconnu, and suckers. Most salmon found
in the region make their way 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometres) from the
Bering Sea up the Yukon River and its tributaries (and are in correspond-
ingly poor shape upon their arrival). Salmon in the Alsek River drainage
in the southern part of the Kluane region, however, make the much less
arduous journey from the PaciWc. During the summer months, the region
is home to a wide variety of birds, and in the spring and fall it is a tempo-
rary stopping place for large numbers of migrating waterfowl.
A multitude of creeks and river systems carves up the mountainous
landscape. Among the most important of these are the Donjek, Kluane,
and Duke Rivers. The Donjek River, which has its source in the Kluane
Glacier to the south, carves out a wide valley about twenty-Wve miles (40
kilometres) west of Burwash and continues north and west until its conXu-
ence with the White River, far to the northwest. The Kluane River begins
about Wve miles (eight kilometres) north of Burwash. It drains Kluane Lake
and Xows northwest for about forty miles (sixty-Wve kilometres) until it meets
the Donjek. The Duke River also has its source in the glaciers to the south
and carves a wide valley between the Kluane and Donjek Ranges before
emptying into the Kluane River just north of Burwash. These and other
river valleys in the area are rich with wildlife and provide for relatively
16 Introduction

easy travel through the otherwise rugged landscape. In addition, Kluane

Lake, whose arms thrust deep into the Ruby Range, provides an easy
means of travel through otherwise difWcult terrain, especially in the win-
ter (during the summer, high winds and waves can make travel on the
near-freezing waters of the lake quite dangerous).
The climate in the Kluane region is one of extremes. The winters are
very cold; temperatures can drop below -60° Fahrenheit (-51° Celsius), and
the monthly mean temperature is below freezing from October through
April. The coldest temperature ever recorded in North America, -81.4°
Fahrenheit (-63° Celsius), was measured at Snag, about 84 miles (135 kilo-
metres) northwest of Burwash Landing on 3 February 1947. By contrast,
summers in the Kluane area are fairly mild. Temperatures can exceed 86°
Fahrenheit (30° Celsius), but the mean temperature in July, the warmest
month, is only 54.5° Fahrenheit (12.5° Celsius). The region is also quite
dry. Shielded from the heavy precipitation of the coast by the towering St.
Elias Mountains, the Kluane area receives an average of only 11.4 inches

Dawson
e r
Klondike Riv

Ala
ska rt
wa Riv
er
Ste ALASKA YUKON
Hi
gh

YU River
River

KO
wa

N Macmillan
y

Fort Pell INSET

e

y Riv
Whit

Beaver Ni Selkirk er
er

Creek sli YUKON

Donjek Riv

ng CANADA
RIV

Riv
ER

er
Ross River
PACIFIC OCEAN
ALASKA

Kluane Aishihik US
Lake Lake
Burwash
Landing Destruction
Bay
Lake
KLUANE Laberge
Te
s

NATIONAL
lin

PARK Haines Lia

Junction WHITEHORSE rd
Kusuwa Ri
Riv

Lake ve
er

r Watson
Klukshu Carcross
Teslin Lake
ay
Neskataheen
Alask a Highw

Tagish r
we
Yakutat Lake Teslin Lo ost
Skagway Lake P
Atlin
Lake
Haines
BRITISH COLUMBIA
PACIFIC
ALA
OCEAN SKA

0 150 km

The Kluane Region, Yukon Territory

 Introduction 17

(290 millimetres) of precipitation annually – which includes, on average,

43.5 inches (110.5 centimetres) of snowfall. The area is extremely windy,
especially during the spring and fall, with gusts sometimes reaching sixty
miles/hour (100 kilometres/hour) or more.7

– –
Lù’àn Mä n Ku Dä n: The People of Kluane Lake
The village of Burwash Landing was originally settled by a mix of people
from different ethnic/linguistic backgrounds (including Northern Tutch-
one, Southern Tutchone, Upper Tanana, Tlingit, and European), but most
of the descendants of these original settlers now identify themselves as
Southern Tutchone people.8 They do, however, recognize close kinship ties
with the people of other First Nations throughout the Yukon and in
Alaska.9 Because of land claims, co-management, and other such pro-
cesses, Kluane people have more and more reasons to distinguish them-
selves from those relatives who live in other villages and are members of
different First Nations. In many ways, however, they continue to recog-
nize their kinship with these people (especially as against Euro-North
Americans). First Nations peoples throughout the region constantly re-
afWrm their common “Indianness” through practice. They hunt together,
visit, and share meat with each other, and they attend and participate in
one another’s potlatches. They share many common understandings
about the world and their place in it, including their relationship to the
land and animals. All are members of either the Ägunda (Wolf) or Khanjet
(Crow) moiety, and recognize a common bond with fellow moiety-members
from other villages and First Nations. Though of less importance than in
the past, moiety afWliation continues to be important in certain contexts,
most notably at potlatches.
Although the majority of Burwash’s population now has Indian status,
this was not always the case. Until 1985 Indian women in Canada who
married non-Indians (anyone who lacked Indian status as deWned under
the Indian Act) lost their Indian status. This had important consequences
for the people of Burwash Landing because several non-Aboriginal men
settled in the area around the turn of the century and married local
women.10 As a result, all the descendants from these marriages (who now
make up perhaps half of the population of the village) lacked Indian sta-
tus and all the beneWts associated with it. It was not until 1985 and the
passage of Bill C-31 Amendments to the Indian Act that these people
gained their status as Indians and became eligible for beneWts under the
Indian Act. Although differences between “Bill C-31 people” and those in
the village who have always had status are signiWcant in some social con-
texts, for the purposes of this book they are relatively unimportant. The
two groups are related to one another by virtue of their common descent
as well as through subsequent intermarriage. They grew up together, live
18 Introduction

together, and have had many similar life experiences. In most contexts,
they do not even think of themselves as two distinct groups.
I make frequent use of two related, though distinct, terms: “Kluane peo-
ple” and “members of the Kluane First Nation.” By “Kluane people” I
mean the First Nations people who presently live part- or full-time in the
Kluane area (mostly in Burwash Landing). These include all of those
who are members of the First Nations community, whether they trace
their ancestry to Southern Tutchone people, the Tlingit, Europeans, or
any combination of these. There are good reasons for doing this; in most
contexts, Kluane people think of themselves as a coherent community
and seldom pay much attention to these “ethnic” differences. This is not
to imply, however, that there are no tensions or differences of opinion
among Kluane people. Indeed, they are a heterogeneous group, with a
wide variety of personal experiences, interests, and perspectives, who fre-
quently disagree with one another over everything from local politics to

HAN
ALASKA YUKON
NORTHERN
TUTCHONE INSET
UPPER CANADA
TANANA
SOUTHERN PACIFIC OCEAN
US

TUTCHONE INLAND KASKA

EYAK
TAGISH
TLINGIT
TLINGIT

TAHLTAN
0 150 km

Languages spoken in the Yukon

 Introduction 19

land claims. Some of these differences between Kluane people are signiW-
cant to the issues discussed in Hunters and Bureaucrats. One of these is the
distinction Kluane people themselves draw between “bush Indians” (those
who have spent a signiWcant part of their life on the land) and “city Indi-
ans” (those who have spent their lives in village, or even urban, settings,
and who often have a considerable amount of formal education). As we
shall see, this distinction is relevant to discussions of Kluane people’s
involvement in both co-management (see Chapter 5) and land claims (see
Chapter 6).
Any attempt to draw sharp distinctions between different “types” of
Kluane people (e.g., between bush and city Indians) and their particular
beliefs, practices, and values, however, runs the risk of greatly oversimpli-
fying what are in fact extremely complex situations. Certainly, there are
tensions and contradictions among various beliefs, practices, and values to
which Kluane people subscribe; but there is no simple way to map any par-
ticular set of beliefs and practices onto a corresponding subset of Kluane
people; rather, all subgroups – regardless of how they are constituted – are
themselves heterogeneous, cross-cut by numerous other types of differ-
ence (e.g., see Chapter 6 for a discussion of how the categories of bush
Indian and city Indian are cross-cut). Perhaps even more important, indi-
vidual Kluane people are themselves often inconsistent – their beliefs,
practices, and values depending to some extent on the social context
within which they are enacted. Thus, tensions exist not only among indi-
viduals with different beliefs and practices but also within individuals. At
the same time, however, there are also some cultural assumptions that
are widely shared by most Kluane people in most circumstances.
In Chapter 2 I describe an elaborate constellation of beliefs, values,
social relations, and practices that have their roots in Kluane people’s abo-
riginal land-based way of life. I ascribe these aspects of “Kluane culture” to
“Kluane people” in general and show how they inform their approach to
and understanding of co-management and land claims. As will become
evident, however, there are certainly Kluane people who reject or other-
wise fail to comply with the beliefs, values, social relations, and practices I
attribute to “Kluane people.” But this does not mean that I have ignored
an important subset of the population (e.g., that I talked only to bush
Indians). In fact, several of those KFN members whom I cite and who are
most active in the co-management and land claims processes have them-
selves spent very little time out on the land (indeed, some explicitly con-
sider themselves to be city Indians). This, however, does not prevent them
from espousing (and, in fact, sharing) many of the land-based values of
their elders. Although not all Kluane people share these beliefs, values,
and practices, all of them – regardless of their personal backgrounds – are
aware of them and must take them into account when relating to others
20 Introduction

in the village. So these land-based beliefs, values, social relations, and prac-
tices are important to all Kluane people – even to those who reject them in
certain contexts. In fact, it is precisely this shared understanding of the
terms of debate that enables Kluane people to evaluate and criticize one
another’s behaviour – as a number of examples that I provide demonstrate.
When I use the term “Kluane people” I do not generally include the
Euro-Canadian inhabitants of Burwash or Destruction Bay, a small settle-
ment of thirty-Wve people or so – mostly Euro-Canadians – ten miles (six-
teen kilometres) to the south of Burwash. This is because, with one or
two notable exceptions, the Euro-Canadian inhabitants of the area (even
the few who live in Burwash itself) keep themselves quite separate from
the First Nations community and maintain a very different way of life.
For the most part, they do not engage in the subsistence activities, partic-
ipate in the social relations, or subscribe to the beliefs and values that I
describe in Chapter 2. Nor do they, as non-members of KFN, participate in
the processes of co-management and land claims with which this book
deals. In fact, outside of administrative and commercial contexts (the First
Nations ofWce, store, post ofWce, gas station) and the bar, there is surpris-
ingly little social interaction between Euro-Canadian and First Nations
inhabitants of the area.
Occasionally, I will use the term “members of the Kluane First Nation”
rather than “Kluane people.” When I do so, I am referring to all those ofW-
cially enrolled as members of the Kluane First Nation. Since 1985 this
has included virtually all of the First Nation inhabitants of Burwash Land-
ing, but it also includes the many relatives who have moved away from
the area permanently as well as their descendants.11 Thus, according to my
usage, (almost) all Kluane people are members of the Kluane First Nation12
but not all members of the Kluane First Nation are Kluane people. The dis-
tinction between these terms is not a local one, but I make it because there
are times when I wish to speak generally about the people with whom
I lived and worked without making statements about their relatives who
live elsewhere and whom I never met. At other times (especially in Chap-
ter 6, when I examine land claims), I wish to speak about members of the
Kluane First Nation inclusively.
Unlike the term “Kluane people,” which is fairly loose (as I use it), mem-
bership in the Kluane First Nation is clearly and legally deWned, and it is
accompanied by speciWc rights and beneWts (those currently spelled out
under the Indian Act and those that will replace them when and if KFN
ratiWes a land claims agreement). At present, there is virtually no disagree-
ment among Kluane people about who should qualify as a member of the
Kluane First Nation and so be eligible for the special rights and beneWts
that accompany membership.13 This unity may be a function of how
recently Bill C-31 adjusted the category of membership. Under the new
 Introduction 21

amendments, very few people in the village who consider themselves

Indians are excluded from membership in KFN. This may change in the
future, however, with continued intermarriage between KFN members and
non-First Nations members.14 Under their self-government agreement,
should it be ratiWed, KFN will gain the power to establish its own mem-
bership code.

The Research
Hunters and Bureaucrats is based on research carried out in the Yukon
between October 1995 and July 1998 (with another two-month visit dur-
ing the summer of 1999). I arrived in Whitehorse at the end of October
1995 and spent approximately a month and a half familiarizing myself
with the local situation and making arrangements with KFN to conduct
research in Burwash Landing. Then, on 13 December, armed with a car-
load of groceries and a chainsaw, I headed up the highway to Burwash
Landing. When I arrived, I moved into a log cabin that I rented from Joe
and Sandy Johnson. Joe was then the chief of KFN and Sandy was a school
teacher in Haines Junction, eighty miles (130 kilometres) to the south.
Though they had raised their family in the cabin I was renting, they had
recently built a new house right next to it – a house with all the modern
conveniences. My cabin was large and had electricity but no running
water or telephone. They had installed an oil furnace in addition to the
wood stove, but, because of the high price of oil, I seldom used it (during
the winter, I kept the thermostat low so that it would turn on only in the
early morning to keep the cabin from freezing up once the Wre in the stove
had died down). It had been some years since anyone had lived in the
cabin, so I had to “re-chink” it with insulation to replace what the squir-
rels and magpies had taken. I got water from the well in the village, cut
Wrewood along the highway, and hauled it in my Volvo station wagon
(until people began lending me their pick-up trucks). I quickly learned the
tricks to using an outhouse at -40° Celsius.
Though the chief and council of Kluane First Nation had approved my
research, and I had spoken with a few other people before my arrival, very
few people in the village knew who I was or what I was doing when I
arrived; I was just some strange Whiteman who had shown up in their vil-
lage. The Wrst couple of months were difWcult. It was cold, so people either
stayed in their homes or were out in the bush somewhere. There is no real
public social space in the village (aside from the KFN ofWce and the store,
which is only open intermittently during the winters, if at all). The village
seemed almost a ghost town.
Although at Wrst I lamented my winter arrival (because it made it harder
to meet people), I eventually came to see it in a positive light. Researchers
are not at all uncommon in the villages of the North, and the Kluane area
22 Introduction

gets more than its share. Forty miles (sixty-Wve kilometres) away, on the
south end of Kluane Lake, is the University of Calgary’s Kluane Field Sta-
tion. This facility serves as the base for a signiWcant part of all the biologi-
cal and ecological research on Canada’s boreal forests; during the summers
it hosts a population of up to Wfty researchers studying everything from
the lynx-hare cycle and birds of prey to the glaciers of the St. Elias ice
Welds. In addition to these scientists, who seldom come into Burwash,
there are a host of researchers, many working for the government, who
descend on the village to Wnd out about local wildlife use, energy con-
sumption, diet, and a whole array of other topics. Kluane people complain
that the vast majority of these researchers come in the summer, stay only
a short time, and are never heard from again. Thus, in the eyes of most
Kluane people, my arrival in the winter, combined with the length of my
stay in the community, distinguished me from the typical researcher. Sev-
eral people told me that they appreciated the time and effort that I put
into trying to Wnd out about their lives and my willingness to admit that I
did not know things. This set me apart from most researchers, who arrive
in the community armed with a prearranged set of questions and “think
that they know everything.”
Gradually, I began to get to know people. In addition to cutting wood,
hauling water, and performing other necessary activities for myself, I
tried to make myself useful around the village; I did everything from help-
ing to cut and haul Wrewood and performing light carpentry work and
equipment-repair to giving lessons on the use of a computer. In return, I
received informal instruction on how to sew, snare rabbits, skin and pre-
pare game, speak Southern Tutchone, and so on. As I became more and
more a member of the community, I accompanied people out on the land
as much as possible to hunt, Wsh, trap, and survey land selections for KFN’s
land claims negotiations. I began to participate regularly in social activities
such as community meals, regular informal visiting, potlatches, and the
nightly village poker game. Eventually, it began to feel like home, and I
participated fully in the life of the village. In this way, I learned about
social relations and subsistence practices. I also got a sense of Kluane peo-
ple’s beliefs and values as well as how they think about themselves in rela-
tion to the world.
I did conduct some formal interviews, but I found that it was more use-
ful (and comfortable for all involved) to talk with people informally while
engaging in daily activities such as visiting, hunting, driving, playing
poker, cutting wood, and so on. The length of time I spent in the Weld
afforded me the luxury of gathering information in this way, but I soon
found that, by actively participating in the things I wanted to learn about,
I was conforming to Kluane people’s own ideas about the proper way to
 Introduction 23

learn: by watching and doing, rather than by engaging in formal research

or pestering people with questions (see Chapter 2).
In addition to participating in the daily life of the village, I also attended
wildlife management meetings, land claims negotiations, and other kinds
of formal interactions between Kluane people and various Euro-North
American “experts.” I was encouraged to actively participate in some of
these management processes (by both KFN and government representa-
tives) as a disinterested but knowledgeable observer – most notably in the
meetings of the Ruby Range Sheep Steering Committee, which are the sub-
ject of Chapters 4 and 5. I helped out in these meetings by taking minutes
and was able to participate in the social relations of the committee – as a
committee member myself. This gave me the opportunity to observe these
bureaucratic interactions up close and to have numerous informal conver-
sations with all those participating in these processes (including both First
Nations and government representatives).
In addition to the resource- (or species-) speciWc wildlife meetings I
attended in Burwash, I also went to Whitehorse and sometimes even fur-
ther aWeld to attend conferences, symposia, and workshops dealing with
co-management and traditional knowledge, forestry, mining, and so on.
Some of these meetings were attended by delegates from across the cir-
cumpolar North, from Greenland to Siberia.15 These meetings gave me a
sense of how co-management in the Kluane region Wts into broader terri-
torial, national, and even international contexts. This (along with my
knowledge of the Kluane situation and a review of the relevant literature)
allowed me to formulate a view of co-management processes and tradi-
tional knowledge more generally – a view that I present in some detail in
Chapter 3.
Finally, in addition to attending wildlife management meetings, I also
observed and eventually participated in KFN’s land claims negotiations.
Because of the ongoing and sensitive nature of these negotiations, I was
at Wrst hesitant about getting involved with them. I began by attending
community meetings that KFN negotiators held to inform KFN’s member-
ship about the status of negotiations. Before long, however, I was given
permission to observe the negotiations themselves and to attend and par-
ticipate in meetings of KFN’s land claims caucus. Once again, I was encour-
aged to actively participate in the discussions at caucus meetings, though
I kept silent during actual negotiations. Then, in the spring of 1997, the
KFN Land Claims Department asked me to research, draft, and ultimately
negotiate the speciWc provisions for a chapter of KFN’s Final Agreement
(chapter 13 – Heritage). Once again, I had the opportunity to interact with
and get to know the other participants (those working for KFN and gov-
ernment alike) in a process that is helping to deWne the new relationship
24 Introduction

between KFN and the state. In this way, I not only gained a good under-
standing of the technical aspects of the land claim but was also able to get
a sense of both KFN and government negotiators’ respective approaches to
and understanding of the claim. Over the course of my stay in Burwash, I
also spoke with most Kluane people about their conceptions of and atti-
tudes toward the land claim.

I focus on the cultural and political dimensions of contemporary wildlife

management and land claims negotiations in Kluane country. These
processes, however, cannot be understood in isolation. Because they grow
out of a long history of Aboriginal-state relations in the Kluane region and
in Canada more generally, they must be situated within their proper his-
torical context. In Chapter 1, therefore, I outline the history of Aboriginal-
state relations in the Kluane region and indicate how that local history
intersects with territorial, national, and even continental trends. In so
doing, I have two principal goals. First, I show how state wildlife manage-
ment and land claims negotiations in Kluane country Wt into the broader
colonial history of the region. Second, I seek to show that, although state
wildlife management is heavily implicated in colonial relations and land
claims are a reaction to those relations (and perhaps are being subverted
by them), neither can be understood as the result of Kluane people’s inter-
actions with a monolithic “state.” Rather, both are complex processes aris-
ing from interactions among various agents of the state and numerous
non-state actors – all of whom often have different and even opposing
interests and agendas.
In Chapter 2 I examine the social relations and practices of contempo-
rary Kluane hunting as well as the beliefs and values that inform Kluane
people’s view of their place in the world and their relationship to animals.
This constellation of social relations, practices, beliefs, and values makes
up the “way of life” that forms the basis of Kluane people’s “traditional
knowledge” about the land and animals. It is also that which they wish to
preserve through land claims. For this reason, Chapter 2 provides the
background necessary for understanding subsequent chapters dealing
with co-management and land claims negotiations. While it is possible to
examine these processes in isolation, one cannot appreciate their real
impact on the community without some understanding of the “way of
life” that underlies Kluane people’s participation in these processes in the
Wrst place.
In Chapter 3 I take a critical look at the idea that traditional knowledge
can and should be integrated with scientiWc knowledge. The notion that
such integration is possible undergirds most contemporary efforts at co-
management; and, as I show in Chapter 6, an analogous set of ideas
 Introduction 25

also underlies modern Canadian land claim negotiations. The idea of

knowledge-integration, however, contains implicit assumptions about the
nature of “knowledge.” It also takes for granted existing power relations
between Aboriginal peoples and the state by assuming that traditional
knowledge is simply a new form of “data” to be incorporated into existing
management bureaucracies and acted upon by scientists and resource
managers. As a result, Aboriginal peoples are forced to express themselves
in ways that conform to the institutions and practices of state manage-
ment rather than to their own beliefs, values, and practices (as described
in Chapter 2). And, since it is scientists and resource managers, rather than
Aboriginal hunters and trappers, who are expected to use this new inte-
grated knowledge, the project of knowledge-integration actually serves to
concentrate power in administrative centres rather than in the hands of
Aboriginal peoples.
In Chapters 4 to 6 I use the theoretical arguments laid out in Chapter 3
to analyze particular cases of co-management and land claims negotia-
tions that took place in the Kluane region during the period of my Weld-
work. In Chapters 4 and 5, I take a close look at the workings of the Ruby
Range Sheep Steering Committee. In 1995 KFN and the Yukon govern-
ment jointly established this committee to address KFN concerns about a
population of Dall sheep and to develop a set of management recommen-
dations for addressing those concerns. I analyze the unexamined assump-
tions that different parties brought to the table, the politics surrounding
sheep and co-management in the territory more generally, and the work-
ings of the committee itself to show why the process failed. I argue that
this failure stemmed neither from “technical” difWculties nor from bad
faith on the part of the participants but, rather, from the very nature of co-
management and the assumptions that underlie the project of knowledge-
integration in the Wrst place.
In Chapter 6, I turn to an examination of the Kluane First Nation’s land
claim and argue that the land claim process shares many of the same
dynamics evident in processes of co-management discussed in previous
chapters. The very idea of land claims is based on the European concept of
“property”; modern land claims in Canada grant First Nations “owner-
ship” of certain lands and spell out the rights they possess in relation to
those lands. Yet many of the relationships inherent in the notion of prop-
erty are incompatible with many of the beliefs, values, social relations, and
practices that constitute Kluane people’s relationship to the land, animals,
and one another (as described in Chapter 2). As a result, Kluane people
have had to learn to think and speak the “language of property” and to
create a bureaucratic infrastructure as preconditions for engaging govern-
ment ofWcials in a dialogue over land and sovereignty. I argue that the
26 Introduction

land claims process – because it has forced Kluane people to think, speak,
and act in uncharacteristic ways – tends to undermine some of the very
beliefs and practices that a land claims agreement is meant to preserve.
Taken together, these chapters illustrate the ambivalent nature of the
new relationship between Aboriginal peoples and the state in the Yukon.
Processes like land claims and co-management, which are the corner-
stones of this new relationship, do grant First Nations peoples a measure
of autonomy and control over local resources. Based as they are on the
assumptions and practices of Euro-North American bureaucracy, however,
these processes – by the very way in which they are conceived – are incon-
sistent with some important First Nations beliefs and practices. First
Nations people who participate in these processes must learn to speak and
act in new and uncharacteristic ways, and First Nations must construct
elaborate bureaucratic systems that correspond to the federal and territor-
ial bureaucracies with which they must interact. This not only stacks the
deck against First Nations people involved in land claim negotiations and
co-management, but it also serves to undermine the very way of life they
hope to preserve by participating in these processes.
1
Aboriginal-State Relations in
Kluane Country: An Overview

Over the last 150 years, Kluane people and their lands have become
increasingly integrated into the economic systems of global capitalism
and the political structures of Canada. Initially, the process of integration
was gradual, Kluane people having only occasional and indirect contact
with the forces that were already dramatically transforming First Nations
life elsewhere on the continent. In the second half of the twentieth
century, however, the process began to accelerate. The construction of the
Alaska Highway in 1942 ushered in an era of rapid social change. In just
two generations, First Nations society in the Kluane region was trans-
formed. Today, Kluane people live dramatically different kinds of lives
than did their grandparents.
Many of the changes to Kluane society were extremely disruptive.
Indeed, Kluane people have suffered all of the hardships and indignities
experienced by colonized people the world over. If anything, the social
change they experienced was all the more disruptive because of its rapid-
ity. In just over Wfty years they have made the transition from subsistence-
oriented hunters and trappers to full – if still marginalized – citizens and
workers in a postindustrial capitalist state (although, as we shall see, these
roles are not as clear-cut or exclusive as they may at Wrst appear). Kluane
people and their culture, however, have not simply given way before the
irresistible onslaught of capitalism and the Canadian state. To present the
last 150 years of history in the region in this way would greatly oversim-
plify what has in reality been an extremely complex and multifaceted set
of processes.
In the Wrst place, Kluane people continue to regard themselves as a dis-
tinct people, and they have managed to preserve a set of beliefs, values,
social relations, and practices that, to a large degree, set them apart from
mainstream Euro-Canadian society in the Yukon. As a result, they often ap-
proach and interpret their interactions with government ofWcials and
other agents of the state quite differently than do those government ofWcials
28 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country

themselves. We cannot hope to understand Aboriginal-state relations in

the Kluane region without taking into account Kluane people’s own
approach to and interpretations of their interactions with the various
agents and processes of the state.
Second, as I discussed in the introduction, the standard narrative of
colonial domination also fails to take into account the complex nature of
the modern nation-state itself. The state is a complex yet loosely interre-
lated set of institutions and processes with many different – and often con-
tradictory – interests and agendas (as, indeed, is the Kluane First Nation,
though on a somewhat smaller scale). This affects how Kluane people ex-
perience state power: as the sum of many everyday interactions with differ-
ent state ofWcials and institutions rather than as a coherent set of policies
and actions administered by some monolithic entity known as the state.
It is beyond the scope of this book to examine every aspect of the com-
plex relationship between Kluane people and all the various ofWcials, insti-
tutions, and policies that together comprise “the state” in the Yukon. For
this reason, I have chosen to limit myself to an analysis to two aspects of
Aboriginal-state relations that have been particularly important in the
Kluane region: wildlife management and the land claims process. Inextri-
cably bound up with one another, these two processes have had a pro-
found effect on the region and continue to be among the most signiWcant
arenas of interaction between Kluane people and agents of the state.
Before delving into an analysis of these processes, however, it will Wrst
be necessary to lay the contextual groundwork with a brief historical
overview of the Kluane region’s integration into the wider political and
economic systems of modern Canada.

Precontact Kluane Society

It is difWcult to make many Wrm statements about how Kluane people
lived prior to their contact with Europeans. There is no doubt, however,
that, until well into the twentieth century, they were nomadic. They
depended almost exclusively on Wsh and animals for their subsistence;
long- and short-term Xuctuations, along with seasonal migrations of
wildlife populations, prevented Kluane people from settling in any one
place. Instead, they followed a yearly round based on the seasonal avail-
ability of Wsh and animals. In the course of their annual movements, they
covered an immense territory. Frederick Johnson and Hugh Raup (1964:
195-96), an archaeologist and a geologist working in the Kluane area
between 1944 and 1948, noted: “Our Indian friends at Burwash Landing
had been extensive travelers and they knew intimately the country
between the upper reaches of the White River and Carmacks, a distance of
about one hundred and Wfty miles east and west. They had roamed and
hunted with their families at different times over the country from the
 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country 29

White River south for some sixty or eighty miles, or all told an area of
some ten to twelve thousand square miles.”
Kluane people’s movements were neither static nor random; rather,
“each family might follow a yearly round slightly different from that of all
other families, and its exact movements would also be different from year
to year,” depending on the characteristics of the country, the weather, the
type of animals sought and their abundance, and so on (McClellan 1975:
97-98). The size of the groups in which Kluane people lived and hunted
varied considerably over the course of the year, depending on the avail-
ability of animals. For much of the year, the land simply could not support
large concentrations of people, so they spread out across the country in
small groups. It is clear, however, that Kluane people made intensive, if
seasonal, use of certain especially rich areas and extensive use of the land
in general:

The ruins of temporary camps are everywhere. There are localities which
have been used as camp sites for an untold number of years. Brush camps,
or “open top camps” can be found literally by the hundreds in favorable
areas such as along Talbot Creek. The right bank from about a mile from
the mouth has been such a camping area and ruins of all ages are found
on the valley Xoor and on the bordering hillside. Another such area, with
a similar concentration of brush camp ruins was located in the Ptarmigan
Heart Valley. While such concentrations have developed in favorite local-
ities isolated camps are widely distributed. Most frequently these are built
wherever a hunter happens to be when it comes time to camp ... Water is
always near at hand in summer and available as snow in winter, and since
hunters usually have some food with them, the principal requirement for
a site for a brush camp is merely a supply of small trees and some wood to
build a Wre. (Johnson and Raup 1964: 184)

At times, however, people did come together to trade, hold potlatches,

and carry out collective hunts (such as when they drove caribou into
surrounds or fences)1. Duke Meadow, about Wve miles (eight kilometres)
north of Burwash Landing, was clearly one place where people gathered.
Kluane people themselves maintain that it has long been an important
gathering place for them, and Johnson and Raup discovered the remains
of numerous (at least ten) houses there that they estimated were built no
later than 1850 and possibly much earlier (169-78).
Although precontact Kluane people subsisted almost exclusively on
hunting and Wshing, they were also active participants in networks of
trade that stretched over much of the Northwest Coast and Subarctic Inte-
rior. Aboriginal trade goods included, from the interior, copper, obsidian,
moose and caribou hides, fur, yellow lichen for dye, goat hair and skins,
30 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country

and sinew; and from the coast, dried seaweed, eulachon oil, dentalium
shells, a mixture of crushed clam shells and “tobacco” (probably not real
tobacco), and Chilkat blankets (see de Laguna 1972; McClellan 1950,
1964; Workman 1978).2 In addition to this material exchange, Aboriginal
trade exposed Kluane people to different traditions and new ideas, which
they often integrated into their own way of life after changing them to
suit local beliefs and practices. An example of this is the potlatch, which
originated on the coast before being modiWed and adopted by First
Nations peoples in the Subarctic interior.

The Fur Trade

Well before actual contact with Europeans, First Nations peoples in the
southwest Yukon were drawn into the European fur trade through Tlingit
intermediaries on the coast. European trade goods reached the southern
Yukon via the coast early in the nineteenth century, and gradually fur
and European trade goods began to dominate trade in the area. By the
1880s the number of pelts being taken out of the southwest Yukon was
considerable.3 In return, Kluane people and other First Nations peoples
of the interior received guns, powder and shot, steel traps, axes, knives,
cloth, needles, Wles, pots and kettles, tobacco leaf, tea, sugar, Xour, and
other goods. Initially, the trade in furs seems to have more or less followed
already established patterns of trade between the coast and the interior,
though these were modiWed somewhat as the fur trade grew in volume
and importance.4 This trade gradually began to have signiWcant impacts

Burwash Landing 1922.

 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country 31

on the lives of First Nations peoples in the southwest Yukon. The in-
creasing availability of European trade goods led First Nations peoples to
change their hunting techniques and provided them with new oppor-
tunities for transportation, shelter, clothing, cooking, food storage, and so
on. In addition, it is likely that epidemics accompanied these trade goods
inland from the coast, and these likely had signiWcant demographic
impact on interior populations (Cruikshank 1974: chap. 5, 2; McClellan
1964: 7). But, because trapping for furs was compatible with their hunting
lifestyles, First Nations peoples’ participation in the trade itself seems
not to have disrupted their lives too seriously. Indeed, they had always
killed fur-bearers for clothing and, as we have already seen, Aboriginal trade
in fur predated the European trade. As a result, though the European fur
trade quickly became an important element in the lives of First Nations
peoples in the area, it never took the place of subsistence hunting: “it is
known that well into the nineteenth century seasonal movements appear
to have been dictated more by the availability of food and traditional
social interests of the Indians than by the goal of trapping furs” (McClellan
and Denniston 1981: 375). The annual subsistence round persisted with
only relatively minor modiWcations until well into the twentieth century.
Throughout much of the early fur trade period, Kluane country (and
the southwest Yukon in general) was relatively inaccessible to outsiders.
The trade routes to the interior were jealously guarded by Tlingit middle-
men throughout most of the nineteenth century.5 By the turn of the cen-
tury, however, the situation had changed dramatically. Sometime around
1894, Jack Dalton built the Wrst trading post in the southwest Yukon near
the old trading village of Neskatahin in Southern Tutchone country but
well south of the Kluane area. The trade at Dalton Post seriously weakened
the Tlingit monopoly on trade in the region, and the Klondike gold rush
of 1898, which saw thousands of miners enter the territory via the old
trade routes, ended it once and for all. Although huge numbers of Euro-
North Americans arrived in the Yukon at that time,6 relatively few made
their way into the Kluane region. A few small and short-lived gold and
silver rushes (notably, the Chisana stampede in Alaska and smaller rushes
to Silver City and Burwash Creek) brought a few miners into the area for
short periods during the Wrst two decades of the century, but the lack of
roads in the area and its distance from the Yukon River, the territory’s
main transportation corridor, kept Kluane country off the beaten path.
Nevertheless, it was during that time that Burwash Landing was founded.
In 1904 Eugene and Louis Jacquot, brothers from the Alsace-Lorraine
region of France, established a trading post at the site of present-day Bur-
wash Landing. The First Nations people who traded at the new post
remained essentially nomadic, but they began to visit the post for provi-
sions two or three times a year. They came in the autumn before heading
32 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country

their separate ways to hunt and trap for the winter. They often returned
around Christmas time (and sometimes around Easter as well) to celebrate
and socialize. In the spring or early summer they again returned to the
post to sell their fur. This was also the season for holding potlatches
and other social events (Cruikshank 1974: appendix 1-2; McClellan 1975:
95-98). Apparently, the Jacquot brothers built cabins near the post for the
families who came most often, and gradually others built their own dwell-
ings nearby (Johnson and Raup 1964: 164). As a result, Burwash Landing is
one of the oldest currently occupied villages in the Yukon. In addition to
the usual trade activities, Burwash Landing rapidly became the centre for
big game outWtting and mineral prospecting in the area (McClellan 1975:
30-31).7 This provided many local First Nations people with seasonal
employment opportunities as hunting guides, horse wranglers, and cooks
during the late summer and autumn. Throughout the Wrst four decades of
the twentieth century, Kluane people were able to take advantage of the
fur trade and these seasonal opportunities for wage labour without alter-
ing their way of life too dramatically.

The Alaska Highway

This all changed with the building of the Alaska Highway in 1942. The
construction of the highway was perhaps the single most signiWcant event
to occur in the Kluane region in the twentieth century. It had a whole host
of both short- and long-term consequences, some of which Kluane people
saw as positive and some of which they regarded as negative. Overall,
however, the construction of the highway had the effect of binding the
region and its people much more closely into the wider political and
economic systems of mainstream Euro-North American society.
The Alaska Highway was built by the US military during World War II,
ostensibly to help defend Alaska and the PaciWc Northwest from Japanese
aggression.8 Almost overnight, there was a huge – though temporary –
inXux of US military and civilian personnel into this once-remote region.
These newcomers brought with them a whole series of diseases for which
the First Nations peoples of the Kluane region were ill-prepared (though,
as we have already seen, it is likely that European diseases had been sweep-
ing through interior populations at least since the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury). A round of epidemics moved through the communities of the
southern Yukon between 1942 and 1948. These included: measles, dysen-
tery, jaundice, whooping cough, mumps, meningitis, tuberculosis, and in-
Xuenza. Although the Aboriginal death rate in the territory more than
doubled from 1941 to 1942, the brunt of these epidemics was borne by the
elderly and the very young. In 1942 the mortality rate among Yukon First
Nations infants less than a year old was 47 percent (Cruikshank 1985: 182-
83, Coates 1985b: 157-61).
 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country 33

Tuberculosis had an especially strong impact on the community during

this period. A government survey in 1949 indicated that nearly 25 percent
of all Yukon Aboriginal peoples were suffering from advanced tubercu-
losis (see Coates 1991: 105). The disease severely limited people’s ability,
over the long term, to engage in the strenuous physical activity that was
so important to the Aboriginal way of life. In the 1950s the Canadian
government began a strenuous effort to deal with the problem. Many of
those who contracted the disease were Xown out of the Yukon (usually to
Charles Camsell Hospital in Edmonton) for treatment that sometimes
lasted for years. This meant that children spent some of their most forma-
tive years completely cut off from any contact with parents, elders, the
land, and animals. Similarly, when parents contracted the disease they
were separated from their children and so were unable to teach them
anything. While their parents were gone, children often left the village to
stay with relatives or attend boarding schools. In either case, the disease
wreaked havoc on relations between children and parents/elders, severely
disrupting the transmission of cultural knowledge and practices. Some-
times these effects were compounded when Wrst the children fell ill and
then, after their return, the parents contracted the disease (or vice versa),
as happened in a number of cases in the Kluane area.
The temporary population increase associated with highway construc-
tion also led to a scarcity of wildlife in the region. US military and civilian
highway personnel were granted resident hunting licences (for one dollar

The coming of the Alaska Highway. Burwash Landing, 1942.

34 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country

apiece), and they exacted a heavy toll on local wildlife populations. There
are numerous reports that, in addition to legitimate hunting, some of
these men engaged in the wanton slaughter of a great many large animals
(Coates 1985b: 156; Cruikshank 1985: 177; McCandless 1986: 80-86).
Though McCandless argues that accounts of waste by highway personnel
were probably exaggerated (86), there is little doubt that increased hunt-
ing pressure led to a short-term depletion of wildlife in areas along the
highway (85).9 This, in turn, led to a shortage of meat, upon which Kluane
people depended.
The shortage of meat caused by highway construction was partially off-
set by the increased availability of food and other goods from outside the
region. Although Kluane people had had access to outside goods since
the fur trade (and, indeed, before that), the highway made it much easier
to obtain them. As we have already seen, a wide array of European goods
have been available in the Kluane area since the early days of the fur
trade. These items were adopted quickly and willingly, altering in impor-
tant ways how people hunted, trapped, made shelters, collected Wrewood,
and so forth. As noted above, however, although these were signiWcant
changes, they seem not to have had too disruptive an effect on the overall
way of life in the region; rather, Kluane people tended to trade only for
those items that could be easily and effectively incorporated into the
annual subsistence round (with the minor modiWcations brought about by
the fur trade). This pattern began to change once the highway was built.
The highway gave Kluane people more regular access to a wider range of
goods and technologies than they had ever had before. The consequences
of this inXux of new goods and technologies, however, were extremely
complex and ambivalent. While some new goods were clearly disruptive
to Kluane society, others were used to help Kluane people maintain certain
aspects of their way of life in the midst of rapid change.
Perhaps the most disruptive of the new goods to enter the region was
alcohol. Although alcohol had been available in the area before 1942, the
quantity and nature of its use changed radically during the decade follow-
ing the construction of the highway. Until that time, Kluane people had
drunk only occasionally – usually to celebrate special occasions. After the
highway came through, alcohol was much easier to obtain, and drink-
ing became more regular and widespread (Cruikshank 1985: 183). The in-
creased availability of alcohol combined with the hardship and trauma
caused by the creation of the Kluane Game Sanctuary, the mission school
experience, and other government policies (see below) led many First Nations
people to engage in new, more self-destructive, drinking patterns.10
The introduction of the snowmobile had far more subtle and complex
consequences than did the introduction of alcohol. Although snowmo-
biles had not yet been invented in 1942, the existence of the highway
 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country 35

ensured their quick spread throughout the region when they were in-
vented slightly over two decades later. The Wrst skidoos11 began to appear
in the Kluane region in the mid- to late 1960s, and by the 1970s they had
almost completely replaced dog sleds as the primary means of winter
transportation in the bush.12 The consequences of this were far reach-
ing and complex. For one thing, skidoos had the effect of decreasing the
amount of time that people had to spend out on the land. With dog
teams, Kluane people had to spend a signiWcant amount of time out hunt-
ing for dog food (or, more likely, Wshing since one of the major sources of
dog food was the whiteWsh that ran in certain creeks and on the far side of
Kluane Lake during the late summer and fall). Skidoos eliminated the need
for this activity, thus contributing to Kluane people’s increasing sedenta-
rization (see below).
At the same time, however, snowmobiles made it possible for Kluane
people to maintain their annual subsistence round, albeit in modiWed
form. As they gave up their nomadic way of life and began to settle more
permanently in Burwash Landing, they needed to go further and further
from the village to hunt. The speed of the snowmobile allowed them to
continue to make use of widely scattered Wsh and animal populations as
they become available over the course of the year. Instead of following the
seasonal patterns of animals and camping where they could best take
advantage of these opportunities, thanks to the skidoo Kluane people were
now able to travel to distant hunting and Wshing areas for short one- or

Douglas Dickson hunting by

skidoo on Arch Creek, March
1997.
36 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country

two-day hunting trips. This would have been impossible on snowshoe or

even with dogs.
Kluane people did not immediately become dependent on every new
good introduced into the region, but they did, over time, become increas-
ingly dependent on outside goods and technologies (for reasons that will
be discussed below). The nature and consequences of this dependence, how-
ever, varied over time and with the type of good. For instance, although
Kluane people adopted skidoos eagerly, at Wrst their dependence on
them was not particularly disruptive. This is because when skidoos were
Wrst introduced to the region, the price of furs was quite high, and people
could easily afford them. At one point early on, a skidoo could be pur-
chased for less than a trapper earned by selling a single lynx pelt. All
this changed, however, when the bottom fell out of the fur market. Previ-
ously, trappers had been able to weather periods of low fur prices at least
partially because dog teams, which they supported completely off the
land, required little or no money to maintain. Use of skidoos, however,
increased people’s dependence on money. When fur prices dropped, gaso-
line and spare parts became prohibitively expensive. The result was that
people were driven off the land. In most cases it was not even possible to
switch back to dogs because people had gotten rid of their teams, and it
takes signiWcant time and money to build a team from scratch.
Whether we are talking about alcohol, snowmobiles, or imported food,
Kluane people’s dependence on outside goods and technologies had the
effect of drawing them more fully into the market economy. As a result,
they became increasingly dependent on wage labour and other sources
of cash. In 1942 there were very few opportunities for Kluane people to
earn money. As noted above, they had long engaged in a activities such as
trapping and big game outWtting/guiding to earn the cash they needed.
During highway construction itself, and for much of the immediate post-
highway period, woodcutting and craft production13 were also important
sources of income. Kluane people often favoured such work because it
enabled them not only to remain in the region but also out in the bush.
All of these activities, however, were adversely affected (at least temporar-
ily) by wildlife shortages and other developments associated with the
highway, such as the creation of the Kluane Game Sanctuary (see below).
As a result, many people had to turn to seasonal or wage labour that
removed them from the land and, in many cases, from the region entirely
– sometimes for extended periods of time. The highway facilitated this.
Suddenly, the trip to Whitehorse could be measured in hours rather
than days, and from Whitehorse it was possible to go even farther aWeld.
Still, because they lacked automobiles, it was some time before Kluane
people themselves made much use of the highway. For a time, the only car
in the community was owned by Father Morisset, the Roman Catholic
 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country 37

missionary (whose arrival also coincided with the building of the highway
– see below). Kluane people who are old enough to remember still talk
about how he used to give people rides in his car, not so much back and
forth to Whitehorse as up to different hunting and Wshing sites along the
highway (e.g., to Andrew Atlin Lake, about eighty kilometres northwest of
Burwash). He used to drop them off and then pick them up again on an
agreed-upon day perhaps a week or two later. There was occasional bus ser-
vice along the highway, and people could hitch rides; but, until relatively
recently, trips even as far as Whitehorse were not taken lightly or often.
The lives of Kluane people were still focused on the land, much of it far
from immediate access to the highway (e.g., on the far side of Kluane
Lake). Although they made use of the highway to get around the area
when it was convenient, they did not at Wrst dramatically alter their own
activity to conform to it.
Gradually, however, more and more Kluane people acquired cars. This
made it easier for them to seek work in Whitehorse, northern British
Columbia, and even farther aWeld. Today, most people in the village have
a car (or truck). Local use of the highway has increased to the point where
one person could joke to me that people these days think nothing of mak-
ing the trip all the way into Whitehorse and back “just to play bingo.” In-
creasingly, people have been structuring their lives and activity around the
highway. Grace Chambers, a Kluane elder who remembers life before the
highway, lamented to me that these days most people “can’t go nowhere
without a car.” This has clearly had an enormous impact on how people
use, and what they know about, the land. In the course of conducting
some semi-formal interviews in the community, I asked people to identify
on a map the parts of the country they feel they “know well.” A number
of young people just laughed and pointed to the highway. A few confessed
that they have never really been very far off the highway, that all the hunt-
ing and Wshing they have done has been in areas close to the highway.
At the same time that increased use of the highway has restricted some
young people’s experiences to areas along its corridor, increased mobility
has allowed Kluane people to spend much more time outside the region.
Today many of them spend a signiWcant amount of time in Whitehorse
or even further away: working, going to meetings, shopping, attending
high school and/or university, and socializing. Many of these activities, in
which they can engage regularly only because of the highway, enmesh
Kluane people in social relations and ways of thinking that are far re-
moved from those associated with life in the bush. Their exposure to new
ideas, along with their increased dependence on money and their immer-
sion in the wage economy, has also led to the growth of a new set of val-
ues and ways of thinking that often conXict with long-standing beliefs
and values (see especially Chapter 6).
38 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country

Perhaps even more signiWcant to Kluane people than their own use of
the Alaska Highway, and at least as important as the introduction of new
goods and technologies, was the fact that it suddenly made the area acces-
sible to a whole range of powerful outside people and institutions. Many
of these new arrivals to the Kluane region had among their explicit goals
the transformation of First Nations society and the integration of the
region into wider political and economic systems. Agents of the govern-
ment and the church were unquestionably among those whose presence
had the most signiWcant impact on Kluane people and their way of life.

Making Subjects: Church and State in the Kluane Region

Neither church nor state can be viewed as a single monolithic institution.
As we shall see, both the federal and territorial governments established
their presence in the region. Not only did these different levels of gov-
ernment often have distinct interests and agendas, but each was (and is)
also composed of various departments, agencies, and individuals who
themselves frequently had differing interests and agendas. Similarly, the
Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches vied with one another for access
to Aboriginal populations and government funding. This heterogeneity
affected how Yukon First Nations peoples experienced the inXux of pow-
erful outsiders. As we shall also see, however, these various religious and
administrative entities at times cooperated with one another in systematic
efforts to alter First Nations peoples’ way of life – including, most notably,
through the establishment of mission schools.

Kluane Game Sanctuary and the Enforcement of Game Laws

Environmental historians and anthropologists alike have noted that the
development of the institutions and practices of state wildlife manage-
ment at the beginning of the twentieth century was inextricably bound up
with the expansion of state power. In many parts of the world (especially
those inhabited by hunting peoples), it was the imposition of state wildlife
management and conservation programs that Wrst brought not only land
and wildlife under the effective control of central governments but also
Aboriginal peoples (e.g., Feit 1998; Hays 1959; McCandless 1985; Marks
1984; Sandlos 2001). Wildlife management, they have argued, is “very
much a social activity serving needs and interests of speciWc groups, and
not simply those of wildlife or of society in general” (Feit 1998: 133). In
the Canadian North, “[wildlife] conservation ... was intimately associated
with the civilizing ideology of the late colonial period in Canada,” and
attempts to preserve wild game animals there in the early to middle parts
of the twentieth century “represented an extension of intellectual and
political sovereignty over the North” (Sandlos 2001: 6).
 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country 39

This was certainly the case in the Yukon. Law enforcement ofWcers were
among the Wrst government ofWcials to establish a permanent presence in
the Kluane region following the construction of the Alaska Highway. Tech-
nically, Indian people had been subject to territorial game laws since 1920
(until that time they had been exempt from them),14 but it had been difW-
cult if not impossible for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) to
enforce these laws in the Kluane area prior to the construction of the
Alaska Highway.15 By giving the RCMP easy access to the region, the high-
way greatly facilitated such enforcement. The highway did much more
than simply allow for greater enforcement of existing game laws, however;
it also led directly to the imposition of severe new restrictions on hunting
and trapping in the region. In the spring of 1943, in response to over-
hunting by military personnel during the period of highway construction,
the Yukon government designated much of the land between the Alaska
Highway and the Alaska border as a game sanctuary, off limits to all hunt-
ing and trapping (see McCandless 1985: chap. 4). These restrictions ap-
plied to Aboriginal as well as non-Aboriginal hunters. Although RCMP
ofWcers initially lacked the resources to effectively enforce the prohibition
on hunting in the sanctuary and other game laws in the region (McCand-
less 1985: 82-83), it became easier for them to do so once most of the mil-
itary personnel had left the region.
The creation of the Kluane Game Sanctuary (much of which was later to
become Kluane National Park) meant that Kluane people were suddenly
prohibited from hunting and trapping in a large part of their traditional
territory. Not surprisingly, Kluane people objected strenuously to this turn
of events. In a 1946 letter addressed to Yukon Commissioner J.E. Gibben,
they complained about the adverse effects that the sanctuary was having
on their way of life and requested the restoration of their hunting rights:

We most Wrmly object against these conditions forced upon us. For we are
thus deprived of our means of subsistence and development; we, the
natives of this country, are being driven away like a pack of dogs ... We
beseech you therefore to help us, to protect us in these new conditions in
which we have been placed by the development of the country and the
new invasion of the whites ... We are not asking a favor, but the right to
live and develop. The whites are always favored to our detriment. We are
simply forgotten and set aside ... After all we are human beings like they
and in this country we have a right prior to theirs.16

The ban on hunting in the Kluane Game Sanctuary – combined with the
short-term effects of over-hunting associated with highway construction –
did indeed create real hardship for Kluane people, seriously diminishing
40 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country

their ability to make a living from the land. As Father E. Morisset, the
newly arrived Roman Catholic missionary in Burwash, noted in a subse-
quent letter to the Indian Affairs Branch in Ottawa:

I wish to call your attention to the severe and undue hardship caused to
the Indians of this village by the recent inclusion of their traditional hunt-
ing and trapping ground in the forbidden area of the Kluane Game Sanc-
tuary, and which covers some ten thousand square miles. As a result of the
Regulations forced on them, the Indians had very little meat last winter.
(Mr. Meek [the Indian Agent] sent out some three hundred pound of beef
from Whitehorse). They do not have any more hides from which to make
moccasins and bead work which is the main source of income to widows
supporting families, also many self-supporting women. All that is left is
occasional woodcutting work even to the women. That they do on a
diet of rice, lard and Xour since canned food is too expensive and staple
groceries very high in price. Also they are not sure to get even woodcut-
ting work in the future. At present they have no work as trapping muskrat
and beaver on their grounds is not allowed. On what are these Indians
expected to live on [sic]?17

Eventually, Kluane people were given the right to conduct a limited and
“supervised” hunt for muskrats and moose in part of the sanctuary (Coates
1991: 67; Cruikshank 1985: 178), but this in no way made up for what
they had lost, and, for the next several decades, they continued to see the
Park/Sanctuary as responsible for many of their difWculties.
The establishment of the Kluane Game Sanctuary not only caused a
shortage of food in the region but it also had profound effects on Kluane
people’s hunting patterns and seasonal movements. Although members of
the Kluane First Nation have since regained the right to hunt in the park
and sanctuary, some Kluane elders are still hesitant to enter these areas,
recalling with fear the years during which it was a crime for them even to
set foot in the sanctuary (although it was not technically a crime for Klu-
ane people to enter the sanctuary, enforcement ofWcers generally assumed
that if they were there at all, they must be hunting). By prohibiting Kluane
people from entering a huge part of their country, the creation of the sanc-
tuary caused them to lose a great deal of knowledge about the land. Even
though it is now legal again for them to hunt in Kluane Park and Sanctu-
ary, few Kluane people alive today possess much detailed experiential
knowledge of this vast area (see Chapter 2 for a discussion of the impor-
tance of experiential knowledge).18
It was not only the RCMP and other law enforcement agents whose
presence in the Kluane region increased after 1942. The Roman Catholic
Church, too, took advantage of the new highway to move into the area.
 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country 41

With funding from the federal government, church ofWcials set about
attempting to transform Kluane people’s way of life – and one of the princi-
pal means of doing this was through the establishment of Euro-Canadian-
style education.

The Church and the Mission School Experience

Much like scholars studying the imposition of wildlife management and
conservation practices in the Third and Fourth Worlds, those studying the
spread of formal Euro-American-style education have linked it to the colo-
nialist project (Carnoy 1974). Numerous scholars have analyzed the assim-
ilationist program underlying the creation of Indian residential schools
in the United States and Canada, arguing that the proliferation of these
schools was tied to the imperatives of an expanding capitalist economy
(Altbach and Kelly 1984; Hoxie 1984; LittleWeld 1993). Motivated by
recent revelations of abuse throughout Canada, other scholars (e.g., Mil-
loy 1999) have sought to document systematic abuse in the residential
school system. Residential schools in the Yukon Wt neatly into both of
these moulds. They were aggressively assimilationist, and it has now
become clear that the Aboriginal children who attended them were sub-
jected to systematic physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.

Joe Bruneau and Bob Johnson on a trip up the Donjek River into Kluane Park,
February 1997. Kluane people today frequently make trips into the Kluane Park
and Sanctuary to reacquaint themselves with the land, often looking for old trails
and camps about which they have heard stories.
42 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country

Without denying that this abuse took place, some scholars have rightly
sought to complicate our understanding of residential schools by pointing
out the struggles and ambiguities surrounding them. Historian Ken Coates
(1991: chaps. 7, 10), for instance, shows that, although residential schools
in the Yukon were run by churches with funding provided by the federal
government, they were hardly the well-planned colonialist conspiracy
that some today claim them to have been. Rather, mission schools in the
territory were the product of a complex series of struggles among various
churches (Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Baptist), the Department of
Indian Affairs (which was initially quite reluctant to get involved in Abo-
riginal education in the territory), and First Nations peoples themselves.
Each of these groups had different ideas about the nature and goals of
Aboriginal education, and they struggled with one another for funding
and control over the education process. Taking an ethnohistorical ap-
proach, other scholars (Graham 1997; Lomawaima 1985; Trennert 1988)
have shown that it is difWcult to generalize about the residential school
experience; each school was different, and students often had quite varied
and ambiguous feelings about their experiences there. Some scholars
(Lomawaima 1994; Miller 1996) have made a point of distinguishing
between policy makers’ explicit goal of assimilation and the realities of the
residential school experience. They have revealed the (unintended) role
residential schools played in the rise of Aboriginal political resistance.
Rather than furthering the colonialist project of assimilation, as their
founders hoped they would, these schools often ironically ended up fos-
tering the growth of organized political resistance to assimilation and cap-
italist exploitation. As oppressive as they were, mission schools in the
Yukon shared some of the same ambiguities described by scholars else-
where on the continent.
Because of its isolation, there was neither a school nor much missionary
activity in the Kluane region before the construction of the Alaska High-
way. In 1944 the Oblate Fathers established a Roman Catholic church in
Burwash Landing. At the time, First Nations people were not permitted to
attend the territorial school in Destruction Bay.19 So, shortly after his
arrival, Oblate priest Father Morisset set up a day school in the church
were he taught local First Nations children when they were present in
the village. In 1944 he requested school supplies and funding from the
Department of Indian Affairs, but the department was at that time reluc-
tant to provide funds for Aboriginal education, preferring instead to allow
First Nations peoples in the territory to maintain their subsistence way of
life – and so eliminate the need to provide them with welfare and other
forms of social assistance. By this time, however, the struggle between the
Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches for domination in the Yukon was
in full swing. As Coates points out, much of this struggle took place in the
 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country 43

Weld of education and manifested itself as a struggle for students and

federal subsidies (Coates 1991: 130-34, 157). The Roman Catholic Church
strenuously objected to the enrolment of Roman Catholic children in the
Anglican mission school at Carcross (156-57). In 1949 the Department of
Indian Affairs, caught in the middle of the conXict between denomina-
tions, reluctantly agreed to the construction of a Roman Catholic mission
school at Lower Post, on the Alaska Highway just across the border in
British Columbia.
Although school attendance had been compulsory since 1920, in prac-
tice few Yukon Aboriginal children had attended school before 1940. After
the Second World War, however, the federal government began to enforce
attendance. When the school at Lower Post opened in 1951, attendance
by Kluane children was mandatory20 and was enforced by the RCMP, who
– because of the Alaska Highway – now had easy access to the region.
Indeed, the mission school experience and the highway are intimately
associated in the minds of many Kluane people. One of the most powerful
and often-described images of the trauma caused by mission school was
the arrival of the school bus in autumn, with children crying and clinging
to their parents, pleading to be allowed to stay (see also Coates 1991: 203).
The Roman Catholic Church seems to have had some initial success in
the Kluane area; according to an educational survey, there were twenty-
two declared Roman Catholics in Burwash Landing by 1950 (Coates 1991:
133). But it met with little long-lasting success in its attempts to convert

Our Lady of the Rosary Mission, Burwash Landing, established 1944.

44 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country

Kluane people. Kluane people do generally speak well of their early expe-
riences with the Church in Burwash – especially of Father Morisset, who,
as we have seen, drove them to distant hunting areas, established a day
school, and helped them in their struggle against the imposition of the
Kluane Game Sanctuary. Today, however, although a sizable minority of
Kluane people claim to be Christian and regularly gather together for
bible readings, the majority of the population expresses outright hostility
towards the Roman Catholic Church, and few if any attend semi-regular
Roman Catholic services in the village (except on Christmas Eve). At the
root of these negative feelings are their experiences with the mission
school in Lower Post.
No one has yet conducted detailed ethnographic or ethnohistorical
research on the Roman Catholic mission school at Lower Post. In 1962-63,
however, anthropologist Richard King conducted a year of participant
observation in the Anglican mission school at Carcross, Yukon Territory.
The resulting ethnography (King 1967) is a scathing indictment of the
education and cultural politics at the school. Although they did not attend
the school in Carcross, Kluane people who attended school in Lower Post
are – without exception – adamant about the negative impact it had on
their lives. As children, they were forcibly removed from their families
(starting at age Wve) and made to spend the majority of each year of their
childhoods at the mission school. As a result, they spent very little time
out on the land learning from their parents and other elders; instead, they
were exposed to a southern Canadian curriculum that had very little to
do with them and in no way prepared them for their future lives back in
Burwash. Indeed, rather than preparing them for life back in Burwash, the
mission school actively suppressed all First Nations cultural practices. Any
expression by the children of their culture, including speaking their lan-
guage, was seen as evidence of “savagery” and dealt with harshly. People
described to me how they were constantly reminded that they were
savages and made to understand, in no uncertain terms, that they were
vastly inferior to White people. This aggressively assimilationist program
was accompanied by all manner of physical, emotional, and (sometimes)
sexual abuse.21
Even now, decades after having left mission school, many Kluane peo-
ple still cannot speak of the experience without anger. Many attribute
their problems with alcohol to their experiences in mission school, and
nearly everyone with whom I spoke told me of one or more people whom
they knew at school whose lives were ruined or who actually died (either
by their own hand or from alcohol) primarily because they were unable to
cope psychologically with their experiences at the school. Another effect
of the mission school experience is what one person described to me as
“mission school syndrome.”22 At mission school, he said, children were
 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country 45

expected to do what they were told and only what they were told. Any
expression of independent thought or initiative was punished severely
(see also King 1967: 75-79). He explicitly contrasted this to the initiative
and innovation that characterizes – and is absolutely necessary for – life
in the bush. As a result of their conditioning at mission school, he said,
many First Nations people today are unsuited to a life on the land – or,
indeed, for anything but unskilled labour. They are Wne in situations in
which there is someone there to tell them what to do, but if they have to
take the initiative themselves, they are lost. Although he said that people
can learn (and gradually are learning) to overcome this conditioning, it
has prevented many of them from spending as much time in the bush as
they otherwise might have spent. This has necessarily also prevented them
from effectively teaching their children about life on the land.
Another of the most obvious casualties of the mission school experience
was language. Although many of those who attended mission school are
able to understand Southern Tutchone, the majority of them are either
unwilling or unable to speak it. Several mission school alumni attributed
this directly to their experiences at mission school, where they and others
had regularly been beaten or had had their mouths “cleaned” with soap
or Lysol simply for uttering a word in Southern Tutchone (or any Aborigi-
nal language). The result is that, even today, despite their own conscious
understandings about what happened to them, they feel ashamed to speak
the language and have difWculty even forming words. When an elder
speaks to them in Southern Tutchone, they respond in English. Some of
the younger people in the mission school generation lost the language
almost entirely – to the point where they cannot even understand it. The
result is that none of the children of the mission school generation can
speak Southern Tutchone Xuently (and most cannot speak it at all). This
severely limits the ability of younger community members to communi-
cate with elders – even sometimes with their own parents (some of whom
speak only very limited English).
Loss of language was not the only gap created between students and
parents/elders by the mission school experience. Some who attended mis-
sion school either never returned to their communities or did so only after
an extended absence. Those who did return often found that they were ill-
prepared for life in the village. Several mission school alumni told me that,
upon their return, their elders could not understand how they could have
been away at school for so many years and yet have “learned nothing.”
Similarly, people told me that they never discussed their experiences at
mission school with their parents because “they wouldn’t have under-
stood” what they were talking about. Such statements illustrate the mag-
nitude of the rift that had been created between those who had gone off
to mission school and the parents and elders who had remained behind.
46 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country

As far as the elders were concerned, students had learned nothing in all
the years they had been away (about animals, hunting, respect, language,
or any of the other things that were important to a life on the land). Of
course, children had been exposed to these things when they were very
young as well as during summer breaks when they were at home, but in
the eyes of the elders, they knew very little.
Many former mission school students who did return tried to make
up for lost time by spending time out on the land with their elders; but
several of these – who are now becoming elders themselves and are recog-
nized as being among the most knowledgeable people in the village – con-
fessed to me that there are some skills and understandings that they never
acquired; namely, those that derive from a lifetime spent out on the land.
There is a certain intimacy with the land and animals, they say, that they
never managed to acquire from their parents and the other “old timers”
who taught them.
In reality, of course, children did learn a great deal during their years
at mission school. Although little of what they learned there was of
much use to them in the bush, neither was it limited to what their Euro-
American teachers intended them to learn. In addition to what they
learned in the classroom (academic instruction in Yukon residential
schools was substandard, but students at least learned to read and write
and gained a basic knowledge of the Canadian political system), Kluane
children attending mission school learned a great deal about Euro-North
American ways of viewing the world, about prejudice, and about the hard
realities of life in a White-dominated society.
Several scholars studying residential schools in the United States and
Canada have argued that these schools had a number of effects that Euro-
North American educators had not intended and that were even contrary
to the explicit objectives of the founders of the residential school sys-
tem. In her ethnohistorical analysis of life at Chilocco Indian School in
Oklahoma, for example, Tsianina Lomawaima (1994) shows that students
resisted adult authority in a variety of different ways, engaging in every-
thing from passive and covert resistance to acts of open rebellion. Thus,
the school served as a training ground for organized political resistance to
Euro-American domination. Because the students recognized their com-
mon oppression and acted upon their common interests, Lomawaima
argues that, rather than leading to the assimilation and detribalization for
which educators and government ofWcials had hoped, the school actually
strengthened tribal and pan-Indian identities among the students. J.R.
Miller (1996, 2000) makes a similar argument, pointing out that many of
the leaders of twentieth-century First Nations political movements were
alumni of residential schools. The schools not only provided future First
Nations leaders with the basic education they needed to organize politically
 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country 47

(reading, writing, knowledge of the American and Canadian political sys-

tems, and so on) but it also enabled them to meet and forge networks with
other school-educated First Nations peoples from around the country –
networks that later became the bases for pan-Indian political movements
across the continent.
This dynamic was clearly at work in the Yukon as well. As mission
school students came face to face with the assimilationist policies and
institutionalized racism of the mission schools, they necessarily recog-
nized and acted upon common interests. In his ethnography of the Angli-
can school in Carcross, Richard King (1967: 71-83) identiWes some of the
same forms of student resistance described by Lomawaima at Chilocco.
Similarly, mission school alumni in Burwash told me stories about their
resistance to authority at Lower Post and Whitehorse. One alumnus of
Lower Post told me that it had been a matter of survival, which she said,
necessitated breaking various school rules and risking punishment. Pri-
mary among these survival skills was the stealing of food – from the school
kitchen and elsewhere. Students worked together to gather enough food
because the school did not provide them with enough to eat: “We were
always hungry,” she recalled (see King 1967: 37 for similar testimony from
the Carcross school). In the process of surviving, students became accus-
tomed to resisting Euro-Canadian authority. At the same time, they learned
to read and write and made contacts with children from other parts of the
Yukon. In the 1960s and 1970s First Nations political leaders – most of
whom attended residential school – would draw on these experiences,
skills, and social networks in their efforts to organize politically (see below).
The mission school experience may be at least partially responsible for
another important change in Kluane people’s way of life. In the past,
elders had automatically commanded great respect because of their knowl-
edge and skills; they knew everything a person needed to know to survive
and live life in a “good way” (see Chapter 2 for a discussion of the Kluane
concept of respect). Today, although Kluane people still respect their
elders, nearly everyone agrees that people do not respect them as much as
they once did. There are no doubt a number of reasons for this, but two of
them can be directly tied to mission school. First, as we have seen, mission
school taught a whole generation of First Nations children that the knowl-
edge possessed by their elders was by itself no longer sufWcient to ensure
survival. Those alumni who did return to their villages were acutely aware
that there were other skills and ways of thinking – about which their
elders knew very little – that were necessary for survival in a changing
Yukon. Second, many students at least partially blamed their elders for
what happened to them at mission school. Every autumn, after all, parents
put their children on the bus, despite the youngsters’ tears and pleas to be
allowed to stay. One mission school alumnus confessed to me that she had
48 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country

felt resentment towards her parents because of this for many years, even
though she knew in her heart that they had hated sending her away (and
that they had only sent her because they had been threatened with jail if
they did not). She told me that, despite this knowledge, it had taken her
years to overcome these feelings and speculated that others felt the same
way. It is likely, then, that many people who attended mission school held
their parents and other elders at least partially responsible for their trau-
matic experience. Thus, the mission school experience may have created
(perhaps subconscious) feelings of resentment against parents and elders
at the same time that it painfully illustrated to children that the land-
based way of life was no defence against the harsh realities of a changing
world. Thus, it seems clear that mission schools have played a major role
in undermining (and changing) the fundamental relationship of respect
that exists between Kluane elders and youth.

Other Government Programs

The period following the construction of the Alaska Highway also saw a
rapid increase in the number of government-sponsored social programs
in the Kluane area. These included the expansion of welfare services and
social assistance, the extension of medical care into the region, housing
programs, and so on. Along with the programs themselves came the phys-
ical and administrative infrastructure needed to administer them. One of
the Wrst orders of business for the federal government was the creation of
a local administrative infrastructure to facilitate the delivery of govern-
ment services. To this end, in the 1950s the federal government organized
the Kluane people into a “band,” with its own elected chief and council.
Bands of this sort, set up throughout the territory at this time, had little
real self-government authority but acted as intermediaries between the
Department of Indian Affairs and the local population and helped admin-
ister government programs (Coates 1991: 233). Over the years, the federal
government altered the band structure in the region in order to streamline
– and to decrease the cost of – delivering services. In 1961, for example,
Indian Commissioner F.E. AnWeld issued a memorandum to all Indian
superintendents in British Columbia and the Yukon:

For some time it has now been evident that one method of reducing the
work load in the Agencies is through the medium of amalgamation of many
of the small Bands into what might be termed “federated” groups or large
Bands ... Large sums are being spent these days in water systems, school
plants, etc., from public funds ... Consolidation of total effort in education,
social welfare, health, engineering services would obviously result, not
only in great economies, but in increased efWciency. I wish you to take a
long and careful look at this question of amalgamation in your Agency.23
 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country 49

Later that same year the federal government amalgamated what had
previously been two separate bands: the Burwash Band and the White
River Band.24 In their place, they created the Kluane Band (subsequently
renamed the Kluane Tribal Brotherhood and then the Kluane Tribal Coun-
cil). This amalgamation led to the forced relocation of White River people
to Burwash Landing, causing hard feelings and tensions that persist to this
day. In 1990 the Kluane Tribal Council – amidst a great deal of acrimony –
separated again into two distinct First Nations: the Kluane First Nation
and the White River First Nation.
Most of the infrastructure for delivering government services in the
Yukon was necessarily located in the existing villages of Burwash Landing
and Destruction Bay (because they were on the highway).25 Although gov-
ernment social programs often provided Kluane people with much needed
cash and/or services, they could only beneWt from them if they were phys-
ically present in the village. Thus, many of these government programs
and services had the effect of tying Kluane people more closely to the
village and integrating them ever more tightly into wider political and
economic systems (although, as we saw above, the introduction of the
snowmobile and other technologies enabled Kluane people to continue
the annual round in a modiWed form). In some cases, this was a logical
result of the nature of the program (e.g., to receive medical care, Kluane
people had to visit the nursing station in Destruction Bay; similarly, it is
difWcult to receive a welfare cheque or old age pension out in the bush), but
some of these programs had provisions that effectively required beneWci-
aries to settle more permanently in Burwash. The family allowance, for
instance, became available to Kluane people in the 1950s. To be eligible for
this monthly payment, however, families had to have children under six-
teen registered and attending school. This requirement, combined with
the increased enforcement of mandatory schooling, forced many parents
to leave their winter traplines (where they could better provide for their
children) and settle in Burwash (or Haines Junction, where there was a ter-
ritorial school) – where they were necessarily more dependent on govern-
ment services and social assistance (Coates 1991: 183-85).
Today, many Kluane people single out social assistance as the govern-
ment program most responsible for undermining the land-based way of
life that existed in the region prior to the construction of the Alaska High-
way. They say that social assistance has made some people lazy, that these
people would prefer to “sit around in the village and collect welfare cheques”
rather than get a job or get out and live a more strenuous and – nearly
everyone agrees – fulWlling life on the land. This problem (and most com-
munity members do see it as a problem), however, does not appear to be
primarily a matter of personal laziness or of some natural tendency to pre-
fer inaction to work (though a number of people in the village sometimes
50 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country

speak of it in those terms). Indeed, even though social assistance has been
readily available in the community since the highway came through, at
Wrst relatively few people made use of it; instead, most continued to make
a living off the land and/or through seasonal employment. According to
people in the village, widespread acceptance of social assistance payments
in the village did not begin until the mid- to late 1960s. This impression
is consistent with government Wgures concerning welfare payments to
First Nations people throughout the territory during that period (Coates
1991: 196). Until the mid-1960s only the old and inWrm tended to accept
government assistance. The reasons for the change are unclear. Certainly
there were few enough economic opportunities in the area as far as wage
labour went, but that had been the case earlier as well. The timing of the
increase in welfare payments suggests some other causes.
For one thing, the rise in the number of welfare recipients coincided
with the return to the community of many of those who had been to mis-
sion school. Many mission school alumni described to me how they had
returned from school utterly unprepared to live a life in the bush. They
lacked the knowledge and skills to do so, and the trauma of the mission
school experience had left many emotionally scarred. In addition, some
Kluane people argue that “mission school syndrome,” which manifests
itself in the lack of initiative and independent thought instilled in them
by mission schools, made returning students unsuited to life in the bush
or to anything but unskilled and low-paying labour. Unable to support
themselves economically and trying desperately to cope with the emo-
tional scars left by their experiences at mission school, many of these
people turned to alcohol and/or left the village. They had no choice but
to accept welfare payments. The increase in welfare payments also coin-
cided with a number of other historical developments (such as the intro-
duction of snowmobiles, the spread of automobiles, and the continued
prohibition on entering the Kluane Park and Sanctuary), all of which had
the effect of increasing people’s dependence on money and disrupting
their access to the land. The increased need for money combined with
increasing limitations on access to the land and the severe social problems
arising out of the mission school experience probably go a long way to
explaining the rise in welfare payments during this period.
Kluane people’s increasing dependence on government assistance con-
tributed to a trend that saw them spending less time on the land and more
time in Burwash Landing. At the same time, these government programs
did little to address the roots of the many social problems in the village;
indeed, some Kluane people are adamant that welfare payments actually
enable people to avoid dealing with a host of emotional and social prob-
lems arising from the mission school experience and other dislocations.
As a result, they say, many children in the village grew up in difWcult
 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country 51

circumstances, which, in turn, led many of them to have emotional prob-

lems of their own. This younger generation was as inexperienced and
unprepared for a life on the land as their parents had been and so had few
choices but to accept social assistance themselves.
Another important government program was education. Although the
mission school at Lower Post did not close its doors until 1975, by the
mid- to late 1960s Kluane children began to attend the territorial school
in Destruction Bay. These children were spared the trauma and abuse of
mission schools, but the territorial schools themselves were far from ideal.
The curriculum was the same as that used elsewhere in Canada, so it was
often not particularly relevant to Kluane children’s lives. Also, the very
fact that children were required to be in school meant that they often
could not accompany their parents and elders out on the land; indeed,
mandatory schooling had the effect of keeping parents in the village, too,
so they could care for their school-aged children. This effect was com-
pounded by the fact that there is no high school in Burwash Landing; any-
one who progresses beyond grammar school has to leave the village to
attend school either in Haines Junction or Whitehorse. This effectively
removes children, and sometimes their whole families, from the village for
long periods of time.
Territorial schools, too, had their share of bias and racial prejudice.
Several territorial school alumni – now in their mid-thirties – described to
me the discrimination they experienced at high school in Whitehorse.
Teachers and other students, they said, were apt to dismiss them as “lazy
and stupid Indians.” One man told me that he regularly got into Wghts
simply because he was an Indian. In most cases, alumni of the territorial
schools from the 1960s and 1970s said that they were made to feel that the
knowledge and skills of a life on the land were at best irrelevant and per-
haps even something of which to be ashamed.
In recent years the territory has been trying to expand the curriculum to
include material that is of relevance to First Nations students (including
the study of Aboriginal languages, history, and so on). This is a step in the
right direction, but it is one thing to learn about the traditional way of
life while sitting in a Euro-Canadian-style classroom; it is another thing
entirely to actually experience it out on the land, learning from parents
and elders. The most positive experiences that any Kluane people seem to
have had with school were those of the children who attended the Lù’àn
–
Mä n (Kluane Lake) School, which, after a long and bitter battle with the
territorial government, was established and run by the Kluane Tribal
Brotherhood (KTB)26 in Burwash for a few years in the late 1970s and early
1980s. At this school, the teacher, a member of KTB, made a conscious
effort to include First Nations values and knowledge as vital parts of the
students’ education. Children were regularly taken out on the land by
52 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country

community members to set Wshnets, learn how to snare rabbits, and so on.
Elders in the village also frequently came into the classroom to tell stories,
teach sewing, and other skills. People who attended the school all speak
highly of the experience, saying that it was a good atmosphere for learn-
ing these aspects of their culture in addition to the more standard ele-
ments of a Canadian education. Unfortunately, the school closed after
several years due to a lack of students27 and has never reopened.
Despite the problems with public schools in the territory, most Kluane
people recognize the importance of a Euro-Canadian-style education for
life in today’s Yukon. Kluane children who attended territorial schools,
like those who attended mission schools, learned to read and write, and
they gained other important knowledge and skills that are vital for facing
current challenges such as land claims and other dealings with federal and
territorial ofWcials. A fair number of younger KFN members have received
university degrees, and over the years a surprising number of Kluane
people (given the size of the community) have gone on to get advanced
degrees, including a law degree, several MAs, and a PhD, and several KFN
members are currently working on advanced degrees. In general, Kluane
people have put their education to good use in the land claims process and
in otherwise defending their land from encroachment and development
by non-First Nations people and corporations.

Land Claims
The modern land claims process formally began in the Yukon in 1973.
Since that time, land claims have been perhaps the single most important
factor shaping Aboriginal-state relations in the territory. The process of
negotiation itself – quite apart from the agreements that have arisen from
it – has radically transformed relations between the government (both
federal and territorial) and Yukon First Nations. As each of the various
Yukon First Nations Wnal agreements are ratiWed and implemented (see
below), the relationship between First Nations and the federal and territo-
rial governments will continue to evolve. What follows, then, is a brief
outline of the history and structure of land claims in the Yukon.
Land claims by First Nations peoples are hardly a recent phenomenon
in the Yukon. In 1902, in reaction to the invasion of Euro-Canadian new-
comers that accompanied the Klondike gold rush of 1898, Chief Jim Boss,
headman of the Southern Tutchone people at Lake Laberge, requested a
treaty with the federal government to safeguard his people’s access to their
hunting and trapping grounds (McClellan et al. 1987: 99). Nothing came
of his request (aside from an assurance that the RCMP would not allow
First Nations people to starve). In subsequent years, however, the Euro-
Canadian population of the Yukon declined dramatically. The majority of
First Nations people in the territory (except some of those living in and
 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country 53

around Euro-Canadian population centres like Dawson and Whitehorse)

continued to engage in their hunting way of life, facing few restrictions on
how they used the land. As we have already seen, however, this began to
change in the Kluane region during the 1940s and 1950s, when, as a result
of improvements in transportation and other developments, the govern-
ment began to assert itself in many spheres of First Nations life.
In contrast to the situation in much of southern Canada, the federal
government never negotiated a land cession treaty in the Yukon. Yet it
claimed to control all lands in the territory and maintained the position
that Yukon First Nations peoples had no legal entitlement to the land,
except that with which the government had explicitly provided them –
and there was little enough of that. It was estimated in 1962 that only
4,800 acres of land in the entire Yukon had been allocated for First Nations
use (Coates 1991: 235). Nevertheless, throughout the 1950s a feeling was
growing among territorial government and church ofWcials that a treaty
was necessary to settle the Aboriginal land issue and so avoid a whole
series of potential difWculties in the future. The federal government, how-
ever, was reluctant to engage in treaty negotiations with Yukon First
Nations (235-36). During the 1960s various Yukon Aboriginal groups made
a number of requests for speciWc (small) pieces of land, some of which
were granted (235), but the First Nations people of the territory made no
uniWed effort to assert their rights to land until 1973. In that year, Elijah
Smith, president and co-founder of the newly formed Yukon Native Broth-
erhood, a political organization representing status Indians throughout
the territory, presented the federal government with a document entitled
Together Today for Our Children Tomorrow (Yukon Native Brotherhood
1973). This was the Wrst comprehensive land claim tabled in Canada, and
it was accepted as such by the federal government.
The timing of the Yukon Native Brotherhood’s claim was fortuitous.
Had they made it only a few years earlier, the federal government would
almost certainly have rejected it. Indeed, just four years before, in 1969,
the liberal government of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau had issued its
now infamous White Paper, outlining its policy for dealing with the
“Indian problem.” It was a policy of assimilation, not accommodation or
treaty making. The policy came under immediate and intense criticism
from Indian organizations and sympathetic Euro-Canadians alike, and
the government was soon forced to back down and rethink its approac
to Aboriginal-state relations (Miller 2000: 331-38). Then, in 1973, the
Supreme Court of Canada delivered its landmark decision in the case of
Calder v. Attorney-General of British Columbia. The case involved a land claim
by the Nisga’a of British Columbia. Although the Nisga’a lost the case on
a technicality, six out of the seven justices agreed that Aboriginal title ex-
isted in law and continued to exist until explicitly extinguished by the
54 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country

Crown. The repercussions of this decision were profound. The court’s

recognition of Aboriginal title led the Trudeau government to perform a
dramatic about-face and institute a policy for the settlement of compre-
hensive claims in those parts of Canada – including the Yukon – where
no land cession treaties had ever been signed. This policy change ushered
in the era of modern land claims negotiations in Canada, and the Yukon
claim was the Wrst of the comprehensive claims to be accepted by the fed-
eral government.
Despite its home-grown character, the Yukon’s land claims process was
not unique. Indeed, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, First Nations
peoples throughout Canada and the United States were organizing politi-
cally. The time was ripe for organized resistance on a large scale because a
cadre of First Nations political leaders was emerging across the continent.
In his history of Aboriginal-White relations in Canada, J.R. Miller (2000:
chap. 13) notes that many of the First Nations leaders who played key
roles in the organization of national political movements during the sec-
ond half of the twentieth century were either war veterans and/or prod-
ucts of the residential school system. First Nations people enlisted in the
Wrst and second World Wars in large numbers. After having fought over-
seas “in defence of democracy,” they returned to Canada with a new
perspective on institutionalized racism at home. Meanwhile, as we have
already seen, repressive residential schools throughout the country were
inadvertently providing First Nations students with Wrst rate training in
resistance techniques while, at the same time, giving them the basic skills
and knowledge they would need to organize politically and facilitating
the creation of national social networks of alumni (Miller 2000: 269; see
also Lomawaima 1994). These emerging First Nations political leaders
were able to tap into the frustration and anger of First Nations peoples
around the country who were facing systemic discrimination and severe
social and economic hardship.
Figuring prominently among the government policies that fueled this
anger and frustration were those that limited First Nations peoples’ rights
to land and wildlife – often in contravention of treaty and/or Aboriginal
rights (e.g., Miller 2000: 323). In particular, the threat of large-scale devel-
opment served to galvanize First Nations protest against government con-
trol over land and resources in the North. Mega-projects, such as the
Alaska Pipeline, the James Bay Hydroelectric Project, and the proposed
Mackenzie Valley and Alaska Highway Pipelines became the objects of
organized protest movements and/or high-proWle government inquiries.
In the process of organizing against these projects, northern First Nations
peoples began to recognize their common interests and to forge political
alliances with one another.28
This pattern certainly holds true for the Yukon; many of the key Wgures
 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country 55

in the political organization of Yukon First Nations peoples during the

1960s and 1970s were veterans of the Second World War and/or alumni of
one of the territory’s mission schools. Indeed, Elijah Smith, co-founder
and Wrst president of the Yukon Native Brotherhood and one of the chief
architects of the Yukon land claim was himself a veteran of the Second
World War. As the following statement about the creation of the Kluane
Game Sanctuary makes clear, his experience during the war informed how
he interpreted the postwar imposition of restrictions on First Nations
hunting and Wshing: “When I came back from the army I couldn’t go
where I wanted to go. That hurt me, it hurt me something awful. Being in
the service, I thought I was Wghting for a free country. Instead of that, you
can’t go here, you can’t go there, you can’t Wsh when you want to. You
go and get a piece of paper from that guy to Wsh. That was just like tying
me up” (Smith 1986: 2).
Regaining access to land and resources and gaining at least partial con-
trol over development were two of the principle goals of the Yukon land
claim. In 1973 talks were underway to create Kluane National Park (from
what was then the Kluane Game Sanctuary), and the proposed Mackenzie
Valley and Alaska Highway Pipelines threatened to alter Yukon First
Nations peoples’ way of life dramatically. Together Today for Our Children
Tomorrow makes frequent reference to such developments and demanded
that First Nations peoples be involved in any decisions regarding the
establishment of a national park or the construction of a pipeline (Yukon
Native Brotherhood 1973: 42).
The federal government’s acceptance of the Yukon land claim, however,
did not lead to a quick settlement. Negotiations between the Council for
Yukon Indians29 and the federal and territorial governments continued, at
varying degrees of intensity, for twenty years. Finally, in 1993, representa-
tives of the federal and territorial governments, along with the Council for
Yukon Indians, signed the Yukon Umbrella Final Agreement (UFA). The
UFA is not in itself a land claims agreement, but it provides an overall
framework for the negotiation of land claims throughout the territory. It
contains many general provisions that apply to the entire Yukon as well as
identifying the areas in which individual Yukon First Nations (there are
fourteen in the territory) may negotiate provisions speciWc to their own
needs. It was left to each individual First Nation to negotiate its own
speciWc Wnal agreement within the framework of the UFA. The intent of
this was to allow each First Nation to negotiate an agreement that is
appropriate to its own speciWc needs while simultaneously avoiding the
potential administrative nightmare of having fourteen completely distinct
treaties in the Yukon.
At the time of this writing, approximately half of the First Nations in the
territory have concluded negotiations and ratiWed a Wnal agreement. The
56 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country

Kluane First Nation is a signatory to the UFA, but it is not among those
First Nations that have concluded a Wnal agreement. In April 2002, how-
ever, after a Xurry of eleventh hour negotiations, KFN, Canada, and the
Yukon signed a memorandum of understanding that effectively ended
negotiations and committed parties to holding ratiWcation votes on a
negotiated agreement. The parties have one year to attend to technical
matters, clean up the legal language of the agreement, and conclude the
ratiWcation process. Although the Wnal agreement, if ratiWed, will usher in
a new era of Aboriginal-state relations in the Kluane region, it will by no
means represent a complete break from the past. Indeed, such agreements
are merely the culmination of a process that has been transforming First
Nations peoples’ way of life for a long time. In Chapter 6, I discuss the
conceptual underpinnings of the land claims process and the social con-
sequences for the Kluane of having engaged in it at all.
It should by now be apparent – even from this brief and admittedly
incomplete historical sketch – that Aboriginal-state relations in the Kluane
region are a multifaceted and complex affair. As I mentioned above, it is
beyond the scope of this book (or, indeed, of any single volume) to present
a comprehensive account of the complexities of Aboriginal-state relations
through time – even for such a relatively small and out-of-the-way corner
of the world as Kluane country. This is why I have chosen to focus on
wildlife management and land claims in particular. Although there are cer-
tainly other processes that shape Aboriginal-state relations in the Kluane
region, wildlife management and land claims are unquestionably among
the most important, and they are likely to remain so for the foreseeable
future. Indeed, these processes provide us with something of a window
onto Aboriginal-state relations. By attending to the ethnographic sub-
tleties of the interaction between Kluane people and various agents of the
state in the realms of wildlife management and land claims, I provide
insights into how Kluane people experience state power in their day-to-
day lives and, thus, shed light on how state power is constituted more gen-
erally. I conclude this chapter with a story that illustrates the multifaceted
and ambiguous nature of Kluane people’s encounters with “the state.”

Tragedy at Andrew Atlin Lake

In May 1980 Sam Johnson Sr., a respected Kluane elder and renowned
hunter, was arrested along with a younger man for trapping muskrats at
Andrew Atlin Lake in the Kluane Game Sanctuary. Later that same day, a
short time after his encounter with the game warden, Sam suffered a
stroke that left him partially paralyzed for the rest of his life. In the minds
of most Kluane people, Sam’s stroke was directly related to the stress and
fear associated with his experiences that day. They accused the Yukon gov-
ernment of having caused his collapse and sued for damages. According
 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country 57

to Yukon law at the time, trapping in the sanctuary was illegal,30 but the
situation was not a straightforward one. The year before the incident,
members of KTB had occupied part of the sanctuary in protest over the
territorial government’s continued refusal to allow them to hunt and trap
there, a right they claimed had been illegally denied them. Although the
Yukon government disagreed with this position, it had begun discussions
with KTB representatives early in 1980 to try and reach some sort of com-
promise. In the uproar that followed the arrests, Swede Hanson, then
Yukon minister of renewable resources, admitted to having struck an
informal “deal” with KTB. He had agreed that, while the parties were
working on a compromise, the government would “turn a blind eye to
KTB members hunting in the sanctuary in exchange for a commitment
from the KTB that they would not publicly Xaunt their activities” (Stock-
still 1980a; see also Stockstill 1980b). Hanson, however, had neglected to
inform Kluane area game wardens of this informal (and, by his own
admission, illegal) understanding, directly precipitating the unfortunate
incident at Andrew Atlin Lake.
This incident illustrates how various agents of the state – even those
within the same government department – can have quite different or even
opposing agendas. Here, the political agenda of the minister was at cross
purposes with the game warden’s efforts to enforce the law. For someone
like Sam Johnson, caught in the middle of these competing interests
and agendas, the state can seem a capricious entity indeed: sometimes

Sam Johnson Sr., Moose Johnson, and Phil Temple (a local outWtter) in 1965.
58 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country

seemingly benevolent, at other times apparently arbitrary and cruel;

sometimes ruthlessly efWcient, at other times ineffectual to the point of
comedy. There is no denying the imperialist aspects of state wildlife man-
agement, but incidents like the one that took place at Andrew Atlin Lake
in May 1980 warn us against viewing the extension of state wildlife man-
agement regimes throughout the Canadian North as the product of some
deliberate and coherent effort on the part of the state to expand its control
over land, animals, and people. Rather, it is more accurately viewed as
arising out of a complex series of struggles among various agents of the
state as well as between those agents and non-state actors – including Abo-
riginal people. As Harvey Feit (1998: 132) notes: “[wildlife management]
decisions are typically the outcome of politics involving conXicting govern-
ment policies for economic development and wildlife management, inter-
departmental competition, complex and usually incomplete scientiWc
evaluations, and lobbying by public users’ groups, environmentalist orga-
nizations, and others, many claiming to speak for wildlife themselves.”
In recent years, with the rise of land claims and related ideas about
cooperative management, Kluane people have become one of the most
important groups of non-state actors to be involved in the creation and
implementation of wildlife management policy in the Kluane region. This
is not to say that they always get what they want (indeed, as we shall see
over the course of this book, they seldom do), but state and other non-
state actors and institutions must now take Kluane (and other First
Nations) people into account as they vie with one another to inXuence the
creation and implementation of wildlife management policy. Any effort
to understand Aboriginal-state relations in the Kluane region – and else-
where – must necessarily forgo the temptation to cast wildlife manage-
ment policy as a series of sinister machinations by a monolithic state.
At the same time, however, it will not do to excuse what happened to
Sam Johnson that day as the result of an “innocent” – though perhaps
unfortunate – misunderstanding on the part of various government ofW-
cials. Although the miscommunication between minister and game war-
den may have been real enough, the context within which it took place
was far from politically neutral. We have seen that Kluane people had no
say in the establishment of the Kluane Game Sanctuary in 1942 – even
though it had long-term adverse consequences for them. The creation of
the sanctuary was one of the Wrst in a long series of government actions
that undermined their way of life and subjected them to colonial-style
relations of domination. We saw, too, that the imposition of the game
sanctuary and other restrictions on First Nations hunting and land use
were among the most important concerns of Elijah Smith and other First
Nations political leaders. Indeed, by 1980, the land claims process was well
underway, and KTB’s “occupation” of the sanctuary the year before –
 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country 59

which had given rise to their “informal understanding” with the minister
– must be seen as a part (albeit an informal part) of the negotiation
process. In that context, Sam Johnson’s arrest can be seen as an aspect of
a larger colonial struggle.
Yet this, too, is an oversimpliWcation. Sam Johnson’s decision to trap in
the sanctuary may have been – at least in part – a political act, but it was
not merely a political act. Although his decision of where to trap muskrats
in the spring of 1980 was certainly politically informed,31 his decision to
trap muskrats in general was not. For Sam, as for many other Kluane
people, hunting and trapping was a way of life. He did not go hunting
simply to send a message to government ofWcials or because of its poten-
tial effects on the land claims process; rather, he hunted for food and fur
and to maintain a complex set of social relations with other Kluane people
as well as with a whole array of other-than-human persons (see Chapter
2). He hunted and trapped because these activities were essential to his
sense of himself and of what it meant to be a First Nations person in the
Kluane region. And these social relations and cultural understandings –
bound up as they are with the very act of hunting or trapping – in turn
inXuenced how Sam (and many other Yukon First Nations people) under-
stood the imposition of the game sanctuary, wildlife management policy
more generally, and the land claims process. For him, exclusion from the
sanctuary represented more than just a threat to Kluane political sover-
eignty and economic well-being, it also undermined the social relations
and practices that sustained his very identity and way of being in the
world. And yet, although the beliefs and practices associated with hunting
continue to inform Kluane understandings of political processes such as
wildlife management and land claims, these beliefs and practices have not
themselves remained static; rather, they have been changing to adapt to
contemporary circumstances – including the fact that Kluane people must
now regularly interact with government ofWcials at wildlife management
meetings and land claims negotiations.
At stake for Kluane people in their interactions with the federal and
territorial governments are not only their lands and resources but also
their way of life and their understandings of the world. And they use
these cultural meanings and practices (the very things they are trying to
preserve through their participation in land claims negotiations and co-
management) as a basis for interpreting and acting upon the world –
including in their interactions with non-Aboriginal people in, for example,
co-management and land claims negotiations. We cannot, therefore, hope
to understand these processes and their role in contemporary state forma-
tion without taking into account Kluane understandings of and relations
with animals and the land – and how those understandings and relations
have changed over the last 100 years. This is the subject of Chapter 2.
2
“It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All,
It’s More a Way of Life”

When I arrived in Burwash Landing, I was already interested in the politi-

cal dimensions of knowledge production. Even had I not been, however, it
would have been difWcult for me to ignore the issue of “traditional knowl-
edge.” It is a topic that came up at virtually every meeting on wildlife
management and in nearly every session of land claims negotiations that
I attended. Over the past Wfteen years, interest in studying First Nations
knowledge of the land and animals has grown dramatically across the Arc-
tic and Subarctic. Much of the effort along these lines has gone into col-
lecting and documenting this alternate form of knowledge and in trying
to incorporate it into the scientiWc, legal, and bureaucratic structures of
the state. The hope is that this will not only improve our overall under-
standing of the environment but will also empower the Aboriginal peoples
who are the holders of traditional knowledge. What is more, this interest
in traditional knowledge is only a regional manifestation of what is really
a global phenomenon. Around the world, scientiWc “experts” have acknowl-
edged the potential value of “local,” or “indigenous,” systems of knowl-
edge and are attempting to Wnd ways to integrate this knowledge with
science and incorporate it into processes of Wsh and wildlife management,
environmental impact assessment, agricultural policy development, and
so on. As it turns out, anthropologists are right in the thick of the debates
over traditional knowledge. And it is only natural that they should be,
since the justiWcation for knowledge-integration has its roots in anthropo-
logical theory.
In his 1925 essay “Magic, Science, and Religion,” Bronislaw Malinowski
(1954) argued against the idea that magic, science, and religion are evolu-
tionary stages in the development of human thought, as had previously
been supposed. Instead, he argued, they should be seen as distinct modes
of thought that can and do co-exist in people’s minds. It is not the case,
he maintained, that Europeans subscribe to science, while everyone else
has to settle for “magic” or, at best, “religion.” Instead, all people every-
where have and have always had “science” (which he deWned as a body of
 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All” 61

practical empirical knowledge). Without empirical knowledge of this kind,

a society simply could not survive in the world. Also implied in his argu-
ment – although he himself never elaborated on the point – is the idea
that all people, including Europeans, also possess a host of non-rational
beliefs that cannot be supported empirically. In other words, everyone every-
where subscribes to both “magic” and “science.” Over the years, anthropol-
ogists have taken this argument to heart, Wnding “science” in everything
from indigenous African agricultural techniques (Horton 1967; Richards
1985), to the hunting practices of Subarctic Cree hunters (Scott 1996), to
the indigenous management of local Wsh stocks in Asia (Johannes 1989).
At the same time, others have described the very non-empirical assump-
tions underlying energy policy in the United States (Nader 1996b), bio-
logical understandings of human reproduction (Martin 1991), genetic
research (Lewontin 1991), and other supposed paragons of Western empir-
ical rationality.
Malinowski’s approach to knowledge has a number of important impli-
cations. Among them is the notion that, if all cultures possess science (i.e.,
practical empirically-based knowledge about the world), then the empiri-
cal knowledge of one culture should be comparable to that of another. In
other words, their practical value should be independent of cultural con-
text. Knowledge about wind and tides, for example, should be of equal
value to all mariners, whether they be European sailors or members of a
Kula expedition. This is, in fact, the reasoning that underlies the project
of knowledge-integration today. Malinowski (1954: 35) argued that West-
ern scientists had much to learn about distant environments from the
“savage” naturalist, who was “patient and painstaking in his observations,
capable of generalization and of connecting long chains of events in the
life of animals, and in the marine world, or in the jungle.” In the spirit
of this tradition, anthropologists and other social scientists around the
world are currently arguing that indigenous knowledge systems are empir-
ically valid. They claim that, because these alternate ways of knowing are
just as rigorous and empirically based as is science, they can and should be
integrated with science and given equal weight in making management
and policy decisions. This whole approach to knowledge and knowledge-
integration assumes that discrete elements of Aboriginal peoples’ culture
(i.e., their empirical knowledge) can be extracted from their sociocultural
context and then inserted into Euro-North American institutional and
ideological contexts while, at the same time, retaining their utility, their
meaning, and even their “Aboriginality.”
There is, however, another very different strand of theory in the anthro-
pological literature on knowledge. Reacting to the work of Lévy-Bruhl,
Evans-Pritchard (1937) showed that it is not always so easy to distinguish
between a people’s “rational” knowledge of empirical reality and their
62 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All”

supposedly “non-rational” beliefs about the world. In his analysis of

witchcraft among the Azande, he showed that their apparently non-rational
beliefs in witchcraft actually provide a structure for their social relations.
Thus, what to European observers appears to be irrational superstition is
actually eminently useful to the Azande. Furthermore, he argued that the
beliefs and practices of witchcraft derive their meaning and even their
validity from their embeddedness in the overall system of Zande social
relations, values, and practices. Thus, to the Azande, witchcraft is not irra-
tional at all but perfectly rational, provable, and true. Following Evans-
Pritchard’s famous argument about witchcraft, anthropologists studying
different systems of knowledge – from navigation in Polynesia (Gladwin
1970) to high energy physics in the United States and Japan (Traweek
1988) – have argued that each such system possesses its own internal con-
sistency and rationality, and that those who accept the fundamental
assumptions underlying any particular system of knowledge cannot help
but see that system as both useful and legitimate.
But this approach to the study of knowledge raises the spectre of incom-
mensurability. If people are embedded in different systems of cultural
meaning that possess their own internally deWned criteria of validity, then
what are the prospects for communication across the boundaries of differ-
ent knowledge systems? Like Captain Cook and the native Hawaiians
(Sahlins 1985), we may be doomed to misunderstand one another forever.
The implications of this for the project of knowledge-integration are pro-
found. One simply cannot extract and combine the empirical aspects of
different knowledge systems if those systems are incommensurable.
It seems, then, that we are faced with a contradiction. Is knowledge
really culturally contingent? Or is some degree of cross-cultural knowledge-
integration possible? What are we to make of this apparent contradiction
between two different, and both well-supported, strands of anthropologi-
cal theory?
To answer these questions, I focus on a speciWc case: that of Kluane
people and their knowledge about animals. I am interested in examining
the political implications of contemporary efforts to integrate the knowl-
edge of Aboriginal peoples with that of Euro-North American “experts” in
a number of contexts, ranging from wildlife management to land claims
negotiations. Before doing so, however, we must Wrst take a close look at
how Aboriginal peoples themselves (in this case, Kluane people) conceive
of and relate to one another and the land and animals around them. As a
hunting people who continue to rely heavily on hunting and Wshing for
their subsistence, Kluane people (along with many other Aboriginal peo-
ples in the North American Arctic and Subarctic) necessarily relate to the
land and animals quite differently than do the biologists and other Euro-
North Americans who seek to appropriate First Nations knowledge of the
 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All” 63

environment and incorporate it into their own understandings of the

world. Before we can hope to understand the political dimensions of
knowledge-integration in Kluane country, we must examine the whole
range of beliefs, social relations, practices, and values that inform Kluane
people’s views of the world.
Kluane people are acutely aware of the culturally contingent nature of
their knowledge about animals. At a conference on traditional knowledge,
I once heard a wildlife biologist ask a member of the Kluane First Nation,
“What exactly is ‘traditional knowledge?’” She responded, “Well, it’s not
really ‘knowledge’ at all; it’s more a way of life.” Since it is from that
way of life that biologists and others hope to isolate and extract “tradi-
tional knowledge,” we need to know something about it if we are to have
any hope of understanding the potential social and political impacts of
knowledge-integration.

Kluane Hunting
Without doubt, the single most important aspect of Kluane people’s way
of life is hunting.1 Kluane people think of themselves Wrst and foremost as
a hunting people. But what does that mean? What exactly is “hunting”?
Euro-North Americans have deeply ingrained ideas about what it means to
hunt (socially, ecologically, morally, and existentially) – ideas that derive
from a long tradition of hunting in Europe and its former colonies (see, for
example, Cartmill 1993; McCandless 1985: chap. 1). Because of this, it is
difWcult for us not to bring preconceived notions to bear in the course of
regulating, legislating, negotiating, or theorizing about hunting, whether
Aboriginal or otherwise. But Euro-North American and Aboriginal hunting
are not so easily compared. Anthropologists have long noted that hunting
is not simply a matter of killing animals (Evans-Pritchard 1956; Hubert and
Mauss 1964; Nelson 1983; Robertson Smith 1957); rather, it is a set of prac-
tices that are deeply embedded in speciWc sets of social relations and ideas
about how humans should relate to one another as well as to animals.
So what are Kluane people doing when they “hunt?” To even begin to
comprehend what hunting means to them, one must appreciate the con-
straints of living in a Subarctic environment. The climate does not allow
for agriculture; and, aside from berries and a few roots (both of which have
very limited seasons of availability), there is precious little vegetable mat-
ter available for forage. This means that Aboriginal peoples living in the
Subarctic have historically had to rely almost exclusively on meat and Wsh
for their survival. For them, hunting has always been much more than just
a pleasant pastime. To put it simply, for First Nations peoples living in the
Arctic and Subarctic, hunting is synonymous with life itself.
It is true that Kluane people’s way of life and their relationship with the
land and animals have changed dramatically over the past 100 years. At
64 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All”

the turn of the twentieth century, they depended almost entirely on meat
and Wsh for their subsistence. Increased access to wage labour, manufac-
tured goods, and store-bought foods, among other things, have decreased
their dependence on wild meat and Wsh. But it would be a mistake to
assume that they now hunt only for sport. Despite huge changes to their
way of life, hunting remains absolutely vital to their lives.
Some would argue that Aboriginal peoples’ survival no longer depends
on hunting since they can now buy all the meat they need at the store.
Such arguments ignore the well-documented importance of wild meat in
the “mixed economies” of the North. Like elsewhere in the Arctic and Sub-
arctic, high rates of unemployment and seasonal employment in Burwash
Landing, combined with the high price of food, have led to the develop-
ment of what has been called a “mixed economy” (see Berger 1977: 121-
22; Langdon 1986; Usher and Staples 1988). Most people in the village (as
individuals or families) engage in some combination of wage labour and
hunting to make a living. Formal studies of caloric intake have clearly
shown that Wsh and meat obtained from hunting remain a very impor-
tant source of food in the mixed economies of Aboriginal communities
throughout the North. Burwash Landing is no exception. Kluane people
annually consume approximately 200 pounds (about ninety kilograms) of
moose meat per capita, which works out to over one-half pound (about
one-quarter kilogram) per day for every man woman and child in the vil-
lage.2 And that does not include the quite signiWcant amounts of Wsh (the
most important of which include lake trout, whiteWsh, inconnu, salmon,
and grayling), snowshoe hare,3 arctic ground squirrel (or “gopher”), water-
fowl, and berries; nor does it include those foods that are currently of
lesser importance but still eaten occasionally, such as Dall sheep, caribou,
muskrat, beaver, porcupine, lynx, grouse, and ptarmigan.4 While some in
the community could indeed afford to buy all their food at the store, there
are those who would suffer very real hardship if they were forced to do so.
There is no doubt that Kluane people continue to conceive of hunting
as essential to their physical survival. Many people explicitly spoke to me
about hunting as being necessary for survival and stressed how important
it is to “know how to survive.” By this they did not mean the plane-
crashes-in-the-woods type of emergency survival but, rather, the ability to
live and function comfortably in the bush for extended periods. Several
Kluane people spoke to me of their belief that there will come a time, per-
haps in the not too distant future, when the current economic and social
system will grind to a halt (see Chapter 6). When this happens, they said,
only those who know how to live off the land will be able to survive.
But the importance of hunting to Kluane people cannot be measured in
calories alone. Hunting is every bit as important to their survival as Abo-
riginal people as it is to their physical survival. It has been the fundamental
 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All” 65

organizing principle of their culture, structuring and informing every

aspect of their entire way of life. Everything from their technology and
social organization to their beliefs and values were, and in many ways con-
tinue to be, deeply intertwined with (and given meaning by) the need to
kill animals to survive.
But anthropologists have had a tendency to conceive of hunting as a
series of activities that are limited to the Wnding and killing of animals.5
Once the animal is dead and butchered, “the hunt” is over and the “every-
day life” of cooking, eating, tanning, sewing, and sharing resumes. This
strict separation between hunting and everyday life derives from the tra-
dition of European sport hunting, in which “the hunt” is viewed as an
activity that is largely separate, and even a diversion, from the everyday
lives of the participants. Such a separation makes little sense to those who
hunt for their subsistence. For Kluane people the point of killing ani-
mals is, after all, not to kill them but, rather, to eat them (and to use their
hides and certain other inedible parts). To insist on drawing Wrm analytic
boundaries between the act of shooting animals and cooking – or even
eating – them is to impose a European perspective on the concept of hunt-
ing and to ignore people’s own perceptions of what they are doing. Not
only does this impose a whole series of European-derived assumptions and
values on the lives of hunting peoples but it also obscures the real richness
and complexity of beliefs and social relations that surround what we call
“hunting.”
Even so, some anthropologists have persisted in arguing that Aboriginal
peoples themselves draw a rigid distinction between the act of killing
animals and all other kinds of activity. Henry Sharp (1981), for instance,
argues that the Chipewyan (another northern Athapaskan people) rigidly
separate the male labour of hunting from the female labour of meat prepa-
ration. His analysis, however, is notably limited to a discussion of the
hunting of large animals. This is a serious problem because many northern
Athapaskan peoples rely quite heavily on the meat from small animals,
such as hares and ground squirrels (at certain times of the year and in cer-
tain years, small animals make up the bulk of their food), and it is usually
women who are responsible for hunting and killing these animals. But a
gendered argument like Sharp’s is particularly inappropriate for understand-
ing Kluane hunting because Kluane people do not distinguish sharply
between gender roles – even when it comes to hunting large animals. A
Kluane woman going hunting for moose is a totally unremarkable event,
and there are quite a few women in the village who are/have been consid-
ered accomplished hunters of large animals. Although Kluane people do
sometimes talk about (large animal) hunting as a male occupation and the
cutting of meat as a female one, in practice I observed no strict separation
of gender roles; men cut meat as often as women hunt.
66 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All”

In fact, some anthropologists have argued explicitly that the identiWca-

tion of strict distinctions between hunting and non-hunting based on
gender is more a product of anthropologists’ own assumptions about the
nature of hunting than it is a reXection of Aboriginal concepts. Barbara
Bodenhorn (1990), for example, has argued that, in order for anthropolo-
gists to have characterized Iñupiat men as “hunters” and women as “non-
hunters,” they had to ignore a number of important ritual practices (and
the ritual dimensions of some “everyday” practices) carried out by women
– practices that Iñupiat themselves, both men and women, see as abso-
lutely integral to the practice of hunting. Indeed, according to Bodenhorn,
“women’s activities – sewing, butchering, sharing – are classiWed by the
Iñupiat as hunting skills” (65).
As it turns out, Malinowski (1935) made an analogous argument about
gardening in the Trobriands. He argued that the concept of “gardening”
had to be understood in a much broader sense than was typical of Euro-
pean usage. Along with the obviously important activities of planting,
weeding, harvesting, and so on are the equally important “ritual” activi-
ties of gardening, including magic and the ritually prescribed redistri-
bution of the harvest. He illustrated quite convincingly that one simply
cannot understand Trobriand gardening without taking all of these activi-
ties into account.
This is not to say that Kluane people are incapable of distinguishing
between shooting and eating. They can, of course: but they see them as
integrally related activities. A number of anthropologists (e.g., Brightman
1993; Speck 1935; Tanner 1979) have implicitly made this point by
describing the rich constellation of ritual practices, beliefs, and social rela-
tions that surround Aboriginal hunting in the North. Consequently, when
I talk about “hunting” I am referring not simply to the shooting of ani-
mals but also to the entire constellation of values, beliefs, practices, and
social relations that surround and give meaning to Kluane people’s subsis-
tence strategies and their relationship to animals.

The Social Dimensions of Hunting

As we saw in Chapter 1, Kluane people were nomadic until well into the
twentieth century. They ranged over a large territory as they followed an
annual round based on the seasonal availability of Wsh and animals. The
size of the groups in which Kluane people lived and hunted also varied
considerably over the course of the year. These groups “would combine,
split, and recombine in various ways ... [depending on] ... what the differ-
ent parts of the terrain had to offer at different seasons of the year and on
how many people the environment might require or allow for effective
exploitation” (McClellan 1975: 98).6 Thus, Kluane social organization was
constantly in Xux, based on the changing contingencies of the hunt.7
 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All” 67

Kluane people’s knowledge of the land and animals was necessarily vast
for, without such knowledge, the annual round would indeed have
amounted to little more than random wanderings, and they would long
ago have perished. As we will see shortly, in addition to this practical
knowledge, Kluane people also had a deep interest in their place in the
world, in how they related spiritually and socially to the animals on whom
they depended for survival. Many of their most precious beliefs dealt with
these relationships and how to successfully negotiate them in order to sur-
vive and to gain power in the world. Hunting was not merely an impor-
tant activity to them; it permeated nearly every aspect of their lives.
Another important historical aspect of Kluane social relations (as for all
northern Athapaskans and hunting peoples in general) was the sharing of
meat. Kluane people saw the sharing of meat, like the act of killing ani-
mals itself, as an integral part of hunting. Indeed, a number of scholars
(e.g., Gould 1982; Lee and DeVore 1968; Winterhalder 1986) have argued
that sharing food is a necessary social adaptation for dealing with the
uncertainties of a hunting way of life. Anthropologists working with vari-
ous hunting peoples around the world have often described the existence
of formal – sometimes quite elaborate – rules for the distribution of meat
along kinship lines and/or among those who participated in the hunt
(e.g., Altman and Peterson 1989; Balikci 1970: 133-38; Gould 1966;
Graburn 1969: 68-70; Kelly 1995: 165-67; Turner 1996). No such formal
rules seem to have been in place in the Kluane region, however. Catharine
McClellan (1975: 114), who conducted ethnographic research in the
southern Yukon during the late 1940s, reported as follows:

In the old days, meat was always divided among families travelling
together, but I got no clear statement from any group about formal rules
of division. For example, when asked who had the right to a skin, an
Inland Tlingit woman explained: “They try to help each other out. Who’s
out of anything like that, they would get it. They have to have something
to use. They cannot let them go without it.” That this is not just romanc-
ing about a golden age of brotherly love seems borne out by present
behaviour, for in all tribes [Southern Tutchone, Tagish, and Inland Tlin-
git], meat and skins seem to be quite freely distributed.

Despite the apparent lack of formal rules for the distribution of meat,
McClellan noted that there was, nevertheless, a set of principles governing
these activities:

Among Tagish and Inland Tlingit, as is probably true of the Tutchone, ‘old
people get Wrst choice.’ Furthermore, although the scheme is Xexible, a
hunter does have recognized prior commitments to certain of his kinsman
68 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All”

which he tries to fulWll if possible; parents-in-law, brother-in-law, sister,

paternal uncle’s wife, and grandparents should all be generously provided
with meat. The order in which he may actually fulWll his obligations varies
with the particular social situation in which a hunter Wnds himself. (114)

Thus, sharing functioned as a principle of social organization, embedding

people in sets of reciprocal obligations and reinforcing ties with kin. Klu-
ane people structured their lives and relations with one another around
hunting; that is, around the procurement, preparation, sharing, and con-
sumption of meat.
However, as we saw in the introduction, over the last century there have
been dramatic changes in Kluane people’s way of life. The introduction
of new technologies and manufactured goods, devastating diseases, the
building of the Alaska Highway, mandatory schooling, the proliferation
of social programs, alcohol, and a host of other factors have led to huge
changes for Kluane people. They are no longer nomadic but, rather, live
permanently in the village of Burwash Landing (the site of the old fur trad-
ing post). No one in the village hunts or traps full-time any longer. Some
have full-time or part-time jobs in the KFN ofWce; others Wnd seasonal
work on the highway or elsewhere, do odd jobs, and/or collect welfare and
other government aid. During the three years that I lived there, no one
spent more than a few weeks at a time living out on the land. All are to
some degree dependent on cash from wage labour, welfare, and/or other
government programs. Many non-First Nations observers interpret these
changes to mean that the hunting way of life is now a thing of the past.
This, however, is simply not the case. Despite the dramatic changes that
have occurred over the last 100 years, Kluane people continue to structure
their lives largely around hunting.
Though Kluane people now live year-round in the village, the introduc-
tion of snowmobiles in the late 1960s, along with other technology, has
enabled them to reach remote hunting areas relatively quickly (see Chap-
ter 1). This has led to a modiWed version of the annual round in which
Kluane people, though based in Burwash, continue to make use of widely
scattered Wsh and animal populations as they become available over the
course of the year. Kluane people retain a good deal of knowledge about
when and where it is best to take animals. In the spring, they still know
exactly where to go to get lake trout, grayling, and gophers; they know the
location of all the good lakes and high lookouts for hunting moose in late
summer. In the fall, they know where the whiteWsh spawn and where to
go to Wnd sheep. They know where to look for moose and where to set
Wshnets in the winter. The entire village is still very much keyed into the
annual round; at a certain time in May, everyone is suddenly “hungry for
grayling,” and they head en masse for the creek where they run. Soon after
 Fall: Agnes Johnson Wshing for
whiteWsh at Long’s Creek,
September 1996.

Winter: Peter Johnson and Gerald Dickson preparing to set a Wshnet under the ice
on Kluane Lake, November 1996.
 Spring: Kathleen Johnson
cleaning grayling at Swede
Johnson Creek, while Jasmine
Walker and Alana Johnson
look on, April 1997.

Summer: Michael and Edward

Johnson skinning a moose near
hunting camp at Mile 1120,
Alaska Highway, August 1996.
 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All” 71

that, gophers emerge from their hibernation; everyone is “hungry for

gophers,” and they head to Duke Meadow to set traps for them. And so it
continues throughout the year – the annual round in modiWed form. Since
people now live permanently in the village, however, residence patterns
are no longer based on the seasonal availability of animals and the labour
requirements of different hunting techniques.
Even so, social relations in the village continue to revolve very much
around hunting, though the exact nature of those relations has changed
somewhat over the years. The modiWed annual round, based as it is on
industrial technology, has increased Kluane people’s need for capital to
pay for equipment, fuel, and repairs. This has helped ensure that modern
hunting remains a collective enterprise. Many of the social relations in the
village revolve around people’s efforts to marshal the necessary resources
(of both labour and capital) to hunt.
Hunting today requires a signiWcant degree of capital; one needs vehi-
cles (trucks, snowmobiles, ATVs, boats), fuel, guns, ammunition, binocu-
lars, knives, packboards, stoves, tents, and an array of other equipment.
Not many individuals in the community own everything they need to
hunt. As a result, most hunts remain joint ventures, with several people
pooling their resources and hunting together. There is a tendency for such
hunting partnerships to follow kinship lines, but this is not always the
case. People also regularly borrow hunting equipment from one another,
with the lenders usually receiving a share of the catch (and sometimes
demanding it). When someone gets a moose, he or she usually returns to
the village with a load of meat and attempts to enlist the help of anyone
they can Wnd to “pack out” the rest.
In addition to capital, hunting also requires time, which many in the
community have in short supply, especially those with full-time jobs.
Many of them plan their vacations around hunting and trapping, and it is
very common for people to spontaneously take days off to hunt. When
someone gets a moose, the KFN ofWce is often short-staffed as people take
a day or two off to pack meat and then cut it up. People go out on week-
ends and after work. Those who do not have full time jobs can go out any
time, but because of their lack of steady income, they are unlikely to have
all of the equipment they need. As a result, they usually borrow what they
need from someone who has full-time work. And, as mentioned above,
this entitles the lenders to part of the catch. Occasionally, people with full-
time jobs pay (or “grubstake”) those without jobs to build or repair their
hunting cabins, trap on their traplines, and so on.
Hunting is also an occasion for socializing. If someone sets up a hunting
camp away from the village somewhere, whether it is right along the high-
way or at a trapping cabin one hundred kilometres into the bush, they can
expect a steady stream of visitors who come to help out, eat, drink coffee,
72 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All”

and socialize.8 And hunting is a regular topic of conversation in the village

as people constantly share with one another accounts of their hunts:
where they went, what they did, what they saw. Indeed, much of the every-
day talk in the village concerns hunting – both recounting past hunts and
planning future ones. Thus, hunting continues to shape social organiza-
tion in the community, though in ways that differ somewhat from those
of the past.
The other important social dimension of Kluane hunting is the sharing
and distribution of meat. This is every bit as important today as it was in
the past.9 Kluane people see the distribution of meat as an integral part of
hunting itself, and this kind of reciprocity continues to be one of the orga-
nizing principles of Kluane social organization, enmeshing people in a
web of reciprocal obligations and reinforcing kinship ties. Today, meat is
distributed throughout the community in a number of ways. First, there
are outright gifts of meat. People regularly give meat to one another;
indeed, it is rare for anyone to keep for themselves their entire catch, even
if it consists of only a few gophers or Wsh. As McClellan found in the late
1940s, there are no explicit rules for the distribution of meat. Such gifts
tend to follow family lines, though again this is not always the case. Peo-
ple do usually make sure that the elders in the community are provided for

Dennis Dickson repairing his

trapping cabin at Onion Creek,
February 1998.
 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All” 73

and often take care to give meat to those families who have no hunter to
provide them with their own. Kluane people sometimes say that certain
parts of animals, especially some organs and unborn foetuses should be
given to elders (the latter are seldom an issue these days because Kluane
people almost never shoot pregnant females anymore; not a single one
was shot during the period of my Weldwork), and they often do in fact give
these parts to elders. But, as far as I could tell, there are no rules about
which elders should receive these choice animals parts, nor do there seem
to be any other rules specifying that certain animal parts should go to
certain people. Sometimes the distribution of meat stays within relatively
narrow social boundaries, while at other times it does not. The quintes-
sential cultural expression of this type of sharing is the potlatch, where
huge amounts of meat (of all kinds) are given away almost randomly to all
comers.10 Of course, there are some people/families who, for personal rea-
sons, seldom give meat to one another, but this does not change the fact
that sharing remains the ideal for interpersonal relations in the village.11
In any case, these social obstacles to the sharing of meat are neither per-
manent nor inviolable; at potlatches, for example, meat crosses all such
social boundaries.
The “payment” of meat in exchange for labour is another important
mechanism for the redistribution of meat in the village. All of those who
participate in a hunt share in the kill. When someone gets a moose, all
of those who help shoot, clean, butcher, pack, transport, or cut meat are

Kathleen, Edward, and Michael Johnson at hunting camp, Mile 1120, Alaska
Highway, August 1996.
74 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All”

given a share. Since access to labour often follows family lines, so, often,
does the distribution of meat, but this is not a hard and fast rule. As noted
above, someone who gets a moose will often simply round up everyone in
the village who is available to come and help. Because this whole process
usually involves quite a few people and they all get a share when the work
is done, the practice of paying those who helped out has the effect of dis-
tributing the meat widely throughout the village. Similarly, people who
have caught a sufWcient number of Wsh will frequently allow others to run
their Wshnet, letting them keep the Wsh they get in the process. In such
cases, they often will not pull their net until everyone who wants Wsh has
taken as many as they want.
Finally, Kluane people also regularly share meat after it has been cooked
and prepared. In most households, families seldom sit down together to
eat formal meals;12 instead, there is usually a pot of meat on the stove,
and people simply take from it when they are hungry. Whenever a visitor
stops by, he or she is invariably offered13 tea or coffee and whatever food
is ready – almost always meat. Visits, at whatever time of day, also fre-
quently serve as the impetus for cooking something new. Though meat
that is shared with guests is not talked about or thought of as a “gift,” a
great deal of meat is nevertheless distributed among community members
in this way. Indeed, some people make it a point to visit those who have
plenty of meat. Once again, though people are more likely to visit their
close relatives (and therefore to receive cooked meat from them), this is by
no means a hard and fast rule. Indeed, friendships between non-relatives
or more distant kin are reinforced or even created through this kind of
hospitality.
The social dimensions of hunting and the redistribution of meat are
so pervasive a part of life village life that a newcomer to Burwash Landing
simply cannot fail to see it. As I became part of the community, I was
quickly drawn into all of the social relations described above. People
extended to me the same hospitality they extend to others in the village.
Wherever I visited someone, I was fed; and people regularly asked me if
I had enough meat. I was given frequent gifts of meat and tried to recip-
rocate whenever I could. At Wrst, I could only do so with rabbits or other
small game, which were all I could take on my own. Eventually, how-
ever, as I began to participate more in the process of hunting, I received
quite generous amounts of meat in return for helping to skin, clean, and
butcher animals as well as for packing and cutting meat. This enabled me
to participate more fully in the social relations of the village. I could offer
meat to my guests and give gifts of meat outright; after a while, people
even occasionally asked me for meat if they themselves were running low.
These experiences left me with no doubts whatsoever about the ongoing
importance of hunting in deWning relations between people in the village.
 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All” 75

In a very important sense, it is through their participation in the various

activities of hunting, including the sharing and eating of meat, that Klu-
ane people actively construct their identities as Indian people. Indeed,
they often explicitly contrast their own “Indianness,” which arises from
participation in these activities, to the “non-Indianness” of the White-
man, who buys his food in the grocery store and so lives a very different
kind of life. But it is not only the activities of hunting (i.e., the practices
and organization that go into procuring, preparing, and consuming meat)
that are important to Kluane people’s sense of identity. Also signiWcant are
the symbolic dimensions of the product of the hunt itself: meat.

Meat and the Survival of Identity

“I would like to say a few words about this land. The food I like is
meat.” – Salluviniq, an Inuit from Resolute Bay (quoted in Brody
1987: 62)

As a rule, Kluane people prefer wild meat to store-bought food. This is not
simply because they like the taste better (though, to be sure, most of them
claim this to be the case); rather, the consumption of wild meat is in itself
a fundamental part of Kluane people’s conception of themselves as Indian
people. SigniWcantly, they tend to refer to wild meat and Wsh as “Indian
food” and to store-bought food as “Whiteman food.” And their attitudes
towards these different types of food are equally telling. They frequently
speak of Indian food as healthy and as a source of strength and vitality,
while they see Whiteman food as unhealthy and enervating. Many people
(especially elders) told me that when they are feeling sick or sad, they will
only eat Indian food since Whiteman food does not impart the necessary
strength for dealing with these problems. Indeed, there are times when
Kluane people do not even seem to classify Whiteman food as “food” at
all; when they run low on moose meat, for example, they often remark
that they “have no meat,” even though they may have a freezer full of
beef. McClellan (1975: 115) observed the same thing Wfty years ago: “The
general feeling persists that meat should be widely shared and that one is
‘starving’ if one has no meat, no matter what other food is on hand.” In a
similar vein, when people leave the Yukon for extended periods (such as
when young people go “Outside” to attend university), what they gener-
ally say they miss most (along with their family) is “meat.” By this they do
not mean beef, which can be found easily enough in places like Vancou-
ver, Edmonton, and Victoria. They mean moose; and whenever their rela-
tives travel Outside for a visit, they invariably arrive bearing gifts of moose
meat, dried or frozen.
To Kluane people, then, wild meat is much more than simply a valuable
76 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All”

source of calories. The act of eating wild meat is the culmination of (and
raison d’être for) the whole array of practices and social relations described
above – practices that are themselves deeply rooted in a complex set of
beliefs and values. Wild meat and its consumption are, in an important
sense, symbolic of that entire social context that links Kluane people to
the land and to one another. If they were to stop eating wild meat, then
their entire way of life would change fundamentally. Their relation to land
and animals, how they spend their time, how they relate to one another,
what they think about, their values – all would necessarily lose their cur-
rent meaning and undergo dramatic change. Kluane people would, in
essence, cease to be the people they are today. The eating of wild meat
(and all that it entails) is fundamental to their identity as Indian people
and to the relation to the land that this identity implies. This vital rela-
tionship between food and identity is often overlooked in discourse on
the politics of Indian identity more generally.
I had this point driven home to me as a direct result of my participa-
tion in the activities of hunting and eating. There are a number of foods
that Kluane people see as especially “Indian.” These include moose head,
moose nose, most internal organs, “bum-guts” (large intestine), Wsh guts,
gophers, porcupine, and other foods that Euro-North American people
generally make it a point to avoid. Once, during the Wrst year of my stay, I
was accompanying Gerald Dickson and Michael Johnson to a hunting
camp. It was August, and Gerald had shot a moose the evening before. I
had been present and a number of us had helped to skin and butcher the
animal in the failing light. Then, after covering most of the meat with the
moose skin, we had packed one load of meat each – including all of the
organs – back out along the approximately one-and-a-half-mile (two-and-
a-half-kilometre) trail (mostly through swamp) to camp. It was quite late
by the time we arrived in camp, and several of us left for Burwash, promis-
ing to return the next morning to continue packing out the rest of the
meat. The next morning, as we approached camp, my two companions
began to talk excitedly about breakfast. It was the Wrst moose of the sea-
son, and both were eager to taste bum-guts again. One of them turned to
me and joked, “Yeah, you’re going to be hungry for bum-guts when you
see us eating them.” They both laughed until I asked, “What do you
mean? I’m going to be eating them too.” They both looked taken aback by
this, and Gerald said, “White people don’t eat bum-guts.” At camp Agnes,
Gerald’s mother, was indeed frying up kidney and bum-guts for breakfast.
She offered to cook up some eggs for me, but I told her not to bother; I
would just have some of what she was cooking. Michael said, “Dig in,
then,” and took a piece of bum-gut from the pan. I joined him, and found
it quite tasty. No one commented further on my breakfast choice, and we
were soon Wnished eating and busy packing and cutting meat. Over the
 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All” 77

next several days, however, several people in the village (who had not
even been there that morning) came up to me and made comments like,
“So, you like bum-guts, eh?” I had clearly made an impression.
In some ways, I think, this was a very signiWcant event in the develop-
ment of my relationship with people in the village. Not only was I willing
to work hard at packing and cutting meat but I also seemed to appreci-
ate the whole point of it all: eating. And eating properly includes eating
nearly every part of an animal, including organs and bum-guts. On a
number of occasions I heard Kluane people speak disparagingly of the
Whiteman’s habit of leaving the organs and guts in the bush to rot. I sub-
sequently tried (and liked) every part of a moose that Kluane people eat as
well as many other animals that Euro-North Americans are often hesitant
to try. People responded very positively to my genuine interest in how to
properly catch, prepare, and eat a wide variety of animals. A number of
people seemed to delight in sharing different “unusual” animals or animal
parts with me. At Wrst, I think this may have been at least in part to see if
I would really eat them, but before long it must have became apparent
that I genuinely enjoyed and appreciated these gestures. From then on,
people often shared these choice parts with me, sometimes inviting me
over specially to sample some culinary treat. Eating quickly became a very
important aspect of my relationship with a number of people in the vil-
lage and the basis of several close friendships.

Lorraine Allen and Agnes Johnson cutting moose meat, Burwash Landing, August
2001.
78 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All”

Numerous incidents helped to convince me of the importance of meat

in relation to Kluane people’s sense of themselves as Indians. I now
describe three of them. On one occasion, I was attending a potlatch in
Burwash. I was seated with a number of friends at a table, and we were
talking and laughing. It was well into the period of my stay, and everyone
in the village already knew of my propensity for eating Indian foods. One
of the servers, however, was not from the village and did not know me.
She was carrying around a box of cooked gophers and distributing them to
guests. She came up to our table and proceeded to give a gopher to every-
one but me. There was no malicious intent in excluding me, she simply
assumed, based solely on the fact that I am non-Aboriginal, that I would
not want a gopher. No one at the table, even those who knew me well,
seemed to notice that I had been excluded. I was not surprised or upset by
this, I merely report it to illustrate the extent to which First Nations peo-
ple in the southern Yukon identify certain types of food with ethnicity.
The second incident also occurred well into the period of my stay in the
community. A non-First Nations friend of mine had caught a trout and
had asked me to show her how to clean and cook Wsh guts since she knew
I had learned how to do this and wanted to taste them. As we fried them
over a campWre, another friend, a member of KFN, joined us. We all ate the
Wsh guts together. Some time later, however, the man who had joined
us expressed to me his misgivings about what I had done: he told me that
he had reservations about teaching non-Aboriginals how to eat Wsh guts
and other Indian foods. He said that if they like them and start eating
them regularly, then they will no longer be “our traditional foods.” He saw
this as a potential political problem and cited the example of a particular
non-First Nations person we both knew who was born and raised in the
Yukon. This person had grown up hunting and eating moose and, on this
basis, denied that First Nations peoples should have an “Aboriginal right”
to hunt.14
The Wnal incident occurred near the end of my stay in Burwash Landing.
I, along with many other community members, attended a KFN workshop
at Cultus Bay, across the lake from Burwash Landing. A visitor from Aus-
tralia was giving some informal classes and had introduced some ritual
practices from other parts of the world, suggesting that Kluane people
might Wnd them useful in addressing some local problems. This led to a
fairly intense discussion of ritual and its role in the lives of Kluane people.
One of the youths in attendance complained that Kluane people seem not
to have any obvious ritual practices the way many other Aboriginal peo-
ples do (such as burning sweet grass, taking sweat baths, and so on). She
clearly felt, because of this, that something must be missing from their cul-
ture, and she wanted to know what it was. Exasperated, she asked, “What
is our culture? Eating gophers?”
 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All” 79

As the discussion went on, it became clear that several people wanted
me to speak (perhaps as the resident expert on “culture”), and eventually
someone asked me publicly what I thought about the matter. I talked a bit
about the nature of ritual and then I addressed the question “what is our
culture?” directly. I told them that, yes, I thought eating gophers (and
moose, and ducks, and so on) is, in a sense, their culture. I proceeded to
talk about “hunting” much as I have in this chapter, arguing that, from
what I could see, meat itself, along with all the activities, social relations,
beliefs, and values surrounding its procurement, redistribution, and con-
sumption, was central to their ideas of themselves and their sense of
community. After my little speech, the group took a coffee break. Douglas
Dickson, one of the most respected and accomplished hunters in the com-
munity, came up to me and said, “So, you think it’s all about food, eh?” I
was taken aback and suddenly felt far less sure of myself. I could only reply
(in what must have been a very uncertain tone), “Yeah, that’s how it seems
to me.” He smiled slightly and said simply, “You’re right.” He then talked
to me brieXy about the importance of learning how to survive in the bush
before turning and walking off to pour himself some coffee.
Here I have focused on the social dimensions of hunting in Burwash
Landing. I have shown how hunting, broadly conceived as the procure-
ment, preparation, distribution, and consumption of meat, serves to orga-
nize and give meaning to social relations in the community. I have also
shown that these activities, especially the consumption of meat itself, are
fundamental aspects of Kluane identity. There is, however, a whole other
(though related) dimension to Kluane hunting. As yet, I have not said a
word about the beliefs and values that underlie Kluane people’s actions.
What do they think of themselves as doing (besides procuring food) when
they hunt? How does hunting affect their ideas about their place in the
world and their relationship to animals? These questions are vital to the
issue of knowledge: what people know, what they wish to know, and what
they feel it is appropriate and/or possible to know about animals. It is to
these issues that I now turn.

Hunting and Respect

Respect is one of the most important concepts in many First Nations
peoples’ understanding of their relationship with animals. Kluane people,
like other Aboriginal peoples throughout the North, often stress the
importance of treating animals with the proper respect. But what exactly
do they mean by this? Even a superWcial inquiry into the matter will reveal
that “respect” is a very tricky concept indeed. To begin with, Kluane peo-
ple speak about respect in a number of contexts that are seemingly quite
distinct from the realm of human-animal relations, such as when they
stress the importance of respecting other people, elders, and oneself. Is
80 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All”

respecting an animal the same as respecting oneself or an elder? Or are we

talking about different things here? Part of the problem is that there is
no Southern Tutchone word for “respect.” It appears that First Nations
peoples and/or those writing about them seized on the word “respect” as
a gloss for referring to and explaining a whole range of beliefs, values, and
practices. We cannot simply assume that the English word “respect”
stands for a distinct or coherent set of First Nations beliefs and practices;
rather, we can only hope to understand what First Nations peoples mean
by the term if we examine it “in action.” In other words, we must observe
its use within speciWc social contexts.15
To compound the problem, the term “respect” is already loaded with
meaning and signiWcance for all English speakers long before most ever
think of applying it to an understanding of First Nations peoples and their
relationship with animals. Their familiarity with the English word “re-
spect” tricks many Euro-North Americans into assuming that they under-
stand what First Nations peoples mean when they use the term. As a
result, biologists, environmentalists, and others often feel justiWed in mak-
ing claims about what constitutes respectful behaviour (according to First
Nations peoples), and they frequently do so as part of the effort to bolster
their own particular arguments and views about animals and proper
human-animal relations. In the process, however, what they really do is
unconsciously substitute their own notions of respect for those of First
Nations peoples.

Two Views of Respect

Most Euro-North Americans think of respect, in relation to animals, pri-
marily as an injunction against killing too many or wasting their meat.
And, since many of them see the injunction against waste as the very
essence of what it means to respect animals, they naturally assume that
this is also what First Nations peoples mean when they talk about respect.
This perspective is clearly visible in a recent television ad campaign spon-
sored by the Yukon Department of Renewable Resources and featuring a
First Nations hunter who is well known throughout the territory. This ad
talks about the need to respect animals and exhorts Yukon hunters: “Take
only what you need. Use all you take.” The same assumption about respect
can also be found in current issues of the Yukon Hunting Regulations Sum-
mary, which is distributed to all Yukon hunters. A section entitled “A First
Nations Perspective” contains a pair of quotes from the same respected
First Nations hunter who appears in the TV ad: “When you kill something,
the animal gives itself to you. So you’ve got to give thanks to the great
spirit. Something had to die for you to continue with your life. That’s the
way I look at it” (Art Johns, quoted in Yukon Department of Renewable
 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All” 81

Resources 1997a: 69). “If you show respect for the animal and treat it right,
it will come back to you the next time you are hungry. If you don’t show
respect, it will not return. That’s what we tell the children so they will
learn how important it is to respect the animal” (70). Note that, although
both of these statements refer, implicitly or explicitly, to the notion of
respect, neither of them explains what is implied by the term; rather,
the “meaning” of the term is supplied by the anonymous bureaucratic
author(s) of the document, who advise hunters to “Eat everything – waste
nothing” (69). The document also contains tips from the same hunter
on how to butcher and prepare a moose or caribou, especially those parts
– like the nose, head, marrow, organs, and guts – that non-First Nations
people do not usually eat. In the same vein, the Yukon Department of
Renewable Resources Sport Fishing Regulations Summary states: “through-
out their long relationship with this land and its resources, Yukon First
Nations have followed three rules of traditional wildlife management:
1. Respect the animal. 2. Take only what you need. 3. Use everything you
take” (Yukon Department of Renewable Resources 1997b: 20).
But are First Nations peoples’ notions of respect really just a synonym
for the injunction against wasting meat? Despite the assumptions made by
the author(s) of the Hunting Regulations Summary, even the quotes cited in
their own text seem to indicate that something more complex is going on.
There is no question that the injunction against waste is an important part
of the First Nations concept of respect,16 but the concept is far richer and
more complex than anything that can be summed up in a catchy slogan
penned by biologists of the Yukon Fish and Wildlife Branch. That this is
so becomes immediately apparent when one looks into the speciWcs of any
of a number of contemporary debates over wildlife in the territory. The
debate over catch-and-release Wshing is a case in point. It illustrates clearly
that most Euro-North Americans’ understanding of respect differs mark-
edly from First Nations peoples’ understanding of the term. (See Fienup-
Riordan 1990 for a discussion of the catch-and-release Wshing controversy
in the Alaskan context.)
Catch-and-release, or live-release, is a very widely used technique for the
management of Wsh stocks. In those places where there are size and bag
limits for Wsh (most jurisdictions), catch-and-release is mandatory under
certain circumstances, such as when the Wsh caught is below the size limit
or if the Wsher inadvertently catches a species of Wsh that, because of the
bag limit or season, he or she may not keep. But many biologists and sport
Wshers also advocate voluntary forms of catch-and-release Wshing. This is
the case in the Yukon, where the Department of Renewable Resources
maintains that catch-and-release is a valuable tool for managing Wsh pop-
ulations, arguing that “the real value of live-release Wshing is that it lets
82 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All”

you choose the Wsh you are going to kill and eat. It lets you release the
large, valuable spawners and make a healthy, fresh meal out of the smaller
Wsh” (Yukon Department of Renewable Resources 1997: 20).
The rhetoric of respect is very much a part of the debate over catch-and-
release Wshing in the Yukon. Most Euro-North American biologists and
sports Wshers support the practice, maintaining that it ultimately en-
hances the Wsh population and so is good for everyone. And, since catch-
and-release Wshing clearly conforms to the “take-only-what-you-need,
use-all-you-take” concept of respect, they see the practice as inherently
respectful. As one Yukon sport Wsher weighing in on the catch-and-release
debate wrote in a letter to the editor at the Yukon News: “Releasing of a Wsh
unharmed, after the battle at the end of a line, shows the greatest respect
for the Wsh and gives the greatest of personal satisfaction” (Hrynuik 1998).
Most First Nations peoples, however, Wnd the practice of catch-and-
release Wshing deeply problematic. They feel that one should only Wsh
if one needs the food; to do otherwise is to “play with Wsh.” They view
such activity as inherently disrespectful. Julie Cruikshank (1998: 57-58)
describes an interaction between a Yukon biologist who, aware of the
controversy over catch-and-release Wshing and sympathetic to the First
Nations position, nevertheless attempted to explain the value of catch-
and-release Wshing as a tool for managing Wsh stocks. An elder responded
by telling the story of “the boy who stayed with Wsh.” This well-known
story is about a boy who spoke disrespectfully about a piece of Wsh. As a
result, he was transformed into a Wsh himself and lived among the Wsh
people for an extended period. Eventually, he regained his human form
and taught people how to treat Wsh with the proper respect.17 By telling
the story in this context, it seems likely that the elder was attempting to
illustrate the dangers of disrespectful behaviour and to draw a comparison
between the disrespectful actions of the boy in the story and the practice
of catch-and-release Wshing. Other First Nations people are even more
straightforward on the subject: “I watch these Wshermen on TV. They
catch a big lake trout and lift him up out of the water. Then they measure
him and take a picture and horse around with him. They take the hook
out and let him go. Then they catch him again. How do you think that
Wsh feels?” (Jessie Scarff, quoted in Yukon Department of Renewable
Resources 1997b: 20). “The Wsh comes to you as a gift. It’s offering its life
to you. And if you don’t accept it, that’s an insult. Sooner or later, the Wsh
will stop coming to you” (Mark Wedge, quoted in Yukon Department of
Renewable Resources 1997b: 21).
Euro-North Americans often react with surprise and confusion when
they initially learn that Yukon First Nations peoples disapprove of catch-
and-release Wshing because they feel it is disrespectful to the Wsh. A com-
mon reaction is to question First Nations peoples’ concept of respect, as in
 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All” 83

the case of the sport Wsher quoted above, who continued in his letter to
the editor with the following: “Some First Nations feel live-release Wshing
hurts the spirit of the Wsh. I feel strongly that this is one issue I must dis-
agree with. To a large percentage of sport Wshers, the live release of Wsh
shows the greatest respect for the spirit of the Wsh” (Hrynuik 1998).
The controversy over catch-and-release Wshing shows that First Nations
peoples’ understanding of the term “respect” differs greatly from that of
biologists and sport Wshers. Clearly there is much more to First Nations
ideas about respect than simply an injunction against waste. It seems as
though it has something to do with a concern for the thoughts and feel-
ings of animals themselves (the injunction against “bothering” or playing
with them). This indicates that First Nations peoples conceive of the their
relationship to animals very differently than do most Euro-North Ameri-
cans. But how exactly do Kluane people conceive of animals and human-
animal relations?

Other-Than-Human Persons and Respect

One cannot hope to understand First Nations peoples’ concept of respect
without some understanding of how they perceive their relationship with
animals and the rest of the world around them. In 1960 A. Irving Hallo-
well observed that, among the Northern Ojibwa with whom he worked,
people tended to attribute person-like attributes to animals as well as to
other “inanimate” entities, such as trees, the sun and moon, thunder, and
even material artifacts such as kettles and pipes. He maintained that
Ojibwa people thought of animals (along with a number of other inani-
mate entities and natural forces) as “persons,” possessing intelligence and,
potentially, great spiritual power. He noted that, among the Ojibwa, “the
concept of ‘person’ is not, in fact, synonymous with human being but
transcends it” (Hallowell 1960: 21). Indeed, as Hallowell and many others
have since noted, Aboriginal peoples of the North American Arctic and
Subarctic do not make as rigid a distinction between human and animal as
do most Euro-North Americans. As Catharine McClellan (1975: 91) put it
for the southern Yukon: “The line which most of us in western society
draw between human beings and the rest of animate nature cannot be
nearly so sharp in the mind of the southern Yukoners. After all, in the past
animals usually appeared in human guise, and even today they may some-
times appear as men or women.”
All hunting peoples of the North American Arctic and Subarctic possess
similarly rich traditions of “long-time-ago” (or “Distant-Time,” to use
Richard Nelson’s [1983] phrase) stories. These stories concern events that
occurred in the distant past, such as the origin of the world and how ani-
mals and people came to assume their current form and roles. In many of
these stories, animals have human form, possess human technology, live
84 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All”

in human-like societies, and interact with “real” humans as though they

were human themselves. According to these stories, it was only gradually
that animals came to lose their human form and to assume their present
animal forms. In another type of story, human beings marry or otherwise
enter the world of a particular type of animal (as in the story of the boy
who stayed with Wsh, mentioned above). They are transformed into
animals themselves and live among them, sometimes for extended peri-
ods. During this time, they perceive the animals to be like humans, to use
human technology, and to live in human-like societies. Upon their return
to the human world, the characters in these stories inevitably teach their
human companions how to treat the animals of that particular species
respectfully based on their personal experiences living among them.
Although anthropologists and First Nations peoples alike refer to these as
“stories,” many Aboriginal peoples insist that they are not “just stories”
but that they are true. Indeed, many northern Aboriginal peoples con-
tinue to this day to interact with animals in human form both in their
dreams and in waking experiences during which they meet and secure the
spiritual aid – usually for life – of an “animal helper.”18 They believe that,
under the right circumstances, humans and animals have the ability to
metamorphose between human and animal form.
So, although Kluane people are every bit as aware as are Euro-North
Americans of the physical differences between humans and animals, they
consider these physical differences to be superWcial. Hallowell (1960: 35)
noted that, for the Ojibwa, “Outward appearance is only an incidental
attribute of being ... In outward manifestation neither animal nor human
characteristics deWne categorical differences in the core of being.” Humans
and animals may appear to be very different from one another, but to Klu-
ane people and many other First Nations peoples they are, in their essence,
very similar kinds of beings.
All of this means that relations between Aboriginal peoples and animals
in the Subarctic must be understood primarily as social relations. As Hal-
lowell himself put it: “The more deeply we penetrate the world view of the
Ojibwa the more apparent it is that ‘social relations’ between human
beings ... and other-than-human ‘persons’ are of cardinal signiWcance”
(22-23). This of course necessitates a rethinking of traditional anthropo-
logical notions of what constitute “social relations.” Hallowell again: “Rec-
ognition must be given to the culturally constituted meaning of ‘social’
and ‘social relations’ if we are to understand the nature of the Ojibwa
world and the living entities in it” (23). Hallowell argued that the Ojibwa
see themselves as enmeshed in a web of social relations not only with
other human beings but also with a whole host of other-than-human
persons, including animals.
Over the past four decades, anthropologists have found Hallowell’s
 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All” 85

concept of other-than-human persons useful for understanding human-

animal relations across the Arctic and Subarctic (e.g., Black 1977; Bright-
man 1993; Feit 1986; Nelson 1983; Smith 1982, 1998; Tanner 1979). Indeed,
David Smith (1998: 412) has written for the Chipewyan (a northern Atha-
paskan people not to be confused with the “Chippewa,” an alternate
spelling of Ojibwa): “The most fundamental assumption of bush sensibil-
ity is that all beings, human and non-human, are inextricably engaged in a
complex communicative interrelationship. Success in life demands act-
ively maintaining harmony, especially among human beings, and among
human and animal persons.”
Only in this context can one hope to understand Yukon First Nations
peoples’ concept of respect. As I have said, First Nations people talk about
respect in a number of different contexts. They maintain that, just as
one must respect animals, so one must also respect other people, elders,
and oneself. To most Euro-North American observers, the respect due to
humans seems of an entirely different order from that due to animals.
Indeed, even anthropologists have tended to treat their analyses of inter-
personal relations among Subarctic hunting peoples as more or less dis-
tinct from the realm of animal-human relations. I argue, however, that
this distinction is artiWcial and is created by the anthropologist rather than
by the hunters themselves. The notion of respect, at least as Kluane people
use the word today, is an important principle pertaining to how they
understand and conduct social relations, and this includes their relations
with both human and non-human persons.
This is not to say that Kluane people interact with animals the same way
they do with humans. But it does mean that social relations between
human and animal persons – just like those among humans – are gov-
erned by rules of appropriate behaviour. Most Kluane people believe that
maintaining proper social relations with animals is essential to their sur-
vival. The exact nature of these relations varies somewhat from animal to
animal, but, at the root of them all, is the principle of reciprocity. Just as it
structures relations among humans, so reciprocity also forms the basis
of relations between human and animal persons (as well as other non-
human persons in the environment). The reciprocal nature of animal-
human relations was driven home to me in a very visceral way early
during my research.
A few months after my arrival in Burwash Landing, Sharon Kabanak, a
member of the Kluane First Nation, asked me to help her with some com-
puter work. In return she promised to teach me how to snare rabbits. So, a
few days later we made snares from a roll of snare wire, boiled them with
some spruce boughs to remove the human scent, and walked out to a large
willow patch behind my cabin to set them. Sharon had to go into White-
horse for a few days, so she asked me to run the snares for her. She told
86 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All”

me that I had to do this early in the morning before hawks or coyotes

got any rabbits caught in the snares.
So, early the next morning I found myself trudging through the snow
from snare to snare. The Wrst few were empty, but just as I had almost con-
vinced myself that I had arisen early for nothing, I came upon a snare that
was not empty. There, tangled up in the willows, was a pure white snow-
shoe hare. It had strangled itself in its struggle to escape and was frozen
stiff in the cold morning air. I was overcome with feelings of amazement
and of triumph (I could now actually catch my dinner with nothing but a
piece of thin wire). The rest of the snares were empty, but I returned to my
cabin feeling exhilarated and, I must say, quite proud of myself. I cleaned
the rabbit and froze it to cook another day.
The next morning I awoke early again and eagerly headed out to run the
snares. Like the day before, one of the snares had miraculously (to my
mind) caught a rabbit. This one, however, was still alive. It looked at me
and struggled to escape as I approached. Sharon had briefed me on this
possibility and had told me that if I found a live rabbit in a snare I would
have to break its neck. It had sounded easy enough when she told me
about it in the comfort of my cabin, but as I stood there in the early morn-
ing light looking into its terriWed eyes, it suddenly seemed a very difWcult
thing to do after all. I needed time to work up my resolve, so I walked the
rest of the snare line. Slowly. I convinced myself that the purpose of my
walk was to prepare myself mentally for what I had to do, but I think I
was subconsciously hoping that the rabbit would have strangled itself in
my absence. No such luck; it was still very much alive when I returned a
short time later. So I went to it. Never having killed anything with my bare
hands before, I was not really sure what I was doing. I grabbed the creature
and twisted its neck. I heard cracking. I dropped it in the snow, thinking
that I was done with it. But the rabbit was not dead yet. It was gasping
for air and thrashing about on the snow. In horror, I grabbed it and twisted
again, harder this time. Still it was not dead. I had to repeat the pro-
cess several times, each time more horriWed and desperate than the last.
Finally, I twisted its head nearly off, and – mercifully – it died. Feeling
shaky and nauseous, I left the rabbit in the snow and walked, taking deep
breaths of the cold air to settle my stomach. After a while I returned,
picked up the rabbit and headed back towards my cabin to clean it, feeling
distinctly less proud than I had the day before.
The next day – somewhat recovered – I cooked a soup using both rab-
bits. Later on, I invited my neighbour, Joe Johnson, who was outside
repairing his skidoo, in for some soup. As we ate, I told him how difWcult
it had been for me to kill that rabbit and how badly I had felt when my
ineptness had caused it unnecessary suffering. He told me that when you
kill an animal you must never think about the pain it feels. To do so, he
 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All” 87

said, is not only difWcult on you but it is also disrespectful to the animal.
Instead, he went on, it is important to give thanks to the animal, because
it provides you with food that sustains your own life. Without it, you –
and not the animal – would be dead.
I thought about this for a long time. There is no shortage of anthropo-
logical literature on First Nations hunting in the North, and all of it must
deal to some extent with First Nations peoples concept of respect. I had
read much of this literature, and I thought I had at least a basic under-
standing of what the notion of respect was all about. It seemed clear to
me why it might be disrespectful to waste meat or to kill an animal that
one does not need. I also had a sense of why it might be considered disre-
spectful to talk (or even think) badly about animals or to mishandle their
remains. But I could not understand why it would be disrespectful just
to think about the pain that animals might feel when you kill them. If
anything, it seemed to me, empathy and compassion should be signs of
respect, rather than disrespect, towards the animals that one must kill in
order to survive.
Over the next few months, I got over the trauma of that Wrst rabbit snar-
ing experience by continuing to help people run their rabbit snares. One
of the people with whom I spent the most time doing this was Agnes
Johnson, who taught me the proper way to kill rabbits (it involves a
pulling motion rather than a twisting one). She had also shown me how
to trap and kill “gophers” (Arctic ground squirrels), another prized source
of meat in the area. Gradually, I had become much more proWcient at
killing these animals, and it was no longer a traumatic experience for me.
I always kept Joe Johnson’s words in mind, however; I blocked out all
thoughts of the animal’s suffering and always remembered to utter a silent
word of thanks to it. There is no question that this helped me to deal emo-
tionally with the act of killing.
Then one day, on a drive into Whitehorse with Agnes, we had a conver-
sation that helped me to understand Joe’s words. As we drove, I told Agnes
about my Wrst experience snaring rabbits, how difWcult it had been and
how horrible I had felt. Then I recounted to her my conversation with Joe.
I told her my understanding of respect and that I did not understand why
it is disrespectful to think about an animal’s suffering when you kill it. She
was thoughtful for a while. She told me that Joe was absolutely right but
that she was not sure how to explain it to me. We drove on for some time,
each thinking quietly to ourselves. Eventually, Agnes broke the silence.
“It’s like at a potlatch,” she said. If someone gives you a gift at a pot-
latch, you must not refuse it, nor do you give it back, complain about it,
or Wnd fault with it in any way. It is disrespectful to imply or even to think
that there is some reason that the giver should not have given it to you
(e.g., because it is too expensive and they cannot afford to do so). You just
88 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All”

accept the gift and be thankful. To do otherwise – even in your thoughts –

shows a lack of respect for the giver. “It is the same with animals,” she
said. They come to you as a gift. You must give thanks for that gift. She
stressed the uncertainty of hunting in particular: “you never know if you
are going to get another such gift, so you must be especially thankful
and respectful.” To think about the animals’ suffering, she said, is to Wnd
fault with that gift. To do so is to run the risk of giving offence and never
receiving such a gift again. She told me also that feelings of pride like
those I had felt when I had snared the Wrst rabbit (which I had found
already dead) – were equally inappropriate, since my skill at setting snares,
while a necessary part of snaring rabbits, was not in the end what had
caused the animal to be caught.19
It is signiWcant that Agnes chose to explain the human-animal relation-
ship by drawing an analogy to the potlatch, which, as I have already
pointed out, Kluane people see as epitomizing relations of reciprocity
among humans. Just as the principle of reciprocity continues to organize
and structure social relations among Kluane people, so too does it form
the basis of relations between human and animal persons. Animals give
themselves to the hunter so that the hunter and his or her people may
live. With this gift, however, as with all gifts (Mauss 1967), come serious
responsibilities and obligations.
A number of authors (e.g., Brightman 1993; Nelson 1983; Tanner 1979)
have written extensively on the ritual obligations towards animals that
structure relations between human and non-human persons in the Sub-
arctic. Adrian Tanner (137) has argued that, among the Mistassini Cree,
hunting rituals presuppose the real-life existence of animals as they appear
in Cree myth (long-time-ago stories); that is, as persons with whom
humans can enter into reciprocal social relations. There is some variation
in the nature of these obligations and responsibilities among the different
Subarctic hunting peoples of North America, but there are striking simi-
larities across the continent (and indeed throughout the circumpolar
world). Hunting peoples across the North believe that human beings incur
ritual obligations towards animal people as a direct result of their need to
kill and eat them. What follows is a brief outline of some of the most
important of these responsibilities and obligations in the Subarctic gener-
ally, and how they relate to the Kluane region both historically and in the
present.
(1) Don’t talk (or think) badly about animals. This includes laughing at
animals, making fun of them, or saying (or thinking) anything derogatory
about them. It also includes boasting about your hunting abilities (espe-
cially in such a way as to deny the animal’s pivotal role in the process),
and, as I found out, empathizing with their suffering when you kill them.
The Xip side of this is that you must remember to appropriately thank
 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All” 89

animals when they give themselves to you so that you may live, and you
must teach young people how to speak and act around them. If you wish
to avoid offending them, you must always keep in mind that animals are
powerful and sentient beings who can understand and interpret human
speech, action, and even thought.
Catharine McClellan (1975: 115) writes that “humans must never think
‘bad thoughts’ about [moose or caribou]” and gives an example of one
hunter who people said had been crippled by a moose because he “said
something bad about it.” As I quickly discovered from my experience
learning how to snare rabbits, the injunction against talking and thinking
badly about animals continues to be a very important aspect of Kluane
people’s relations with animals. One simply does not say or think bad
things about animals without running the risk of offending them. I regu-
larly heard parents admonish their children for laughing at or joking about
animals. Several times while trapping gophers with people, I heard young
children laugh at or imitate the sound that these animals sometimes make
in fear when they are caught in a trap and you approach them. Without
fail, an adult would immediately snap, “You’re not supposed to make fun
of animals.” SigniWcantly, it was not only older people who did this; I also
heard young parents, in their early twenties, do the same. It is clear that
this injunction against “talking about animals” is fairly old since it appears
in a number of long-time-ago stories throughout the area. Although this
clearly implies that animals can understand human speech and even read
their thoughts, I never had anyone tell me this explicitly. Catharine
McClellan, however, noted that “the Indians are careful never to say any-
thing offensive about the bear people, because bear [people] can hear what
humans are saying at any time, and at any place” (126; see also 127).
(2) Don’t bother or play with animals. If an animal offers itself to you, you
must accept that gift graciously or risk offending the animal. This means
that you must kill animals quickly and with a minimum of suffering. You
should never torment or otherwise bother an animal before killing it (e.g.,
if it is caught in a trap). It also means that you should not wound or kill
an animal if you do not need the meat.20
We saw in the discussion about catch-and-release Wshing that the in-
junction against bothering animals, like that against talking badly about
them, is still an important aspect of Yukon First Nations peoples’ relation-
ship with animals. Such treatment is humiliating to the animal, and, in
the case of Wsh and game animals, it represents a failure to properly hon-
our the gift they have offered. Like the injunction against talking badly
about animals, the prohibition against “playing with them” remains
strong in the Kluane area. The following pair of quotes, the Wrst from a
man in his late Wfties and the second from his son, who is in his late 20s,
illustrate that parents continue to teach their children not to play with
90 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All”

animals: “[My parents taught me] how to respect animals and wildlife, and
everything like that. We used to ... before we’d killed anything I always
said in my native Tanana language that ... you know ‘you’re dying for me,
so I’m going to shoot you’ so that’s it. I do it and then didn’t feel bad
about it, because the animals are there for us to use. I would say for sur-
vival and not to play with, because they tell you not to play with any part
of animals and stuff. You don’t play around with that. You respect it”
(interview with Charlie Eikland 1996). “My father told me, and actually
it was illustrated in the way he hunted and treated animals, that you don’t
play with animals. You know, you treat them with respect, even though
you kill them. You’re doing it for a purpose. You’re not doing it for enter-
tainment ... There is deWnitely some satisfaction in being out there doing
it, but the paramount thing was we took it home and ate it” (interview
with Mark Eikland 1996).
Nor does this apply only to those animals that people kill for food. One
must respect the dignity of all animals, no matter how small and seem-
ingly insigniWcant. As Joe Johnson put it: “And when you were a kid, they
tell you not to fool around with ants or don’t talk about other animals.
Ants ... don’t fool around with ants ... when they get together, they going
to pack you away. They work hard for what they got; don’t bother them.
Don’t kick up their house. And that’s how you were brought up. Today,
when I see an ant hill, I don’t kick it. I never did kick an ant hill. But I just
walk around them. You know?” (interview with Joseph Johnson 1996).21
The injunction against senseless killing applies even to “nuisance” ani-
mals and those that actively harm humans. On one occasion, I was speak-
ing with a Tagish man in Whitehorse. We were discussing his experiences
as a member of the Yukon Fish and Wildlife Management Board. He felt
that there were major differences between how First Nations and Euro-
North American members of the board thought about and dealt with ani-
mals. To illustrate what he meant, he said that if a mosquito bites an
Indian, the Indian will try to kill it. But if a mosquito bites a Whiteman,
the Whiteman will try to kill them all (he was clearly referring to the
Yukon government’s mosquito control program, which sprays near all
Yukon communities).
(3) Proper treatment of animal remains. What exactly constitutes “proper”
treatment varies from place to place as well as by species. It commonly
includes such things as putting out the eyes of slain animals, placing
skulls and bones off the ground some distance from camp (usually in
trees), returning Wsh and/or sea mammal bones to the water, keeping car-
casses away from dogs, not leaving blood from butchering/skinning on
the snow or Xoor of a dwelling, and so on. In general, Subarctic peoples
believe(d) that improper treatment of the animal after it has been killed
is insulting to it, possibly causing it to cease giving itself in the future.
 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All” 91

Improper treatment may even jeopardize the animals’ ability to return to

life to be hunted again.22
In the past, according to McClellan (see especially 1975: 107-98), First
Nations peoples in the southern Yukon had speciWc rules for how to
handle and dispose of nearly every animal with which they regularly came
into contact. However, I saw little evidence that these practices persist
into the present. I never witnessed anyone make any special effort to
dispose of animal remains. People frequently just left bones and other
inedible remains on the ground or even gave them directly to the dogs.
The older generation in the village, however, remembers when this was
not the case. Once, a friend of mine pointed out several moose forelegs
and a skull that had been left on the ground where people had recently
butchered a moose. “You see that?” he asked, “You never would have seen
that in the old days. Those old people never left anything lying around.”
Some people even remember some of the speciWc rules for dealing with
remains: “When you kill an otter, you’re not supposed to bring it into
camp, into your dwelling. Supposed to skin it half a mile away and put the
body up high, off the ground. Cover it with branches. Same here with
mink. Show it respect because all the animals used to be people before”
(interview with Joseph Johnson 1996).23
(4) Don’t waste meat. You must not waste meat or kill excessively. This,
the much celebrated injunction against waste, is related to both (2) and (3)
above. To throw any meat away or allow it to rot is tantamount to having
both killed the animal needlessly and treated its remains improperly. If an
animal gives its life so you can live, you must honour that gift by using all
of it. To do otherwise is to treat such a gift with disdain and to risk not
receiving another.
McClellan (1975: 206) says very little about this directly, except to state
that “children are still taught to be careful never to waste food. One of the
few times I saw a Tagish child punished was when she threw away a half
eaten cookie.” In addition, McClellan described food storage practices in
great detail (205-21), as did Robert McKennan (1959: 32-36), who wrote
about the Upper Tanana, the Kluane people’s neighbours to the northwest.
This indicates that Aboriginal peoples in the southern Yukon did indeed
make efforts to avoid wasting meat. Whatever the situation in the past,
however, today Kluane people clearly feel very strongly that it is wrong to
waste meat. Everyone in the village was adamant that all parts of an ani-
mal must be eaten. I witnessed very little meat wastage, and what little did
occur was met with strong disapproval in the village.
(5) Ritual feasts and food taboos. Many boreal hunting peoples practise a
number of special ritual observances to honour and/or avoid offending
certain animals. These include ritual feasts that speciWcally honour certain
types of animals and ensure their return (often the Wrst animal of that type
92 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All”

taken each season). They also include strict taboos regarding who may eat
the meat of speciWc animals (and/or speciWc animal parts). These taboos
must be observed to avoid insulting the animal (perhaps the most impor-
tant animal for many Subarctic peoples in this regard is the black bear).
McClellan noted the presence in the southern Yukon of ritual feasts
to honour certain animals as well as “an elaborate series of tabus and other
observances surround[ing] a number of items of the aboriginal diet”
(McClellan 1975: 206). It seems, however, that ritual feasting speciWcally
to honour particular animals was a thing of the past, even by the late
1940s: “In early days, people paid special honor to the Wrst moose or cari-
bou killed each season by anyone. Everybody in the living group feasted
on it, and the remains of the animal were treated with more than usual
care. Humans should act this way in order to respect the animal qwani
[Inland Tlingit for “people”] and their yek [Tlingit word McClellan trans-
lates as “spirit”] who will be pleased and will therefore continue the sup-
ply of game” (115, see also 185). People do, however, seem to have been
still practising some of the food taboos she mentions (see chaps 4, 5, 6,
and 13 for descriptions of speciWc taboos and observances). Like the ritual
disposal of animal remains, however, these practices seem to have disap-
peared over the past Wfty years. I never heard anyone speak of food taboos,
nor did I ever see anyone avoid eating speciWc animals or animal parts for
ritual reasons.
The exact nature of these responsibilities and obligations, like other
aspects of animal-human relations, has changed considerably over the
past century. Indeed, Brightman (1993), Krech (1999), and others have
shown quite convincingly that northern Aboriginal peoples’ relations
(ideological as well as physical) with animals have changed, often quite
radically, in response to contact with Euro-North Americans and the fur
trade. But just because Kluane people do not follow the old practices for
disposing of animal remains, ritual feasting, and food taboos does not
mean that they now see themselves as being “disrespectful” of animals.
Social norms and ideas about what constitute “acceptable” behaviours
are constantly changing in every society, and this is as much the case for
human-animal relations as it is for human-human relations. The fact that
social relations between human and non-human persons in the Subarctic
have changed over the past century should not be surprising given the
dramatic changes that have taken place in other spheres of life. Despite
these changes, however, the basic idea underlying Kluane people’s obli-
gations to animals has remained the same. Kluane people continue to
conceive of animals as intelligent, social, and spiritually powerful other-
than-human persons with whom they are engaged in an ongoing set of
reciprocal relations, and they see their relations with animal people as
vital to their physical and cultural survival.
 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All” 93

To treat animals with “respect” is to conduct one’s relationship with

them in accordance with the social standards that they (the animals)
deem appropriate (and these may vary somewhat among species). Since
animals, despite their surface appearances, are generally held to be much
more powerful (spiritually) than humans, maintaining proper relations
with them, though vitally important, is fraught with spiritual danger. As
Catharine McClellan (1975: 91) notes for the southern Yukon:

In his relations with animals, the Yukon Indian meets beings with power
which often seems to be far greater than his own. Yet, if he is to live at all,
he must Wnd ways of coming to terms with these powerful co-inhabitants
of the earth. Much of his intellectual interest focuses on the problem, and
the uneasiness he frequently feels about animals suggests that the perfect
solution for harmony between man and animals remains to be found ...
Since animals are endowed with spirits and are potential givers of good or
evil, they can never be ignored. Their creation has made life possible for
the Indian, but at the same time it has imposed a heavy burden upon him.

If a hunter fails to live up to the obligations he or she incurs through

hunting, then the animal or animals may terminate their relationship
with the hunter by refusing to give themselves in the future. In this case,
no matter how skilled the hunter, he or she will never get another animal
of that species until the animal relents. Especially powerful or bad animals
may also impose other sanctions on the hunter, such as illness or even
death. Indeed, disrespectful behaviour is often viewed as a threat to the
entire community:

You don’t do things that are going to be not good to another person or
another thing. When you go out and you get an animal, you don’t just do
it for the hell of it. You don’t do it just to play with. A few days ago some
kids brought a pellet gun here, and they took a shot at a seagull. They
broke that seagull’s wing. By the end of the day, I bet half the community
knew about that and which kids were involved in it. Now in a city it
would ... it would be of no concern to anybody. But in a community like
this that still has to make our life on the land by having respect for it, that
kind of thing ... see a little kid do something like that, that’s not good.
They got no use to do something like that. They got no reason for that.
Why did they do something like that? You got to correct them right now
so that in the future they don’t do something like that. And if they ever
do go out and hunt like that, that good thinking and goodness in your
heart ... that you go out and do something like that. You don’t go out
there and just go, “Well I’m going to go out there and shoot this or shoot
that because I want the gall bladder, because I want the horns.” You go out
94 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All”

there because you have to. You need the food. You don’t go out there for
the hell of it. (Interview with Mary Jane Johnson 1996)

Killing animals is a serious business, and Kluane people do not engage in

it lightly.
Marilyn Strathern (1984, 1988) has argued that, in giving and receiving
gifts, people actively construct their own sense of personhood. This is
certainly true for the kinds of animal-human exchange in which Kluane
people participate. Kluane people’s sense of themselves is very much tied
up with their reciprocal relationship with animals. It is through this rela-
tionship, along with the eating and sharing of meat that it entails, that
Kluane people identify themselves as Indians and distinguish themselves
from Whites. It is also very much in this context that they interpret and
understand their “empirical knowledge” about animals.
Kluane people’s ideas about respecting animals grow out of their belief
that animals are other-than-human persons. Many Kluane people con-
tinue to see themselves as enmeshed in a web of reciprocal social relations
with animal people. They see success in hunting both as evidence that
they have properly maintained these relations and as an indication of
their obligation to continue doing so. To respect animals is to conduct
those relations properly and to live up to one’s social obligations to these
important other-than-human people. So far, however, I have said little
that is new about northern First Nations peoples’ concept of respect vis-à-
vis animals. The anthropological literature on the region has dealt exten-
sively with the notion of respect and, speciWcally, with the types of ritual
observance I outlined above. There is no doubt that these continue to be
an important part of Kluane people’s idea about what it means to respect
animals; however, there is even more to the notion of respect than this. In
fact, there is an important aspect of the concept of respect that has gone
almost completely unmentioned in the anthropological literature. This
neglected aspect of respect has a powerful bearing on what it means to
“know” animals and how one may appropriately gain such knowledge
(and, thus, on attempts to integrate traditional knowledge into the insti-
tutional structures of the state). Before I can describe this other dimension
of respect, however, we must take a fairly close look at Kluane people’s
ideas about what it means to “know” something in the Wrst place.

Experience as Knowledge
In subsequent chapters, I argue that the idea of “knowledge” is not an
appropriate conceptual tool for trying to integrate First Nations peoples’
understandings about the world with those of Euro-North American biol-
ogists, lawyers, environmentalists, and others. This is because the term
“knowledge” itself is loaded with a great deal of cultural baggage. As a
 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All” 95

result, applying this term to First Nations peoples’ lived experiences has
the effect of imposing on their lives a set of “foreign” assumptions about
the nature of the world and how humans can relate to and “know” it. And
these assumptions then become the criteria for distinguishing which of
their experiences are relevant and which are not. My reluctance to use the
term “knowledge,” however, does not mean that First Nations peoples do
not know things and, indeed, even have their own ideas about what con-
stitutes knowledge. They do, of course; but their ideas about knowledge
differ markedly from those of most Euro-North American people with
whom they deal. As we explore these alternate understandings of knowl-
edge, it is important to remember that what I (and others) refer to in this
section as knowledge does not qualify as such in political arenas like those
of wildlife management, land claims negotiations, and environmental
politics.
Recently, scholars have begun to take a critical look at local ideas about
knowledge among northern Athapaskan peoples (especially in the eastern
part of Dene country): how they conceive of, produce, and validate knowl-
edge among themselves. This scholarship has pointed out that northern
Athapaskan peoples see true knowledge as rooted in personal experience;
that is, they believe that people can only truly know what they have expe-
rienced themselves (e.g., Goulet 1998; Ridington 1988a, 1988b; Rushforth
1992, 1994; Scollon and Scollon 1979: 185; Smith 1998). Of course, these
authors all recognize the culturally contingent nature of experience. For
example, for most northern Athapaskan peoples personal experiences
include not only waking experiences but also dreams. Indeed, several of
these scholars point out that dream experiences are the basis for some of
the most powerful forms of true knowledge among northern Athapaskans.
Since any one person’s personal experiences of the world are necessarily
limited, however, everyone must to some extent also rely on the knowl-
edge of others. As a result, northern Athapaskan peoples also accept and
act upon “secondary” knowledge obtained from others through stories or
conversation.24 Indeed, they regard some forms of secondary knowledge
as extremely valuable (e.g., stories from respected elders). In general, how-
ever, they view such knowledge as far less reliable than the primary knowl-
edge of personal experience and are careful to consider the source of all
secondary knowledge in assessing its validity.25 In the end, they believe,
one can only truly verify secondary knowledge through one’s own per-
sonal experience.
The European concept of knowledge posits a collection of thing-like bits
of information that can be separated not only from their social context
but also from the people who “know” them. Thus, learning is a matter of
“gaining,” or “receiving,” knowledge, and teaching consists of “passing
on,” or “bestowing,” one’s knowledge on others. The fact that northern
96 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All”

Athapaskan peoples believe that true knowledge derives from personal

experience means that they do not conceive of knowledge in this way. For
them, knowledge cannot be detached and exchanged between individu-
als; instead, true knowledge (i.e., personal experience) is an inseparable
aspect of a person’s being (see Rushforth 1992: 485-86). One can share
one’s knowledge with others but only in the form of secondary knowl-
edge, which is less reliable and useful. The primary knowledge of personal
experience resides forever with the experiencer alone:

For Sahtúot’ine [Bearlake Athapaskans], knowledge is not an object but

an attribute or quality assimilated into a person’s being. To be alien-
able, primary knowledge would have to be objectiWed and its relationship
to individual experience severed, which has not occurred among the
Sahtúot’ine. Further, because one person’s primary knowledge can only be
transferred to another as secondary knowledge, primary knowledge is not
alienated from the individual. Only secondary knowledge, which is less
than fully justiWed, legitimate, and useful, can be transferred from one
person to another. (491)

Perhaps not surprisingly, then, northern Athapaskans have very differ-

ent ideas about learning and teaching than do most Euro-North Ameri-
cans. They place little emphasis on formal instruction as a means for
educating children (or older learners, such as visiting anthropologists)
since this provides learners with only secondary knowledge, which is far
less useful and reliable than the primary knowledge of personal experi-
ence. Indeed, several people told me point blank that one cannot learn
anything about the bush from books or in a classroom; rather, the empha-
sis is on providing young people with opportunities to participate directly
in subsistence activities out in the bush. This gives them the chance not
only to learn speciWc subsistence techniques but also to gain experiential
knowledge of the land and animals. Indeed, not only do many northern
Athapaskans consider formal instruction a less than optimal means of
teaching but they also see it as potentially detrimental since it can deprive
young people of the opportunity to obtain true knowledge by experienc-
ing things for themselves (Goulet 1998: 29).
If direct participation is not immediately possible (e.g., because of the
complicated nature of a particular activity), then people are expected to
learn by Wrst watching those who are knowledgeable rather than through
formal instruction or (for the inquisitive anthropologist) by asking a lot
of questions. Once you have watched something being done, you are
expected to perfect the action through practice. In a brief survey of the lit-
erature, Goulet (1998: 29-33) shows that the method of “learning by
observation” is extremely widespread among northern Athapaskans (and
 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All” 97

Native Americans more generally), and Kluane people are no exception to

this rule.
Kluane people are quite aware of the differences between their methods
of teaching/learning and those of Euro-North Americans.26 They, like
Athapaskan groups to the east, have been exposed to the Canadian educa-
tion system for some time (though not for as long as their eastern neigh-
bours). As a result, a number of people felt it important to describe to
me their way of “learning by watching,” and they explicitly contrasted
this to “how White people learn” (through books or in classrooms). Many
people told me that, when they were young, they had been expected to
learn how to do things in the bush (from butchering a moose to lashing
down a toboggan load) merely by watching their elders do it Wrst and then
by doing it themselves. I myself quickly discovered that if I wanted to
learn anything about hunting, Wshing, trapping, or general survival in the
bush, then I had to keep my mouth shut and watch carefully. Once I felt
competent to try something, I simply did it.
The emphasis on personal experience applies not only to how one
goes about mastering technical tasks but also to how one learns about the
land and animals, to how one becomes a good hunter, and to how one
learns about respect. People often stressed that their knowledge of the
bush could not be summed up in or learned from a book. The only way to
learn about the land is to spend time out in the bush. And it is not enough
simply to see a place once because the land constantly changes; it is dif-
ferent at different times of the year and it also changes slowly over time.
To truly begin to know a place, you must spend a great deal of time there
and experience it in all seasons over a period of many years. Similarly, if
you want to learn about animals, then the only way is to spend time out
on the land hunting and observing them. All of this is evident in people’s
ideas of what it means to be a good hunter.
As described above, Kluane people view hunting as a matter of survival.
But, despite the common analogy,27 the bush is not a grocery store with
food labelled and organized by aisle. To Wnd what one needs requires a
great deal of knowledge and experience. This does not simply mean that
good hunters have to memorize where different animals can be found at
different times of the year. In practice, the process is much more complex
than that. To Wnd a moose on a particular day, a hunter must weigh a hun-
dred different variables: weather, temperature, wind speed and direction,
snow depth, vegetation, land forms, time of year, time of day, animal be-
haviour, and so on. Given the complexity of the problem, it is amazing
that people did not simply starve a long time ago. But they did not. In fact,
Aboriginal peoples of the southwest Yukon were long renowned as some of
the best big game hunting guides in the world. Even so, their abilities are
difWcult to characterize as “knowledge” in the typical Western scientiWc sense.
98 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All”

On a few occasions, one or another of the better hunters in the village

mentioned to me that he/she had a “feeling” about where to look for
moose on a particular day; these feelings almost always turned out to be
accurate. Most Euro-North Americans would dismiss these incidents as
coincidence or lucky guesswork since the hunters cannot “explain” their
reasoning. Rupert Ross (1992: 70-87) has explored this apparently intu-
itive understanding of the environment among Cree and Ojibwa hunters
in northern Ontario. He argues that it is based on extensive personal expe-
rience. Over time, hunters build up a vast store of experiential knowledge;
they have seen the land in thousands of subtly different climatic and
seasonal conditions and have observed animal habits and behaviour in
each of those conditions. As a result, when a hunter observes current con-
ditions, he or she can compare them to a vast store of past experience.
Based on this comparison, a feeling develops about where animals might
be on that particular day – to the point where someone with enough expe-
rience on the land will often have a seemingly uncanny sense of where
animals are at a given time. I tried asking hunters how they knew in
advance where animal would be, but they were by and large unable to
explain how they knew (or else they responded to the silly question with
an over-simpliWed answer like, “because it’s cold”); they just knew. This led
me to think, like Ross, that what is involved is not so much a conscious act
of reasoning as a subconscious process.
The intimate familiarity with the land that I have just described can
only be obtained by spending long periods of time out in the bush. This
knowledge involves a way of life rather than a collection of “facts” about
the land. It is rooted in personal experience and, as a result, it cannot be
passed on to others; the only way to learn to hunt is to do it. As Goulet
(1998: 31) puts it: “to know is effectively to become a dancer, a hunter or an
embroiderer.” Maurice Bloch (1990), in his exploration of what he calls
“non-sentential” knowledge, gives an explanation that is strikingly similar
to Goulet’s. By non-sentential knowledge Bloch means knowledge that
cannot be expressed (without distortion) in the linear form demanded by
language. Non-sentential knowledge – whether it involves the ability to
identify good sites for swidden agriculture, to recognize metapatterns in
chess, to type, to drive a car, or to hunt – cannot be shared with others
because it cannot be expressed linguistically. One can tell someone about
how to do these things, but the only way one can really learn them is by
doing them.
None of this is to imply, however, that Kluane people never actively
help one another to learn. They do – but seldom through direct means
such as formal instruction or abstract explanations. As noted above, some
people actually see this direct approach as a disservice to the learner;
instead, they prefer to use more indirect means of teaching, such as
 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All” 99

correcting mistakes, telling stories, and joking. This indirect approach has
several advantages. In the Wrst place, by waiting until a person is strug-
gling to learn something by doing it, the would-be teacher can conWdently
assume that the former is really serious about wanting to learn (in this way
elders neither waste their time and effort teaching someone something
they do not care about nor do they risk imposing their will on the “stu-
dent”). Second, these indirect methods preserve the experiential nature
of the learning process by allowing the learner to continue to learn by
watching/doing.
Several women told me stories about similar incidents that had occurred
to each of them as little girls learning to sew. After spending hours on
some intricate beadwork, a “grandma” had taken one look at their work
and silently begun pulling it apart. Invariably, they had made a mistake
back at the beginning, and the older woman undid everything they had
done since that time until they came to the original mistake. Finally, after
undoing hours of work, the elders had handed the pieces back to the girls
to begin again. All remarked that it had been a frustrating experience. It
was clearly one they had never forgotten, however, and they all claimed
that they had been very careful not to make the same mistake again. Even
more important, they said that incidents like these had taught them
patience and the importance of doing things the right way. My experi-
ences of indirect teaching methods in the bush paralleled the stories that
people told me of their own educations. People were seldom interested in
telling me in the abstract how to do something. If, however, I tried to do
it, then my companions would correct any mistakes I made by telling me
what I had done wrong and by allowing me to correct them myself, or –
even more likely – by undoing my mistake and Wxing it for me as I looked
on and tried to commit the correction to memory.
In addition to correcting the mistakes of those attempting to “learn by
watching/doing,” knowledgeable Kluane people also use laughter and
joking as highly effective educational tools. Very little has been written
on the educational role of joking and humour among northern Atha-
paskans.28 Unfortunately, I can only touch on the subject here. A number
of older Kluane people told me that, once they had watched something
enough times,29 their elders had expected them to perform reasonably well
on their own. If they did not do so, they said, then the elders would laugh
at and/or ridicule their efforts.

Indian ... he tells you once. And they give you shit after that if you don’t
catch on. So you better catch on Wrst time around. If they tell you twice or
three times, they say, “Oh shit, that guy’s useless. He’ll never learn.” My
dad used to give me shit if I asked him how to do things second time:
“why in the hell didn’t you pay attention the Wrst time?” You know ... and
100 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All”

you live that type of life. You’re always with ... somebody that’s going out
in the bush. You see them set rabbit snares. You see them trapping. You see
them building caches. (Interview with Joe Johnson 1996).

Most people claimed that such jokes had not been mean-spirited; rather,
they had been good-natured and genuinely funny – so funny, in fact, that
the butt of the joke him- or herself could seldom refrain from joining in
the laughter. Agnes Johnson recalled that once, when she was a little girl,
she had attempted to “punch” a moose skin on her own.30 She had done
so but had punched it on the hair side rather than on the other side as one
is supposed to. When her grandmother saw what Agnes had done, she did
not yell at her or tell her she was stupid; instead, she had just laughed and
laughed. It had been so funny that Agnes had laughed too, though at the
time she had not been sure what was so funny. But even the memory of
that event, which had occurred so long ago, made Agnes laugh. Her grand-
mother had laughed because, although Agnes had been young at the time
(she estimated somewhere between seven and nine years old), she had
helped with skins before and had seen it done many times; so she should
have known better. Once she Wgured out what she had done wrong, she
assured me, she had never made that mistake again.
This educational form of joking is not a thing of the past (though some
elder Kluane people lamented that it is far less common than it used to
be). I witnessed joking of this kind many times during my stay in the com-
munity (and more than once was on the receiving end). On one occasion
in early September, for example, two hunters had attempted to call a bull
moose.31 Instead of waiting there to see if a moose would come, however,
they had grown hungry and had headed back to the village. A short time
later, two other hunters from the village had shot a moose right near the
spot where the Wrst pair had called. It did not take long for people to learn
what had happened, and it was a big joke in the village for the next day or
two. One man in particular enjoyed describing in rich detail (though he
himself had not been involved in the incident at all) the thoughtfulness
and generosity of the Wrst pair of hunters for having called a moose for the
second pair. None of the joking was malicious; even the hunters who were
the butt of these jokes laughed at them. Besides providing the entire vil-
lage with a day or two of amusement, however, this joking also had the
effect of teaching the two hunters a valuable lesson about moose hunting:
if you call a moose, you must be prepared to wait – sometimes for several
hours – because they can come from a very long way off. And it was not
just the two hunters who learned this lesson; the public nature of the jok-
ing meant that everyone in the village learned about (or was reminded of)
an important aspect of calling moose.
Finally, several Kluane people made it clear to me that humans are not
 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All” 101

the only ones who can act as teachers. They told me that, for those with
an open mind, animals can be the greatest teachers of all. By watching
what they do, people can learn not only about the animals themselves
and how to hunt them but also about the environment as well: “You start
reading the animals ... When you see the sheep start coming down low,
right into the gullies and stuff like that, they [elders] are going to say ‘Oh,
it’s going to be a big wind or a big storm.’ You get prepared too. Just by
watching the animals” (interview with Joseph Johnson 1996). Even more
important, however, several people indicated that animals can teach us
important lessons about life and about ourselves: “Animals teach us things
too. Teach us patience and respect and stuff like that. All that, I’ve been
taught by my grandpa Sam and my grandma Jessie. Taught me all those
important things ... how animals can teach us and stuff. I always think
about what can I learn from ... or we as a whole society ... what can we
learn from animals? I mean, a lot of people don’t think that way, eh? A lot
of people forget that animals can teach us things. I mean, we once lived
with them” (interview with Gerald Dickson 1996).
This attitude is perhaps a natural consequence of the belief that animals
are other-than-human persons. After all, if to respect animals is to conduct
oneself properly in relation to animal people, then who better to teach
respect than animals themselves? Indeed, we have already seen that ani-
mals are the ultimate source of knowledge about respectful behaviour;
after all, according to long-time-ago stories, people – like the boy who
stayed with Wsh – Wrst learned the rules for respectful treatment of animals
directly from animals themselves. It is only by knowing animals directly,
through personal experience, that one can hope to relate to them properly
and respectfully. The above quote is also important because it directly
links the notion of respect with that of patience. The signiWcance of this
will become apparent shortly.
As noted in Chapter 1, Kluane people are no strangers to Euro-North
American ideas about education. They attend southern Canadian-style
schools and recognize the importance of this type of education, especially
for facing current challenges such as land claims. They know that the
formal instruction of Euro-Canadian-style education now has its place in
their lives. But when it comes to knowledge about the bush, about the
land and animals, most Kluane people adamantly maintain that the only
way to truly “know” anything is to spend time in the bush, watching and
doing. One can expect help in his or her quest for “true” knowledge in the
form of stories, conversation, warnings, and even jokes; but ultimately
everyone is on her/his own – for it is only through personal experiences
that one can truly come to know about the land and animals. As will be
seen, this has profound implications for how Kluane people interact with
Euro-Canadians, especially those “experts” who claim to know the land
102 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All”

and animals based on a very different set of ideas about what constitutes
“true” knowledge.

Knowledge, Patience, and Respect

We are now ready to take another look at Kluane people’s concept of
respect. Earlier in this chapter, I noted that Kluane people (along with
other northern peoples) talk about respect in a number of contexts; in
addition to respect for animals, they speak of the importance of respecting
other people, elders, and oneself. I wondered aloud whether these were all
related or whether it was just a case of the same English word being
applied to different social phenomena. I argued that, for Kluane people,
to respect animals is to live up to one’s responsibilities and obligations
within a set of reciprocal social relations with other-than-human people.
The fact that respect is essentially a shorthand way of referring to proper
conduct in social relations suggests that the various uses of respect men-
tioned above may indeed be related at a conceptual level. I now address
this issue directly, beginning with a brief discussion of these alternate, and
more obviously “social,” meanings of the term “respect.”
When Kluane people talk about how people should behave towards one
another, they almost always do so in terms of respect. Many people spoke
to me about this speciWcally in terms of survival. They told me how, in the
old days, theft of food from someone’s cache could cause the death of a
whole family and how even a single malicious word about someone else
could create hard feelings that might end in tragedy.

All the stories [are] pointed towards survival. It always has something
behind it. That’s so you’re going to survive in this world. They tell you not
to lie, not to talk about other people. Because if I talk about you, and I was
starving [and then] I bump into you way out in the bush, you’re not going
to give me nothing. That’s my theory behind that. If I treat you with utter-
most respect [and then] I bump into you out there, you do the same to me
... give me meat. Cook up a big meal for me because I’m starving, and my
family. It’s always towards survival. (Interview with Joe Johnson 1996)

For Kluane people, respect is the basis for proper human interactions,
and they talk about many of their most important social practices as being
ways of showing and reafWrming respect: the sharing of meat; the pot-
latch; and injunctions against lying, stealing, talking badly about others,
or telling other people (including children) what to do. According to a
number of people with whom I spoke, respect for oneself, like respect for
others, also grows naturally out of the imperatives of living on the land. In
addition to having to learn a whole range of skills, everyone who spends
her/his life in the bush must also develop a sense of initiative (if you don’t
 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All” 103

do it, nobody else will do it for you) and an ability to think on her/his feet.
People said that a person who is good in the bush can Wgure out a solution
to any problem provided that he or she thinks about it for a while before
acting. The bush life also makes people aware and accepting of their own
limitations. This knowledge of themselves and conWdence in their own
abilities is the source of self-respect.
Everyone in the community stressed the importance of respecting
elders. This is not because they have special knowledge, powers, or wealth,
however, but because they have learned to live respectfully themselves.
People explained to me that, in the past, elders never “demanded” respect.
They did not “boss people around” but, instead, treated everyone, even
young children, with great respect. Because of this, they say, people
wanted to spend time with elders and do things for them. Many people
recalled how, in the past, whenever they visited an elder, they were sure
to get some tea with sugar, bannock, or some other treat. They always
checked to see if the elder needed wood or water hauled and did so with-
out being asked in hopes of being told a story. Elders never told people
what to do (at most they might comment, for example, that they needed
some wood and would allow the visitor to act on that information of their
own accord). It was their attitude of respect, as much as their speciWc
knowledge and experience, that caused people in the community to seek
out their wisdom and guidance.32
Anthropologists have long described northern Athapaskan social rela-
tions as characterized by an ethic of “non-interference” (e.g., Helm 1961:
176).33 It has been widely reported that, among northern Athapaskan peo-
ples, bossy behaviour of any kind is frowned upon; people generally
refrain from imposing their views on others, and adults will rarely even
tell their own children what to do, much less discipline them. People
generally avoid aggressive behaviour. This includes aggressive shows of
friendliness and hospitality, such as those in which Euro-North Americans
frequently engage, because such behaviour “forces” someone to respond
in a certain way. Since northern Athapaskan peoples tend to avoid overtly
pressuring others in any way, outside observers have often described them
as speaking and acting in an “indirect” manner so as not to inadvertently
put someone “on the spot.” Anthropologists have even viewed taciturnity
among Athapaskan peoples as a strategy for avoiding conXict (i.e., a
potential clash of views and temptation to impose one’s views on others)
since Athapaskan peoples “avoid conversation except when the point of
view of all participants is well known” (Scollon and Scollon, cited in
Goulet 1998: 56).
Goulet (1998: 36-37) has argued that the term “non-interference” is
unenlightening because it describes Athapaskan peoples’ behaviour nega-
tively; that is, it characterizes Athapaskan peoples simply as not acting the
104 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All”

way that Euro-North Americans do. He argues that, instead, we need to

understand northern Athapaskan behaviour on its own terms. He then
goes on to argue – quite convincingly – that northern Athapaskan peoples’
respect for personal autonomy is intimately connected to their episte-
mology, speciWcally the belief that true knowledge derives from personal
experience: “The epistemological stance that privileges direct personal
knowledge over any other kind of knowledge, and the ethical position
that promotes the inherent right of individuals to govern themselves
freely and independently, are intimately associated” (58).34 The reason for
this, he argues, is that northern Athapaskan peoples believe that to inter-
fere with another person’s autonomy, even – or perhaps especially – a
child’s, is to hamper that person’s efforts to gain true knowledge through
experience. It is for this reason that people do not “force themselves” on
others by making decisions for them, acting aggressively, or teaching them
through direct or formal means.35 Instead, they allow others the freedom
to live their lives (and thus seek knowledge through experience) in their
own personal way. Viewed positively, the ethic of non-interference
becomes “the right to one’s autonomy and the obligation to respect the
autonomy of others” (37). This, according to Goulet, is the essence of
respectful behaviour among Dene Tha and other northern Athapaskan
peoples.
There is, however, an important aspect of respectful behaviour that has
gone virtually unnoticed in the literature: patience.36 Allowing others
complete personal autonomy and the right to experience the world in
their own way requires an extraordinary amount of patience. One may
have to sit by and do nothing while a young child plays with a chainsaw,
puts his or her hand through a broken window, or throws a temper
tantrum.37 Or one may have to wait patiently as someone struggles to
do something on his or her own. It may mean silently enduring other peo-
ple’s bossiness, despite the fact that one disagrees with what they are
saying and trying to do. It means making suggestions and allowing other
people time to reXect before making their own decisions rather than try-
ing to convince people to do what you want them to. It requires that one
accept other people’s actions and decisions as valid even if one does not
agree with them. It is the height of arrogance to try to “improve” people,
and this includes any expectation that they will abandon their own nature
and conform to your personal needs and desires. You simply cannot treat
other people respectfully if you are attempting to impose on them your
own personal agenda, timetable, beliefs, values, or goals. In the end, to
behave respectfully towards other people means accepting them for who
they are and having the patience to allow them to act upon or realize their
own natures by themselves. Rather than complaining about the actions of
other people, one must take the time to understand their nature and deal
 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All” 105

with them on their own terms. If you do not like it, then you can always
withdraw from the offending person or situation, but you must never
attempt to deal with them on your terms. Not only does patience allow
you to treat other people respectfully, but it enables you to reXect on and
come to accept your own nature. It is therefore also the foundation of
self-respect.
Many outsiders who have lived among northern Athapaskan peoples,
however, have come away with the impression that they actually behave
quite disrespectfully towards one another and outsiders alike. In attempts
to characterize their bewildering and sometimes infuriating behaviour,
outsiders have variously described Athapaskan peoples as individualis-
tic, inhospitable, overly permissive with their children, indirect, taciturn,
and/or completely unwilling to intervene in the affairs of others. These
descriptions have often been less than Xattering.38 Goulet (1998) points
out that, in their behaviour towards one another and towards outsiders,
Dene Tha peoples can often appear, by Euro-North American standards, to
be quite disrespectful. He argues, however, that what may appear to out-
siders as inhospitable or even callous, are, in the eyes of northern Atha-
paskan peoples, expressions of respect. For instance, he describes how
able-bodied adults will sit by and not lend a hand as elderly individuals
struggle – sometimes for several minutes – to pull themselves up into the
back of a pickup truck. As he watched such incidents, he said he could not
help wondering to himself “if it would not be more respectful, and easier
for everyone, to give the old person a helping hand.” He knew, however,
that to do so would have been insulting because “it would suggest that he
or she cannot climb on board the vehicle on his or her own” (37-38). If the
elder wanted help, he or she would have asked for it. Until then, no one
would have dreamed of interfering with how they chose to live their lives.
This clash between northern Athapaskan and Euro-North American ideas
about respectful behaviour between people should sound familiar. It is
very much like the difference – noted above – between Yukon First Nations
and Euro-North American peoples’ ideas about whether or not catch-and-
release Wshing is respectful to Wsh. I argue that the two situations are anal-
ogous: both are based on the same kind of misunderstanding.
As it turns out, patience is the common thread running through all of
the different types of respect that Kluane people speak about. Just as the
essence of respecting other people is to take the time to understand them
on their own terms and to deal with them on those terms, so it is with ani-
mal persons. Over and over again, Kluane people spoke to me of the
importance of patience in dealing with animals:

Because when you hunt beaver you got to sit in one place for sometimes
all day and then next day. Just sit there. Beaver ... because if the beaver ...
106 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All”

you move around and that, they just whoop gone. They’re smart too. If
there’s a stick or something in the water like this, they’ll come up and put
their nose right up by that stick. They breathe in by that stick there. They
won’t come out of the water. They’re smart. And you can’t be going Wgur-
ing, “Oh I’m going to play around over here, play around with this and
that.” You sat there. You sat there. Spring beaver hunt, you just sit there.
You look at the water. You look at the water. Any kind of change ... any
kind of ripples in the water ... And you listen, because you can hear beaver
when they go in the water too, eh? They splash. Listen. You sit there. It’s
patience. You can’t be just playing, Wguring you’re going to play around
and do this or do something and talk and stuff like that. You just got to sit
there. How long grandpa and them sit there on the bank. If they’re sitting
there all day, then you’re sitting there all day. And as soon as you started
talking, even how low you’re talking, just trying to whisper a little bit and
that, grandpa: “Keep quiet.” So you just end up looking all day. Just sit
there all day and just look. And maybe the next day you might get a
beaver. And I don’t know how much kids around here right now are going
to have that kind of patience. Everything for them is just right now. (Inter-
view with Mary Jane Johnson 1996)

There are proper, respectful ways to hunt and improper, disrespectful

ways to hunt.39 Everyone agreed, for instance, that it is not right to just
drive up and down the highway hoping to shoot a moose. Not only does
this require no skill at all, but it is disrespectful to the moose.40 To hunt
moose properly, one must be patient. We have already seen that if you call
a moose you must be willing to sit and wait for several hours, listening
carefully for sounds of its approach. At other times of the year, one prop-
erly hunts moose by camping near a likely lake, waiting and watching
perhaps for days, or atop a lookout watching an entire valley for move-
ment. On several occasions I accompanied people on these moose-hunting
vigils. Each time, my companions stressed to me the importance of watch-
ing and listening. Even if you never see a moose, you are bound to learn
something important.
There are a number of other acceptable ways to hunt moose, but one
of the most important of these is to track them. Tracking moose is not sim-
ply a matter of mindlessly following a set of tracks. Several people stressed
to me that “moose are smart”; if they hear a sound they will usually dou-
ble back downwind of their own tracks to try to identify their pursuers by
scent. To track them successfully, one must anticipate their moves, and
this requires extensive knowledge of their behaviour.41 Although there are
some very accomplished hunters in Burwash, they themselves speak in
awe about the hunting skills of some of the “old-timers” in their parents’
and grandparents’ generations. One day in May 1998 I had driven to the
 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All” 107

village of Haines Junction with Joe Johnson, himself a skilled hunter. We

ran into an elder named Moose Jackson. Joe introduced us and then he
turned to me: “you remember how I told you that when those old-timers
come across a moose track, that’s a dead moose?” I told him I did. He said,
“Well, this is one of those old-timers.” What followed was a fascinating
discussion about how to track moose.
Moose Jackson said he can tell by looking at moose tracks how old they
are. From that information, he knows where the sun was at the time the
moose was there and which way the wind was blowing. This information,
combined with his knowledge of moose behaviour, is enough for him to
know where the moose was going and what it was doing. Alternatively, he
said, by tracking the moose a ways and seeing where it went and what it
did, he can determine what the wind and sun conditions were at the time.
He can read wind changes in moose tracks, he said. This information (age
of tracks, direction of wind, and position of sun) is enough to tell him
where the moose is. This means that he does not have to actually follow
the moose tracks, he merely goes directly to where he knows the moose
will be. But, he stressed, he can only do this because he knows what moose
do and “how they think.” He illustrated this with a story. Once he had
taken out a younger, inexperienced hunter. They had found moose tracks

Gerald Dickson on a moose lookout near the Donjek River, September 1997. The
lookout has been used by Kluane hunters for generations.
108 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All”

and, after inspecting them, he had led his partner away from the mean-
dering tracks right to a thicket of willows, where he told the younger man
the moose was lying. The young hunter looked at him in disbelief and
said, “If the moose is really there, I’ll laugh.” Moose told me that he had
replied, “You better start laughing then, because there he is,” and he shot
the moose just as it stood up. I asked him how he had learned to hunt like
that. Without hesitating, he said that he had learned it from moose. Then
he thought a bit and said that his father and others had taught him some
things, but mostly he had learned by hunting and by being open to what
the animals had to teach him.
During my stay in Burwash, I heard several stories like the one Moose
Jackson told me that day. In fact, Joe himself had once described to me
one time he had gone hunting with his uncle Sam Johnson, who has since
died. Sam had done the same thing that Moose had done; he had left
the tracks and walked directly to where the moose was lying down. Like
Moose, Joe had said that such a feat was only possible for someone who
had “learned to think like a moose.” He told me that, although he himself
often knows what a moose will do, he does not have as great an under-
standing of them as did old-timers like Moose Jackson, his uncle Sam, and
his own father, Moose Johnson. The difference, he said, was that those
men had lived their whole lives out on the land, whereas he had spent
much of his adult life either in the village or logging in British Columbia.
Moose Jackson’s story, along with others like it, illustrates very clearly a
number of the points I have been making in this chapter, including the
primary role of personal experience in “knowing” about the bush, the
non-sentential nature of that knowledge, and the importance of animals
as teachers. The story also illustrates the importance of patience. A hunter
can only learn to think like a moose through many years of hunting and
patient observation. As Moose himself said, even this is not enough; one
must also be open to learning from the animal. One must be willing to
invest the time and effort needed in order to understand the essential
nature of the moose and to deal with it on its own terms.

Conclusion: Implications for Knowledge-Integration

Kluane people conceive of animals as intelligent, social, and spiritually
powerful other-than-human persons, and they see themselves as embed-
ded in a complex web of reciprocal relations with animals. They see their
relationships with animal persons as social in nature and as vital to their
physical and cultural survival. As a result, most Kluane people negotiate
these relationships delicately, taking care not to act in ways that might
offend animals and so jeopardize their relationship with them. It almost
goes without saying that Kluane people’s notions about animals and
animal-human relations are profoundly different from those held by most
 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All” 109

Euro-North Americans. This has important and adverse implications for

the attempt to integrate First Nations peoples’ knowledge about animals
with that of Euro-North American experts such as biologists and lawyers.
Along with biologists’ use of the term “animal,” for example, comes
a whole array of implicit notions about the nature of animals and the
proper relationship between humans and animals (see Ingold 1988). As is
shown in Chapters 3 through 5, biologists and resource managers tend to
see animals as essentially distinct from humans: largely lacking in con-
sciousness, intelligence, and social and/or spiritual relations with one
another and with humans. Nearly everything that biologists wish to know
about animals can be expressed numerically or graphically (e.g., popula-
tion Wgures, harvest Wgures, mortality rates, population distribution, and
so on). Rather than relating to animals socially as other-than-human per-
sons, most biologists think of animals as objects of study and/or as eco-
nomic or ecological resources. They more often relate to animals in the
abstract, as numbers to be manipulated, than as intelligent social beings.
It is inevitable, then, that they also conceive of the human-animal rela-
tionship quite differently than do most Kluane people. Most biologists
and resource managers understand the human-animal relationship as pri-
marily unidirectional (humans can affect animal populations but not vice
versa).42 They see this relationship as characterized by “harvest” levels43
and other human impacts, such as harassment, habitat destruction, preda-
tor control, and so on. The relationship between biologists and animals is
emphatically not a social one. As we have seen, in contrast to First Nations
peoples, biologists’ ideas of what it means to respect animals have more
to do with practising what they see as sound management than with
maintaining proper social relations with powerful other-than-human
persons. What implications do these differences have for the project of
knowledge-integration?
One of the most important consequences arising from these differences
is that First Nations peoples often perceive scientiWc wildlife research to be
an inappropriate way of seeking to know animals. Many First Nations peo-
ple in the Yukon are uncomfortable with scientiWc wildlife research on a
number of different levels. To begin with, such research often involves
bothering animals, which they see as inherently disrespectful. Many, for
instance, oppose collaring animals with radio transmitters (a common
technique for studying caribou and grizzly bears in the Yukon) because,
like catch-and-release Wshing, they see it as disrespectful to the animal
(KoWnas 1998: 272-73). But there are many other less obviously intrusive
types of research that some First Nations people also Wnd objection-
able, including those that involve the study of animal remains or excre-
ment. One man, for example, a member of the White River First Nation,
expressed to me his disapproval of biologists’ practice of collecting and
110 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All”

analyzing bear scat in Kluane National Park and Reserve – a project in

which his son, who used to be a park warden, had been involved:

He’s [my son] telling me they’re going around collecting bear shit all over
the place and shipping it off. I said, “That’s against tradition, [what] you’re
doing there.” I said, “I was raised, you know, you respect the bear. When
he shits on the trail you go around it. You don’t step in it; you don’t step
over it; you go around it. You respect that bear.” I said, “Now you’re going
against [the] traditional way I was raised to respect.” “Well, that’s what
they have to teach us in school” [his son replied]. “Well,” I says, “That’s
not my right way.” ... “So you go to school, and they tell you all kinds of
B.S. in school,” I said, “but ... you know I been there.” We get in lots of
arguments. He’s been brainwashed. The government likes to brainwash
people. (Interview with Charlie Eikland 1996)44

Thus, many First Nations peoples see the practice of much scientiWc
research itself as objectionable because biologists fail to treat animals
and/or their remains in what they see as a respectful manner. On a deeper
level, many First Nations peoples see the whole approach of scientiWc
wildlife research as disrespectful. We have seen that, for Kluane people,
respectful interaction with animals entails patience. One must be willing
to take the time and effort to learn their true nature from the animals
themselves, and one must do so on the animal’s terms. By conducting
annual aerial sheep surveys or radio-collaring caribou or grizzly bears, biol-
ogists not only subject these animals to what Kluane people see as insult-
ing treatment but they also engage with them on exclusively human
terms. They impose upon animals their own time schedules, budgets, and
research agendas. They force them into strange new contexts of biologists’
own creation. Rather than trying to understand animals on their own
terms, biologists wrest knowledge from them by force. We have seen that
this is completely contrary to Kluane people’s notions about what consti-
tutes respectful behaviour towards all persons, whether human or non-
human. Though no biologists would ever suggest using these techniques
(aerial surveys, radio-collaring) to learn about people, they have no
qualms about using them on animals, whom they do not view as persons
but simply as objects of study, as non-sentient beings with whom social
relations are impossible. Many Kluane people, however, refuse to make
such a distinction between the proper treatment of animals and people.
Unlike biologists, they are very concerned with what animals think and
feel in response to such treatment. One man summed up his concerns by
stating that he would like to collar all the biologists and watch what they
do for a while. Then, he said, they would know how it feels to be treated
that way.
 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All” 111

Finally, many Kluane people Wnd some of the most basic assumptions
underlying scientiWc wildlife research offensive. The most important of
these is the belief that animals are “objects of study” that can be under-
stood through quantitative analysis. Biologists, at least in their ofWcial
capacities, talk about animals as “things.” They are not interested in indi-
vidual moose but only in “moose” in general (or in a particular area). For
them, moose are not individual beings with thoughts and feelings; they
are merely representative instances of an abstract quantity. The behav-
iour of particular animals is irrelevant to them unless it can be generalized
and quantiWed. Thus, biologists tend to treat animals as mindless, their
behaviour more the outcome of instinct and statistics than of conscious
thought. Biologists’ implicit denial of the individuality and intelligence of
animals is especially grating to Kluane people, who see individual animals
as intelligent non-human persons to be respected. As one Kluane hunter
told me in disgust after a wildlife management meeting with biologists,
“Biologists think animals are stupid. They’re not.”
These differences lead many Kluane people to view scientiWc wildlife
research not only as inappropriate but also as inaccurate. As I have shown,
most Kluane people adamantly maintain that the only way to gain true
knowledge about the land and animals is through direct personal experi-
ence in the bush. Wildlife biologists, by contrast, gain most of their knowl-
edge of animals from secondary sources (such as scientiWc documents);
and, even when they do experience animals directly, they do so almost
exclusively in artiWcial contexts that they themselves create (such as in
aerial surveys or by tracking radio-collars). This is why Kluane people fre-
quently scoff at biologists’ claims to know animals. As far as they are con-
cerned, one cannot really learn anything important about the land and
animals from reading books or from Xying over them once a year in a heli-
copter. Kluane people told me over and over again that if biologists were
really serious about learning about animals, then they would go out and
live on the land.45 Because biologists do not generally have the kind of
experiential knowledge about animals that Kluane people value, the latter
are predisposed to doubt the validity of the scientiWc knowledge produced
by the former.
The difference between how biologists and Kluane people conceive of
animals is far from academic. As I show in Chapters 3 through 5, it leads
directly to tangible differences in how each interprets and acts upon oth-
erwise agreed-upon quantitative information about animals. In some
cases, I argue, these different knowledge systems are truly incommensu-
rable in that there is no way to integrate them that does not do violence
to one or the other. Biologists can extract and use certain kinds of data
from Kluane people, such as how many animals they saw, when, and
where. But to use this information they have to assign their own meanings
112 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All”

and interpretations to those numbers, completely ignoring the social rela-

tions, practices, beliefs, and values that inform Kluane people’s notions
of animals and how to relate to them. As soon as Kluane people try to
contribute more than just raw data to the processes of co-management
and land claims, however, communication with biologists and lawyers
becomes difWcult, if not impossible.
This has clear implications not only for the project of knowledge-
integration but also for our understanding of knowledge more generally. It
is true, as Malinowski pointed out, that all peoples possess practical empir-
ical knowledge about the world, but that does not mean that this knowl-
edge is culture-free. Even empirical knowledge is culturally contingent, its
meaning deriving from its embeddedness in non-empirical understand-
ings of the world. Because of this, it is misleading to conceive of empirical
knowledge as a mode of thought that exists in people’s minds indepen-
dently of other non-empirical modes. And this allows me to address an old
theoretical question that grew, at least in part, out of Malinowski’s ideas;
that is, how can people so easily “switch” between modes of thought?
How is it possible for them to think rationally and empirically about gar-
dening in one moment and non-rationally about gardening magic in the
next?46 The answer is simply that they do not. Certainly, Kluane people do
not switch between their empirical knowledge of moose populations and
their non-empirical understandings of moose as other-than-human per-
sons. The two are inseparable for them, each informing the other and
imbuing it with meaning. Empirical knowledge simply cannot be removed
from its broader social context without distorting or destroying it. As
Edmund Leach (1957: 128-29) argued in an essay on the epistemological
assumptions underlying Malinowski’s empiricism: “Where [Malinowski]
seems to err is in maintaining that the ordinary man distinguishes consis-
tently between the magical and the non-magical ... In seeking to break
down the dichotomy between savagery and civilization Malinowski
argued that primitives were just as capable as Europeans of making such
distinctions ... He would have had a much better case if he had insisted
that Europeans are ordinarily just as incapable as Trobrianders of distin-
guishing the two categories.”
That said, I do not mean to imply that cross-cultural communication is
impossible. In fact, there are times when Kluane people make their claims
about animals and the land in a way that biologists and lawyers can
understand, despite their very different assumptions about the world. The
problem is that government lawyers and biologists, in their ofWcial capac-
ities, cannot act upon those understandings. Given the politics and
bureaucratic realities of wildlife management and land claims negotia-
tions, they simply cannot make management recommendations or take
negotiating positions based on these alternate understandings of the
 “It’s Not Really ‘Knowledge’ at All” 113

world. In this light, Evans-Pritchard’s argument about the embeddedness

of knowledge implies not that cross-cultural communication is impossible
but, rather, that any attempt at knowledge-integration is at least as much
a political process as an epistemological one. It makes no sense to talk
about the integration of two abstract systems of knowledge in isolation
because knowledge systems do not exist in isolation. Neither government
biologists nor Kluane people are merely vessels containing different kinds
of knowledge. They are social beings embedded in a system of unequal
power relations that not only have a direct bearing on what qualiWes as
knowledge but that also dictate how they can interact with one another
and what kinds of actions are seen as legitimate.
What is more, co-management and land claims negotiations (which are
at least in part attempts to gain access to and utilize First Nations peoples’
knowledge about the world) are undermining the social relations, prac-
tices, beliefs, and values that inform Kluane people’s empirical knowledge
about the land and animals. So if we really want to understand the role
knowledge plays in processes like co-management and land claims, then
we have to examine not only the unequal power relations between par-
ticipants but also the assumptions underlying the concept of knowledge-
integration itself and how they both derive from and reinforce those
relations. In the remainder of Hunters and Bureaucrats I do just that. By
examining speciWc attempts to incorporate Kluane people’s knowledge
about the world into the bureaucratic structures of state wildlife manage-
ment and property rights, I seek to throw light on the complex relation-
ship between power and knowledge.
3
The Politics of TEK: Power
and the Integration of Knowledge

Use of the term “traditional ecological knowledge” (TEK) is now com-

monplace in discourse concerning the management of land and resources
across the North American Arctic and Subarctic. The past decade and a
half has witnessed an explosion in the number of conferences, symposia,
and workshops devoted to TEK across the North, not to mention the
growth of a substantial academic literature on traditional knowledge and
the establishment of numerous regional, national, and international work-
ing groups, information networks, and other organizations concerned
with promoting and disseminating research on the topic. The principal
objective of this activity has been to collect and document TEK and to
integrate it with scientiWc knowledge of the environment. The hope is that,
by integrating the knowledge of Aboriginal people who have spent their
lives out on the land with that of scientiWc experts, we will increase our
overall understanding of the environment and that this new integrated
knowledge will allow for the improvement of existing processes of envi-
ronmental impact assessment and resource management. There is also
some hope that the integration of traditional knowledge with science will
help to empower the Aboriginal peoples and communities who are the
holders of this knowledge.
The widespread recognition that something called traditional ecological
knowledge even exists represents, in itself, an important Wrst step towards
the full participation of Aboriginal communities in the management of
local land and resources. In spite of nearly Wfteen years of effort by count-
less scientists, resource managers, Aboriginal people, and social scientists
to develop a method for integrating scientiWc and traditional knowledge,
however, there has been little actual progress towards achieving such an
integration. Despite the establishment of numerous co-management re-
gimes across the North, scientists and resource managers remain essen-
tially at a loss regarding TEK; many are still not quite sure what it is, much
 The Politics of TEK 115

less how to use or integrate it with scientiWc research. A recent review of

the TEK literature, for example, noted that a large proportion of it still
focuses on the potential use of TEK rather than on actual applications
(Kuhn and Duerden 1996: 79). Many works continue to advocate the use
of TEK and its integration with scientiWc knowledge without describing
how this might be achieved. Meanwhile, Aboriginal peoples continue to
express dissatisfaction and impatience with current efforts to use TEK in
the real world of resource management and environmental impact assess-
ment. Why, given the duration, intensity, and interdisciplinary nature of
the effort to integrate traditional and scientiWc knowledge, has there been
so little success along these lines? In this chapter I seek to answer this
question by taking a new approach to the integration of TEK and science.
Rather than focusing on obstacles to integration that arise from differ-
ences in form between the two types of knowledge, as most of the literature
has done, I instead consider the power relations underlying the project
of integration itself.

The Context of Traditional Knowledge in the Yukon:

Co-Management
At present, the primary reason for integrating traditional and scientiWc
knowledge in the North has been an effort by government and First
Nations to engage in the cooperative management, or co-management,
of wildlife and other resource. The meaning of the term “co-management”
is somewhat vague, as it has been used to refer to many different types of
institutional arrangements. These run the gamut from simple consulta-
tion, which consists of an explicit attempt on the part of resource man-
agers to elicit the views of local people (here “resource users may be heard
but not heeded, and perhaps not even understood” [Berkes, George, and
Preston 1991: 7]), to the actual institutionalization of joint decision mak-
ing (see Berkes, George, and Preston 1991 for a discussion of the spec-
trum of co-management). Governments and First Nations throughout the
North are currently establishing various forms of co-management regimes
in an effort both to improve resource management and to incorporate
Aboriginal peoples and their knowledge into the management process.
Some of these efforts at co-management are ad hoc responses to speciWc
management problems; but, increasingly, First Nations and governments
are establishing permanent co-management bodies through the land
claims process.
In the Yukon, both permanent and ad hoc co-management initia-
tives presently exist, though in theory the co-management boards estab-
lished by Yukon First Nations Wnal agreements will replace all the ad hoc
boards and committees currently in place as soon as all fourteen of these
116 The Politics of TEK

agreements are signed and ratiWed. The Yukon Umbrella Final Agreement
(UFA) and existing First Nations Wnal agreements1 provide for co-management
in a wide variety of contexts throughout the territory, from environmen-
tal impact assessment to the management of land, water, wildlife, and
heritage resources. They do so in two ways. First, each of the different
chapters relating to wildlife, water, heritage, and so forth begins with a for-
mal statement of objectives, which includes the recognition and use of tra-
ditional knowledge and the empowerment of Aboriginal peoples. Second,
and perhaps more important, the UFA provides for the establishment of
a whole array of boards and councils to co-manage these resources. These
are considered co-management bodies because First Nations people are
assured at least half of the seats on them. Both types of provision for co-
management are contained within Chapter 16 of the UFA, the chapter
that deals with the management of Wsh and wildlife.
Among the formal objectives of Chapter 16 are the following: “to inte-
grate the relevant knowledge and experience both of Yukon Indian People
and of the scientiWc communities in order to achieve conservation” and
“to enhance and promote the full participation of Yukon Indian People
in Renewable Resource Management” (Council for Yukon Indians 1993:
153). The chapter then goes on to create a regime for the co-management
of wildlife in the territory by establishing the Yukon Fish and Wildlife
Management Board and fourteen renewable resources councils. According
to the UFA, the Fish and Wildlife Management Board is to be the “primary
instrument of Fish and Wildlife management in the Yukon” with jurisdic-
tion over the entire territory (Council for Yukon Indians 1993: 166). Its
mandate is to make recommendations directly to the Yukon minister of
renewable resources regarding any aspect of Wsh and wildlife management
throughout the territory. The Fish and Wildlife Management Board is
considered a co-management body because the Council for Yukon First
Nations and the Yukon Territorial Government each appoint one-half of
its members. The fourteen renewable resources councils are similar to the
Fish and Wildlife Management Board, but their jurisdiction is limited to
a single First Nation’s traditional territory. Though the form and role of
each of the councils can vary slightly as a result of the speciWc provisions
of the First Nations Final Agreement under which it is established, each is
intended to be “a primary instrument for local renewable resources man-
agement in that Traditional Territory” (CYI 1993: 163). The councils have
a mandate to make recommendations to the Fish and Wildlife Manage-
ment Board or directly to the minister regarding any aspect of Wsh and
wildlife management throughout that First Nation’s traditional territory.
Like the board, the renewable resources councils must also have 50 percent
First Nations representation, with the added requirement that all council
members must be residents of the First Nation’s traditional territory.
 The Politics of TEK 117

Conventional Perspectives on the Integration of Science and TEK

There are two conventional ways of explaining why it has been so difWcult
in practice to integrate traditional knowledge and science. One type of
explanation is encountered primarily in ofWcial and formal settings, while
the other tends to be heard only in more informal contexts. At confer-
ences, workshops, and other formal arenas for the discussion of traditional
knowledge and co-management, as well as in the vast majority of the
academic and policy-oriented literature on the topic, participants and
authors are likely to identify and focus on certain obstacles to the integra-
tion of traditional knowledge and science. These, they argue, arise from
the fact that the two types of knowledge are incommensurable. In contrast
to traditional knowledge, which is assumed to be qualitative, intuitive,
holistic, and oral, science is seen as quantitative, analytical, reductionist,
and written. Indeed, one cannot examine the question of traditional
knowledge for long without being confronted by a barrage of such dualis-
tic comparisons (often arranged neatly in a table) purporting to sum up
the differences between traditional and scientiWc knowledge. The assump-
tion is that, since traditional knowledge is expressed in a form that is
vastly different from, and largely incompatible with, that of science, there
are a whole host of essentially technical problems that accompany the
effort to integrate them. Most of these problems relate to difWculties in
gaining access to and collecting TEK or with translating it into a form that
can be utilized by resource managers. This approach views the present lack
of progress towards integration as resulting from the complexity of these
problems and the difWculty in developing strategies and methodologies
capable of effectively dealing with them (e.g., Usher 2000).
This ofWcial type of explanation, which focuses on the “integration of
knowledge systems” as a technical problem, is inadequate because it
ignores the political dimensions of the issue of knowledge-integration.
Rather than merely assuming, as many do, that integrating traditional
knowledge with science will automatically lead to improved resource
management and Aboriginal empowerment, we must closely examine the
assumptions underpinning this project. If we do this, then it will become
apparent that the practice of integrating traditional knowledge with
science may well be reinforcing, rather than breaking down, a number
of Euro-North American cultural biases that, in the end, work against
full First Nations involvement in managing local land and wildlife. Before
developing this argument further, I turn to a brief discussion of a hidden
discourse surrounding traditional knowledge and its integration with
science.
There is another fairly common form of explanation regarding the cur-
rent failure to integrate traditional knowledge and science – one that is
almost completely absent from both the literature and the formal arenas
118 The Politics of TEK

of discussion on traditional knowledge. One encounters it almost exclu-

sively in informal, or even private, conversations. You are more likely to hear
such an explanation in someone’s home or in a bar than in a meeting room.
Though they very rarely do so in one another’s presence, both Aboriginal
people and Euro-North American scientists and resource managers are
equally likely to engage in this private discourse about traditional knowl-
edge. In these relaxed informal settings, people are more likely to give
voice to their suspicions regarding the hidden agendas of others and regard-
ing the “real” motives behind their invoking the term “traditional knowl-
edge.” Expressions of this sort are extremely varied, running the gamut from
vague expressions of uneasiness, through racist explosions of distrust and
contempt, to thoughtful and cogent arguments.2 It is not my intention to
deal exhaustively with the dynamics and meanings of this private discourse
on traditional knowledge; I only point out some of its major currents.
In expressing to me their frustration with traditional knowledge and co-
management processes, a number of First Nations people have come to
the conclusion that many scientists and managers have no real intention
of trying to integrate traditional knowledge with science, but that they are
merely paying lip service to the idea because it has become politically
expedient to do so. As a result, First Nations people often interpret the fail-
ure of scientists and resource managers to deal seriously with traditional
knowledge as a calculated strategy for retaining control over the manage-
ment of land and resources. In this context, First Nations people are
increasingly likely to (and some of them already do) view most “ofWcial”
talk about TEK as a form of obfuscation. For their part, several scientists
and resource managers have privately expressed to me their own doubts
about the existence and efWcacy of traditional knowledge. Most feel that,
though TEK may very well have existed at one time, drastic changes in the
lifestyle of Aboriginal peoples have so eroded it that, effectively, it no
longer exists. As a result, they tend to view Aboriginal people’s insistence
on the use of traditional knowledge with suspicion. More than once I have
heard scientists and resource managers say that TEK is simply a political
ploy invented by Aboriginal people to wrest control of wildlife from
“qualiWed” scientiWc managers. On one occasion a biologist told me out-
right that the only value she sees in consulting with Aboriginal elders is
that she must do so in order to secure community support for her projects,
which, in the current political climate, is now required.3
It is perhaps not surprising that, by now, many people on all sides of
the traditional knowledge debate have become suspicious of the whole
idea. Although confusion and uncertainty about the role of TEK in the
co-management process are as widespread as ever, the term “traditional
knowledge” itself (or the acronyms “TK” and/or “TEK,” which have by now
 The Politics of TEK 119

almost completely replaced it),4 is thrown around with ever greater (and
more indiscriminate) abandon. Indeed, it often seems as though the term
“TEK” is now used to avoid rather than to engage in the difWcult task of
speciWc cross-cultural negotiation and understanding that is inherent in
the idea of co-management. Even if TEK is not the deliberately mystifying
political jargon that many are beginning to suspect it to be, it is neverthe-
less in danger of becoming – if it has not already done so – a meaningless
buzzword, its use masking more than it reveals.
UnofWcial explanations for the failure to integrate TEK and science
are, if anything, more riddled with bias and unexamined assumptions
than are the ofWcial explanations. Even so, we ignore this private discourse
at our peril, not only because many of those involved with the issue pro-
fess to “really think” these things but also because this private discourse
focuses on a dimension that is almost completely absent from the ofWcial
explanations: power. In these informal discussions, people do not concern
themselves with abstract questions of epistemology or with the nuances of
different information-gathering techniques; instead, they concentrate on
the political dimensions of the issue: How are the different actors in the
management process using the term “TEK”? What meanings and agendas
are promoted or masked through their use of the term? How are thoughts
and actions constrained and directed by these meanings? Who beneWts
from all this? This chapter takes these questions and concerns seriously.
Accordingly, I do not approach the issue of integrating traditional knowl-
edge and science from a technical perspective but, rather, from a political
one. I begin by questioning – rather than proceeding from – some of the
basic assumptions underlying the concept of traditional knowledge.

“Tradition,” “Environment,” and “Knowledge”:

Unexamined Assumptions of TEK
As Morrow and Hensel (1992) argued of the Alaskan context, many of
the terms used in relation to the management of land and wildlife, such as
“subsistence,” “conservation,” and “traditional use,” have no counterparts
in the languages or cultural practices of Aboriginal peoples. As a result,
these terms, while seemingly straightforward, are actually contested on a
fundamental level. Since all parties assume that the contested terms refer
to agreed-upon realities when, in fact, they serve only to mask deep cul-
tural differences, their use can lead to serious misunderstandings and
perceptions of bad faith. Their use also has the effect of biasing the dis-
course in favour of scientiWc managers by restricting the ways in which
it is possible to talk (and think) about these issues. Morrow and Hensel’s
language-based argument is directly applicable to an examination of the
political dimensions of traditional knowledge and TEK research.
120 The Politics of TEK

Though the way of life to which the term “traditional ecological knowl-
edge” refers is far from new, the term itself has only recently been adopted
by resource managers and First Nations peoples alike. The meanings of
TEK’s constituent terms “traditional,” “ecological/environmental,” and
“knowledge” are all contested on a fundamental level and constrain peo-
ple’s thoughts and actions in signiWcant ways. This chapter focuses on
these terms, especially “knowledge,” and their role in structuring the way
that people can act upon and think about TEK and its relation to science.
Morrow and Hensel speak directly to the term “traditional,” which, as
used and understood by most non-Aboriginal people, has the effect of
assuming that cultural practice is frozen at a particular point in time (usu-
ally the distant past). This allows the dismissal of more recent practice,
however consistent it may actually be with local beliefs and values, as
“inauthentic,” giving non-Aboriginal resource managers and others the
power to deWne what constitutes “authentic” Aboriginal culture and to
judge the behaviour of Aboriginal peoples accordingly. To illustrate this
they recount a case in which two Yup’ik boys were charged with shooting
a muskox out of season (Morrow and Hensel 1992: 40-41). Muskoxen are
rarely found around the village in question, so the boys had consulted the
village elders for guidance before shooting it. The elders had advised the
boys to shoot the animal because it had offered itself to them and might
be offended if they did not. The boys shot the animal and the meat was
distributed within the village in a culturally accepted manner. Thus, they
interpreted and acted upon the unusual appearance of the muskox in a
manner that was consistent with local Yup’ik ideology. Yet the judge in the
case rejected a defence based on “customary and traditional” practice and
ruled against the boys on the grounds that muskoxen are not traditional
game animals in the area.
This illustrates how the idea of tradition can be used by non-Aboriginal
people to deny the adaptability and dynamism of Aboriginal culture.
Many Euro-North Americans view changing practices and lifestyles in
Aboriginal communities as evidence that traditional knowledge is disap-
pearing. This allows them to discount the opinions and knowledge of
Aboriginal people who do not live according to their own preconceived
notions of a traditional Aboriginal lifestyle. More than once I have heard
a Euro-Canadian dismiss an Aboriginal person’s claim to possess tradi-
tional knowledge with a statement like, “He doesn’t have any traditional
knowledge. He went to school and drives a truck and a skidoo just like
me.” Use of the modiWer “traditional” enables people to hold such views
because it implies that Aboriginal culture is static. This allows people, like
the judge in the above example, to deny that First Nations peoples have
the ability to adapt to new circumstances without abandoning their cul-
tures altogether. Use of the term “traditional” also makes it easy for scientists
 The Politics of TEK 121

and resource managers to disregard the possibility that Aboriginal peoples

might possess distinct cultural perspectives on modern industrial activities
such as logging or mining.
As with the term “tradition,” use of the English terms “environment”
and “ecological” in discussions of TEK tends to bias the discourse towards
a Euro-North American perspective. These terms are products of a dis-
tinctly European conception of the world. Implicit in their use is the
notion that human beings are separate and distinct from the rest of the
world, and it is speciWcally the non-human part of the world that consti-
tutes the “environment.” Though some ecologists and others have begun
to point out that humans are indeed part of the environment (e.g., in the
debate over global warming), in practice, this has done little to break
down the conceptual separation between humans and the environment
in Western thought. There are very few Euro-Canadians who would con-
sider kinship, for example, to be an ecological topic. Yet there are those
who do not subscribe to this rigid European distinction between humans
and the environment, among them many of the Aboriginal people of the
Yukon, who have referred to themselves explicitly as “part of the land,
part of the water” (McClellan et al. 1987: 1). In the absence of a strict sep-
aration between humans and the environment, the very idea of separating
“ecological” from “non-ecological” knowledge becomes nonsensical. This
is powerfully illustrated by Aboriginal elders who, when asked to share
their knowledge about the environment, are just as likely to talk about
non-environmental topics like kinship or respect as they are to talk about
animals and landscapes. Every time researchers or bureaucrats dismiss or
ignore these parts of an elder’s testimony as irrelevant, they impose their
own culturally derived standards of relevance.
The most fundamental and least examined (in the discourse on TEK, at
any rate) concept underlying the idea of TEK is that of “knowledge.” The
goal of most TEK research is to collect, preserve, and/or utilize traditional
knowledge. Yet traditional knowledge is not really knowledge at all in the
Western sense of the term. Aboriginal people themselves constantly point
this out when they say that traditional knowledge is not so much knowl-
edge as it is a “way of life” (see Chapter 2). This should come as no surprise
to anthropologists, who have long regarded knowledge as culturally con-
structed (e.g., Bulmer 1967; Evans-Pritchard 1937; Gladwin 1970; Lévi-
Strauss 1966). As a result, they have tended to approach it not simply as
an abstract product of the human intellect but, rather, as one aspect of
broad cultural processes that are embedded in complex networks of social
relations, values, and practices. Indeed, all of the Wnest ethnographic
treatments of local knowledge in the North (Cruikshank 1990; Nelson
1983; and Tanner 1979, to name but a few) have made this point explic-
itly, and with scarcely a single incidence of the expression “TEK” among
122 The Politics of TEK

them. Despite the warnings from anthropologists and Aboriginal people

themselves, however, scholars and government ofWcials engaged in the
discourse on TEK continue to treat traditional knowledge as a set of dis-
crete intellectual products that are completely separable from the cultural
milieu that gives them meaning.
To understand why this is the case, we need to look at the context in
which TEK research has been carried out and in which its results are being
used. Most TEK research in Canada has grown out of the land claims
process, in which First Nations entered into negotiations with federal
and provincial and/or territorial governments to settle the question of
Aboriginal rights to land and self-government. Early traditional knowl-
edge studies were carried out to document patterns of Aboriginal land use
for speciWc land claims negotiations (Freeman 1976). Increasingly, how-
ever, the purpose for collecting TEK has been to incorporate it into co-
management and environmental impact assessment processes established
under, or in conjunction with, these land claims agreements (e.g., Allen
1994; Berger 1977; Brody 1982; Freeman and Carbyn 1988; Inglis 1993;
Johannes 1989; Johnson 1992; Nakashima 1990; Northern Perspectives
1992; Roberts 1996; Urquhart 2001).
Although the idea of incorporating TEK into processes of state resource
management and impact assessment is a fairly new one, systems of state-
sponsored wildlife management and impact assessment are themselves
far from new. Indeed, not only do both Welds have relatively long histories
as established disciplines in applied science (especially wildlife manage-
ment) but both have also been formally institutionalized through the
establishment of complex state bureaucracies. Moreover, these bureau-
cratic structures have long been the exclusive domain of scientists and
resource managers who necessarily have a great deal personally invested in
scientiWc management as a profession. Because of this, they tend to view
TEK (at best) as a supplementary body of information that does not
threaten the fundamental assumptions of wildlife management itself. This
is evident from the rhetoric concerning incorporating TEK into the manage-
ment process, which assumes that the value of TEK lies in its use to
wildlife managers. That traditional knowledge might be used to rethink
unexamined assumptions about how people should relate to the world
around them, which unconsciously form the basis of scientiWc wildlife
management itself, is a possibility that scientists and resource managers
never entertain. It is this perspective on the relation between TEK and the
management process that has led directly to the goal of integrating TEK
and science in the Wrst place.
This approach allows the project of integrating the two knowledge sys-
tems to be reduced to the technical exercise of combining two alternative
sets of data, while the management system into which this new integrated
 The Politics of TEK 123

knowledge is inserted remains essentially unchanged (see also Cruikshank

1998: 53). The imperative of integration means that TEK must be ex-
pressed in forms that are compatible with existing institutions and pro-
cesses of scientiWc resource management. The problem with this approach
to TEK is that it ignores the cultural processes in which different ways of
knowing are embedded and treats traditional knowledge (to say nothing
of scientiWc knowledge) as simply another type of information or source of
data. In practice this has had two important and interrelated effects on the
way TEK researchers have approached the rich constellation of social rela-
tions, practices, values, and beliefs to which the term TEK supposedly
refers: they have had to both compartmentalize it and distill it.

The Compartmentalization of TEK

ScientiWc knowledge and practice are compartmentalized. Indeed, the same
can be said of everything that Western scientists and scholars classify as
“knowledge.” There are categories such as “social science,” “natural science,”
“pure science,” “applied science,” and so on, each of which is further sub-
divided into a whole array of disciplines and subdisciplines that are quite
distinct from one another both intellectually and socially. Historians of
science and sociologists have argued that this compartmentalization has
more to do with the politics of institutionalized knowledge production in
the West than it does with any corresponding divisions in the “real” world
(e.g., Foucault 1980; Rabinbach 1990; Said 1978; Worster 1977). The pro-
duction and compartmentalization of knowledge do not occur in a world
of pure intellect but, rather, are aspects of broader trends in the develop-
ment of capitalism and state structures (e.g., Foucault 1978; Lukács 1971;
Marcuse 1982; Merchant 1980). This compartmentalization has profound
effects on how people can think about knowledge and the ways in which
it can be used. This is especially obvious to those who do not accept the
basic assumptions underlying compartmentalization.
An experienced hunter in Burwash Landing, who has dealt extensively
with both government ofWcials and biologists, explained to me once why
he felt the government could not effectively manage wildlife. He com-
plained that government ofWcials would not act without Wrst gathering
knowledge from all its experts. But this is easier said than done, he ex-
plained, because the government has forestry experts, water experts, and
mining experts; it has sheep biologists, moose biologists, wolf biologists,
and bear biologists; and none of these people knows anything outside of
their own specialty. Since any management efforts necessarily must in-
clude a number of different resources, the government is powerless to act
without endless meetings in which these specialists attempt to “educate”
one another; and even then no one really understands the environment as
a whole. He explicitly contrasted this situation to his own knowledge of
124 The Politics of TEK

the land and that of others in the village who have spent considerable
parts of their lives out on it. He said that survival in the bush depends on
one’s knowledge of the environment as a whole. It is not enough to know
only about bears or moose; one must know about all of the animals out
there – how they behave, what they eat, how they interact with one
another, and how they think. To illustrate his point, he listed about ten
different species of animals and the relative sizes of their populations in
the area over the past Wfteen years. He said that biologists do not know as
much about the environment as they think they do because, if you put
them out in the bush alone, they would not be able to survive.
While it may not be entirely fair to criticize the knowledge of biologists
on this count (since it is not their goal or intention to be able to “live on
the land” in this way), this statement does highlight the radically different
social contexts in which scientiWc resource managers and Aboriginal peo-
ple are embedded. Knowledge compartmentalization, which is an unques-
tioned fact of living and functioning in the world of bureaucratized state
management, is seen as quite strange and counterproductive by one who
does not accept that social context as given. Indeed, most aboriginal peo-
ple are quite explicit about the uncompartmentalized nature of the life-
style that is referred to under the rubric “traditional knowledge.” To survive
on the land one must know not only about certain animals but also about
how they Wt into a complex web of practices, values, and social relations
that encompass not only all animals, plants, and land forms but all
humans as well.
All general descriptions of traditional knowledge encountered at TEK
workshops and found in the introductions to management-oriented TEK
studies echo this sentiment; indeed, much is made of the holistic nature
of TEK in all the rhetoric surrounding it. Yet, despite all this, one continu-
ously comes across TEK reports with titles like “Traditional Ecological
Knowledge of Beluga Whales” (Huntington 1995) or “Collection and
Analysis of Traditional Ecological Knowledge about a Population of Arc-
tic Tundra Caribou” (Ferguson and Messier 1997). And community-level
workshops are being held regularly across the North for the explicit pur-
pose of gathering “Moose TEK” or “TEK about Dall sheep.” As these titles
imply, many TEK studies focus on single species or, at most, on a handful
of related or “important” species – almost always large game animals or
medicinal plants. This focus on individual species conforms not to the
views of Aboriginal elders and hunters but, rather, to the needs and speci-
Wcations of the scientists and government ofWcials who are managing
these populations in an established institutionalized setting.
Scientists and resource managers concerned with managing a popula-
tion of Dall sheep, for example, are primarily interested in data on sheep.
They may have some interest in a few other species (e.g., major prey or
 The Politics of TEK 125

predator species such as, in the case of Dall sheep, coyotes, wolves, or
eagles), but in general they are not at all interested in “unrelated” animals
such as ground squirrels, salmon, moose, or otters. The integrated holistic
view of the world that hunters value and, indeed, depend upon for their
survival cannot be accommodated by the institutional structure of the
state management system into which it is being incorporated. For the
experience of local hunters to be useful at all to scientists and resource
managers, it must be compartmentalized in a way that corresponds to the
divisions that already exist in the practice of scientiWc resource manage-
ment. So sheep biologists deal with sheep TEK; bear biologists deal with
bear TEK; moose biologists deal with moose TEK, and so on. Since scien-
tiWc knowledge of the environment is divided and compartmentalized,
scientists treat TEK – insofar as it is considered “knowledge” at all – as
compartmentalizable as well.
The experiences and lives of First Nations peoples, however, cannot be
compartmentalized in a way that corresponds to the categories of scien-
tiWc management. The lack of correspondence that inevitably results from
the attempt to do so leads to two types of problem. The Wrst is that there
are categories in the Weld of scientiWc resource management that appear
to have no analogues in TEK. This creates the illusion that First Nations
peoples have nothing to say regarding these topics. Examples of this type
are categories such as “mining” and “forestry.” Though Aboriginal peoples
certainly used both minerals and trees in precontact times, their practices
had little resemblance to contemporary industrial mining or forestry. The
knowledge that they did possess concerning the location of these re-
sources and how to obtain them are seen as rudimentary and outdated,
unable to provide even supplementary data for foresters or geophysicists
(though there are some signiWcant exceptions to this).5 Nor do these activ-
ities seem to be surrounded by the same richly elaborated set of beliefs
and practices as is, for example, hunting. Most scientists and resource
managers conclude, therefore, that no TEK exists regarding these “mod-
ern” topics; though there may be such a thing as “moose TEK,” there is no
“forestry TEK” or “mining TEK.” This assumption is given additional
weight by the use of the modiWer “traditional,” as noted above.
On numerous occasions at meetings and workshops on mining or
forestry in Whitehorse, I heard questions and concerns regarding tradi-
tional knowledge dismissed with the assertion that, in essence, there is no
such thing (though it is usually phrased somewhat more delicately than
this). This assertion is an illusion caused by the false compartmentaliza-
tion of TEK. Although Aboriginal peoples did not engage in industrial
forestry or mining in precontact times, they nevertheless have distinct
beliefs, practices, and values regarding trees and the earth that are relevant
to the modern practices of mining and forestry (Kari 1995; McClellan
126 The Politics of TEK

1975; Nelson 1983). By channeling all discussion into the institutionally

accepted language of science-based resource management, the assertion
that “there is no TEK on mining/forestry” effectively limits the ways in
which First Nations peoples can participate in the debates surrounding
these industries. Although they are welcome to participate, the “truth” of
their input is evaluated strictly according to the standards of forestry, ecol-
ogy, geology, or geophysics. Because there is supposedly no TEK about
forestry or mining to compete with these accepted disciplines, scientists
and resource managers can conWdently assume that they hold a monopoly
on knowledge in these Welds. This is especially signiWcant in the Yukon,
where mining has long been one of the most important resource-based
activities, and governments are at this moment struggling to develop a
management plan for a newly emerging timber industry.
The second problem arising from the compartmentalization of TEK is
that whole aspects of Aboriginal peoples’ reality fall outside the estab-
lished categories of scientiWc resource management. A whole array of
stories, values, social relations, and practices, all of which contribute
substance and meaning to aboriginal peoples’ relationship to the environ-
ment, must be distilled out of TEK before it can be incorporated into the
institutional framework of scientiWc resource management. I now examine
this process of distillation.

The Distillation of TEK

As discussed above, scientists and resource managers interested in gather-
ing the TEK of Dall sheep, for instance, are not particularly interested in
hunters’ opinions or observations regarding ground squirrels or otters as
these seemingly have nothing to do with sheep. Their interests, however,
are even more circumscribed than this. It is not simply that they are inter-
ested only in sheep; rather, they are only interested in certain kinds of infor-
mation regarding (only) sheep. Resource managers are typically interested
in information on the numbers of sheep sighted by First Nations members
and the years and locations of these sightings. They are not interested
in (nor are they able to make use of) a wide variety of the elements of
an Aboriginal hunter’s world view (which to her or him are directly related
to sheep), such as the stories, values, and social relations that transmute
those sheep from a set of population Wgures into sentient members of
the social, moral, meaning-Wlled universe of the hunter and his or her
family. These vital aspects of the hunter’s rich and complex relationship
with sheep are distilled out in any attempt to collect or use TEK in the
management process. A speciWc example should illustrate the nature of
this process.
In an attempt to manage a population of Dall sheep in the southwest
Yukon, the Kluane First Nation and the Yukon Territorial Government
 The Politics of TEK 127

established the multi-stakeholder Ruby Range Sheep Steering Committee

(RRSSC) to make recommendations to the Yukon Fish and Wildlife Man-
agement Board (see Chapter 4). The committee was explicitly mandated
to consider both scientiWc and traditional knowledge in the formulation
of their recommendations. First Nations people, including elders and
hunters, spoke to the committee, and some sat on it and participated
regularly in its meetings. They were asked to recall the numbers of sheep
they had seen over the years as well as when and where these sightings
had occurred. A series of maps was prepared from their accounts. As far as
the scientists and government ofWcials involved in the process were con-
cerned, this meant that they had fully and fairly considered the traditional
knowledge of the community; they proved either unwilling or unable
to make use of other types of information offered by community mem-
bers. In discussions about regulating sheep hunting, for example, several
Kluane people expressed concern over the current practice of restricting
hunters to shooting only full curl rams (these are mature rams eight years
old or older). They argued that these older animals are especially impor-
tant to the overall sheep population because of their role as teachers; it
is from these mature rams that younger rams learn proper mating and
rutting behaviour as well as more general survival strategies. Thus, killing
too many full curl rams has an impact on the population far in excess of
the number of animals actually killed by hunters. One person speciWcally
likened it to killing off all the elders in the village; though the actual num-
ber of people killed might not be great, the damage to the community in
terms of knowledge and social reproduction would be incalculable.
Kluane people had raised these concerns hoping to switch from a full
curl rule to a quota system as a means for limiting the sheep kill in the
area. Both methods effectively limit the number of animals that can be
killed, but a quota system would spread the kill more evenly over the
entire population rather than focusing it on a particular age group. The
scientists and resource managers present at the meetings, however, neither
dismissed nor refuted this argument. In fact, they did not respond at all.6
Indeed, even after Kluane people made this argument, biologists contin-
ued to assert that there was no need for a quota because the full curl rule
was sufWcient to limit the number of sheep taken. It was as though Kluane
people had never made their argument at all. There are three possible
reasons for the biologists at these meetings to have ignored Kluane peo-
ple’s argument against the full curl rule. First, restricting the hunt to full
curl rams (the big “trophy” sheep) is clearly preferable to big game outWt-
ters, several of whom were also present at these meetings. Second, some
of them may simply not have taken this social information about sheep
very seriously. Third, those who did take it seriously (and I believe there
were at least some who did) were unable to make use of it because it fails
128 The Politics of TEK

to conform to Euro-North American assumptions about animals – assump-

tions upon which wildlife management is based. In addition, it would be dif-
Wcult either to prove that such an effect exists or to calculate its magnitude.7
Contrast this to justiWcations for a ban on hunting ewes (along with the
females of nearly all big game species), which is supported without ques-
tion by biologists and resource managers (and which they mentioned sev-
eral times over the course of these meetings). The argument for this ban is
that, since ewes bear young, they represent not only themselves but also
all of their potential offspring. Thus, killing a ewe has a much greater
impact on the future population than the death of a single animal. This
argument strongly resembles Kluane people’s argument against shooting
full curl rams, except that it is mathematical and biological rather than
social in nature. In contrast to the case of full curl rams, it is a simple mat-
ter to calculate the number of potential offspring that will be affected by
the shooting of a ewe. Everything that one needs to know about sheep to
make this calculation can be expressed numerically (e.g., average numbers
of offspring, number of reproductive years per ewe, and so on).
Kluane people attending these meetings expressed frustration at the
tendency of scientists to treat animals as numbers. As one hunter put it:
“The sheep don’t fall out of the sky. They don’t create on a piece of paper
in somebody’s ofWce. They are born, raised out there in the wild. That’s
where they are born; that’s where they die. They don’t happen in some-
body’s ofWce. It doesn’t matter how many numbers you put on that piece
of paper; out there is still the same.”8 To this hunter, sheep are not num-
bers. They are sentient beings with their own social structure, whose lives
are quite independent from the mathematical manipulations of biologists.
As far as he and many other Kluane people are concerned, disruption of
the sheep’s social structure can do at least as much damage to their popu-
lation as can the death of hordes of “potential offspring” who exist only as
numbers on paper. Understanding how animals think and behave is every
bit as important to them as the numbers sought by biologists; yet scientiWc
resource managers are unable to accommodate this kind of information.9
In the relatively exceptional cases when TEK studies do elicit non-
numerical information, such as descriptions of the behaviour of sheep and
their predators, they tend to treat these accounts as isolated incidents
of pure observation, exhibiting little interest in (or dismissing as useless)
the meaning of such behaviour (i.e., how does the hunter interpret this
behaviour in the context of certain stories, beliefs, and social relations
to which it directly relates?); instead, biologists conWdently assign their
own meanings and interpretations to these observations. Even those
management-oriented TEK studies that have explicitly tried to gather
more than just animal population Wgures (e.g., the collection of personal
histories described in Ferguson and Messier 1997) have usually only done
 The Politics of TEK 129

so to “tighten up” these population Wgures (i.e., to get more precise data
for time and place). Scientists and resource managers usually do not even
acknowledge, much less attempt to make use of, the stories, beliefs, and
values that inform the hunters’ view of the world and specify the proper
relationship between themselves and the animals in question (see Chapter
2). Since these non-quantitative understandings cannot really be “trans-
lated into the language of TEK,” they tend to “drop out of the database”
(Cruikshank 1998: 57-58).
The imperative of incorporating TEK into the state management system
has caused researchers to focus on extracting from communities only that
kind of information that can be expressed in a few very speciWc ways –
that is, in forms that can be utilized within the institutional framework
of scientiWc resource management, such as numbers and lines on maps
contained in reports, books, and other written documents – and then to
interpret that information in a manner consistent with the assumptions of
scientiWc wildlife management. The practice of distilling these TEK arti-
facts out of the interrelated complexity of social relations has some very
serious consequences. To begin with, the simple attempt to set down on
paper that which all holders of traditional knowledge agree is a “way of
life” necessarily distills out the social relations and practices that make it
meaningful. In addition, the need to render this information into a form
compatible with scientiWc data tends to remove even those qualitative
aspects of local experience that might otherwise have survived translation
into written form.
Several First Nations people, who have themselves worked on tradi-
tional knowledge projects in the Yukon, have expressed to me their frus-
tration that, once this knowledge has been gathered, “it just sits there” in
a Wling cabinet or book. It is not passed on to young people and incorpo-
rated into the daily life of the village but Wled away to be consulted occa-
sionally in the course of land claims negotiations or resource management
debates. Indeed, the artifacts produced by these traditional knowledge
studies, useful though they may be in certain contexts (speciWcally, those
for which they were produced), actually possess none of the characteris-
tics that such studies themselves use in their deWnitions of TEK in the
Wrst place. In other words, rather than being holistic, oral, qualitative, and
intuitive, TEK artifacts tend to be categorized, written, quantitative, and
analytical. They are closer in form to scientiWc documents than they are to
the accepted (and idealized) descriptions of the type of knowledge they are
supposed to represent. It should hardly be surprising, then, to Wnd that
these artifacts are largely useless to people’s everyday lives – even in the
communities where they were produced.
TEK researchers are to some extent aware of the dangers of distilla-
tion and translation inherent in their work, but they usually treat these
130 The Politics of TEK

problems as technical difWculties to be overcome and ignore their politi-

cal dimensions. The crucial question concerning the distillation of TEK
should be: “who is doing the distilling?” The answer to this question is not
always obvious because distillation is not usually the result of a conscious
process; rather, the very conceptualization of TEK as something to be gath-
ered and incorporated into the management process virtually assures this
distillation. All those who use the term TEK, for example, are (probably
without even realizing it) participating in the process of distilling out
“non-traditional” in favour of “traditional” knowledge; “non-ecological”
in favour of “ecological” knowledge; and, most signiWcantly of all, “non-
knowledge” in favour of “knowledge.” But who decides what qualiWes as
“traditional,” or “ecological,” or “knowledge?”
TEK artifacts are produced for the explicit purpose of being incorporated
into existing institutions of scientiWc resource management. As a result,
TEK researchers – Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal alike – have no choice
but to conform to the meanings scientists and resource managers assign to
terms like “knowledge” and “traditional” when designing and conducting
TEK research as well as analyzing it. If they do not, then the TEK artifacts
they produce will be useless to resource managers and therefore will not
be incorporated into the management process. Thus, the meanings and
categories used by scientists and resource managers end up shaping the
process of distillation, which in essence sorts the life experiences of elders
and hunters into the relevant and the irrelevant, into useful knowledge
and useless non-knowledge. In effect, TEK researchers are – by the ques-
tions they ask, the data they record, and the TEK artifacts they produce –
deciding for elders and hunters which of their experiences are relevant
to the management of wildlife (though TEK researchers are themselves
constrained by the needs and assumptions of the state management sys-
tem). Thus, regardless of who is conducting a speciWc TEK research project,
they must – by the very nature of the project in which they are engaged –
distill out meaning and content so that the resulting TEK artifact is accept-
able and useful to scientists and managers. The irony is that the very
people who know the least about traditional knowledge are the ones who
set the standards of relevance by which it is distilled.
Distillation also emerges almost naturally out of the social context of
TEK research and co-management processes. TEK research is often con-
ducted through formal interviews or TEK workshops. Co-management
decisions (or, as is usually the case, recommendations) are made at confer-
ences and resource board meetings. Though these meetings and workshops
are often held in local communities, they are nevertheless conducted in
ofWces and conference rooms quite similar to those used by federal and
territorial government ofWcials. Thus, bureaucratic resource managers
never Wnd themselves in truly unfamiliar social contexts. This is true of
 The Politics of TEK 131

scientists as well since their participation in conferences and government

meetings has long been an integral part of the process of doing science
(see, e.g., Latour 1987; Traweek 1988). This is certainly true for scientists
involved in resource management in the Canadian North, a majority of
whom either work directly for federal or territorial governments or derive
a large part of their income from government contracts. They attend con-
ferences and other bureaucratic forums of resource management as a
regular part of the work they do as scientists; and their work is speciWcally
tailored to these kinds of use. Thus, though co-management may mean
that scientists and resource managers have to travel out to the villages and
must make use of TEK artifacts alongside those of science, they never have
to leave the comfortable setting of the conference room to engage in the
practice of resource management.
The situation is very different for many First Nations peoples called
on to participate in TEK studies or co-management meetings. Elders and
hunters must take time out from their lives to attend the necessary inter-
views, workshops, or meetings. They sit, often ill at ease, in the unfamiliar
surroundings of conference rooms. Often they must endure one or more
lectures by biologists on the “state of the resource” – lectures that are
so full of jargon and “big words” that they understand very little of them.
They are then expected to speak about the resource in question – but only
about that particular resource and only about certain aspects of it (num-
bers, places, dates). When they feel the need to disregard these seemingly
arbitrary limitations on the subject matter and choose to talk more
broadly about matters they feel are important and relevant, they are
allowed to speak (though they are sometimes subjected to gestures of
impatience and disrespect, such as eye-rolling, audible sighs, and/or
under-the-breath comments), but the conversation is invariably brought
back “on topic” (often after a brief but awkward silence) by a scientist or
resource manager. After putting up with all of that, elders and hunters
with whom I have spoken say over and over again that they see very little
that they consider to be of practical value to them emerge from these
processes. Small wonder that several elders and hunters have told me quite
plainly that they Wnd these affairs extremely frustrating because it seems
that government ofWcials do not take them very seriously. I know several
who view all such meetings as a waste of time and simply do not attend
them any more, despite their extensive experience on the land.
In the conference rooms, with their Xip charts and overhead projectors,
scientists and managers are in their element. They set the agenda, frame
the discussion, ask the questions. First Nations elders and hunters, feel-
ing out of place and a bit bewildered, follow along and answer the scien-
tists’ questions, Wlling in the TEK “blanks” in their management scheme.
Any attempt that an elder may make to reframe the discussion is usually
132 The Politics of TEK

viewed by scientists as irrelevant side-tracking. Elders and hunters are

quite aware of the contextual bias inherent in these events. One hunter,
who does not attend co-management meetings any more, told me that
this was because government people treat him and his knowledge as “old-
fashioned” and useless. He said that they should hold one of these meet-
ings out on his trapline during the winter (where it might easily be -40° or
-50° Celsius.). He would tell them they could discuss management after
they got a Wre going, built a brush camp, and got dinner ready. Then they
might realize that he and other elders know a little something.

Systems of Knowledge
I have argued that attempts to incorporate the lived experiences of First
Nations elders and hunters into the language and institutional structures
of modern bureaucratic resource management lead inevitably to their
compartmentalization and distillation, thus seriously distorting them. As
I have said, TEK researchers and others are, to some extent, aware of these
problems, but they tend to see them as technical difWculties that can be
solved through improvements in research methodology and/or as a neces-
sary (if regrettable) aspect of the attempt to integrate two radically differ-
ent systems of knowledge. Most are willing to live with these problems
because they view the integration of TEK and science as a project that will
ultimately beneWt First Nations peoples and bureaucratic resource man-
agers alike. In this section and the one to follow, I question this view. I
take a critical look at the idea of “knowledge-integration” in an effort to
understand the assumptions and processes lying beneath the surface
rhetoric: what does it really mean to speak of integrating science and TEK?
And what assumptions does this project take for granted?
The idea that traditional and scientiWc knowledge can be integrated
is based on two implicit assumptions about the nature of knowledge. First,
it assumes that knowledge is a collection of intellectual products that
can be isolated from their social context; second, it assumes that knowl-
edge exists in discrete bounded “systems” (i.e., that “scientiWc knowledge,”
for example, is somehow qualitatively different from “traditional knowl-
edge”). According to this view of knowledge, integrating TEK and science
should be a simple matter of combining the intellectual products of one
system with those of the other. Indeed, most attempts to integrate TEK
and science through the production and use of TEK artifacts have at-
tempted to do just this.10 Unfortunately, this view of knowledge and
knowledge-integration does not withstand close scrutiny. In this section, I
explore this issue on a theoretical level, arguing that the idea of knowledge-
integration is Xawed because the assumptions about knowledge upon
which it is based are themselves Xawed.11 Then, in the following section,
 The Politics of TEK 133

I turn to an examination of the political implications of pursuing the pro-

ject of knowledge-integration in light of these difWculties.
As I have already argued, the idea that knowledge is a set of intellectual
products separable from their sociocultural context is itself a cultural
construction. This is hardly news to social scientists. Anthropologists and
others have long sought to demonstrate the sociocultural dimensions of
so-called traditional knowledge systems throughout the world (Bastien
1978; Bulmer 1967; Evans-Pritchard 1937; Gladwin 1970; Goulet 1998;
Lévi-Strauss 1966; Lévy-Bruhl 1973a, to name just a very few). These stud-
ies have shown not only that non-Western knowledge systems are inter-
nally consistent and rational to those who accept the fundamental
assumptions upon which they are based but also that such systems of
knowledge are socially useful, providing their adherents with powerful
tools for understanding and functioning in the world. This utility legit-
imizes these ways of knowing in the eyes of those embedded in the social
relations and practices that make them meaningful. It is only relatively
recently, however, that scholars have begun to take seriously the implica-
tions of this perspective on knowledge for the study of science, our own
peculiar way of knowing about the world. Studies in the anthropology of
science (e.g., Charlesworth, et al. 1989; Hess and Layne 1992; Knorr-
Cetina and Mulkay 1983; Martin 1991; Nader 1996; Traweek 1988), the
sociology of knowledge (Callon 1986; Latour 1987, 1988; Longino 1990;
Merton 1973, Woolgar 1988), and the history and philosophy of science
(Feyerabend 1970; Hesse 1980; Keller 1985; Kuhn 1970; Todes 1989) have
all begun to explore the social dimensions of scientiWc knowledge produc-
tion. These studies indicate that all knowledge – including science – is
embedded in larger social processes that give it meaning.
If, as so many studies have implied, both the “truth” and “utility” of all
knowledge – including science – derive from and give meaning to the
sociocultural contexts in which they are embedded, then it is clear that
the idea of trying to understand or make use of any knowledge in isolation
from its social and cultural context is impossible (even nonsensical). This
has serious implications for the project of knowledge-integration.
Some scholars studying the production of scientiWc knowledge (e.g.,
Feyerabend 1970; Latour 1987, 1988), however, have gone even further,
questioning the assumption that science is an epistemologically distinct
system of knowledge at all. They see not only the production of scientiWc
artifacts (theories, data, and instruments) but also their legitimacy (and,
indeed, their very utility) as resulting from active social manipulation
rather than from some elite epistemological status they happen to possess.
This calls into question long-standing assumptions about the existence of
knowledge systems more generally.
134 The Politics of TEK

The assumption that knowledge exists in discrete bounded systems is

not new. It is, in fact, merely one aspect of the long and widely held belief
that science is qualitatively different from all other ways of knowing about
the world.12 Indeed, since Descartes and Bacon, philosophers and other
scholars have puzzled over (and wondered at) the phenomenon of science.
Aware that other ways of knowing exist throughout the world (and at
home), these thinkers have struggled with the question “what is science?”
What is it that distinguishes science from all other types of knowledge
(or, perhaps, “belief,” since many would be unwilling to apply the term
“knowledge” to these other systems)? And, most important of all, why
does science work (with the implication that other ways of knowing do
not)? Despite hundreds of years of effort, however, scholars have been
unable to answer these questions satisfactorily.
Philosophers and historians of science have approached the question
“what is science?” in a number of quite different ways. The most straight-
forward approach has been the attempt to delineate the body of scientiWc
knowledge through the use of some set of exclusionary criteria. All of the
knowledge that meets these criteria is deemed science, while knowledge
that does not meet them is classiWed as non-science. Perhaps the most
inXuential work of this sort was Karl Popper’s (1959) attempt to deWne
science with the criterion of “falsiWability.” The problem with this type of
approach to deWning science was made clear by Thomas Kuhn (1970),
among others. Kuhn showed that science is not simply an ever-expanding
body of knowledge, as most of those attempting to deWne it had main-
tained; rather, it is constantly being redeWned in such a way that new
knowledge can be admitted and old knowledge either excluded as no
longer “scientiWc” or has its meaning radically altered. Weeded out are
all of the intellectual dead-ends and worn out paradigms that no longer
retain their “truth”: from Ptolemaic astronomy, to the mystical writings
of Newton and Kepler, to the phlogiston theory in chemistry. Often
enough, elements and theories that are discarded and reviled as unscien-
tiWc and false are later revived and reincorporated into the body of
accepted scientiWc thought (e.g., see Silverstein 1979 for a dramatic
account of the rise, fall, and subsequent revival of Eli Mechnikov’s phago-
cytic theory of immunity). Clearly it would be difWcult to arrive at a hard
and fast set of criteria that would at times admit certain knowledge as sci-
entiWc and at other times dismiss it as “unscientiWc.”
In the second type of approach to conceptualizing science, scholars do
not attempt to delineate the body of scientiWc knowledge itself but, rather,
attempt to deWne the “scientiWc method” by which that knowledge is gen-
erated. This was, of course, the strategy adopted by Bacon (1960) and
Descartes (1981), who saw the methodology of science as the link between
purely objective reality and the purely subjective mind. Utterly value free
 The Politics of TEK 135

and impersonal, this methodology, when applied to the world, was to

yield objective truth, the image of reality faithfully reconstructed in the
human mind. As described above, however, scholars have demonstrated
the context-dependent nature and value-ladenness of all scientiWc fact
and theory to the satisfaction of nearly all those engaged in the study of
science. This has cast doubt on the idea that scientiWc knowledge can be
deWned as the product of some objective methodology.
The recognition that all knowledge is value-laden has caused something
of a crisis in the philosophy of science since now the value-ladenness of
scientiWc knowledge must be reconciled with its apparent utility. A whole
array of attempts has been made to reconceptualize the methodology
of science to deal with this crisis and to explain the mechanism by which
scientiWc knowledge, value-laden and subjective as it is, apparently is still
able to “grow” and “progress.” Among the more inXuential of these refor-
mulations have been the models of Kuhn (1970) and Lakatos (1978);
but even these, though certainly more complex and nuanced than those
of Bacon and Descartes, have ultimately proven either inadequate to the
task of dealing with the historical realities of scientiWc knowledge pro-
duction or have been too vague to really constitute a methodology at all
(Feyerabend 1981: 160-61). As a result, no adequate formulation has yet
been developed for a methodology capable of distinguishing science from
non-science.
Philosopher Paul Feyerabend (1970: 21-22) has claimed not only that all
attempts to formulate a scientiWc method have thus far been inadequate
but, further, that no such formulation is even possible:

The idea of a method that contains Wrm, unchanging, and absolutely

binding principles for conducting the business of science gets into consid-
erable difWculty when confronted with the results of historical research.
We Wnd, then, that there is not a single rule, however plausible, and how-
ever Wrmly grounded in epistemology, that is not violated at some time or
other. It becomes evident that such violations are not accidental events,
they are not the results of insufWcient knowledge or of inattention which
might have been avoided. On the contrary, we see that they are necessary
for progress.

And further:

There is no “scientiWc method”; there is no single procedure or set of rules

that underlies every piece of research and guarantees that it is scientiWc
and, therefore, trustworthy ... Scientists revise their standards, their proce-
dures, their criteria of rationality as they move along and enter new
domains of research just as they revise and perhaps entirely replace their
136 The Politics of TEK

theories and their instruments as they move along and enter new domains
of research. (10)

For Feyerabend, then, science is not a system of knowledge at all. In

spite of this, however, he too feels the need to retain a distinction between
science and non-science, claiming that science is a distinct ideology.13
Unfortunately, this raises the question of what he means by “ideology” as
his characterization of science as an ever-changing collection of knowl-
edge and beliefs governed by the rule “anything goes” does not Wt with
common notions of what constitutes an ideology.
Recently, some scholars (e.g., Hesse 1980; Merchant 1980; Scott 1996)
have approached the conceptualization of science in yet another way.
They argue neither that scientiWc knowledge satisWes some set of criteria
nor that it is the product of a speciWc methodology; rather, they see sci-
ence and, indeed, all systems of knowledge as bodies of knowledge/belief
that are based on one or more root metaphors. These metaphors structure
how we think at such a fundamental level that we are seldom even aware
of their existence.14 This approach allows scholars to preserve the distinc-
tion between science and non-science while allowing for the fact that
science may indeed be “just another way of knowing” or even “just an
ideology.” “Western science is distinctive not through any greater logical
coherence or empirical Wdelity [than, in his case, the knowledge of Cree
hunters], nor any lesser involvement with metaphysical premises, but
through its engagement of particular root metaphors in speciWc social
institutional and socioenvironmental settings” (Scott 1996: 84-85).
This third approach has the advantage of allowing scholars to contrast
science with other knowledge systems without necessarily implying that
one system is “more true” than the other. But it, too, has its problems.
Scientists and Cree hunters may well subscribe to different root metaphors
in their efforts to understand the world, but attempts to separate scien-
tiWc from non-scientiWc knowledge on this basis inevitably fall short
when confronting the dynamic nature of what we call “knowledge.” Cree
hunters, for example, readily accept (and, indeed, incorporate fully into
their view of the world) many of the beliefs and technologies that arise
from the social phenomenon we call science (from guns and snowmobiles
to mathematics) while continuing to base their understandings of the
world on their own particular set of root metaphors. Similarly, scientists
constantly adopt as “scientiWc” beliefs and practices (such as acupuncture)
that have their origins among people who subscribe to very different sets
of root metaphors.15 To what system of knowledge do these different ele-
ments belong?
Even more troublesome than the diffusion and reinterpretation of
knowledge “elements,” however, is the fact that it is extremely difWcult in
 The Politics of TEK 137

practice to map particular knowledge systems onto particular root meta-

phors. The mechanistic view of the world that supposedly underlies scien-
tiWc knowledge, for example, long pre-dates the rise of science (Feyerabend
1993: 248-49). To make matters worse, these underlying metaphors of
science themselves undergo regular change (this is, in fact, precisely what
Kuhn was describing in his analysis of “paradigm shifts”). Does this mean
that, since Einstein replaced the Newtonian model of mechanics with that
of relativity, the two men were embedded in completely different systems
of knowledge? Most would say no because that would contradict our basic
understanding of what science is; although these two men had radically
different understandings of the nature of the world, they were both scien-
tists and they both did “science.” Some might object that, although
Kuhn’s paradigm shifts do indeed represent changes in our underlying
metaphorical understandings of the world, these changes are not deep
enough to cause a rift in the system of scientiWc knowledge; that is, they
are not changes in the root metaphors of science. After all, despite their
differences, Newton and Einstein continued to share some very basic
assumptions about the nature of the world. What, then, are we to make
of Welds like quantum physics and ecology, which challenge even our
most fundamental assumptions about the world – and speciWcally those
upon which science is supposedly based (such as our belief in the subject-
object dichotomy and the primacy of physical causation)? Are they not
“science”?
The problem, I suggest, lies in the assumption that knowledge exists in
discrete epistemological systems. All attempts to conceptualize science
necessarily take this assumption for granted. Indeed, most Western acade-
mics have a stake in distinguishing science from non-science because they
wish either to preserve for science a privileged epistemological status (vis-
à-vis other systems of knowledge) or to deny that status as unwarranted
or ethnocentric (i.e., to argue that other knowledge systems are equally
valid). Proponents and critics of science alike use the term “science” to
stand for a collection of beliefs and practices, the actual meaning/content
of which they take for granted. Even when scholars engage with one
another in a struggle over whether some knowledge artifact qualiWes as
scientiWc, they need consider only the status of the contested artifact not
the overall meaning/content of the term “science” itself. Just because most
people, scientists and non-scientists alike, assume that science exists as a
discrete system of knowledge, however, does not mean that this is the
case. It has in fact proven to be extremely difWcult, if not impossible, to
conceptualize scientiWc knowledge in such a way as to distinguish it from
non-science in a consistent and convincing manner. It seems that knowl-
edge is just too Xuid and heterogeneous to be neatly divided into different
systems. This suggests that the question “what is science?” (along with the
138 The Politics of TEK

implied “how does it differ from non-science?”) is not the most useful way
of approaching the question of knowledge.

Power and the Integration of Knowledge Systems

What are we to make of the term “science” (or, indeed, “knowledge”) if,
as I have argued, it does not refer to a discrete system of knowledge at all?
And what could it possibly mean to speak of “integrating” traditional and
scientiWc knowledge if the only thing distinguishing the beliefs and prac-
tices of “science” from those of “traditional knowledge” is the degree to
which they are incorporated into and legitimized by the institutions of
state power? What is really going on when scientists, resource managers,
and First Nations people engage in the project of knowledge-integration?
And what are the likely consequences of all this – especially for First
Nations people? To answer these questions we need to forget about episte-
mology and look, instead, at power. The term “science” refers to a collec-
tion of artifacts (facts, theories, instruments, and methodologies) that have
gained the backing of individual scientists, research institutions, journals,
funding agencies, governments, universities, and so on. These people and
institutions taken together (the so-called scientiWc community) are them-
selves far from homogeneous and often have very different ideas about
what can and should qualify as science. Battle lines are continuously being
drawn and redrawn in an unending struggle to label some facts and theo-
ries science, while relegating others to the realm of non-science. These are
essentially political struggles, characterized by persuasion and propaganda
rather than by some objective measure of truth (see Callon 1986; Feyer-
abend 1970; Latour 1987, 1988). The term “science” is important in these
struggles because it has become the marker of validity. It is a label that
marks those beliefs and practices that presently enjoy institutional sup-
port and whose proponents have access to funding and prestige.16 The
legitimacy thus conferred on these beliefs and practices facilitates their use
as the basis of and/or justiWcation for political and social action. The legit-
imizing role of the label “science” has important implications for the pro-
ject of knowledge-integration and the cross-cultural study of knowledge
more generally.
All people everywhere possess understandings of the world that are
based on empirical observation and that really “work.” Indeed, it is hard
to imagine a society surviving without its people possessing a great deal of
understanding about how the world works. We might, as some anthropol-
ogists have done (e.g., Horton 1967; Malinowski 1954), choose to label
as “science” all of these useful ways of knowing the world. Given the
above-mentioned difWculties with actually conceptualizing the term, how-
ever, we must ask why someone would want to make (or deny) this claim
in the Wrst place. The decision to label some belief or practice scientiWc (or
 The Politics of TEK 139

non-scientiWc) is a deeply political one. This casts new light on the acade-
mic literature dealing with TEK. Much of that literature attests to the
scientiWc nature of (at least some aspects of) traditional, indigenous, and/
or local knowledge systems; some has even gone so far as to claim that
“traditional knowledge is science” (Hobson 1992: 2, emphasis in original).
The point of such claims has been to establish the legitimacy of traditional
knowledge. By calling traditional knowledge “science,” TEK theorists are
attempting to convince scientists and policy makers that the knowledge of
Aboriginal elders and hunters is a valid basis for making management
decisions. Given the symbolic weight and legitimizing power of the term
“science” in the context of state wildlife management, it is not at all sur-
prising that First Nations peoples and their allies feel the need to make
claims like this. But what are the social and political consequences of
doing so?
In the effort to legitimize the beliefs, values, and practices of First
Nations peoples by calling them science, TEK theorists are helping to sub-
ject those very beliefs, values, and practices to powerful forces of social
change. As I have pointed out, the term “science” does have powerful
connotations in Euro-North American political discourse. These connota-
tions are created and reXected in the complex political institutions of the
state, including those of wildlife management. For the sake of arguing
its legitimacy, we may claim that traditional knowledge is scientiWc, but
the moment we do so, we authorize scientists, resource managers, and
politicians to act upon it as they would more familiar forms of science. It
gives them the conceptual tools and intellectual justiWcation for imposing
their view of the world on First Nations peoples. In other words, to label
the beliefs, practices, and values of First Nations peoples “science” is, in
essence, to tacitly agree to play by the rules of the knowledge game as set
out by the state.
Bruno Latour (1987) has described how the production of scientiWc
knowledge is part of an overall social process that simultaneously pro-
duces not only the artifacts of science but also the utility of these artifacts.
He argues that the artifacts of science do not possess the seemingly magi-
cal universal and cross-cultural utility that people ascribe to them; rather,
they only “work” under certain very speciWc conditions that exist in the
laboratories in which they are produced. These artifacts do not gain ac-
ceptance and utility in the outside world because they “happen to work”
but only through an intense process of negotiation and struggle that has
recreated those speciWc conditions outside the laboratory. This includes
the creation of the necessary physical, social, and conceptual infrastruc-
ture without which the artifacts are useless. He argues, for example, that
airplanes may work in principle, but without the enormous physical infra-
structure that makes them work in practice (from runway systems and
140 The Politics of TEK

Xight schools to the industries that produce the planes themselves and
the fuel to Xy them), they cannot really be said to “work” at all. Similarly,
Newtonian mechanics might work everywhere in principle, but without
the establishment and maintenance of an elaborate (and expensive) sys-
tem of standardized measurements of length, weight, time, temperature,
and so on (all of which are cultural constructions), and their prior appli-
cation to the outside world, mechanics does not work in practice. For
Latour not only the meaning but also the utility of a scientiWc theory or
instrument is entirely dependent on the extension of the social, physical,
and conceptual networks that gave rise to it.
Latour sees the extension of these networks as intimately connected
to power. Scientists extend them primarily by representing local realities in
forms compatible with science. In practice, this means expressing them
in a written form that is amenable to mathematical manipulation. Thus,
in another of his examples, the rich social and physical complexities of
place are expressed as a set of numbers (latitude and longitude). The point
of doing this is to render that place into a mathematical form that can be
brought back to a “centre of calculation” for collection and manipulation.
As these centres accumulate more and more such sets of numbers from
countless other places, scientists there can make new kinds of compar-
isons between realms that earlier may have seemed entirely unrelated
(e.g., Hong Kong and Whitehorse, by virtue of their latitude and longi-
tude, can now be directly and mathematically compared). This gives those
in the centre a new kind of power over all of the places to which these
networks have been extended (i.e., all the places that have been assigned
a latitude and longitude). Power accrues in the centre of calculation, how-
ever, not merely through the collection of information; even more impor-
tant is the manipulation and interpretation of these abstractions. As
scientists at the centre extend their networks ever farther, they can begin
to manipulate the abstractions brought back to them to form higher-
and higher-order abstractions, such as maps, graphs, and theories. In the
process they make choices about what kinds of information and meaning
to preserve and produce (e.g., in generating a map from collected coordi-
nates, cartographers must decide what kinds of information to preserve:
angles or surface shapes). As a result, cartographers in the centre gain enor-
mous power when, for example, navigators all over the world begin to use
their maps. This power is derived not from any inherent “truth” in the
maps they produce but, rather, from the fact that navigators have been
trained to use and rely on these maps (not to mention the particular con-
ceptions of space and time upon which they are based).
Powerful as the abstractions produced by scientists can be, their purpose
is not – nor has it ever been – to represent local knowledge. Indeed, local
knowledge of place, for example, is far too rich and varied to be expressed
 The Politics of TEK 141

by a set of numbers; rather, the sole purpose of distilling these abstract

forms from the complexities of local reality is to extend social/conceptual
networks from the centres of calculation to the outside world. Until this
has been accomplished, the artifacts of science are useless. Four hundred
years ago, for example, Athapaskan hunters in the Yukon, though they
possessed profoundly detailed knowledge of the place in which they lived,
would have regarded their latitude and longitude as both useless and
meaningless. Not surprisingly, cartographers in London had no power over
their lives. Once people far from the centres of calculation accept the con-
cepts of latitude and longitude and begin using maps generated by cartog-
raphers thousands of miles away, however, they – like navigators – must
implicitly accept and base their actions upon the cartographers’ priorities
and assumptions about the world. The illusion of universality that accom-
panies this extension of scientiWc networks makes local knowledge, which
is rooted in its own social networks, seem extremely limited and unreliable
by comparison. Although these seemingly universal abstractions do not
negate local knowledge, they do greatly increase the power of scientists
vis-à-vis local people.
Latour’s argument puts TEK research and the production, compartmen-
talization, and distillation of TEK artifacts in a new light. It indicates that
we might more usefully view the integration of TEK and science as a
process that is extending the social and conceptual networks of scientiWc
resource management into local communities rather than as part of an
attempt to meld two distinct epistemological systems (which, from his
point of view, do not even exist as such). TEK research is, in Latour’s terms,
extending the networks of scientiWc resource management into the “out-
side world” of First Nations communities by rendering the life experiences
of Aboriginal elders and hunters (through the processes of compart-
mentalization and distillation) into forms that can be used and interpreted
far from these communities, in laboratories and centres of calculation
(in this case, for example, the ofWces of the Department of Renewable
Resources in Whitehorse). Rather than empowering local communities, as
many people hope, this process actually concentrates power in the centres
of calculation.
Indeed, viewed in these terms, there can be little doubt that TEK re-
search and co-management have effectively extended the networks of
scientiWc resource management into First Nations villages. As long as TEK
researchers continue to “collect” or “document” TEK as an intellectual
product to be integrated with science, they will be helping to extend the
networks of scientiWc resource management into local communities. This
cannot help concentrating power in the hands of scientists and resource
managers in administrative centres like Whitehorse. After all, who uses
these categorized and distilled TEK studies? As discussed above, community
142 The Politics of TEK

members who spend time out on the land have no use for the kinds of
artifacts produced by standard TEK studies. They do not take those maps
and reports out into the bush with them, and sometimes they even
express their annoyance at continually being asked to contribute to such
studies, which, as often as not, they view as pointless. Yet, more than once
at conferences and workshops on co-management or TEK, I have heard
well-meaning bureaucrats and scientists plead with First Nations people to
“tell us what traditional knowledge is, so we can use it.” The fact that such
pleas can be made again and again without anyone so much as raising an
eyebrow indicates the degree to which people have come to accept the
extension of scientiWc resource management networks into First Nations
communities. By contrast, if a First Nations elder were to stand up at one
of these meetings and ask a biologist to teach him/her then and there the
principles of conservation biology “so we can use it,” these same well-
meaning ofWcials would probably chuckle at the absurdity of the request
and patiently explain to the elder how many years of training are required
before one can be expected to master and use that kind of knowledge.
What makes people accept the notion that scientists and bureaucrats are
in any way qualiWed to “use” traditional knowledge after one or even a
dozen workshops on the subject? It is because they are expected to (and
do in fact) use the numbers, lines on maps, and other artifacts generated
by standard TEK research. These they are undoubtedly qualiWed to use
since they have been trained to read and manipulate exactly this kind of
information. These numbers and maps are none other than the abstract
forms afWxed to local realities for the precise purpose of being manipu-
lated by scientists and managers in the centre. Just as is the case with lati-
tude and longitude, however, TEK artifacts are emphatically not substitutes
for local place-dependent knowledge and practice.
But it is not only resource managers in the centre who use the artifacts
of TEK. A growing segment of First Nations populations in the villages are
making use of these artifacts. This segment is composed primarily, though
not exclusively, of members of the younger generation who are engaged in
negotiating land claims, setting up systems of self-government, and par-
ticipating in bureaucratic co-management processes. Due to the nature of
these activities, these community members have necessarily spent large
periods of their lives in local First Nations government ofWces. They have
earned degrees in law or resource management and/or have taken courses
in mediation and negotiation skills. Unlike most elders in their communi-
ties, they feel comfortable talking with biologists and government ofWcials
in the context of negotiations and co-management meetings. Because of
the huge time commitments they have made, however, Wrst to receive their
formal education and then to work on land claims and co-management,
they have spent a great deal less time out on the land than have many of
 The Politics of TEK 143

their elders (and even some of their peers). As a result, many of them, too,
have to consult with their elders for the traditional knowledge perspec-
tive. While First Nations people in the villages are aware of the increasing
bureaucratization of a segment of their own communities, see it as a prob-
lem, and are actively seeking ways to deal with it, the need to participate
in land claims and co-management continues to tie many people to their
desks at least eight hours a day. Thus, while many elders in the villages
quite clearly reject the networks and assumptions of scientiWc resource
management, the bureaucratization of the younger generation is testi-
mony to the extension of these networks into the villages and into the
bodies and minds of local people themselves.
As noted above, the extension of scientiWc resource management net-
works does not nullify or replace local knowledge of place; it does, how-
ever, increase the power of scientists and resource managers vis-à-vis local
hunters and elders. If we are serious about utilizing the life experiences
of Aboriginal elders and hunters (and not just the abstract representations
of them embodied in TEK reports) to improve resource management prac-
tices and empower local Aboriginal communities, then we must acknowl-
edge this aspect of the current attempt to integrate TEK and science and
develop a new approach to the issue. Improved management and local
empowerment cannot be achieved through any attempt to include local
elders and hunters into the existing state-management system simply
through the production and use of TEK artifacts; instead, this would
require that local beliefs, values, and practices themselves – and not
merely the abstract forms afWxed to them – be accepted as a valid basis for
action. This would require changes to current practices of resource man-
agement and environmental assessment to allow these people to play a
meaningful role in such processes as decision makers. In short, traditional
knowledge cannot be incorporated into processes of resource management
and environmental assessment until Aboriginal elders and hunters have
achieved full decision-making authority in these realms.

Conclusion
The past Wfteen years have witnessed an explosion in the amount of
research devoted to traditional ecological knowledge throughout the Arc-
tic and the Subarctic. The self-proclaimed goal of much of this research
has been to collect and document TEK and to integrate it with scientiWc
knowledge for use in resource management, environmental impact assess-
ment, and land claims negotiations. I have shown that the simple act of
framing the problem as one of integration automatically imposes a cultur-
ally speciWc set of ideas about knowledge on the life experiences of Abo-
riginal peoples. The goal of knowledge-integration forces TEK researchers
to compartmentalize and distill Aboriginal people’s beliefs, values, and
144 The Politics of TEK

experiences according to external criteria of relevance, seriously distorting

them in the process. The project of knowledge-integration also takes for
granted and reproduces existing power relations between Aboriginal peo-
ples and the state by assuming that traditional knowledge is simply a new
form of data to be incorporated into already existing management bureau-
cracies and acted upon by scientists and resource managers. Knowledge,
however (whether scientiWc or traditional), does not exist in some pure
form, independent of power relations; rather, it is constituted by those re-
lations and draws its validity from them. TEK researchers, in so far as they
focus exclusively on the methodological difWculties of integrating distinct
knowledge systems, help to obscure the power relations that shape the pro-
duction and use of the knowledge they study. And, since it is scientists and
resource managers (rather than Aboriginal hunters and trappers) who will
be using the new integrated knowledge, the project of integration actually
serves to concentrate power in administrative centres rather than in Abo-
riginal communities.
In the Yukon, co-management essentially means that First Nations peo-
ples will hold half of the seats on the management boards set up under
the Yukon Umbrella Final Agreement. But nothing in the agreement spe-
ciWcally requires the Fish and Wildlife Management Board or renewable
resources councils to take traditional knowledge into account in formulat-
ing their recommendations; the 50 percent First Nations representation
on these bodies was thought to be sufWcient to ensure this. It remains to
be seen how these co-management bodies work in practice, but a number
of factors work against their revolutionizing the practice of resource man-
agement. One of the most important of these is the fact that all of the
co-management bodies established under the Umbrella Final Agreement
are purely advisory in nature. Though the Fish and Wildlife Management
Board is supposedly “the primary instrument of Fish and Wildlife Man-
agement in the Yukon,” it only has the power to make recommendations
to the Yukon minister of renewable resources. The minister is not obli-
gated to follow these recommendations but only to respond to them in
writing within a speciWed period of time. Not only does this make it
unlikely that decisions will be made purely on the basis of traditional
knowledge, but it also creates a situation in which co-management bodies
are likely to engage in a form of self-censorship, passing on only those rec-
ommendations that they feel will be acted upon (i.e., those based on
acceptable scientiWc evidence). As long as First Nations peoples are com-
pelled to subject their own way of life to external standards of validity
established and imposed by scientists and resource managers, the state
management system will remain essentially unaltered. Reliance on dis-
tilled TEK research, the bureaucratization of First Nations peoples, and the
many bureaucratic layers separating Aboriginal elders and hunters from
 The Politics of TEK 145

real decision-making authority make it unlikely that the creation of these

co-management bodies will lead to a transformation of the management
process or to empowerment of local First Nations peoples.
What is the solution then? Is it possible to develop a management
process that makes full, unbiased use of the way of life that is traditional
knowledge?17 Perhaps, but this would require a radical rethinking of the
basic assumptions, values, and practices underlying contemporary proc-
esses of resource management and environmental impact assessment. Such
a process can only be achieved if elders and hunters are relieved of the bur-
den of having to express themselves to scientists and bureaucrats in ways
that are foreign to them. This means devolving control over local land
and resources to Aboriginal communities themselves, and this would have
to include not only control over wildlife but also over all forms of devel-
opment. As long as ultimate decision-making power over the land is held
in distant administrative centres, local ways of life will continue to be
undervalued or ignored in favour of the illusion of universal scientiWc
applicability.
This is not to say that there is no value at all in the practices of scientiWc
resource management. Village-based Aboriginal peoples themselves are
among the Wrst to admit the usefulness of some of the techniques and per-
spectives of relevant scientiWc disciplines, especially in light of the North’s
increasing population, heterogeneity, and integration into global systems.
Returning decision-making power over the land to local communities,
however, would provide a counter-weight to the power-centralizing ten-
dencies of scientiWc resource management. This would not preclude scien-
tists from engaging in their own set of socially useful practices, but they
would be doing so at the request and direction of local communities.
Thus, scientists would no longer deWne and drive the process of resource
management but would act as a resource, providing communities – upon
request – with a perspective on the environment that, by virtue of its
greater scope for large-scale comparison, would help local people to deal
with larger regional or global issues that cannot be well understood from
a purely local perspective.
It seems unlikely that territorial and federal governments will be de-
volving this kind of control to local communities any time soon (though,
ironically, the present climate of budget cutting and Wscal restraint, if it
continues indeWnitely, may provide just the incentive necessary to do so).
In the meantime, however, the present role of traditional knowledge in
the management process needs to be carefully rethought. As Julie Cruik-
shank (1981: 86) puts it, “the focus should not be on ‘getting information
before it is too late’ but on developing mechanisms for its continued trans-
mission.” The important work is to ensure that there continue to be those
in First Nations villages who engage in the way of life to which the term
146 The Politics of TEK

“traditional knowledge” refers. This project may include some documen-

tation of that lifestyle, but this must be done with great care to avoid
undermining that way of life and further concentrating power in distant
administrative centres. A rule of thumb for this kind of local research
might be to ask the question, “Who is going to actually use, interpret
and/or manipulate this research?” If the answer is not “local community
members,” then the research will probably do more harm than good.
In this chapter I have taken a critical look at the project of knowledge-
integration, arguing that it is based on the implicit assumption that the
cultural beliefs and practices referred to as “traditional knowledge” conform
to Western conceptions of knowledge. Because knowledge-integration
takes for granted existing power relations, it forces First Nations peoples to
express themselves in ways that conform to the institutions and practices
of state wildlife management rather than to their own beliefs, values, and
practices. This serves to concentrate power in administrative centres rather
than in the hands of First Nations peoples. In Chapter 4 I consider these
theoretical issues in relation to a speciWc case of co-management, that of
the Ruby Range Sheep Steering Committee, an ad hoc co-management
body formed to deal with local concerns about declining sheep popula-
tions in the Kluane First Nation’s traditional territory.
4
Counting Sheep: The Ruby Range
Sheep Steering Committee and the
Construction of Knowledge

In Chapter 3 I pointed out that much of the literature on traditional

knowledge and co-management celebrates the idea of traditional ecologi-
cal knowledge and advocates integrating it with science. Yet this litera-
ture seldom indicates how knowledge-integration might be achieved and
seldom questions the cultural assumptions underlying it. I presented a
critique of the concept of TEK and the project of knowledge-integration
but did not refute or even substantively address the numerous existing
studies of co-management regimes in the North. Many of these case stud-
ies seem to indicate that co-management really does work, directly con-
tradicting my arguments in Chapter 3. The academic literature on TEK
abounds with case studies of co-management regimes (e.g., Freeman and
Carbyn 1988; Inglis 1993; Johannes 1989), and one can Wnd many more
such studies in the “grey literature” of government reports. In fact, case
studies have formed the bulk of the presentations at the co-management
conferences and symposia that I have attended in the North, and most of
these have portrayed existing co-management processes in a very positive
light (see, for example, Robertson 1996; Urquhart 2001). One might well
point to all these case studies and declare that the project of integrating
TEK and science seems to be proceeding quite smoothly, despite the objec-
tions I outlined in Chapter 3.
At Wrst glance, these case studies and TEK conference presentations cer-
tainly do paint a rosy picture of co-management. They give the impression
that, although we still have much to learn, the use of TEK and its inte-
gration with science have already signiWcantly improved the practice of
wildlife management in the North and have helped to give Aboriginal
peoples more control over local land and resources. After reading and lis-
tening to many such case studies and presentations, however, one begins
to notice an extraordinary fact: virtually every one of these case studies is
a success story. Indeed, I have yet to come across a single account of failed
148 The RRSSC and the Construction of Knowledge

co-management in the North.1 This in itself seems highly improbable

since everyone agrees that the cross-cultural negotiations involved in co-
management and knowledge-integration are exceedingly difWcult and
complex. But if this striking lack of documented “failures” is not enough
to make one suspicious of the entire genre of the “co-management suc-
cess story,” then one need only listen to the coffee break conversations
between ofWcial presentations at co-management conferences to know
that not everyone agrees with the glowing “ofWcial” assessments of co-
management practice.
In this chapter and the next, I respond to the co-management success
story with a case study of my own – an examination of the Ruby Range
Sheep Steering Committee (RRSSC). The tale of the RRSSC is not one of
success. In fact, I will argue that the RRSSC was a dismal failure, though
not everyone involved in the process would agree with that assessment. It
is important to note that it is not my intention here to pass judgment on
any of those who participated in the RRSSC process. Indeed, I believe that
nearly everyone involved participated in good faith, sincerely hoping to
work together to solve a common problem in an atmosphere of trust,
respect, and cooperation. Rather, I am critical of the process itself and seek
to understand the social interactions between members of the RRSSC in
light of the unexamined assumptions that they brought to the table and
the larger political context of sheep management in the territory.
Criticizing the RRSSC process in this way shows two things. First,
despite the best intentions of those participating in the RRSSC, the process
ultimately foundered on a series of cultural misunderstandings (such as
those illustrated in the example of the dispute over the full curl rule
recounted in Chapter 3). Second, because much of the misunderstanding
between participants arose from differences in their understanding of fun-
damentally contested terms like “knowledge,” and in the conceptions of
the world upon which the meanings of such terms are based, many of the
participants were not really aware that they were misunderstanding one
another at all. The result of this is that some people – mostly government
scientists and resource managers – came away from the process feeling
that it had been a success. Indeed, I heard several of the biologists who
had been on the RRSSC describe it in glowing terms, holding it up as a
model of co-management to be emulated elsewhere in the territory. Other
committee members, however – mostly First Nations members – felt it
had been a complete failure (and worse, that government biologists had
betrayed them). I examine the RRSSC process in some detail, with an eye
to understanding how different members of the RRSSC could have per-
ceived the process so differently. I make no claims that my critique of the
RRSSC can be generalized and applied to all processes of co-management,
but some of the patterns and dynamics I describe are widespread and
 The RRSSC and the Construction of Knowledge 149

general enough to suggest that similar criticisms might be applied to other

co-management processes as well. My goal here is not to make general
statements about co-management writ large but, rather, to cultivate a
healthy skepticism of the “co-management success story” and to call for more
critical and nuanced analyses of particular co-management processes. I
want to call into question what we mean by “success” in the Wrst place.

Background: The Ruby Range Sheep Steering Committee

In the fall of 1995 the Kluane First Nation hosted a meeting in Burwash
Landing to express its concerns over declining populations of Dall sheep
in the nearby Ruby and Nisling mountain ranges. This meeting led
directly to the creation of the Ruby Range Sheep Steering Committee
(RRSSC). Participants at the meeting selected committee members who
would represent a wide range of people and groups with interests in Ruby
Range sheep, and they charged the committee with the task of making
recommendations for managing those sheep.
Under the Yukon Umbrella Final Agreement (UFA) local Wsh and wildlife
management issues are to be dealt with by local renewable resources coun-
cils. These councils are supposed to make management recommendations
either directly to the Yukon minister of renewable resources or, if the issue
has Yukon-wide connotations, through the Yukon Fish and Wildlife Man-
agement Board. Under the UFA, then, the appropriate co-management
body for addressing concerns about Ruby Range sheep would ideally have
been the Renewable Resources Council for KFN’s traditional territory.
When the RRSSC was founded in the fall of 1995, however, KFN and the
government had not yet concluded a Wnal agreement according to the
framework set out under the UFA, and the government had consistently
opposed the pre-implementation of renewable resources councils. As a
result, there was as yet no resources council in KFN’s traditional territory,
and – until the ratiWcation of KFN’s Final Agreement – there would be
no permanent co-management body whatsoever in KFN territory. Thus,
the only avenue open to KFN and others for addressing their concerns
about sheep in the Ruby Range was through the establishment of an ad
hoc issue-speciWc co-management board – hence the birth of the RRSSC.
The general understanding was that RRSSC members would deal with the
pressing issue of sheep management until such time as the ratiWcation
of KFN’s Final Agreement allowed for the establishment of a renewable
resources council.
The fact that there was no resources council in KFN’s traditional terri-
tory, however, does not mean that the RRSSC process was completely inde-
pendent of the system of co-management established under the UFA. The
federal and territorial governments had not opposed the pre-implementation
of the Fish and Wildlife Management Board, as they had the resources
150 The RRSSC and the Construction of Knowledge

councils. Thus, the board, which was to be the “primary instrument for
the management of Wsh and wildlife in the Yukon,” has been in existence
since the signing of the UFA in 1993. Since the RRSSC was not established
by treaty, and since the management board has jurisdiction over the entire
Yukon – including KFN’s traditional territory – it was decided that the
RRSSC would submit its recommendations to the board and that the board
would consider the recommendations of the committee in formulating its
own set of recommendations regarding Ruby Range sheep, which it would
then submit to the minister. To help facilitate this process, the manage-
ment board was given a seat on the RRSSC.
In addition, the RRSSC was composed of representatives from: both KFN
and the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations (CAFN), the First Nations
whose members have traditionally hunted sheep in the Ruby Range and
who claim all or some of the area as part of their traditional territories;
the Yukon Department of Renewable Resources, which has jurisdiction
over Wsh and wildlife in the Yukon; the federal Department of Indian
Affairs and Northern Development, which, in the name of the Crown, cur-
rently administers the majority of all land and mineral rights in the Ruby
Range (currently subject to lands claims); Parks Canada, which has juris-
diction over the land and resources, including sheep, in the Kluane
National Park Reserve immediately adjacent to the Ruby Range (also sub-
ject to land claims); and the Alsek Renewable Resources Council, the coun-
cil with jurisdiction over CAFN traditional territory (CAFN has concluded
its Wnal agreement); the Yukon Conservation Society, a Whitehorse-based
environmental organization; the Yukon Chapter of the Canadian Parks
and Wilderness Society, an environmental organization also based in
Whitehorse but with strong links to the national organization; and local
big game outWtters, who own and operate hunting concessions that give
them the exclusive right to outWt and guide non-Yukon hunters in the
area. Finally, I was fortunate to have been present at the formation of the
RRSSC during that initial meeting in November 1995 and was invited to
participate fully at committee meetings (not as a stakeholder but as a
knowledgeable observer). This gave me the opportunity to observe and
participate in RRSSC meetings and in RRSSC-sanctioned research. Just as
important, however, it gave me full access to the social relations of the
committee by allowing me to interact with other committee members,
both inside and outside RRSSC meetings, as a committee member myself.
The diverse membership of the RRSSC indicates the complexity of social
relations surrounding Ruby Range sheep in particular and wildlife man-
agement in the Yukon in general. Before turning to an examination of the
speciWcs of the RRSSC process, however, it will be necessary to describe the
social and political context that gave rise to the committee and provided
the constraints within which its members were forced to operate.
 The RRSSC and the Construction of Knowledge 151

The Politics of Sheep in the Yukon

Dall sheep are found throughout much of the Yukon and Alaska, but
certain areas of the southwest Yukon, including the Ruby Range, boast an
especially high density of these animals. A smaller cousin of the Bighorn
sheep found in the Rocky Mountains to the south, the pure white Dall
sheep, with its large curving horns, is a prized trophy animal for big game
hunters all over the world. As trophy animals, Dall sheep represent a sig-
niWcant potential income for big game outWtters, who charge hunters
quite substantial sums for their hunts, as well as for the territorial govern-
ment, which sells hunting licences and collects trophy fees and taxes.
At the same time, Dall sheep have been an important part of the diet
of Aboriginal peoples in the southwest Yukon for at least the last 2,000
years.2 In Chapter 2 I examined the importance of hunting to Kluane peo-
ple. It must be noted here that sheep hunting is of particular importance
to Kluane people. They think of themselves as sheep hunters, speak highly
of the virtues of sheep meat,3 and they have occasionally gone to great
lengths to get it. I was told one story – from the days before the restoration
of KFN’s hunting rights in the Kluane National Park and Game Sanctuary
– in which a man risked Wnes and/or imprisonment to get sheep for his
father’s funeral potlatch because he felt that a proper ceremony could not
be held without sheep meat. I heard countless stories about speciWc sheep
hunts, some of which had occurred as far back as the turn of the twentieth
century.4 Kluane people have detailed knowledge of where to go to hunt

Dall rams.
152 The RRSSC and the Construction of Knowledge

sheep and know the locations of dozens of traditionally used sheep hunt-
ing camps throughout their traditional territory, quite a few of which are
in the Ruby Range. They also have knowledge – which they guard carefully
– of certain special places where it is particularly easy to hunt sheep.
Finally, on several occasions, I heard Kluane people speciWcally use their
self-ascribed status as sheep hunters to contrast themselves to members of
another First Nation, who they claimed did not traditionally rely on sheep
for subsistence.
Historically, struggles between those who see animals as trophies and
those who see them as food have played an important role in shaping the
politics of big game hunting in the Yukon (see McCandless 1985, n.d.).
The difference in perspective between First Nations hunters and Euro-
North American outWtters and sport hunters has often led to conXict over
big game, including sheep. As one Kluane elder put it: “John Ostashek
[a former outWtter in the region] says, ‘they’re [referring to sheep] worth
$5,000 to me.’ I says they’re worth a little bit to me too, because they go
in my deep freeze” (Grace Chambers, in KFN and YTG 1996: 15). These
struggles were exacerbated by the 1991 Supreme Court of Canada decision
R. v. Sparrow, which upheld Canadian First Nations peoples’ Aboriginal
right to hunt and Wsh for subsistence, effectively exempting them from
territorial hunting and Wshing regulations. Non-First Nations hunters, on
the other hand (even those engaged in subsistence hunting), must abide

Jimmy Johnson and Thomas Dickson with Dall sheep shot for food, ca. 1920.
 The RRSSC and the Construction of Knowledge 153

by all state-imposed hunting regulations, including seasons, bag limits,

and – in the case of sheep – the full curl rule. Perhaps not surprisingly, this
situation has intensiWed friction and ill will between First Nations and
non-First Nations hunters throughout the territory. Because of their eco-
nomic value and vulnerability to over-hunting, Dall sheep have become
the focus of a struggle that is even more intense than that over other big
game animals in the territory. It is so intense that, despite overwhelming
archaeological and oral evidence, it was not until 1998 that the territorial
government Wnally acknowledged at the land claims table that Dall sheep
qualify as a traditional subsistence animal for First Nations peoples.5
To understand the dynamics of the RRSSC, we must take a brief look at
the different actors who have interests in hunting sheep in the Ruby
Range: First Nations peoples, outWtters, and non-First Nations resident
hunters. Before doing this, however, I must brieXy describe the legal and
regulatory context of sheep hunting in the territory.
At present, the principal mechanism for managing sheep hunting in the
Yukon is what is known as the “full curl rule.” The full curl rule makes
it illegal for a hunter to shoot anything but a full curl ram. The horns
of Dall rams curl around and outward from their heads as they grow.
Though rams reach sexual maturity at around one and a half years of age,
their horns do not usually achieve full curl (360 degrees) until sometime

Luke and Simon Johnson butchering Dall sheep above Koidern River (not in the
Ruby Range), August 2001.
154 The RRSSC and the Construction of Knowledge

between their eighth and ninth years. The maximum life expectancy for
Dall sheep in the southwest Yukon is thirteen years, with most rams dying
well before this – between the ages of seven and ten (Hoefs 1984a: 103).
Thus, the full curl rule allows hunters to take only the oldest mature rams
from the population. Other mechanisms for regulating sheep hunting in
the Yukon include season and bag limits. Sheep hunting is only allowed in
the territory during the hunting season, which extends from 1 August to
31 October, and hunters are limited to one sheep per year. Finally, the
Department of Renewable Resources has further restricted sheep hunting
in certain areas in the Yukon (primarily areas that are within a short drive
of Whitehorse) by establishing a permit hunt, effectively putting a quota
on the total number of full curl sheep that can be taken from these areas.
No such permit hunt has been established in the Ruby Range.
In 1993, because of public concerns about non-resident sheep hunting
(see below), a committee was established to make recommendations to the
Fish and Wildlife Management Board about whether or not to impose
quotas on the number of all big game animals taken by outWtters.6 At the
time, some such quotas were already in place in some areas for certain
big game species but not for sheep (except as noted above). This is because
most wildlife managers believe that the full curl rule alone is sufWcient
to prevent over-hunting. In June 1995 the OutWtter Quota Committee
reasserted this position, recommending that outWtter quotas be imple-
mented for sheep only under certain very special conditions.7 At the time
of the RRSSC meetings, then, sheep hunting in the Ruby Range was regu-
lated solely by the full curl rule, the existence of a hunting season, and the
bag limit.
The sheep hunting regulations described above apply to all licensed
sheep hunters, including non-residents guided by outWtters as well as
Yukon resident hunters. As noted above, however, they do not apply to
First Nations hunters, whose constitutionally guaranteed Aboriginal right
to hunt for subsistence has been upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada.
Despite the importance of sheep hunting for Kluane people, however, KFN
members claimed that, out of concern for the sheep population, they had
refrained completely from hunting sheep in the Ruby Range for several
years prior to the formation of the RRSSC. Since First Nations hunters –
unlike all other hunters – do not have to report their kills to the Depart-
ment of Renewable Resources, some non-First Nations members of the
RRSSC clearly doubted the veracity of this claim.8 Although all KFN mem-
bers with whom I spoke supported this voluntary cessation of hunting
in principle, some of them clearly had misgivings about it in light of
continued (and what they saw as excessive) hunting by non-First Nations
hunters, especially outWtters. Several times, when discussions about hunting
became heated, one KFN member threatened not only to resume hunting
 The RRSSC and the Construction of Knowledge 155

sheep but also to “clean them out.” He argued that Kluane people might
as well get as many sheep as they could right now since the non-First
Nations hunters were going to wipe them out anyway. He said that, in the
end, this would hurt non-First Nations people more than Kluane people
because the latter would at least always have access to the otherwise
unhunted sheep in nearby Kluane National Park.9
Non-First Nations hunters can be divided into two groups: residents of
the Yukon, who may hunt on their own, and non-residents, who must
hire an outWtter. There is a great variety of resident hunters in the Yukon.
They run the gamut from long-time Yukoners to relative newcomers.10
Some hunt for sport, while others are primarily interested in the meat. The
Yukon Fish and Game Association, formed in 1945 (see McCandless 1985:
89), ostensibly represents the interests of resident hunters, but resident
hunters need not be members nor have anything to do with the organiza-
tion. The association does have signiWcant political clout in the territory,
especially in Whitehorse, but it was not directly involved in the RRSSC
process. This is perhaps due to the fact that, compared to the number of
sheep taken by outWtters in the Ruby Range, those taken by resident
hunters are relatively insigniWcant.
In 1995 the two big game outWtters with concessions in the area of most
concern to the RRSSC11 took twenty-Wve sheep between them. Compare
this to the resident hunters, who took a combined total of three (YTG
1996).12 For this reason, although no outWtters attended the November
meeting in Burwash Landing at which the RRSSC was founded (two were
invited but were unable to attend), everyone at that meeting agreed that
outWtters had to be involved in the process. Most felt that the outWtters
had a legitimate interest in the sheep; and, in any case, everyone agreed
that no solution to the problem of the Ruby Range sheep would be work-
able without outWtter involvement in the process. This is due not only to
their status as major players in the Ruby Range sheep hunt but also to
their signiWcant political power.
Historically, outWtters have had considerable inXuence in the territorial
government. This is due at least in part to the Wnancial beneWts accruing
to the Yukon government as a result of outWtting, but there are other fac-
tors as well. One of these is the symbolic importance of big game hunting
to many Yukoners’ sense of territorial identity. The Yukon, famous for the
quality of its big game animals as well as its hunting guides, has been a
prime destination for big game hunters from around the world since the
turn of the twentieth century. Thus, outWtting is an old and respected (not
to mention colourful) tradition in the Yukon, and today’s outWtters, as
practitioners of that tradition, can draw on powerful historical imagery to
justify their positions. Another source of outWtter strength is their political
organization. Though there are only twenty outWtters in the Yukon, they
156 The RRSSC and the Construction of Knowledge

present a common front through the actions of the well-organized and

very active Yukon OutWtters’ Association. Perhaps the greatest source of
their political strength, however, is their membership in an elite stratum
of Yukon society. Business and government in the territory are dominated
by a relatively small number of businesspeople who are long-time Yukon-
ers. OutWtters have traditionally been among the members of this group.
In 1995, for example, when the RRSSC was formed, at least two members
of the Yukon Legislative Assembly, one of whom was the government
leader, were ex-outWtters. Given the place of outWtters in Yukon politics,
and their legitimate interests in Ruby Range sheep, it is not surprising that
First Nations and the government alike felt it imperative that they be rep-
resented on the RRSSC.
The Ruby Range stretches across two outWtting concessions. The out-
Wtters who own these concessions were invited to be members of the
steering committee, and both accepted (though, because of a change in
ownership, one did not attend the Wrst few meetings). These two conces-
sions differ somewhat in their relation to sheep. The larger of the two con-
cessions (OA 11) contains signiWcant populations of moose and caribou in
addition to sheep. The other (OA 12) is the smallest outWtting concession
in the Yukon. Part of the reason for its small size is the fact that it contains
some of the richest sheep habitat in the territory. Because of its size, how-
ever, it contains very little moose or caribou habitat. This means that the
outWtter depends almost exclusively on hunting sheep. A third outWtter
also participated in the RRSSC process. Although his concession was tech-
nically outside the jurisdiction of the RRSSC, community members at the
November meeting had expressed concern about the sheep population in
his area as well.13 He was in a unique position because, in addition to
being an outWtter, he was also a member of KFN and a close relative to
some of those representing KFN on the RRSSC (though he did not live in
Burwash), so in some sense he served to mediate between the First Nations
and the outWtters. Only outWtters more or less directly affected by the for-
mation of the RRSSC were invited to attend, but because the steering com-
mittee discussed sensitive issues like the establishment of quotas on sheep
hunting, which had the potential to affect all outWtters, the Yukon OutWt-
ters’ Association paid close attention to the doings of the RRSSC and occa-
sionally exerted its inXuence on the process.14
Finally, it is worth noting that the politics of wildlife in the Yukon can
no longer be understood simply as a struggle between those who view ani-
mals as trophies and those who view them as food. Another view of ani-
mals (including sheep) has entered the political arena in recent years; it is
the view held by many who consider themselves to be environmentalists
or at least to be sympathetic to the environmentalist cause. Though there
are many variations on what I will refer to as the “environmentalist” view
 The RRSSC and the Construction of Knowledge 157

of animals, all these variations share the assumption that the primary
value of an animal does not lie in its direct use to humans; rather, animals
are seen as important elements of the environment in and of themselves.
Some who subscribe to this view see sheep as having rights, while others
argue that they possess inherent value; some see them as in need of pro-
tection because of their status as fellow creatures, while others argue that
they are vital elements of biological diversity. Still others see the killing
of animals for any reason as morally reprehensible. Although not all of
those who adhere to a variation of the view that I here label environmen-
talist are opposed to hunting, for most of them the issue is something of a
moral dilemma. This view adds a new dynamic to the politics of sheep in
the territory.
Having brieXy described the context into which the RRSSC was born, I
now turn to a consideration of the committee itself. In the next section,
I look at (1) what different RRSSC members thought should be done to
manage Ruby Range sheep, (2) the different ways in which committee
members claimed to “know” about these sheep, and (3) the relationship
between RRSSC members’ management positions and their ways of know-
ing about sheep.

Knowing and Managing Ruby Range Sheep

The RRSSC had a mandate to develop a management strategy for sheep in
the Ruby Range. In their attempt to do this, members of the RRSSC spent
a considerable amount of time debating the question of knowledge. This
should not be surprising, given the close relation between ideas of man-
agement and ideas of knowledge in bureaucratic society. In this context,
the term “management” refers to an attempt by “managers” to ensure that
the use of a particular resource proceeds rationally – or these days, per-
haps, “sustainably” – according to their knowledge of that resource.
Everyone participating in the RRSSC process agreed on one thing regard-
ing sheep in the Ruby Range: that the population was not as high as it had
once been. That, however, is more or less where the agreement ended.
Members of the committee disagreed over the magnitude of the decline
and over the possible reasons for it. They also disagreed over what consti-
tuted acceptable ways of knowing sheep and even over the nature of sheep
themselves. The members of the RRSSC presented and discussed their
knowledge about sheep in terms of the standard distinction between TEK
and science. RRSSC members called what local First Nations people
claimed to know about sheep “traditional knowledge,” while they referred
to that which biologists and government ofWcials claimed to know as “sci-
ence.” They had a harder time classifying the knowledge of outWtters,
however. On the one hand, like elders and hunters, outWtters base their
knowledge of sheep on the signiWcant amounts of time they and their
158 The RRSSC and the Construction of Knowledge

guides spend out on the land actually hunting them. On the other hand,
they record and manipulate this knowledge in a way that more closely
resembles the work of biologists than of First Nations hunters. In addition,
most outWtters also lack the culturally speciWc set of beliefs, stories, social
relations, and values that provide meaning and context to First Nations
hunters’ visual observations of sheep. Some of those currently engaged
with co-management in the North deal with this ambiguity by creating a
third category, “local knowledge,” which they apply to the knowledge
held by outWtters, non-Aboriginal trappers and others who fall outside the
standard categories of TEK and science.15
In this analysis, however, I am not interested in classifying different
people’s knowledge about Ruby Range sheep; rather, I want to show how
the beliefs and experiences through which different RRSSC members came
to know sheep informed their ideas about how to manage them. Starting
from different RRSSC members’ conceptions of the sheep problem in the
Ruby Range, I examine the knowledge that they used to justify their posi-
tions at RRSSC meetings and how they came to “know” what they claimed
to know. What experiences did they have that made them feel justiWed in
claiming to know about sheep, and how did they record and transmit
these experiences to others? How did this knowledge affect their ideas
about what constitutes an appropriate management strategy for sheep in
the Ruby Range? To answer these questions, I divide the membership
of the RRSSC into several different groups: biologists, First Nations people,
outWtters, and environmentalists. There were, of course, occasional disa-
greements and differences of opinion among members within each of
these groups. I do not mean to represent any of them as homogeneous;
but, since each group tended to present a common front at the commit-
tee table, it makes some sense to examine the dynamics of the RRSSC in
these terms. Even though they were from different First Nations, govern-
ment departments, outWtting concessions, or environmental organizations,
members of each of these groups tended to share a common vision for the
management of Ruby Range sheep. They shared a set of common assump-
tions with one another about what constituted valid knowledge about
sheep and engaged in similar kinds of practices in the course of coming to
know them.

Biologists
Wildlife biologists agreed with First Nations elders and hunters that the
sheep population had declined during the 1980s, but they interpreted the
decline quite differently. While First Nations hunters viewed the decline
as long-term and catastrophic, biologists saw it as no more than a tempo-
rary dip in the population. As one biologist put it, “on the basis of good
lamb crops in recent years, we can predict that there will be an increase in
 The RRSSC and the Construction of Knowledge 159

population over the next few years. We have already reached the ‘turn-
around’ in population trend. We just need to Wgure out the cause of the
decline in the Wrst place” (RRSSC 1996b: 11). And, according to the section
on sheep in the 1997-98 Yukon hunting regulations, which was written by
a biologist who sat on the RRSSC (YTG 1997: 16): “Sheep numbers in the
Talbot Arm [i.e., the Big Arm of Kluane Lake – in the Ruby Range] area
went from about 750 in the early 1970s to almost 1,000 in the late 1980s.
Today there are only about 600 sheep in the area ... Today, the Talbot Arm
sheep population is healthy, but much smaller than it was a few years ago.
There have been some good lamb crops in recent years, but a smaller pop-
ulation means fewer ewes and fewer births, even in good years” (Yukon
Department of Renewable Resources 1997: 25).
This interpretation of the sheep decline informed biologists’ view of
how to go about remedying the situation. Since they did not see the prob-
lem as an emergency requiring immediate action, they advocated a policy
of “adaptive management.” This increasingly common approach to wild-
life management entails treating the management process itself as a scien-
tiWc experiment. Rather than doing anything that might work to help the
sheep (i.e., manipulating any and all relevant variables simultaneously
as one might in an emergency), biologists wanted to manage for a lim-
ited number of variables and to monitor the effects of this management
closely. A crucial part of this approach involved leaving part of the popu-
lation completely unmanaged, to serve as a control group.16 They felt that
a scientiWc approach of this sort was the only way to increase their knowl-
edge not only about sheep but also about how best to manage them and
that, in the long run, this approach would enable people to manage sheep
much more effectively.
Though this approach makes sense to those with a strong faith in the
scientiWc method, it is less convincing to those who do not. First Nations
elders and hunters, for example, tended to view the biologists’ approach
as self-serving; several of them told me that they felt that biologists were
more concerned with maintaining their jobs (by generating yet another
series of scientiWc studies) than with saving the sheep. Regardless of what
one thinks about the motivations underlying their approach, however, it
is clear that biologists did not share First Nations people’s sense of the
urgency of the problem. They felt they could afford to take the time to
study the problem and devise the most effective management strategy
possible based on their Wndings. They saw the Ruby Range situation as an
opportunity to learn about sheep management rather than as a case of
sheep needing to be saved.
Biologists were also keenly aware of the politics surrounding sheep in
the area and realized that it would be more difWcult to implement certain
management strategies than others. Since they did not see the situation as
160 The RRSSC and the Construction of Knowledge

quite so urgent as did First Nations people, they were willing to give more
weight to political considerations. Rather than simply doing everything
that they possibly could to save the sheep, they hoped to implement those
strategies that would (1) have the most effect on the sheep population and
(2) cause the least disruption to human activities in the area (and therefore
minimize the political backlash). This meant that, on some management
issues, they saw eye to eye with First Nations people while on others they
disagreed almost entirely.
Biologists and First Nations people were largely able to agree on the need
to address the issues of predation (by natural predators such as wolves,
coyotes, and eagles) and harassment by aircraft (from mining activity,
wildlife research, and “Xight-seeing”) and all-terrain vehicles (from hunt-
ing and “off-roading”). For their part, biologists were quite convinced of
the need to limit harassment of sheep by aircraft and all-terrain vehicles
(ATVs). Some of their own research (Frid 1995) supported observations
made by First Nations hunters and outWtters who had seen sheep run in
terror from low-Xying aircraft and ATVs, sometimes injuring themselves in
the process. Biologists also had concerns that aircraft and ATV activity
caused sheep to change their seasonal movement patterns, which could
affect the population’s ability to reproduce. Just as important, the RRSSC
could make recommendations limiting disturbance by ATVs and aircraft
with a minimum of political backlash. As a result, First Nations people and
biologists were able to agree on a number of recommendations to limit
harassment by aircraft and ATV activity in the area. These included rec-
ommendations to inform local pilots and the general public about the
effects of harassment, to limit road building in the area (and ensure
the reclamation of roads no longer in use), to conduct further research
on the effects of harassment, and to include guidelines and conditions on
the use of aircraft in licences and permits for mining and other types of
land use (RRSSC 1996d, 1996e, 1997b, 1997c). The only signiWcant differ-
ence between biologists’ and First Nations people’s positions regarding
harassment by aircraft was in relation to the aerial surveys conducted
by biologists themselves. As we shall see later, many First Nations elders
and hunters saw these surveys as just another form of harassment. Biolo-
gists acknowledged that their surveys necessarily entailed some harass-
ment of sheep, but they felt that the information gained from them was
well worth a single day’s harassment. Even so, they were willing to modify
the surveys to take First Nations concerns into account. I will discuss the
aerial surveys in more detail below, but for now I simply note that First
Nations people and biologists viewed these surveys differently, in part
because of the different degrees of urgency that each accorded the sheep
problem.
Biologists seemed less certain about the effects of predation on the sheep
 The RRSSC and the Construction of Knowledge 161

population than they were about the effects of harassment. On the one
hand, previous research (Barichello et al. 1989) had indicated that wolf
predation did not signiWcantly affect sheep numbers in the southwest
Yukon; on the other hand, however, biologists acknowledged that preda-
tors such as coyotes, eagles, and bears also killed sheep, especially new-
born lambs, and that together these predators might signiWcantly affect
population levels. Indeed, biologists cited one study that showed that
coyotes were the single largest cause of sheep mortality in the nearby
Sheep Mountain population (RRSSC 1997a: 4). Despite their uncertainty
about the actual role of predation in limiting the sheep population, how-
ever, biologists were willing to support First Nations calls for increased
predator control. Although large-scale predator control programs (e.g.,
wolf kills) do tend to be extremely controversial – often with signiWcant
political repercussions for those implementing them – the decision to
support predator control in the Ruby Range during the period of the
RRSSC was politically risk-free for biologists. For one thing, KFN members
supported community-based forms of predator control, such as trapping
initiatives, which are far less controversial than are more sensational
methods, such as poisoning wolves or shooting them from helicopters.
Even more important, however, is the fact that a highly controversial
predator control program was at that time already underway in a large
region of the southwest Yukon – a region that included the Ruby Range.
This program had nothing to do with sheep (it was geared to restoring the
moose and caribou populations in the Aishihik region); however, since it
did entail shooting wolves from helicopters, YTG biologists were already
embroiled in a political controversy of international proportions. For
them to have opposed local predator control initiatives in the area would
have made very little sense. As a result, First Nations people and biologists
were able to agree on a number of recommendations regarding predator
control, including consultation with trappers, the promotion of trapper
support and training programs, and the promotion of local wild fur sales
(RRSSC 1996d, 1996e, 1997b, 1997c).
There was considerably less agreement between biologists and First
Nations people when it came to two other factors potentially affecting the
sheep population: hunting and the weather. Biologists were willing to
acknowledge that human hunting could have some effect on the sheep
population, but they felt that, on the whole, such effects were small
and relatively insigniWcant. This belief, in combination with the political
complications surrounding any attempt to regulate sheep hunting, led
biologists to oppose a ban on sheep hunting in the area (though they were
willing to entertain the notion of establishing a quota under certain spe-
ciWc circumstances). Biologists identiWed the weather, rather than hunting,
as perhaps the single most important factor affecting the sheep population.
162 The RRSSC and the Construction of Knowledge

They saw the sheep decline largely as a result of severe winter weather
and deep snow. This naturally affected their attitude towards sheep man-
agement, greatly contributing to their lack of a sense of urgency (as there
is no way to manage weather conditions). As we shall see, First Nations
people not only disagreed with this assessment, but they thought it
patently ridiculous as well as offensive to the sheep.
How is it that biologists could have such radically different ideas from
those of First Nations people about the effects of hunting and weather con-
ditions on the sheep population? To answer this, we must look at how each
came to “know” sheep in the Wrst place. Wildlife biologists and other gov-
ernment bureaucrats participating in the RRSSC meetings tended to know
sheep through quite a different set of activities than did First Nations
elders and hunters. Though some are fairly avid outdoor recreationalists,
none of them has ever spent anywhere near the amount of time out on
the land as have First Nations elders and hunters. In addition, the time
that they have spent out on the land has been qualitatively different. They
tend to “visit” the land, whether for business or pleasure, in relatively
short trips, bringing all they need in the way of food and equipment with
them. Also, their knowledge about sheep comes from their participation
in a set of formal activities (research) rather than as normal part of their
everyday lives. But they, just like First Nations people, come to know sheep
primarily through personal experience and/or through the “stories” of
those who have gone before them, though their experiences and modes
of storytelling are quite different from those of First Nations people.17
The aerial survey is perhaps the most important activity though which
wildlife biologists in the Yukon have come to know sheep. A Yukon gov-
ernment document describes the survey as it is presently carried out in the
Ruby Range:

Counts are done using a helicopter in June or July. The survey team con-
sists of a pilot and a navigator/observer in the front seats, an observer and
an observer/recorder in the rear seats. The helicopter systematically Xies
counterclockwise around the mountain block, putting the navigator and
the observer on the mountain side of the helicopter. The recorder concen-
trates on the downslope side. The helicopter Xies (at about 300 ft above
ground level) up every draw and in and out of every basin. All alpine areas
are thoroughly covered, and if there is any suspicion that the sheep may
be lower (e.g., known mineral licks, obvious trails) lower elevations are
searched. It takes about 3 hours to count an area like GMS 5-28. (YTG
1997: 2)

During these surveys, observers do more than simply count the total num-
ber of sheep: “All sheep are counted and their location marked on a
 The RRSSC and the Construction of Knowledge 163

1:250,000 map as well. Rams are classiWed as having half, three-quarter, or

full curl horns. If the survey occurs before about the third week in June, it
is possible to distinguish last year’s lambs (yearlings) from other sheep.
After that time, yearlings look too much like adult ewes to accurately dis-
tinguish them and all ewes, yearlings, and some 2-year-old-rams found
together are lumped into the category ‘nursery sheep’” (2).
Since sheep spend nearly all of their time on mountains and cliffs high
above the tree line, and because they can move much more quickly than
humans in this steep terrain, most biologists regard aerial surveys as by
far the best method for gathering information about sheep populations.
Yukon Department of Renewable Resources biologists conducted the Wrst
survey of this kind in the Ruby Range in 1974. This Wrst survey covered
four Game Management Subzones (GMS)18 in the Ruby Range, GMS 5-28,
5-31, 5-34, and 5-36, and since then biologists have continued to conduct
annual surveys in the area (see map, p. 164). Because helicopter time is
quite expensive, however, biologists have actually performed these sur-
veys somewhat sporadically. There are two major gaps in the survey data:
the Wrst is between 1974 and 1979, during which no surveys were con-
ducted; and the second is the period between 1986 and 1992, during
which only one survey was conducted (in 1989). In addition, biologists
have not always surveyed the same geographical areas. They have always
surveyed GMS 5-31, 5-34, and 5-36 as a group, but GMS 5-28 has not
always been included in the survey (as a result, survey data for GMS 5-28
is even more sporadic than is that for the other subzones), and when it
has, it has been treated separately (see Table 1). Even so, nowhere else in
the entire territory, with the exception of nearby Sheep Mountain, have
biologists counted sheep as regularly or for as long as they have in those
subzones of the Ruby Range.
As it turns out, biologists’ understanding of the Ruby Range sheep pop-
ulation is shaped in signiWcant ways by their knowledge of the Sheep
Mountain population. The Sheep Mountain study area is located within
the Kluane National Park Reserve, which is nearly adjacent to the Ruby
Range study area (at their closest points, the two study areas are only eight
kilometres apart). This proximity has allowed biologists to assume that
general vegetation and weather patterns are similar in the two study areas.
Because Sheep Mountain is within the park where sheep hunting is not
allowed (except by First Nations hunters), biologists see the sheep there
as constituting a natural “control population” for examining the effects
of hunting sheep in the Ruby Range (Hoefs and Barichello 1984). Parks
Canada has counted the sheep population on Sheep Mountain nearly
every year since 1970 (with the exception of 1974; see Table 2). These
counts were based on aerial surveys much like those conducted by the
Yukon government in the Ruby Range study area (see Eikland 1995; Hoefs
164 The RRSSC and the Construction of Knowledge

1981). In addition to the aerial counts, however, biologists have also con-
ducted intensive ground research on the sheep at Sheep Mountain (e.g.,
Hoefs 1975). Since no one has ever conducted this type of groundwork in
the Ruby Range, biologists had to base a number of their assumptions
about Ruby Range sheep on their understanding of the Sheep Mountain
population. This will be discussed in more detail below.
Several people (most of whom were present at least occasionally at
RRSSC meetings) have participated in the Ruby Range and/or Sheep
Mountain surveys many times and so have signiWcant personal experience
with the sheep in these areas. In addition to aerial surveys, biologists also
have indirect contact with sheep through their collection of sheep kill
data (see Barichello, Carey, and Hoefs 1989). All licensed big game hunters
(this includes resident and non-resident hunters but not First Nations

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5-28 R Aishihik
A 5-32 Lake
N 5-33
River

Kluane G
Lake E
l 5-34 Sekulmun
Burwash 5-35
Landing Lake
Gladstone Creek
5-45
Destructionl 5-37
Du Bay 5-36
ke
5-40
Ri
ve
r 5-39
River

Kluane Sheep 5-38

Mountain
+
National 5-46
Aishihik

Kluane Kloo
Lake 5-41
Wildlife 5-47
Park Sanctuary Ala
ska Highway

0 50km l Haines
Junction

Yukon Game Management Zone 5, with subzones

 The RRSSC and the Construction of Knowledge 165

hunters) must submit a mandatory hunt report to the Department of

Renewable Resources reporting the details of their big game hunts, in-
cluding the date and place of kill. In addition, all licensed sheep hunters
must submit to a conservation ofWcer or wildlife technician the skulls of
the rams they take. The horns are aged, measured, photographed, and
plugged.19 Since 1960 outWtters have had to report the number of animals
taken by their clients, while resident hunters were Wrst required to report
their kills in 1979. Prior to 1979 resident hunters submitted some sheep
heads on a voluntary basis. Thus, biologists have a fairly accurate medium-
term picture of sheep hunting in the Yukon, including not only overall
numbers and locations of successful sheep hunts but also the age, horn

Table 1
Summary of sheep counted in GMS 5-31, 5-34, 5-36, and 5-28
Lambs/100
Total Nursery Total nursery
Year sheep Rams sheep Lambs adults sheep
GMS 5-31, 5-34, and 5-36
1974 777 203 430 144 633 34
1979 909 290 479 140 769 29
1980 980 251 554 175 805 32
1982 854 280 498 76 778 15
1983 700 254 396 59 641 15
1984 928 370 432 126 802 29
1985 963 384 511 68 895 13
1986 795 354 392 49 746 12
1989 754 221 370 162 592 44
1992 597 188 374 35 562 9
1993 477 158 257 62 415 24
1994 492 158 252 82 410 32
1995 575 131 359 86 489 24
1996 428 132 224 72 356 32
GMS 5-28
1974 159 25 104 30 129 29
1980 334 67 194 73 261 38
1982 349 69 216 64 285 30
1983 310 110 174 26 284 15
1984 406 133 244 29 377 12
1985 378 136 209 33 345 16
1986 320 127 182 11 309 6
1989 477 126 266 85 392 32
1993 213 79 103 31 182 30
1996 156 52 70 34 122 49
Source : YTG 1997.
166 The RRSSC and the Construction of Knowledge

length and quality, and sex20 of all sheep killed (excluding those taken by
First Nations hunters and, of course, by poachers).
Biologists, much like First Nations elders and hunters, also make a point
of passing on their knowledge about sheep to those who follow. Unlike
them, however, they do so primarily in writing rather than through stories
(though they transmit some of this knowledge orally as well). Biologists
distill their lived experiences with sheep (or their remains) into written
reports containing all of the information about those experiences that
they deem signiWcant. Thus, biologists, again like elders and hunters, can
know sheep not only through their own personal experiences but also

Table 2
Summary of sheep counted on Sheep Mountain
Lambs/100
Total Nursery Total nursery
Year sheep Rams sheep Lambs adults sheep
1970* 240 81 114 45 195 40
1971* 265 85 121 59 206 49
1972* 254 82 122 50 204 41
1973* 232 77 120 35 197 29
1975 298 97 190 11 287 6
1976 273 146 114 13 260 11
1977 306 165 113 28 278 25
1978 284 142 104 38 246 36
1979 362 100 185 77 285 42
1980 338 154 143 41 297 29
1981 375 100 226 49 326 22
1982 344 112 221 11 333 5
1983 283 89 172 22 261 13
1984 346 92 185 69 277 37
1985 391 140 205 46 345 22
1986 328 100 228 36 292 16
1987 319 71 201 47 272 23
1988 388 158 142 88 300 62
1989 344 104 189 51 293 27
1990 330 76 187 67 263 36
1991 323 69 210 44 279 21
1992 267 63 184 20 247 11
1993 386 123 201 62 324 31
1994 294 79 182 33 261 18
1995 322 103 174 45 277 26
1996 329 96 192 41 288 21
* Counts based on intensive ground work rather than on aerial surveys. Lamb counts
were conducted during lambing not after (as in other years).
Source : YTG 1997.
 The RRSSC and the Construction of Knowledge 167

through the distilled accounts of other people’s experiences with them. In

addition, biologists compile these distilled accounts of personal experi-
ences with sheep (data) and compare and contrast them with similar
accounts from other regions (e.g., Alaska) or with other types of distilled
accounts (e.g., weather data) to develop theories, models, and other ab-
stract ways of knowing sheep.
Despite the importance of the aerial surveys, biologists did not com-
pletely trust their accuracy, especially for generating a total sheep count.
They were unwilling to draw Wrm conclusions or base their decisions
solely on these counts for a number of reasons. First, despite their faith in
these surveys as the most accurate method for counting sheep, they were
quite willing to admit that the counts they generated necessarily contain
some error (see Hoefs 1974). Second, they recognized that all wildlife
populations are inherently dynamic and undergo a degree of random Xuc-
tuation. This means that signiWcant population trends can only be deter-
mined over a fairly long period of time. Finally, a simple count of the total
number of sheep in an area at a given time does not provide any informa-
tion as to whether the population is increasing or decreasing, nor does it
indicate possible reasons for any change in population. Given their belief
that exact knowledge of the total sheep population is impossible to attain
(and that it does not provide everything that we want to know anyway),
biologists were less interested in exact numbers than in knowing trends in
the sheep population and managing them based on these trends. But what
other techniques, in addition to the aerial survey, did they use in their
efforts to determine these population trends?
Biologists conceive of the total number of sheep in a population as a
relationship between the number of lambs entering the population (repro-
duction) and the number of sheep leaving it (mortality) – although there
are a host of different factors that can affect these (e.g., hunting, weather,
harassment, disease, habitat, population structure, and so on). As long
as a population’s reproduction equals its mortality, the population will be
stable. Thus, a relatively low total population is not necessarily a cause
for alarm (especially given the uncertainty of total sheep counts) so long
as it has a positive growth rate (i.e., reproduction exceeds mortality). If
biologists know a given population’s levels of reproduction and mortality,
then they do not need to know the exact number of sheep to gain a sense
of how the population is doing. To this end, they focus on a number of
variables that they regard as more or less accurate indicators of a sheep
population’s levels of reproduction and mortality. I now turn to a discus-
sion of some of the more important indicators.
As stated above, conducting an aerial survey consists of more than just
counting the total number of sheep. In the process of counting sheep,
biologists also distinguish between lambs, “nursery sheep,” and different
168 The RRSSC and the Construction of Knowledge

ages of rams. The number of lambs counted each year represents the total
annual addition to the surveyed population. The total number of lambs
entering a population in a given year must be greater than the total num-
ber of sheep dying in that year if the population is to increase. But the
total lamb count is every bit as subject to error as is the overall sheep
count, so rather than using this raw number, biologists calculate the ratio
of lambs per 100 nursery sheep. Assuming a regular distribution of lambs
throughout the population, this ratio should remain the same even if
some groups of nursery sheep are missed or double-counted by the survey.
Another advantage to the use of this ratio is that it allows biologists to
compare the level of reproduction among different sheep populations.
This kind of comparison is not possible with total lamb counts because
lamb numbers are dependent on the overall number of sheep (twenty
new-born lambs might be enough to assure the growth of a small popula-
tion, whereas this same number might be disastrous to a larger one). By
using a lamb/100 nursery sheep ratio, biologists can estimate the relative
reproductive success of different populations. As a result, they see the
number of lambs per 100 nursery sheep as the single most important indi-
cator of a population’s level of reproduction.
Even among wildlife biologists, however, there is some mistrust of the
lamb/100 nursery sheep ratio and its utility for indicating a population’s
reproductive success: “The ratio of lambs to nursery sheep is not a very
realistic indicator of productivity, since ‘nursery sheep’ includes yearlings
and 2-year olds of both sex. However, this ratio is often given in the sheep
literature, because of the difWculty of separating nursery bands into indi-
vidual components during aerial surveys” (Hoefs 1981: 15). Also, Dehn
(1997: 4-6) suggests that, because sheep survival is most uncertain during
the Wrst year of life (see also Hoefs 1981: 20-22), a yearling-to-ewe ratio
would more accurately indicate a population’s reproductive success than
does the ratio of lambs to nursery sheep that is currently in use. Despite
these objections, however, biologists at the RRSSC meetings used the ratio
of lambs to 100 nursery sheep as the primary indicator of reproductive
success for the Ruby Range and Sheep Mountain populations.
Even so, this use of the ratio of lambs to 100 nursery sheep is not
straightforward. There is a good deal of uncertainty among biologists
about how to interpret it, speciWcally about how high it must be to assure
a stable population (see Hoefs 1981: 15-16). Of course, this ultimately
depends on the overall level of mortality in the population (including the
high mortality of the new-born lambs), but biologists involved in the
RRSSC process felt qualiWed to make a claim about what level of reproduc-
tion was adequate for the maintenance of the Ruby Range and Sheep
Mountain populations: “25-30 lambs per 100 nursery sheep in June or July
... [is] the point at which births and deaths are balanced” (YTG 1997: 7).
 The RRSSC and the Construction of Knowledge 169

They argued that a population with a ratio higher than this for several suc-
cessive years was likely to increase, while one with a lower ratio was likely
to decrease.
Estimating a sheep population’s mortality rate presents biologists with
problems quite different from those that they encounter when dealing
with reproduction. The most important difference is that they cannot sim-
ply count the number of sheep that die in a population during the year
as they do the lambs that are born into it. Lambs are all born at the same
time of the year and are easily distinguished from other sheep. Thus, biol-
ogists can get a fairly accurate count of new-born lambs in any given year
(or at least of the ratio of lambs to nursery sheep). But sheep do not all die
at the same time of the year, nor do their carcasses usually remain visible
from the air for long. As a result, biologists cannot rely on data derived
from annual aerial surveys to estimate a population’s mortality rate.
Biologists must therefore rely on more indirect sources of information
for estimating the mortality rate among sheep. One way to do this is to
construct a “life table” – a table that represents the age and sex structure of
the total population. Once biologists know the age structure of a popula-
tion, it is a relatively simple matter to estimate the population’s mortality
rate (since they know what percentage of each age class should survive
the year). To construct such a life table is far from straightforward, how-
ever, since the only way to tell a sheep’s age is to examine it up close (usu-
ally through examination of skulls). Since they cannot physically examine
every sheep in a population, biologists constructing a life table must rely
on indirect information and educated guesswork as well as direct observa-
tion. They can determine sheep mortality during the Wrst two years of life
through direct observation because lambs and yearlings are easily distin-
guished from the air. The same is also true for the sex ratio since rams
are easily distinguished from ewes.21 To determine the age structure of the
rest of the population, however, they must rely on more indirect means.
By collecting and determining the age of the skulls of dead sheep from a
speciWc area, biologists can get a sense of the mortality rates of each age
class. Obviously, this method will only generate an accurate estimate of
the population’s age structure under certain conditions. The population
must be relatively stable, and the skulls must represent a more or less “ran-
dom sample” of the population (thus, one could not use data reported
from sheep hunting since “legal” rams make up only a small percentage of
the male population). Presumably they would also have to be gathered
from the animals’ entire range to avoid bias that might arise from season-
or location-speciWc mortality. Finally, a hunted population would have
quite a different age structure from an unhunted one and would display a
different pattern of seasonal changes (especially before and after hunting
season).
170 The RRSSC and the Construction of Knowledge

Biologists did not have the data to construct a full life table for the Ruby
Range population. So, to estimate mortality rates in the Ruby Range, they
turned to nearby Sheep Mountain, where they had already constructed a
life table based on annual surveys and on the ages of 130 skulls of rams
that had died of natural causes in the population’s range (Hoefs 1975,
1984; Hoefs and Bayer 1983).22 They used this table to calculate the mor-
tality rate in the Ruby Range population. They felt justiWed in using the
Sheep Mountain life table to model the Ruby Range population because of
the close proximity of the populations and the similarity of their habitats.
By applying this model to the population Wgures obtained in the Ruby
Range sheep counts, biologists could estimate the mortality rate of the
population (see Figure 1). Now that we have a sense of how biologists
understood the Ruby Range sheep population, we can examine their ideas
about the effects of hunting and weather on that population.
Hunting clearly affects the number of adult rams in the population.
But since hunters are restricted to shooting only a small segment of the
total ram population (full curl rams), which, because of their age, already
experience a high natural rate of mortality, biologists have had to grapple
with the question of whether or not these effects are signiWcant; that is,
whether they are “additive” or “compensatory”: “one can reason that hunt-
ing can be considered additive if it leads to a reduction in population size,
to a change in the adult sex ratio, to a change in the age-speciWc mortal-
ity pattern, or to a reduction in maximum life expectancy of rams. On the
other hand, if these demographic parameters remain the same as in the
unhunted population, then hunting can be considered compensatory and
sustainable” (Hoefs and Barichello 1984: 434), where “‘compensatory’
need not necessarily mean that hunters select those rams that would have
died for other reasons, even though there are indications that this is to
some degree the case; it could also mean that removal by hunting reXects
itself in a higher fecundity rate, a higher survival rate of the remaining

Figure 1

Structure of sheep population

Age in years

Number of ewes Number of rams

1 12 1
1 11 2
2 10 4
4 9 6
7 8 7
9 7 8
10 6 9
11 5 10
12 4 11
14 3 11
14 2 12
15 Yearling 13
23 lamb 23

∑123 ∑117
 The RRSSC and the Construction of Knowledge 171

population members, and a higher recruitment rate of rams into the legal
age classes” (Hoefs 1984a: 112).
To answer the question of whether human hunting is additive or
compensatory, biologists turned to the model of population mortality
contained within the life table discussed above and to a study of horn curl
characteristics. By studying the horn curl characteristics of sheep skulls,
biologists have been able to determine the average age at which rams
reach full-curl (legal) status. Combining this with the life table and the
total sheep count enables biologists to estimate the number of rams that
become legal in the population every year (Hoefs 1984a). Biologists on the
RRSSC estimated that, in the case of the Ruby Range sheep population,
this Wgure is approximately 4 percent (YTG 1996: 5).
This means that a 4 percent (or higher) kill by hunters is clearly exces-
sive and unsustainable (i.e., additive). Given that the kill must be some-
thing below 4 percent, however, it is not immediately apparent how much
lower it must be to qualify as compensatory. In 1984 biologists investi-
gated this question in a study comparing the Ruby Range and Sheep
Mountain populations and concluded that “hunting carried out in the
Ruby Range sheep population, which translates into a harvest rate of 2 to
3% of the summer population must be considered compensatory and
sustainable and not additive. It did not cause population decline, it did
not change the adult sex ratio, it did not lower the maximum life ex-
pectancy, and the age-speciWc mortality pattern was not different from
the natural mortality pattern observed in the unhunted population of
Sheep Mountain. Hunting, therefore has had no negative impact over
the past decade in a quantitative sense” (Hoefs and Barichello 1984:
461).23 Since the time of that study, however, the kill rate had increased.
In fact, during two consecutive years, 1992 and 1993, hunters had killed
4 percent and 4.2 percent of the total population, respectively (see Table
3). Biologists on the RRSSC were willing to acknowledge the fact that
hunting in the Ruby Range had indeed been excessive during those two
years, but they saw these as isolated events. Such activity was to be
avoided in the future, to be sure, but they did not see these years as re-
sponsible for the population decline that by then had already been well
underway.
Biologists also considered the possibility that, by decreasing the number
of rams in the population, hunting might adversely affect the pregnancy
rate and therefore the population’s ability to reproduce itself. However, they
found no correlation between the number of lambs/100 nursery sheep and
the number of rams/100 nursery sheep in the annual survey data from the
Ruby Range. This led them to conclude that this effect was not a signiW-
cant factor in the decline of the Ruby Range population (YTG 1997: 9).
Biologists had one major reservation about their ability to assess the
172 The RRSSC and the Construction of Knowledge

effects of hunting. They stressed that their models did not take First
Nations hunting into account, and they urged the First Nations to share
with them the numbers of sheep they killed. Clearly, if First Nations
people were taking signiWcant numbers of sheep in the Ruby Range, then
biologists were greatly underestimating the effects of hunting. Biologists
expressed their concerns about this at every meeting of the RRSSC, despite
continual assurances by KFN that they had not taken any sheep in the
Ruby Range for several years (although CAFN representatives indicated
that their members may have taken some). Perhaps the reason for biolo-
gists’ intense concern with First Nations hunting was that they attributed
the only “published case in which over-harvesting is assumed to have con-
tributed to population decline” to the “non-selective” hunting of First
Nations people (Hoefs 1984a: 112).
Although biologists recognized the potential for human hunting to
affect the sheep population, they believed that – except for perhaps in a
few isolated years – it had not done so in the Ruby Range. Given the polit-
ical difWculties attendant upon any effort to ban or otherwise limit sheep

Table 3
Number of sheep counted and reported kill in GMS 5-31, 5-34, and 5-36
Reported Reported
kill as a kill as a
Total percent of percent of
sheep Full curl Reported total full curl
counted counted kill counted counted
1980 980 * 20 2.0
1981 * 18
1982 854 * 18 2.1
1983 700 34 18 2.6 52.9
1984 928 73 16 1.7 21.9
1985 963 104 10 1.0 9.6
1986 795 66 9 1.1 13.6
1987 14
1988 19
1989 754 94 23 3.0 24.5
1990 23
1991 8
1992 597 68 24 4.0 35.3
1993 477 54 20 4.2 37.0
1994 492 51 16 3.2 31.4
1995 575 43 14 2.4 32.6
1996 428 52
* Rams were not classified by horn curl before 1983.
Source : YTG 1997.
 The RRSSC and the Construction of Knowledge 173

hunting in the area, it is not surprising that they opposed such action.
They were, however, willing to consider imposing a quota on the sheep
hunt – limiting it to compensatory levels – if the kill were once again to
become excessive.
While biologists viewed hunting as only potentially affecting the mor-
tality rate of the Ruby Range sheep population, they saw weather condi-
tions as having a real and signiWcant impact on the population’s rate of
reproduction – especially on the ewes’ ability to bring lambs to full term
and on the lamb survival rate. They saw this as occurring in three ways.
First, they observed that sleet and snowstorms during early June can kill
many new-born lambs who are especially susceptible to hypothermia.
Second, exceptionally cold and snowy weather during the winter can
decrease the amount of forage in the sheep’s winter range, thus compro-
mising their nutrition and making them weaker and more vulnerable to
predation. As evidence for this, they cited a correlation between forage
production on the winter range, lamb production in the spring, and the
survival rate of lambs the following winter (Hoefs 1984b: 141-47). Third,
deep snow could decrease the sheep’s ability to actually get access to their
forage and/or to avoid predators, with similar effects. They saw as evidence
for this a correlation between snow depth and the survival of lambs and
older rams (Barichello and Carey 1988). Biologists were convinced that
adverse weather conditions could affect (and always had affected) the
sheep’s ability to reproduce. In fact, biologists involved in the RRSSC
believed that weather was the single most important factor inXuencing
the size of the sheep population in the Ruby Range. This belief had an
important effect on their outlook on sheep management in general; they
believed that once the low “lamb crops” caused by a few bad years had
cycled through the population, it would return to its former size – without
any special management efforts whatsoever. Hence their belief, cited at
the beginning of this section, that “we have already reached the ‘turn-
around’ in population trend.”

First Nations Hunters and Trappers

The First Nations position on how to manage Ruby Range sheep was quite
different from that of the biologists. This is largely a result of the fact that
they saw the sheep decline not as a temporary dip in the population but,
rather, as a long-term and catastrophic phenomenon demanding immedi-
ate intervention. First Nations elders and hunters went to great lengths to
impress upon the other members of the RRSSC their sense of the severity
of this decline. The Wrst several hours of the November 1995 meeting in
Burwash consisted of testimony by elders and hunters in which each
described how many sheep he or she remembered seeing in the Ruby and
Nisling Ranges back before the decline (some of their recollections went as
174 The RRSSC and the Construction of Knowledge

far back as the 1920s) and contrasted this to how many can be seen in
these places today. A few examples of this testimony:

In 1955 everywhere you turn your head you see a sheep through that
McKinley Creek and Marshall Creek and caribou down at Ruby Range.
[Now the caribou are gone from there] ... and the sheep the same. I rode
with my cousin a couple year ago back with Harry Smith. We took kids
hunting. We saw only 7 rams at the head of Ruby Creek. I went hunting
last fall and never seen anything. Through this valley here there used to
be 60, 70, 80 sheep every Weld there. Now you don’t see nothing back
through there. (Frank Joe in KFN and YTG 1996: 11)

Little Arm [of Kluane Lake] used to have loads of sheep. Now there’s noth-
ing, down by my cabins, anyway ... There was sheep everywhere ... Little
Arm, all over there right down to the lower cabin. See there was a sheep
lick there, and they’d come down on that mountain. Now you don’t see
nothing there, not even a fresh track, up in that area, nowhere. We used
to just go there and get our meat and come home. That was it. Now you
can’t; there’s nothing. (Grace Chambers in KFN and YTG 1996: 15)

I hunted all over in this area over here, the Big Arm [of Kluane Lake] area,
between Raft Creek and Talbot Arm, Talbot Creek, between the two Arms,
down around Ward Mountain, Glacier Creek, and up Tincup Lake. I
started hunting in there in the 60s, the early 60s, and there was game all
over that country. All over. I come back in the late 80s, and I worked for
John Ostashek [an outWtter]. I rode, hunted from the other end of Tincup
Lake in the mountains all the way back to Ward Mountain then all the
way back to Big Arm. We was two weeks just to get one sheep. That’s all I
seen, one big old sheep. I mean that’s a lot of miles, a lot of mountains.
(Douglas Dickson in KFN and YTG 1996: 20)

All of the elders and hunters who testiWed at that meeting agreed that
the sheep population had declined drastically. They continued to main-
tain this position at subsequent meetings throughout the RRSSC process.
In addition, all of the elders and hunters who participated in the Wrst
meeting and in the RRSSC process agreed that the population began to
decline sometime before 1970 and continued to do so throughout the
1970s and into the 1980s. First Nations members’ perception of the sheep
decline as both serious and long-term led them to advocate immediate
action to solve what they saw as an urgent problem. They supported a
broad-based approach that would address simultaneously all of the factors
that might be responsible for the decline. Their primary concern was to
increase the sheep population, and they were willing to do whatever it
 The RRSSC and the Construction of Knowledge 175

took to accomplish this. This meant curtailing any activities that might
potentially affect the population, regardless of any uncertainty about the
actual effects of those activities or the political obstacles to doing so.
One of their main goals was to minimize human impact on the sheep
population through a total, though temporary, ban on sheep hunting in
the area. In the meantime, they hoped to change government policy
regarding sheep in such a way that the population would remain stable
once the ban was lifted. However, they never claimed that human hunting
was the only cause of the population decline. Many of them agreed with
biologists when they cited predation and harassment by aircraft and ATVs
as factors contributing to the decline of the sheep population. Most of
them, however, explicitly identiWed over-hunting, especially by outWtters,
as the most important single cause of the decline. Several speciWcally
stated that the sheep population in OutWtter Area 11 began to decline after
Joe Jacquot, a KFN member, sold the outWt in 1969 (KFN and YTG 1996:
16, 22). They blamed the decline in this area on the hunting practices of
subsequent outWtters, criticizing, among other things, the numbers of ani-
mals they took, an increase in the number of hunts per year, their use of
airplanes to spot animals, and their intensive hunting in easily accessible
areas. In Area 12 they blamed the population declines on an increase in
both outWtter hunting and resident hunting.24 So, although First Nations
people felt that the RRSSC needed to work to minimize the impact of all of
the factors that had contributed to the decline, they could not envision a
management strategy that did not include a restriction on hunting. Klu-
ane people realized, however, that, for political reasons, this would be very
difWcult to achieve. As a result, they grudgingly agreed to allow limited
hunting, as long as it did not exceed 2 percent of the total population
annually (RRSSC 1996b: 8).
First Nations people wanted a closure of the sheep hunt (or at least the
establishment of a quota) because of the severity of the population
decline. But how did they know about sheep in the Ruby Range? How
could they be so sure that the population had declined as much as they
claimed it had?
First Nations elders and hunters base their knowledge about sheep on
personal experiences gained over many years spent out on the land: hunt-
ing, trapping, Wshing, guiding, and travelling. They can often recall in
great detail the particulars (when, where, how many) of a great many
sheep sightings throughout a huge area over a span of many decades. They
possess an astounding amount of knowledge about sheep behaviour (e.g.,
where sheep go and when, why they go there, how they act towards one
another and towards people and other animals, and how these behaviours
affect their meat, skin, and horns). Even when elders and hunters were not
speciWcally hunting sheep, they noted them and their signs wherever they
176 The RRSSC and the Construction of Knowledge

went. They did so out of force of habit, taught by their own elders from an
early age that one’s knowledge about animals might someday make the
difference between life and death. In addition, they have cleaned and
butchered countless animals. From this they have become intimately
acquainted with sheep anatomy, inside and out. From the organs, they
can tell if an animal they have killed was sick, and they know what it has
been eating from the contents of its stomach.
Elders and hunters make a point of passing on to others as much of this
experiential knowledge about sheep as they can. To begin with, they teach
young people the skills needed to know sheep as they do: how to hunt and
to prepare meat and hides. They also pass on their own personal knowl-
edge about sheep through storytelling. As we saw in Chapter 2, this pro-
cess remains vital in Burwash Landing, where animals are one of the
favourite topics of conversation. Whether they are telling hunting stories
around the campWre, discussing the details of the latest moose kill, or
recounting the antics of an otter to companions at the evening poker table,
Kluane people are forever talking with one another about animals. They
clearly enjoy both telling and hearing these stories, which are often quite
humorous, but at the same time they are exchanging valuable information
about animal behaviour and the current state of animal populations.
Kluane people’s knowledge of sheep, however, stretches much farther
into the past than either their own personal experiences or those of their
peers. Elders themselves have heard countless stories from their own elders
about hunting sheep and about how these animals behave. Adding their
own tales to the mix, they pass these stories on to those who are younger
and/or have not hunted sheep much themselves. As a result, many in the
village, even those who have not themselves hunted sheep extensively,
have a good sense of sheep populations and behaviours: they can tell you
where to Wnd sheep in any season and can recount many stories that illus-
trate how sheep behave and how to hunt them.
Kluane elders and hunters also have good knowledge of the number of
sheep killed in the area over a long period. As a regular part of their daily
interactions, hunters share with others in the village information about the
animals they have killed. If someone in Burwash Landing kills a sheep, it is
not long before everyone in the village knows about it (indeed, many of
them will get some of the meat). As a result, though First Nations hunters
do not have to report their kills to the Department of Renewable Re-
sources, Kluane people are well aware of the number of sheep taken by mem-
bers of the community. In addition, most of the elders and hunters in the
village worked for many years as hunting guides, horse wranglers, and/or
cooks for local outWtters (who, in some cases, were relatives). As a result,
they possess detailed knowledge about not only the number of animals taken
by outWtters over long periods of time but also of the locations of those kills.
 The RRSSC and the Construction of Knowledge 177

In spite of this extensive knowledge about sheep, Kluane elders and

hunters were willing to admit to a certain amount of uncertainty. They
knew that the sheep had disappeared, and they were very clear about the
factors that they saw as contributing to their decline, but they freely
admitted that they did not necessarily know the whole story. Some sug-
gested that perhaps the sheep had moved away, while others wondered
aloud whether sheep populations are governed by long-term cycles.25 But,
though they could not completely explain the population decline, they
were adamant that it had occurred: “After they make year rounds for some
reason the sheep are gone. Can’t tell what’s happening to them: killing off
or dying off. They moved out? Can’t Wgure what’s happening. But if peo-
ple don’t believe me, I still got horses down there. I’m a horse trail guide,
and we’ll ride. You’ll see there are no sheep around there” (Frank Joe in
KFN and YTG 1996: 12).
Because of their uncertainty, Kluane people were quite willing to listen
to other members of the RRSSC. They were open to other interpretations
of what was going on with the sheep, so long as these did not directly con-
tradict their own knowledge and experiences. They were quite interested,
for example, in data that biologists presented about the impacts of harass-
ment by aircraft and ATVs (e.g., Frid 1995). They were, however, com-
pletely unwilling to entertain some ideas presented by other members of
the RRSSC. Most notable among these was biologists’ theory that weather
was the most crucial factor contributing to the population decline. Kluane
people discounted this idea as ridiculous because it directly contradicted
both their personal experiences and their concept of sheep as intelligent
other-than-human persons. Sheep have been around for a long time, they
said, and are hardly strangers to the harshness of Yukon winters. Since
weather conditions have always been harsh in the Yukon, and the sheep
decline is a relatively recent phenomenon, they argued that it makes no
sense to blame the decline on weather conditions (see RRSSC 1996c: 10).
Perhaps even more important, some Kluane people felt that a weather-
based explanation showed a profound lack of respect towards the sheep,
since it implied that these intelligent non-human persons were too “stu-
pid” to take care of themselves in their own home territory.26
I have described here only a very small part of how Kluane people know
sheep. I have left out any discussion of the cultural practices, beliefs,
and values that give meaning to their personal experiences and to the sto-
ries that they hear and that transform sheep into sentient members of a
meaning-Wlled social universe (see Chapters 2 and 3). The reader, however,
should keep in mind the cultural context in which seemingly straightfor-
ward First Nations observations about sheep are embedded. Kluane people
conceive of sheep, like all animals, as intelligent and social non-human
persons deserving of respect.
178 The RRSSC and the Construction of Knowledge

Outfitters
Big game outWtters on the RRSSC agreed with biologists and First Nations
people on some management issues. For example, they were willing to
support recommendations limiting the harassment of sheep by aircraft
and ATVs.27 Also, like Kluane people, outWtters advocated controlling pop-
ulations of animals that prey on sheep, like wolves and coyotes, as a
means for increasing sheep numbers. Recommendations on both these
issues were palatable to all three parties because they were politically easy
to make and entailed very little sacriWce on anyone’s part. The outWtters’
overall approach to sheep management, however, was closer to that of
biologists than to First Nations people. This stems largely from the fact
that, like biologists, outWtters did not see the decline in sheep as particu-
larly severe. As with biologists and First Nations people, if we are to under-
stand the positions that outWtters took on sheep management, then we
must examine how they came to know sheep.
OutWtters know sheep primarily through daily on-the-ground observa-
tions they and their guides make during a three-month period in late sum-
mer and early fall (sheep hunting season). Since their livelihoods depend
on the existence of healthy animal populations and on their ability to Wnd
sheep (and other big game) when hunting them, they necessarily pay
close attention to what they see out on the land during that time. All of
the outWtters involved with the RRSSC claimed to have a good knowledge
of the size and state of the sheep populations in their hunting conces-
sions. They also claimed knowledge of sheep behaviour based on their
observations.
In addition, all outWtters keep written records of the observations and
experiences they have with sheep throughout the hunting season. In the
Wrst place, they are required by the Yukon Department of Renewable
Resources to report the results of their hunts and to submit the skulls of
the sheep taken by their clients for measurement, plugging, and the assess-
ment of trophy fees. Thus, wildlife biologists and the outWtters themselves
have detailed knowledge of the sheep kills in their concessions. Second,
outWtters usually keep detailed records of the sheep sightings they make
over the course of the season. One outWtter who was a member of the
RRSSC provided the committee with a letter detailing the numbers of
sheep he and his guides had counted throughout his concession, by sub-
zone, over the previous two years.28 This report included an estimate of
the sheep population in his concession that differed signiWcantly from
the count generated by the Yukon government’s aerial surveys in those
years.
The outWtters’ personal experiences with sheep in the Ruby Range, how-
ever, did not extend very far back into the past. One of the two outWtters
whose concessions were most affected by the RRSSC was in the process of
 The RRSSC and the Construction of Knowledge 179

purchasing his area in November 1995. His Wrst working season was actu-
ally not until the summer of 1996. The other outWtter had been operating
his concession only since 1994. Because of this, their only knowledge
about the sheep in their outWtting areas before these dates necessarily
came from the aerial survey and sheep kill data provided by the Yukon
government.29 This could not help but have a signiWcant effect on how
they perceived the population decline. In fact, according to both their
own Wgures and the government’s, the sheep population in the Ruby
Range had actually increased in the time since they had acquired their
outWtting concessions. They were willing to admit that there might have
been some decline in the number of sheep before they had begun working
in the Ruby Range, but their reliance on Yukon government data for that
period led them, like biologists, to conclude that this decline was a tem-
porary dip rather than part of a long-term trend. Since non-First Nations
hunting had been relatively stable over the previous few years, outWtters
maintained that hunting was not a signiWcant factor in the population
decline. They did, however, subscribe to biologists’ view that weather con-
ditions were a factor.
The outWtters’ perspective on the sheep decline had a major effect on
the position they took regarding the management of sheep hunting. Since
they did not see the sheep decline as particularly serious, outWtters were
not inclined to make big personal sacriWces to increase their numbers.30
They were adamantly opposed to any restrictions on hunting beyond
those already in place (e.g., full curl rule) and refused even to consider the
imposition of a quota, much less an outright closure.

Environmentalists
Finally, a note on how RRSSC members who were involved in the process
as representatives of environmental organizations “knew” sheep. None of
these people claimed to possess special personal knowledge about sheep.
Though some of them have spent considerable time out in the bush, they
had no special reason to observe sheep (other than for enjoyment or out
of curiosity) and had made no systematic observations of them. For infor-
mation on sheep populations and behaviour, they relied on what others
presented at the table. For political reasons, all of them tended to be sus-
picious of the information presented by outWtters, but they differed sig-
niWcantly in the degree to which they subscribed to other views; some
seemed to accept the knowledge of First Nations hunters fairly readily,
while others were more comfortable with the information provided by
biologists. In all cases, however, environmentalists on the RRSSC were pri-
marily interested in the sheep themselves as components of a complex
ecosystem rather than as either trophies or meat. Though they appreciated
the social dimensions of many of the issues confronting the RRSSC, their
180 The RRSSC and the Construction of Knowledge

primary concern was to bring back the sheep population. To some extent,
this aligned them more with First Nations members of the RRSSC than
with biologists and/or outWtters since, as a result, they tended to support
any action that might potentially increase the number of sheep regardless
of political considerations. It would be a mistake, however, to equate envi-
ronmentalist and First Nations interests in this matter.
In April 1996 I accompanied the Yukon Conservation Society’s (YCS’s)
representative on the RRSSC to a meeting of the YCS Fish and Wildlife
Committee in Whitehorse. Committee members took him to task for
endorsing – in the name of the Conservation Society – KFN’s position on
some of the RRSSC’s draft recommendations. They were leery about sup-
porting the First Nations because there is “no way to control the First
Nations harvest.” They told him, in no uncertain terms, that the Conser-
vation Society was an environmental, not a First Nations, advocacy group;
and one committee member said that “our primary interest is in protect-
ing the sheep, not in building relations between YCS and First Nations.”
Although this mistrust of First Nations people was emphatically not held by
the Conservation Society’s representative on the RRSSC, such attitudes are
fairly common among environmentalists in the territory more generally.
So even though First Nations and environmentalist interests overlapped
signiWcantly regarding the Ruby Range sheep, there were also signiWcant
differences between them.
We have now examined the different ways that RRSSC members came to
know Ruby Range sheep, and we have seen how that knowledge shaped
their perception of the sheep decline and their ideas about how to deal with
it. Despite their very different perspectives, however, committee members
agreed on the need to work together to manage the sheep population
successfully. Cooperative management, they felt, would only be possible
if they could somehow integrate the very different types of knowledge
held by various members of the committee. This integration of knowl-
edge, however, proved to be an elusive goal. In the following chapter, I
examine RRSSC members’ efforts to integrate their different ways of know-
ing sheep, and I consider why, in practice, knowledge-integration proved
so difWcult to achieve.
5
Knowledge-Integration in Practice:
The Case of the Ruby Range Sheep
Steering Committee

In Chapter 3 I showed that the concept of knowledge implicit in the pro-

ject of knowledge-integration necessarily biases efforts at co-management
against First Nations peoples. I argued that, rather than trying to Wgure
out ways to integrate different systems of knowledge, we would do bet-
ter to see the term “knowledge” itself as a marker of validity whose ap-
plication is a constant source of struggle. By focusing on the struggle over
what gets labelled knowledge in the cross-cultural negotiations of co-
management, we will gain insights into the political dimensions of such
processes – dimensions that are simply not evident from the perspective of
knowledge-integration. In this chapter, I examine Ruby Range Sheep Steer-
ing Committee members’ efforts to integrate and act upon their various
understandings of sheep from a political rather than technical perspective.
In the Wrst part of this chapter, I focus on the political dimensions of
RRSSC members’ efforts to integrate the artifacts of TEK and science. I re-
examine some of the beliefs, assumptions, and practices underlying these
particular knowledge artifacts, paying special attention to their differences
(especially temporal and geographical) and how RRSSC members per-
ceived, interpreted, and criticized one another’s knowledge of sheep. I
show that committee members usually ended up struggling with one an-
other over whose knowledge to use in formulating a management strategy
rather than attempting to build a more complete picture of Ruby Range
sheep by integrating all available sources of information. In the process
of asserting the validity of their own knowledge about sheep, members
usually ended up denying (at least implicitly) the knowledge of others. In
the second part of this chapter, I examine RRSSC members’ use of another
important approach to knowledge-integration: joint research. The hope
was that, by conducting joint research, RRSSC members could produce
knowledge with which everyone was comfortable and that this knowledge
could then serve as the basis for making management decisions. I show
that the RRSSC’s attempts at joint research were no more successful than
182 Knowledge-Integration in Practice

were their other approaches to knowledge-integration and that joint

research actually served to consolidate power in the hands of biologists at
the expense of First Nations people. In this chapter’s Wnal section, I turn to
an examination of the RRSSC process itself: its place in the wider bureau-
cratic context of Yukon wildlife management, its economic dimensions,
and the mechanisms and procedures – some of which took place outside
the actual committee meetings – by which it operated. I show that these
different aspects of the RRSSC process not only governed social interac-
tions within the committee but also signiWcantly affected committee
members’ efforts to integrate knowledge and shaped the kinds of recom-
mendations they could make.
As we shall see, RRSSC members failed (for the most part) to integrate
their different ways of knowing about sheep. Despite general agreement on
the perceived beneWts of knowledge-integration, RRSSC members ended
up struggling with one another over whose knowledge was valid. It is
tempting to blame individual RRSSC members for this failure; each com-
mittee member did after all bring his or her own personal interests and
biases to the table. Here, however, I show that the problem lay not in the
individuals who sat on the committee but, rather, in the nature of the
RRSSC process itself.

The Struggle over Knowledge

The Artifacts of TEK and Science

RRSSC members produced and used a wide array of different knowledge
artifacts over the course of the RRSSC process. To begin with, KFN and the
Yukon Department of Renewable Resources jointly produced two tradi-
tional knowledge artifacts speciWcally for use in managing Ruby Range
sheep. The Wrst of these was a transcript of the testimony given by First
Nations elders and hunters at the Ruby and Nisling Range wildlife meet-
ing in November 1995. This transcript is contained in a report prepared
jointly by KFN and the Yukon Department of Renewable Resources (KFN
and YTG 1996). As noted in Chapter 4, elders and hunters at this meeting
recalled their observations of sheep populations over time in the Ruby and
Nisling Ranges; and it was this testimony that led, in part, to the forma-
tion of the RRSSC. The second artifact is a series of seven maps and accom-
panying text that is contained in the same joint report. These maps are
graphic portrayals of some of the information contained in the oral testi-
mony. Before the meeting began, organizers hung seven large maps of the
area on the wall at the front of the room. Each of these maps was labelled
by decade (except for a single map that was used for the twenty years be-
tween 1920 and 1940) so that the entire set spanned the period from 1920
to 2000. As the tape recorder captured elders and hunters’ recollections
 Knowledge-Integration in Practice 183

about sheep, a biologist and a Kluane First Nation member stood together
at the maps with markers and recorded some of the information provided
by the elders. On the appropriately labelled map, they recorded the num-
bers of sheep each elder remembered seeing and indicated where the sight-
ing had taken place. After the meeting, they prepared Wnal versions of
these maps for inclusion in the report. These Wnal versions were accompa-
nied by a set of tables. Each table contained a number of entries consisting
of a few lines of text that identiWed which elders and hunters had made
each sighting and the brieXy summarized the nature of the sighting.
In Chapter 3 I argued that the problem with knowledge-integration
lies in the conception of integration itself rather than in the particular
people involved in such a project. I argued that the simple act of framing
the problem as one of integration automatically imposes a set of cultur-
ally speciWc notions about knowledge (not to mention tradition and envi-
ronment) on the life experiences of First Nations peoples. The goal of
knowledge-integration forces First Nations peoples and biologists alike to
compartmentalize and distill Aboriginal peoples’ beliefs, values, and expe-
riences according to external criteria of relevance, seriously distorting
them in the process. By assuming that traditional knowledge is simply a
new form of “data” to be incorporated into already existing management
bureaucracies and acted upon by biologists and resource managers, propo-
nents of knowledge-integration also take for granted existing power rela-
tions between First Nations peoples and the state.
The processes of compartmentalization and distillation were clearly evi-
dent in the production of TEK artifacts described above. One of the First
Nations organizers of the November 1995 meeting told me that, before the
meeting, she had explicitly coached elders and hunters to talk only about
sheep and to limit their testimony as much as possible to information that
could be expressed numerically and/or graphically (how many sheep?
when? where?). The conference organizers then further compartmental-
ized and distilled the information contained in these transcripts through
the preparation of the maps and accompanying tables. These maps con-
tained information almost exclusively about sheep (though they also
contained some information about other kinds of sightings, most notably
of wolves and caribou) and distilled a whole morning’s testimony into a
few columns of coded text.
I also showed how different conceptions of knowledge shape people’s
ideas about what is valid, or even relevant, with regard to an activity
such as wildlife management. I argued that biologists’ ideas about knowl-
edge lead them to see much of what First Nations peoples know about ani-
mals as invalid and/or irrelevant to the practice of wildlife management.1
This dynamic was clearly present in the case of the RRSSC. There is no
doubt that the distilled artifacts of TEK described above were produced for
184 Knowledge-Integration in Practice

consumption by non-KFN members, since the Kluane people who pro-

duced them had no need for them; they already knew what was contained
in them as well as much that had been left out. These artifacts were, how-
ever, potentially useful to biologists and other non-KFN members of the
RRSSC precisely because they allowed them to view the “relevant” infor-
mation from the elders’ testimony without having to wade through all the
“irrelevant” information contained in the tapes and transcripts (which, as
a result of coaching, already excluded the vast majority of the elders’ expe-
riences with sheep).
Yukon government biologists and outWtters also provided the RRSSC
with an array of different knowledge artifacts for use in developing a man-
agement strategy for Ruby Range sheep. Biologists submitted summaries
of the data obtained through aerial surveys of both the Ruby Range and
Sheep Mountain as well as summaries of sheep kill information obtained
from licensed hunting reports and ram skull measurements (YTG 1996,
1997). They presented much of their data to the committee through the
use of Xip charts and overhead projectors. In addition, though they pro-
vided RRSSC members with copies of a few relevant scientiWc reports
(e.g., Frid 1996; Singer and Nichols 1992), there are also a number of other
reports, which they never distributed to RRSSC members (or of which they
distributed only fragments), that clearly inXuenced, at least in part, their
own position with regard to the management of Ruby Range sheep. Signi-
Wcant among these are reports on the effects of hunting, on the effects of
weather, and on the age structure of sheep populations (see Chapter 4).2
Although these artifacts were not presented to the RRSSC, some RRSSC
members used them to formulate their positions regarding the manage-
ment of Ruby Range sheep. OutWtters participating in the process also pro-
vided the RRSSC with knowledge artifacts for use in managing the sheep.
One such artifact, which is discussed in Chapter 4, was a letter provided by
the outWtter from Area 12; it contained a summary of the sheep he had
counted in his area since 1994 and his views on the causes of the sheep
decline. OutWtters also kept RRSSC members up to date on sheep counts
and kill levels in their areas throughout the RRSSC process.
Many of these knowledge artifacts were produced explicitly for use in
the management of sheep (and some speciWcally for the management of
Ruby Range sheep). As it turns out, however, RRSSC members actually
made very unequal use of the different knowledge artifacts at their dis-
posal. They made extensive use of the artifacts of science; nearly every
meeting included a presentation by biologists about the state of the sheep
population. They distributed survey and sheep kill data to everyone and
kept them updated on the newest numbers. They invited experts in sheep
biology to come and speak to the committee and produced reports from
throughout the Yukon and Alaska supporting their position regarding
 Knowledge-Integration in Practice 185

management of the sheep. Data collected by outWtters, too, was distrib-

uted to committee members and referred to fairly frequently during RRSSC
meetings. In contrast, although some elders and hunters continued to par-
ticipate in the RRSSC process, they never made another formal presenta-
tion to the committee after the initial meeting in November 1995. Nor
was the report containing the TEK artifacts described above (transcripts
and maps) completed and distributed to RRSSC members until well after
they had prepared a draft of their management recommendations.3 More
important, however, it is clear from the outcome of the RRSSC process (see
below) that Kluane people’s knowledge and concerns about sheep were
not given equal weight in the development of management recommenda-
tions. I now turn to a consideration of why this was the case.
In Chapter 3 I argued that TEK researchers’ preoccupation with techni-
cal and methodological obstacles to knowledge-integration have obscured
the power relations that underlie the whole process of knowledge-integration
and co-management. The supposedly “technical” process of translating
First Nations elders and hunters’ lived experiences into a form compatible
with the institutions and practices of state wildlife management (e.g., num-
bers and lines on maps) takes those very institutions and practices as
givens. Because of this, the practice of knowledge-integration and co-
management ends up taking for granted existing Aboriginal-state relations
and perpetuating – rather than transforming – unequal power relations.
Here, however, I will examine a different aspect of the co-management
process. Despite all that is lost and transformed in the process of translat-
ing First Nations peoples’ lived experiences into numbers and lines on
maps, something survives. After all, the numerical and/or graphic under-
standings sought by biologists are not completely foreign to the experi-
ences of First Nations peoples. Elders and hunters often possess detailed
knowledge about sheep that can be expressed in forms that are entirely
compatible with those regularly used by biologists (e.g., the TEK artifacts
produced by the RRSSC described above). These numbers and lines on
maps – however decontextualized they may be – are nevertheless rooted in
First Nations elders and hunters’ experiences on the land. Thus, some
might argue that integrating these numbers with the knowledge of biolo-
gists should still be of some beneWt – despite all the problems inherent in
the translation process. And, precisely because these numbers and lines
on maps have been decontextualized, this integration should be fairly
straightforward. Yet, even after First Nations people and biologists have
agreed on the numbers and what they mean, knowledge-integration
remains fraught with difWculties. Many of these obstacles to integration
appear to be technical or methodological in nature. Just as in the case of
gathering and translating TEK, however, it would be a mistake to focus
solely on the technical dimensions of this stage of knowledge-integration.
186 Knowledge-Integration in Practice

To do so would ignore the political context in which it takes place and

take for granted existing political inequalities.
RRSSC members did indeed face technical and methodological obstacles
in their attempts to gather and integrate different ways of knowing about
sheep. Over the course of nearly three years, however, they intentionally
worked to overcome these obstacles. As we have seen, they gathered infor-
mation about Dall sheep from various sources – from First Nations elders
and hunters to outWtters to biologists – and successfully managed to
express it all in a form compatible with scientiWc wildlife management
practice. As I showed in Chapter 3, this process was far from politically
neutral. By rendering the information gathered from these very disparate
sources into forms that were compatible with one another, however,
RRSSC members set the stage for their integration. Yet, even then – with a
single exception – they failed. To understand why, it is worth taking a look
at the one case of successful knowledge-integration that did occur. An
examination of this instance provides insights into why such integration
did not occur more often.

“They Don’t Know Nothing about Sheep”:

Time, Space, and Knowledge-Integration
In July 1996 Yukon government biologists conducting an aerial survey of
the Ruby Range in the southwest Yukon counted 147 fewer Dall sheep
than they had just the year before – an apparent decline of almost 26 per-
cent in the course of a single year.4 This drop in the population was poten-
tially of serious concern to the members of the RRSSC. When biologists
presented the results of their sheep survey to the committee on 28 January
1997, however, no alarms were sounded. Indeed, by the time they pre-
sented their survey data to the committee, they were conWdent that the
sheep population had not in fact declined at all. SigniWcantly, the biolo-
gists had not come to this conclusion on their own; instead, they had
come to their current knowledge of the sheep population by integrating
their own knowledge (the product of aerial surveys and other techniques
of scientiWc wildlife management) with the very different knowledge of
another member of the RRSSC.
Any attempt to understand why the biologists were not worried about
the sheep population must begin with a look at the unusual circumstances
surrounding the aerial survey itself. For one thing, biologists had per-
formed the 1996 annual survey in July rather than in June, when it was
normally conducted. The second unusual thing about the survey was that
there had still been signiWcant snow cover in the mountains when it was
carried out, making it harder to spot the white Dall sheep from the air. The
biologists confessed that these factors had caused them to mistrust the
results of their survey and suspect they were not comparable to the survey
 Knowledge-Integration in Practice 187

data from previous years. Fortunately, the big game outWtter in the area,
also a member of the RRSSC, had conducted his own sheep count during
the autumn 1996 hunting season. Eight hunting guides working for him
had counted the sheep in his outWtting area and had obtained results very
similar to the Yukon government’s aerial survey – except in one game
management subzone in his area, where they counted approximately 100
more sheep than had been counted in the helicopter survey. What is
more, they counted all of those 100 sheep in an area where the aerial sur-
vey had found no sheep at all. After the hunting season, the biologists and
outWtter had gotten together to compare data. Together they had decided
that those 100 sheep must have been missed by the helicopter survey
because they had been outside of the study area in July but that they had
then returned to it by the start of the hunting season a few weeks later.
They came to the joint conclusion that the drop in the sheep count repre-
sented problems with the survey (different time of year, snow cover, and
100 moving sheep) rather than a drop in the actual number of sheep. So,
by the time they presented the results of the survey to other members of
the RRSSC in January 1997, biologists felt conWdent that it was their sur-
vey data – rather than the sheep population – that had a problem.
This tale of the 100 missing sheep should be heart-warming to propo-
nents of co-management. It is a perfect example of the kind of knowledge-
integration that is supposed to be the centrepiece of co-management
practice. By integrating the outWtter’s local land-based knowledge with the
scientiWc knowledge generated by biologists, these RRSSC members had
improved everyone’s overall knowledge of the sheep; and by working to-
gether in this way, biologists and outWtter had helped to build trust and a
cooperative relationship among (at least certain) members of the RRSSC.
This new integrated knowledge of the 1996 Dall sheep population com-
bined and reXected both outWtter’s and biologists’ knowledge of the sheep.
That this occurred should not be particularly surprising. After all, knowledge-
integration of this sort is integral to the very idea of co-management.
Aware of the limitations of wildlife biology and other management sci-
ences, biologists and scientiWc resource managers have increasingly come
to recognize the value of traditional/local knowledge not only as a correc-
tive to the knowledge they generate but also as a way of Wlling in the tem-
poral and geographical gaps in that knowledge. This was certainly one of
the goals underlying the creation of the RRSSC in the Wrst place.
As it turns out, there were numerous instances over the course of the
RRSSC process in which committee members might proWtably have
worked together to integrate their knowledge of Dall sheep in precisely
this way. Unfortunately, as I have already indicated, the case of the miss-
ing sheep described above was virtually the only signiWcant instance of
knowledge-integration that occurred during the entire RRSSC process – a
188 Knowledge-Integration in Practice

process that involved not only Yukon biologists and outWtters but also
First Nations people, federal government ofWcials, and members of inter-
ested environmental organizations. Why, if everyone involved in the
RRSSC process endorsed the idea of knowledge-integration (and they did),
was there only a single instance in which they actually succeeded in mak-
ing it come about?
As discussed above, an important part of the RRSSC process was the
translation of First Nations elders and hunters’ understandings (and in-
deed all RRSSC members’ understandings) into a form compatible with
the reports and published papers of wildlife biologists (i.e., written text,
numbers, lines on maps). Despite their common form, however, integra-
tion of these knowledge artifacts remained far from straightforward. Many
of the obstacles to integration appeared to be technical or methodological.
Sheep move around, and population sizes Xuctuate over time. Everyone’s
understanding of sheep, then, is necessarily based on where, when, and how
they observed or interacted with them. Thus, it was often extremely difW-
cult to compare one RRSSC member’s knowledge of Ruby Range sheep with
another’s – even after they had been translated into a form compatible with
scientiWc wildlife management. I turn now to an examination of these
methodological obstacles to knowledge-integration – not because they
prevented knowledge-integration but because – in one case – they did not.

Time
The temporal dimension is vital to the practice of wildlife management.
Time structures what and how people know about animal populations.
Temporal differences in what RRSSC members knew about Ruby Range
sheep provided an incentive for knowledge-integration. At the same time,
however, these differences acted as an obstacle to such integration. Tem-
poral differences existed on a number of different levels – from differ-
ences in the length of time (in years) various RRSSC members had been
observing sheep in the Ruby Range to what time of year they made these
observations. All of these differences played a role in the dynamics of co-
management in the RRSSC.
To manage wildlife effectively, one must have good long-term knowl-
edge of wildlife populations. One must know how these populations are
changing, why they are changing, and what can be done to effect desired
changes. Especially important for management is an understanding of the
impact of human activity on animal populations. Since even “stable”
wildlife populations experience signiWcant Xuctuation from year to year,
however, it can often be very difWcult to determine the causes – or even
the signiWcance – of changes in population size. In an ideal situation – one
in which biologists have good long-term data from a population in a fairly
natural state – they might feel conWdent in their ability to distinguish the
 Knowledge-Integration in Practice 189

effects of human activity from the stochastic Xuctuations experienced by

wildlife populations in the absence of humans.
Unfortunately, such long-term scientiWc data on animal populations
do not exist in the North, where wildlife biology is a relatively recent
arrival. The Yukon government, for example, did not hire a wildlife biolo-
gist until 1974, the year of the Wrst Ruby Range sheep survey. This problem
is further compounded by the expense of conducting wildlife surveys,
which has made it impossible for biologists to carry out regular surveys of
animal populations (in all but a few relatively small areas) since their
arrival in 1974. As biologists themselves admit, this constitutes a fairly
serious limitation to their knowledge of wildlife in the territory, often
making it difWcult for them to assess the effects of human activity on
wildlife populations. To make up for their lack of temporal data on animal
populations, biologists focus on maximizing the data obtained from ani-
mals taken by hunters and make comparisons between different (spatially
separate) populations of the same species.
Ruby Range sheep are exceptional among Yukon wildlife populations
for the amount of data that has been collected about them and its time-
depth. As noted above, biologists Wrst surveyed Ruby Range sheep in 1974
and have been doing so relatively consistently since 1979. Thus, they are
in a better position to assess the impact of human activity on the sheep
population in the Ruby Range than they are for nearly any other animal
population in the Yukon. Given the history of this region, however,
twenty years of data is still inadequate. Serious over-hunting occurred in
parts of the territory at least as early as the Klondike gold rush in 1898.
Although the population (and the pressure on wildlife) subsided some-
what in later years, the rise of the big game outWtting industry and several
subsequent short-lived population booms (most notably as a result of the
building of the Alaska Highway in 1941-42) continued to put varying
amounts of pressure on wildlife populations in the area (see Chapter 1).
All of these events – especially the building of the highway – affected
wildlife populations in the Kluane area, sometimes quite signiWcantly
(Hoefs 1981; McCandless 1985). Indeed, as Dick Dickson, a Kluane elder
put it, “You think game is scarce around here today? You should have seen
it when the highway came through.” Though biologists use a number of
methods to try to “factor out” the effects of human impact on these pop-
ulations, these are necessarily based on a signiWcant degree of educated
guesswork.
In contrast, First Nations elders and hunters have been in the Yukon for
considerably longer than twenty-Wve years. As noted in Chapter 4, there
are some elders who have detailed memories of the Ruby Range from as far
back as the 1920s, and they have heard stories from their own elders from
before then. These people do not depend on costly helicopters to see sheep
190 Knowledge-Integration in Practice

in the Ruby Range, nor do they have to juggle the need to survey those
sheep with the need to study other wildlife populations throughout the
territory – all on a single limited budget; rather, they observe sheep in the
Ruby Range as a natural part of their lives out on the land hunting and
trapping. As a result, there are fewer temporal “gaps” in their knowledge of
Ruby Range sheep than there are in the biological survey data.5
Such differences in the temporal dimensions of TEK and science are
often cited by proponents of knowledge-integration as one of the primary
reasons for integrating them. They see the long-term observations of First
Nations hunters as potentially complementing the more occasional but
intensive observations made by biologists and resource managers. By inte-
grating these two sets of information, many resource managers hope to
be able to extend their knowledge of animal populations signiWcantly
into the past (see, for example, Ferguson and Messier 1997). Indeed, it is
precisely for the purpose of supplementing their inadequate data about
animal populations that many resource managers throughout the North
have begun turning to TEK, and biologists involved in the RRSSC process
explicitly acknowledged this as one of the most important advantages to
managing the Ruby Range sheep cooperatively.
Despite this acknowledgment, and the apparent advantages of integrat-
ing biologists’ and hunters’ perspectives on Ruby Range sheep, however,
biologists proved unwilling or unable to incorporate First Nations hunters’
accounts of past population sizes into their model of the Ruby Range pop-
ulation.6 According to every single hunter who spoke to the RRSSC, there
were once many more sheep in the Ruby Range than there are today, and
all agreed that the population decline began well before the Wrst aerial
survey was conducted in 1974 (and certainly before these surveys became
a regular occurrence in 1979). This would seem to be an ideal situation for
the temporal extension of biological data through the use of TEK. Yet this
never happened.
Before RRSSC members could decide what management strategies to
adopt, they had to agree on a target population to manage for. This en-
tailed long hours of debate over what would constitute a healthy sheep
population in the Ruby Range. The committee might have tried to inte-
grate TEK and science by developing a population model based on a com-
bination of testimony by elders and hunters and the aerial survey data
(not to mention other inputs, such as those provided by outWtters).
Instead, biologists and First Nations people each used their own knowl-
edge of past sheep populations to back up their arguments over what con-
stituted an appropriate target population. Rather than integrating what
they knew about sheep, RRSSC members struggled with one another over
whose knowledge they should use to set this target level.
The RRSSC Wnally agreed on the objective of restoring the Ruby Range
 Knowledge-Integration in Practice 191

sheep population to its 1980 level, the highest ever recorded by an aerial
survey (RRSSC 1996d). According to the survey data, this meant a target
population of 1,314 sheep (in GMS 5-28, 5-31, 5-34, and 5-36, combined).
This Wgure, however, was well below First Nations expectations. Elders and
hunters had been adamant that the population had once been much
higher than this (indeed, they said that by 1980 the population decline
was already well underway). In the end, however, they were forced to
agree to this level because biologists (and outWtters) were completely
unwilling to entertain the possibility of setting a higher one. Whether or
not they trusted the accuracy of the First Nations testimony (and there
were some people on the RRSSC who clearly did not), biologists simply
could not accept that testimony as a basis for action because they had no
way of independently verifying that the sheep population had ever been
any higher than the 1980 level. Given the sensitive political nature of
sheep management, and the much greater weight accorded to scientiWc
evidence than to First Nations testimony by the powerful interests in-
volved, biologists needed to be able to back any recommendations with
scientiWc evidence. As a result, biologists could not (and did not) accord
the testimony of elders and hunters the same status they did their own
survey data. It is perhaps not so surprising, then, that very little knowledge-
integration actually occurred. The First Nations settled on the 1980 popu-
lation as the target level because it was the highest that biologists would
go, and biologists would only go that high because they themselves had
counted that many sheep in the study area.
Biologists were not the only members of the RRSSC to question and/or
undervalue other people’s knowledge about sheep in the Ruby Range. First
Nations people, for their part, often criticized the knowledge of biologists
as part of their effort to establish their own knowledge as legitimate. They
frequently contrasted biologists’ (and current outWtters’) status as relative
newcomers to the area with their own personal and family histories. They
referred to the many years that they and/or their parents and grandparents
had hunted in the area, claiming that this wealth of experience gave them
knowledge of the sheep that far surpassed any that might be gained from
a dozen or so annual surveys from a helicopter. In making this argument,
First Nations hunters were saying more than simply that they had spent
more time observing sheep than had biologists, though this was certainly
part of their point. They were also making a comment on the quality of
those observations. They claimed that, over the course of many years
spent hunting out on the land, they had also learned how to observe ani-
mals. This may at Wrst seem an odd argument to someone who has not
spent any time hunting. Whenever I went out with experienced hunters,
however, I was constantly impressed by their ability to spot animals. I was
always the last to see them, usually after someone had pointed them out
192 Knowledge-Integration in Practice

to me. And, of course, a good hunter does not need to see animals to know
they are there. By noting tracks and other signs, he or she can get a fairly
good sense of what animals are in the area without ever actually seeing
them. It became clear to me, as I spent time with these hunters, that it
would take me many years of studying animals out on the land before I
could hope even to approach their powers of observation. First Nations
hunters are justiWably proud of their abilities in this regard; and, because
of them, elders and hunters on the RRSSC felt uniquely qualiWed to com-
ment on the state of the sheep population in the Ruby Range. At the same
time, they mistrusted the observations of biologists, whom they saw as
lacking the very kinds of experiences they considered essential to being a
good observer. As one elder and hunter put it:

I do look at sheep when I go up the valley. Lots of time I never see any. I
cover lots of country, I never see nothing. Just what we seen last year, is
what I seen up in the Ruby. Head of Marshall Creek, I never seen no sheep
there. My cousin went in there with Junior Moose; he saw two rams ...
Where I went myself, I never seen any. People say they’re all around. With
the plane they seen lots of sheep. When I was there I look around. I look
pretty good around there. I’m used to looking for the game; I’m trained
for that. Can spot a sheep or bear, anything, moose, caribou anywhere in
the bush. Can spot it from here to across the lake. Sheep, I never seen any.
(Frank Joe in KFN and YTG: 1996: 12)

There were other important temporal differences among RRSSC mem-

bers’ knowledge of sheep as well. Because of the vastness of the territory
and the time and expense involved in conducting wildlife research, for
example, biologists can at best hope to survey a given animal population
once a year. In fact, even in the case of Ruby Range sheep, one of the most
studied animal populations in the territory, biologists have fallen short of
this modest ideal. Faced with this reality, they are careful to time their sur-
veys so as to maximize the data they can collect. In the Ruby Range, for
instance, they have traditionally Xown their surveys in June so that they
could count the number of yearlings that survived the winter in addition
the number of lambs born. Also, since sheep have seasonal movement
patterns, biologists must Xy their annual surveys at the same time every
year (if they did not, then they would be unable to compare their results
from year to year).
By contrast, although elders and hunters do not cover as much ground
in a single day as biologists in a helicopter, they do see animals all year
round and have a good idea of what they do and where they are through-
out the entire year – not just on two days in June. In the Ruby Range elders
and hunters see sheep not only on the lambing cliffs in springtime (where
 Knowledge-Integration in Practice 193

biologists see them) but also in their winter and summer ranges. They
watch them come down to mineral licks, note where they cross between
mountain ranges, and watch them in the rut. Whereas biologists know the
sheep population through a series of detailed but static and temporally
isolated “snapshots,” elders and hunters experience sheep continuously
through time. Rather than attempting to integrate these two different
views into the lives of sheep, however, RRSSC members used them to deny
the validity of one another’s knowledge. First Nations people claimed that
biologists’ lamb counts gave an inaccurate picture of the population
because of high mortality rates in the period immediately following the
counts. Biologists felt that because First Nations people do not systemati-
cally count sheep at the same time every year, they do not have an ade-
quate basis for identifying changes in the population.

Space
Like time, geography also structured how different RRSSC members
viewed the problem of sheep in the Ruby Range. In fact, the different geo-
graphical dimensions of their knowledge about sheep played an important
role in the very formation of the RRSSC and the creation of its mandate.
As it turns out, First Nations elders and hunters did not see the decline in
the sheep population as limited to the Ruby and Nisling Ranges. In fact,
some of the elders and hunters present at the November 1995 meeting had
actually spent very little time personally hunting in the Ruby Range.
Though they were aware of the situation there, these elders and hunters
were also deeply concerned about what they saw as equally severe sheep
declines in other areas where they had hunted extensively. The most
important such area was to the north, between the White River and the
Alaska border:

Like, White River, when I Wrst went into that area hunting, that was 1953,
I was 13 years old. I could sit on a mountain between Rabbit Creek and
Boulder Creek, where Dickie [Dickson] was talking about; I’d count 600
sheep. Two deep valleys like. Twenty years later I came back there, could
still count 600 sheep. A lot of time a guy could count 350 sheep in one
day. I hunted [as a guide] I’d say 20 trips, and I’d get a sheep in one day. I
never ever got skunked with a hunter. I’d take hunters out and I’d get
game, but White River, it’s just a cinch to get a sheep in one day. Now, like
David [Dickson] he says, the last time I hunted up there was in 1988. He’s
having trouble getting sheep, the same place ... Now David says he has to
hunt like hell to get sheep. (Douglas Dickson in KFN and YTG 1996: 19)

Aside from two large-scale aerial surveys (in 1974 and 1993) and the
usual sheep kill data, however, biologists had very little knowledge of
194 Knowledge-Integration in Practice

sheep populations in the White River area. As a result, they were unwilling
to include this area in the mandate of the RRSSC. At the Wrst meeting of
the committee in December 1995, members decided that the committee
would limit its activity to that area about which “both government and
First Nations have some knowledge” (RRSSC 1995: 3). This decision effec-
tively limited RRSSC activities to the study area used by biologists in their
aerial surveys of the Ruby Range. First Nations RRSSC members were not
altogether happy about this, since the study area represents just a small
fraction of the area about which they were concerned; it excludes not only
the White River area but also the majority of the Nisling Range. At subse-
quent RRSSC meetings elders and hunters occasionally tried to extend the
RRSSC’s mandate beyond the Ruby Range but to no avail.
Biologists acknowledged that the decline in sheep was not limited to
the Ruby Range, stating that it was occurring in “virtually every accessible
population in the territory” and into Alaska (RRSSC 1996a: 5). Indeed,
they reported to the RRSSC that “Alaska reports a 40-70% decline in
almost all of their sheep populations, even in areas with little or no har-
vest” (YTG 1997: 7). Despite this, however, biologists were unwilling to
comply with First Nations requests to expand the RRSSC’s mandate into
other areas of concern because “there is not enough survey information
from other parts of the Yukon to know how widespread the declines
are there” (YTG 1997: 7). Thus, rather than increasing their total stock of
knowledge about sheep by integrating the localized knowledge of biolo-
gists with the more extensive knowledge of hunters, RRSSC members
ended up struggling with one another over whose knowledge to use. First
Nations people felt that biologists’ knowledge about the decline in sheep
was too limited geographically. Biologists, for their part, were unwilling to
accept hunters’ knowledge of sheep outside the Ruby Range study area
as the sole basis for a management strategy in those areas.
There were other ways in which geographic differences between how
RRSSC members know sheep caused them to question the validity of one
another’s knowledge. We have already seen that the study area is divided
into game management subzones and outWtter areas. It is also divided into
several different trapline concessions and split by a boundary between two
First Nations traditional territories. These arbitrary geographical divisions
directly affect people’s experience of the land and so structure their knowl-
edge of it; yet they overlap with and otherwise fail to correspond to one
another. This makes any attempt to compare different people’s knowledge
of the land very complex. Biologists, for example, conduct their sheep
counts by game management subzone. Since the division of the territory
into these subzones does not correspond to its division into outWtter areas,
and since outWtters count sheep in their area, it is difWcult to compare the
counts of biologists with those of outWtters.7
 Knowledge-Integration in Practice 195

This lack of geographical correspondence becomes even more pro-

nounced when we consider how individual First Nations elders and
hunters experience the land. In the Yukon there is no formal division of
land into different hunting areas (although it is divided into different
areas for trapping), but every First Nations hunter hunts and Wshes in dif-
ferent places over the course of the year. Though different hunters may
share any given place, no two hunters hunt and Wsh in exactly the same
set of places. Thus, each hunter has what we might call a personal hunting
area (although I refer to a “hunting area,” this includes everywhere that
a hunter goes in the bush, whether to hunt, Wsh, trap, pick berries, cut
wood, or whatever). These personal areas may overlap but no two are iden-
tical. Studies mapping the personal hunting areas of individual hunters in
the same community (e.g., Brody 1982) have shown that these areas vary
signiWcantly in size, shape, and location. This is certainly the case in Bur-
wash Landing as well. Elders and hunters regularly share their observa-
tions and thoughts about the land and animals with one another so that
their knowledge of the land extends beyond their own personal hunting
area. But when biologists ask them for speciWc information about ani-
mal sightings (e.g., sheep counts), they necessarily supply this informa-
tion from their own experiences in their own unique hunting areas. This
means that individual First Nations people’s testimony, and the numbers
that each provides to biologists, may vary considerably one from the other
– especially considering the high level of geographical and temporal vari-
ation in the boreal forest (Nelson 1983: 200-24). Some biologists and
resource managers misinterpret these differences among hunters as evi-
dence for the unreliability of TEK, and this makes them suspicious of First
Nations knowledge altogether.
One biologist told me that he had misgivings about integrating TEK and
knowledge because of the “subjective” nature of TEK. He said that it was
“too Xuid and dependent upon individuals” to be integrated with science.
Not only does TEK change over time, he said – perhaps reXecting changes
in the world – but it also varies according to the hunter or elder with
whom you talk. This, of course, is anathema to scientists. ScientiWc knowl-
edge must be reproducible; it must be true for everyone or it cannot
be considered knowledge at all. When biologists are confronted by incon-
sistent and conXicting testimony by elders and hunters, some assume
that this testimony is unreliable. Others recognize the complexity of the
problem but are unsure of how to make use of such knowledge. First
Nations people and scientists alike make much of the fact that TEK is
inherently local, that it is rooted in a particular place. Yet, by failing to use
TEK because of differences between hunters (either because they see it
as invalid or because they do not know how to use it), biologists and
resource managers implicitly deny the local nature of First Nations people’s
196 Knowledge-Integration in Practice

experiences on the land. The fact that this knowledge is not used (even by
those biologists who recognize its validity) because it does not Wt easily
into the practices of bureaucratic wildlife management highlights the
biases inherent in the project of knowledge-integration.
The lack of geographical correspondence among different people’s
knowledge is further compounded when we consider its relation to the
temporal differences discussed above. We saw that people’s knowledge
of sheep is constrained by the times they encounter them. Biologists count
the sheep population in the spring, while outWtters interact with sheep
during the licensed hunting season (late summer and early fall). Even First
Nations people’s observations of sheep are necessarily time-dependent
since there are places that they visit with varying frequency or only for
seasonally speciWc activities (like berry-picking or trapping). These tempo-
ral differences have an important geographical component because sheep
ignore the arbitrary administrative lines that humans draw on maps as
they go about their seasonal movements. Thus, the timing of a sheep
count can affect not only where one will see sheep but also whether one
sees them at all. Sheep that have their lambs outside the biologists’ study
area but whose summer range is in a part of the study area overlapping
an outWtter’s concession, for example, will be counted by outWtters but not
by biologists. This, in fact, is precisely how one outWtter accounted for
the discrepancy between his own counts and those of biologists (RRSSC
1996a: 3). He argued that it was inappropriate to use the biologists’ aerial
survey data to manage sheep hunting in his area since spring counts did
not accurately reXect the population there during hunting season. As we
have seen, however, such temporal/geographical discrepancies were not
an insurmountable obstacle to knowledge-integration. In fact, biologists
and outWtter subsequently overcame them and did succeed in integrating
one another’s knowledge to solve the problem of the sheep missing from
the 1996 survey.

“Trust” and the Politics of Knowledge-Integration

Members of the RRSSC were aware of many of the temporal and geo-
graphical differences in one another’s knowledge of sheep before the
RRSSC process even began. Indeed, the existence of such differences was
one of the primary incentives for engaging in co-management in the Wrst
place. The fact that different people knew about Ruby Range sheep at dif-
ferent times and places meant that RRSSC members could, in theory, pool
their knowledge, creating a collective knowledge base that exceeded any
individual’s knowledge – not only in quality but also in temporal and
geographical scope. At the same time, these temporal and geographical
differences made it extremely difWcult to compare and integrate different
people’s knowledge. What exactly is one to make of differences between a
 Knowledge-Integration in Practice 197

June and a July sheep count? Of a count by game management subzone

versus one by outWtting area? Of differences in the testimony of various
First Nations hunters who have different hunting areas? There is no objec-
tive formula into which one can plug such incomparable data. If one is to
make sense of these disparities, then one must engage in a process of cre-
ative interpretation. The case of the 100 missing sheep is a perfect exam-
ple of such a process.
Although the biologists and outWtter had both counted sheep by game
management subzone (thus, there was no geographical discrepancy), there
were other differences that made their counts difWcult to compare. Biol-
ogists had counted sheep from the air in July while the outWtter had
counted them from the ground in August. Integrating these two counts
required an act of imagination; one had to imagine the sheep leaving the
area in June and returning in August. Either party could have rejected this
interpretation for any number of reasons (e.g., based on their understand-
ing of sheep behaviour). Even more important, biologists and outWtter
had to be willing to accept and act upon the number of sheep reported by
the other.
The notion of trust occupies a prominent place in the rhetoric of TEK.
Government and First Nations participants in co-management processes
are routinely urged to “trust one another” and warned that without such
trust co-management cannot succeed. Certainly, biologists and outWtters
had to trust one another to be truthful, to accurately report the number
of sheep they really saw. Likewise, each had to have conWdence in how
the other had gone about counting sheep; that is, they had to trust one
another’s ability to generate accurate data. Without these two forms of
trust they could not have integrated their knowledge the way they did. But
it was not enough that biologists and outWtter simply trusted one another;
they also had to be willing to act on one another’s information (i.e., to
modify their own numbers, or at least their understanding of the meaning
of those numbers, and to use those new numbers/meanings in their man-
agement efforts). This is not the same thing as trust. Indeed, the notion of
trust must be viewed within the broader context of power relations. Biolo-
gists, for example, may have trusted the First Nations elders who said that
the sheep population had once been much higher than it was in 1980 (i.e.,
they may have believed the elders to be honest and even trusted them to
generate accurate sheep counts). But, given the political context of sheep
hunting in the Yukon, there is no way that biologists could have accepted
and acted upon First Nations elders’ accounts of the size of past sheep
populations. To do so would have been to endorse the view that there
had been a catastrophic population decline requiring drastic and immedi-
ate action. Aside from the fact that biologists did not believe this to be
the case, for them to have advocated a ban on sheep hunting (or similar
198 Knowledge-Integration in Practice

drastic action) in the absence of scientiWc evidence to back it up would

have been impossible.
Biologists on the RRSSC simply could not support a ban on hunting (or
even the imposition of a quota hunt) based solely on Kluane people’s argu-
ments, regardless of how well they understood these arguments or how
personally sympathetic they might have been. Biologists have to be able to
justify (with scientiWc evidence) the positions they take on wildlife man-
agement. They must be able to answer the criticisms of other biologists
employed by those with competing political interests. For them to take
a position that they could not defend in this way would be viewed as irre-
sponsible. OutWtters and others could then have criticized them for being
biased and unscientiWc, and they would have been utterly unable to de-
fend themselves from these charges. Their reputation as scientists would
have been damaged, and they might even have lost their jobs. And all of
this would have been for naught since, considering the political power
wielded by outWtters in the territory, the government could not have
implemented a hunting ban (or quota hunt) without incontrovertible sci-
entiWc proof that the sheep population had once been as high as Kluane
elders and hunters maintained (it would have been difWcult enough even
with such proof). In the absence of scientiWc evidence, supporting Kluane
people’s position regarding the past population size of the Ruby Range
sheep population simply was not an option for biologists on the RRSSC.
Yet this is precisely what they would have to have done if knowledge-
integration were to succeed.
In the case of the RRSSC, the committee’s failure to successfully inte-
grate knowledge artifacts indicates more than simply a lack of trust be-
tween committee members. Indeed, the fact that the only instance of
artifact integration in the whole RRSSC process occurred between an
outWtter and biologists is quite signiWcant; and this signiWcance was not
lost on First Nations people. As we have seen, the integration of biologist
and outWtter data that occurred in the case of the missing sheep was far
from straightforward; it required a certain amount of creative interpreta-
tion to overcome the incomparability of the two counts. The fact that
integration occurred in spite of these difWculties indicates not only that
the outWtter and biologists trusted one another’s motives and methods
enough to work together to overcome these technical difWculties, but it
also highlights the political dimensions of knowledge-integration. Biolo-
gists had accepted the outWtter’s numbers at face value and were willing to
base their actions (or non-action, in this case) on them – without requir-
ing any additional “proof” – despite the fact that those numbers differed
radically from their own. Kluane people felt, that by doing this, biologists
were extending to the outWtter a degree of trust that they had resolutely
refused to extend to First Nations people.
 Knowledge-Integration in Practice 199

By this time in the RRSSC process, some Kluane people had already
begun to suspect that their position regarding sheep was being dismissed
on political or racial rather than on intellectual grounds. When they saw
that biologists were willing to trust the outWtter, whose economic interests
gave him a clear motive for fabricating the results of his sheep count, and
yet seemingly refused to trust the word of some of the most respected peo-
ple in their community, they felt that their suspicions had been con-
Wrmed. In addition, the fact that biologists and outWtters could come to
such an agreement without the consent, or even the involvement, of KFN
illustrates the differences in power that existed between committee mem-
bers.8 It is almost inconceivable, for example, that Kluane people could
have excluded biologists and their knowledge from the process (as they
themselves had been excluded) and still have effectively “explained away”
such a dramatic change in the sheep population. Yet biologists were able
to use outWtter data in this way because there were no signiWcant political
obstacles preventing them from doing so (as there were to the use of First
Nations people’s testimony). The case of the missing sheep, perhaps more
than any other single incident, caused Kluane people to lose conWdence
in the RRSSC process.
Having examined RRSSC members’ attempts to integrate knowledge
artifacts generated by various committee members on their own, I turn
now to an examination of the other important approach to knowledge-
integration taken by RRSSC members; namely, their efforts to cooperate in
the production of brand new knowledge about Ruby Range sheep by
jointly designing and conducting research projects.

Joint Research
One of the most important approaches to knowledge-integration is joint
research. I use this term to refer to the practice whereby scientists and
hunters work together to produce knowledge about the environment.
Joint research has become increasingly common throughout the North
American Arctic and Subarctic because it promises to solve one of the most
serious difWculties plaguing other forms of knowledge-integration. Because
of the very different cultural contexts in which wildlife biologists and Abo-
riginal hunters are embedded, they often have difWculty understanding
and accepting one another’s knowledge of the environment as valid. As
we have seen, this can make efforts to integrate traditional and scien-
tiWc knowledge tricky indeed, which, in turn, makes co-management
extremely difWcult. Yet, if wildlife biologists and First Nations hunters
could work together to produce knowledge about the environment that
both groups could accept as valid, then this problem would disappear and
co-management would become a simple matter of biologists and hunters
acting together on this shared knowledge.
200 Knowledge-Integration in Practice

All RRSSC members clearly recognized the potential advantages of coop-

erative knowledge-production, and they made several serious attempts to
actually carry out joint research. In the pages that follow, I examine the
RRSSC’s various attempts at joint research, with special attention to how
these attempts were shaped by the processes of compartmentalization and
distillation described in Chapter 3. I also show why – despite RRSSC mem-
bers’ best intentions – they failed to generate knowledge that everyone
accepted as valid. I then consider the idea of joint research more broadly.
Differences in RRSSC members’ conceptions about knowledge and in their
understandings of the context in which that knowledge should be used
led them to have very different ideas about what constitutes “research” in
the Wrst place. By elevating some kinds of activities to the status of
research and choosing to engage in them rather than in other kinds, the
RRSSC implicitly privileged the former activities and the knowledge they
produced.

The Aerial Survey

Perhaps the most obvious instance of joint research on Ruby Range sheep
was the inclusion of KFN observers on aerial survey Xights. This practice
had in fact begun several years before the creation of the RRSSC, and
Yukon government biologists were quick to point out in committee meet-
ings that the government and KFN were, in fact, already conducting joint
sheep research. Indeed, the 1997 recommendations submitted to the Fish
and Wildlife Management Board by the RRSSC called for continued aerial
surveys that would “include outWtters and, as in other years, Kluane First
Nation members” (RRSSC 1997c). The mere fact that First Nations people
accompanied biologists on a sheep survey, however, does not in itself
ensure the production of agreed-upon knowledge. Rather than assuming
that the presence of KFN observers on survey Xights automatically led to a
form of knowledge-integration, then, we must consider the KFN observers’
role in the survey and their understandings of what was taking place.
The actual role of the KFN observer in the survey, as it turns out, was
minor indeed. It was fairly difWcult for me at Wrst to get a sense of the
observer’s role on these Xights. Though I spoke with several people who
had Xown as observers, few had much to say when I asked them speciW-
cally what they had done. Most of them claimed to enjoy the Xight but
seemed fairly uninterested in discussing what they had actually done.
They usually just said something to the effect that they had “Xown around
and counted sheep.” In June 1998 I spoke with a young man who had just
Xown the survey as a KFN observer for the Wrst time. He was home from
college for the summer and was quite enthusiastic about the Xight. He
described in animated detail how the survey had been carried out. Later,
I spoke with a biologist who had also been on the Xight. She, too, was
 Knowledge-Integration in Practice 201

enthusiastic about the Xight and especially about the young man’s partic-
ipation in it. She said that it had been a pleasure to have him along
because he had actively participated in the survey. Not only had he helped
to spot and count the sheep, she said, but he had also learned their system
for recording the data. She speciWcally contrasted his behaviour with that
of the elders and/or hunters who usually accompany them, saying that,
unlike them, he had not been “just along for the ride.” This statement
indicates that, in general, the inclusion of a KFN observer on the survey
Xights had little if any effect on the actual way in which the survey has
been carried out.
There are a number of possible explanations for why most KFN ob-
servers are uninterested in or unwilling to actively participate in the sur-
vey process. First, though all KFN observers are comfortable with the
notion of counting sheep, there are undoubtedly some, especially elders
and hunters unfamiliar with the practice of wildlife biology, who do not
really understand the reasoning behind other aspects of the survey, such
as the system biologists use to record their data or the signiWcance of the
lambs-per-100-nursery-sheep ratio. Unless the biologists took the time to
explain to them what they were doing, they might feel a bit out of their
element and uncomfortable about participating. From RRSSC meetings
and discussions in other contexts, however, I am conWdent that at least
several of the people who have Xown as KFN observers were actually quite
knowledgeable about how these surveys were carried out. They must have
had other reasons for not actively participating.
Another possibility has to do with the fact that every survey was
observed by a different KFN member and often by more than one (with a
different person accompanying the survey team on each day of the sur-
vey). This lack of continuity meant that First Nations observers were
unable to obtain either a sense of the overall sheep population through
time (from the survey, at least) or a long-term impression of the survey
itself. Since they were not present for the entire survey it was difWcult
for them to become too involved in what was going on; and because there
was no consistency of observers from year to year, they were less likely to
offer suggestions for improvement since they would not be present to see
their suggestions implemented anyway.
There were, I believe, other even more important reasons for Kluane
people’s lack of involvement in the survey process. These came up in other
types of discussions about the surveys. While most Kluane people who
had Xown as observers were uninterested in giving me a detailed account
of how data was collected, many of them were more than willing to
tell me what they thought of the survey in general terms. Every one of
them (including the young man who had been otherwise enthusiastic
about the Xight) expressed grave concerns about how sheep reacted to the
202 Knowledge-Integration in Practice

helicopter. All of them recalled watching sheep run in terror at full speed
over very dangerous terrain. Several claimed to have seen sheep injure or,
they suspected, kill themselves in their effort to escape. Many of them
wondered aloud if the survey was not doing the sheep population more
harm than good.
Several Kluane people were also quite skeptical of the accuracy of the
survey. They said that, since the sheep scatter in all directions at the sound
of the approaching helicopter, it would be very easy for sheep counters to
miss and/or double-count sheep. Some also suggested that similar difWcul-
ties could arise simply from sheep’s normal movements over the several
hours that it took to survey a mountain block. One KFN member told me
that on one such survey he had kept his own sheep count independent of
the biologists. His Wnal count had differed signiWcantly from that of the
biologists (he had counted fewer sheep), and he had told them so. In the
end, however, biologists had essentially ignored his version of the event.
They had used their own numbers as the ofWcial count and had allowed
his dissenting data to simply disappear from the record. He told me that,
as a result of this experience, he had very little faith in the accuracy of the
biological survey data.
Given their moral and methodological objections to the process, it is
perhaps not surprising that most KFN members preferred not to involve
themselves too actively in the aerial surveys. But if most KFN observers
really were “just along for the ride,” it also seems fairly clear that biologists
treated them that way, even when they did try to actively participate. Nor
does the enthusiastic young observer provide us with a counter-example.
Part of the reason that he was able to participate as fully as he had in the
survey was that one member of the government survey crew had been
unable to count sheep due to extreme air sickness; they had needed him
to cover for her. Thus, he participated actively in the survey, but, in doing
so, he conformed to the methods and assumptions of the biologists,
adding no new perceptions to the survey. Although he was helpful to the
biologists, he did nothing that a healthy biologist could not have done.
But what if he had disagreed with their count or questioned their meth-
ods? Would he, too, have been treated as if he was “just along for the
ride?”
It is clear from the above discussion that the inclusion of a KFN observer
on the survey Xights had no effect either on the way in which the surveys
were carried out or on its results. It would therefore be difWcult to argue
that, through these joint surveys, biologists and First Nations people pro-
duced knowledge that they all could feel comfortable using in the RRSSC
process.
Biologists, however, did modify their aerial survey methods to some ex-
tent in response to RRSSC members’ criticisms. As we saw above, outWtters
 Knowledge-Integration in Practice 203

questioned the appropriateness of using data gathered in June (when the

sheep are on the lambing cliffs) to manage hunting, which occurs when
the sheep are in their summer range; and First Nations people objected to
the harassment of sheep caused by the aerial surveys. Biologists responded
to these criticisms by changing the date of the aerial survey in 1996 from
June to July. By July sheep have moved from the spring lambing cliffs to
their summer range; so biologists felt that, by conducting a July survey,
they would get a more accurate picture of the number of sheep that are
actually in the study area during the hunting season. They also reasoned
that the survey itself would have less impact on the sheep in July than it
had in June. Although the sheep would still be frightened by the heli-
copter in July, they would by then have moved to the much less treacher-
ous terrain of their summer range so that their efforts to escape would
result in fewer injuries.9
By modifying the survey to take into account the concerns of other
RRSSC members, however, biologists created some methodological difW-
culties for themselves. In the Wrst place, July data is difWcult to compare to
June data, so they necessarily became even less sure about the relationship
between the number of sheep counted in the aerial surveys and the num-
ber of sheep actually on the ground than they had been before (since
changes in the sheep count could represent seasonal movements in and
out of the study area rather than a change in overall numbers). This is one
of the reasons they were willing to alter their interpretation of the 100
missing sheep after consulting with the local outWtter. Second, they were
not able to collect as much information about those sheep that they did
see as they had been able to in the June counts. In June biologists had
been able to count the number of yearlings that had survived the winter,
but by July it is no longer possible to distinguish them from ewes. Because
biologists need the yearling count to get a sense of the actual recruitment
of young animals into the population, they needed to Wnd another way to
get this information. After some discussion, the RRSSC decided that the
best way to gather this information was by conducting a ground survey
and that this presented them with an ideal opportunity to engage in more
joint research.

The Ground Survey

Thus, on a sunny day in mid-April 1996, a group of Yukon government
biologists and Kluane First Nation members climbed into two government
trucks and drove together down a frozen arm of Kluane Lake to count the
number of Dall sheep on the surrounding mountains. Using a spotting
scope, they were able to distinguish yearling lambs from the older sheep in
the population. The day was pleasant; the group shared a picnic lunch, and
the sheep count was conducted in a spirit of goodwill and cooperation.
204 Knowledge-Integration in Practice

On the face of it, there seemed to be little room for disagreement about
the data; everyone agreed on the two numbers generated by the study:
the overall sheep count and the yearling count. Much later, however, it
became apparent that biologists and Kluane people had come away from
the experience with very different ideas about what they had seen, and
these differences led to a serious misunderstanding between them. How is
it that people who all participated in the same seemingly straightforward
activity could have such different ideas about what they had seen?
Wildlife biologists who participated in this survey wanted to generate a
Wgure for lamb survival (expressed as the number of yearlings per 100 nur-
sery sheep), but the total number of sheep the group counted was very low
(approximately forty-Wve). According to the biologists, this represented
too small a sample from which to derive a reliable Wgure for lamb sur-
vival; thus, all of the day’s data were useless. Kluane people understood
the desire to get a yearling count, but they were more interested in the
overall number of sheep. Several of them said that in the past they had
counted hundreds or even thousands of sheep from the Big Arm of Kluane
Lake at that time of year. For them, the low count was clear proof of a dras-
tic decline in the sheep population, dramatically bearing out the position
they had taken in the committee meetings. The biologists disagreed with
this interpretation, saying that a ground-based survey is useless for deter-
mining the total number of sheep in the area since, for all anybody knew,
most of the sheep could have been on the other side of the mountains.
Kluane people in turn disagreed with the biologists, saying that, in the
past, they had always seen that many sheep on the Big Arm in the early
spring and that the mountains had had two sides then too.
Thus, biologists and Kluane people assigned radically different mean-
ings to the seemingly straightforward numbers generated by the joint sur-
vey. The biologists saw the number in the context of their understandings
of statistical theory and population dynamics, while Kluane people saw
the same number in relation to their past experiences of that place. Every-
one counted the same forty-Wve sheep, but the biologists saw in them a
sample size that was too small to be statistically valid, while Kluane peo-
ple saw too few sheep. In the end, the committee did not use the numbers
generated by the joint survey because biologists did not feel they could
draw any conclusions from them; and, in any case, data from a single
ground survey would not be compelling enough evidence in a bureau-
cratic context to justify recommending any regulatory action.
This whole episode gave biologists and Kluane people very different
impressions about the role and effectiveness of the RRSSC process itself.
Because the results of the survey had proved worthless, the biologists felt
that a day’s efforts had been in vain. A subsequent trip down the Big
Arm later in the spring was also unsuccessful; for this reason, and because
 Knowledge-Integration in Practice 205

they had decided to conduct their annual aerial survey later in the sum-
mer than usual, biologists were unable to get a yearling count for 1996.
Although this count was important to them, it was not vital for managing
the sheep; they were able to get most of the data they needed from the aer-
ial survey. For biologists, then, the whole episode was an inconvenience,
a minor glitch in what otherwise was a successful ongoing attempt at
co-management. Kluane people, however, saw the affair in a very different
light. They felt they had been betrayed. When biologists disregarded their
claims about how many sheep they had seen from the Big Arm in past
years, Kluane people felt that biologists were either rejecting the knowl-
edge of their elders as unreliable or, worse yet, calling them liars. This inci-
dent helped to convince many of the First Nations people involved in the
RRSSC process that “co-management” is hardly the exciting and empow-
ering new First Nations-government relationship that many tout it to
be; rather, it convinced them that the RRSSC was just a new way for the
territorial government to pay lip-service to ideas of cooperation and
knowledge-integration without giving Kluane people any real say in the
management of wildlife. In other words, Kluane people saw co-management,
in the form of the RRSSC, as just another guise for the same old story of
state-run wildlife management.
Despite the fact that biologists and Kluane people all saw the same
sheep, they came away with very different interpretations of what they
had seen. This, in itself, is not a bad thing. In fact, it is the whole point of
conducting joint research in the Wrst place. The problem arises when deci-
sion makers value only one set of interpretations. This is precisely what
happened in the ground survey. Although biologists and Kluane people
conducted the actual sheep count together, biologists retained the exclu-
sive right to interpret the data. Rather than acknowledging both interpre-
tations as valid and trying to work together to develop a management
strategy consistent with both, the RRSSC ended up discarding Kluane
people’s interpretation of events and basing its management decisions
solely on the interpretation of biologists, which, as we have seen, was
based as much on their understanding of the political realities of sheep
management as on their notions about what constitutes good research.
The ground survey clearly failed as joint research in that it did not gener-
ate knowledge with which all RRSSC members felt comfortable and upon
which they could all agree. Worse still, it alienated Kluane people, causing
them to lose faith in the process.

Research: The Very Idea

We have now seen that attempts to conduct joint research on sheep in
the Ruby Range failed to produce knowledge upon whose validity all
RRSSC members could agree. DifWculties with conducting joint research,
206 Knowledge-Integration in Practice

however, exist not only at the level of execution but also at the conceptual
level. Different RRSSC members’ concept of “research” and, therefore,
what they saw as constituting valid “joint research,” depended on their
very different ideas about knowledge. For biologists, joint research essen-
tially meant including other RRSSC members in their research activities.
To their credit, we have seen that they were willing to modify their
research practices somewhat in response to criticisms made by RRSSC
members. In making these adjustments to their research, however, biolo-
gists never really had to question their assumptions about the nature of
research as a knowledge-producing activity. They only recognized certain
very speciWc kinds of activities as constituting research.
This became especially evident in RRSSC discussions about how to con-
duct future research in the Ruby Range. Committee members all agreed
that more information was needed to determine which factors were hav-
ing the greatest effect on the sheep population. They decided to develop a
comprehensive plan to coordinate and structure this research. In May
1996 biologists presented to the committee their ideas on how to design
the study plan (RRSSC 1996c: 11-12). They suggested that it be designed
around the regressive equation, y = a + b + c + ..., where “y” represents the
change in the sheep population, “a” is the factor that is being control-
led for, and the other variables account for untreated factors and experi-
mental error.10 Perhaps not surprisingly, many of the non-biologists on
the committee were mystiWed by this presentation. One RRSSC member
immediately voiced his objections to this approach. The RRSSC was sup-
posed to include the perspectives of First Nations people and other non-
biologists in the management process, he argued, yet here biologists were
proposing just another “traditional” scientiWc study. He said that even
within the scientiWc tradition itself there are other types of approaches
to understanding animal populations, and he cited the Weld of primatol-
ogy as an example. By using an alternative approach, he suggested, the
RRSSC might design a study that considered social and behavioural factors
rather than merely biological ones. The biologist who responded to these
objections dismissed them, saying that the approach biologists had out-
lined was not at all traditional. In fact, he argued, it was a new “ecosystem-
oriented approach” because it took into account multiple factors rather
than just one, as they used to do. Also, he said, a traditional study would
have involved radio-collaring animals and intensive observation. But he
never addressed the concern that, new or not, the biologists’ study design
failed to take into account the social and behavioural dimensions of sheep
that Kluane people had repeatedly tried to insert into the process. When
biologists suggested that a “technical group” be formed to design the
actual study plan, the same dissenting RRSSC member suggested that,
while such a group might work out the details of the study design, the
 Knowledge-Integration in Practice 207

whole committee together should discuss the kinds of questions that the
research would address. The same biologist responded that “we” (the biol-
ogists) would generate a preliminary set of research questions and distrib-
ute them to the committee for comment. This never occurred. In fact, the
committee never again dealt with the issue of study design, but biological
research on Ruby Range sheep continues.
The point of this account is not to imply that biologists consciously
excluded other RRSSC members from a role in designing the study plan;
rather, it is to illustrate their relatively narrow idea about what kinds of
activities constitute research. They were unable to accommodate a criti-
cism that questioned not only the details of their research plan but also its
underlying assumptions. To have accommodated this criticism, biologists
would have had to change not only the way they did research but also
their idea of what constitutes research in the Wrst place. That they did
not do so should not really be surprising since their concept of what con-
stitutes research is shaped by the political context in which their knowl-
edge is to be used. As one biologist put it: “In order to sway an economic
development agenda, wildlife information has to be particularly com-
pelling, rigorous, and able to withstand the criticism of PhD level biolo-
gists employed by industry. This, more than anything, guides perceptions
about what is research.”11
The wide gulf between how different RRSSC members thought about
research may well have led biologists to view criticisms like those de-
scribed above either as arising from ignorance or as politically motivated.
From their perspective, they had openly and in good faith presented to the
committee their ideas about designing a study plan, hoping for feedback
and constructive criticism; instead, they had received some very “non-
constructive” talk that seemed to question their competence and the
validity of the whole enterprise of scientiWc wildlife research – an enter-
prise in which they had been educated and in which they had chosen to
pursue their careers. It seems likely, then, that it was out of frustration
rather than some sinister plot to co-opt the process that biologists effec-
tively gave up on the attempt to include other RRSSC members in the
development of a research plan.
Only one RRSSC member directly criticized biologists’ ideas about the
nature of research in this way (although we have already seen that many
of them rejected the validity of their results).12 Some RRSSC members,
however, did propose joint participation in other types of knowledge-
producing activities, which we might view as alternative forms of research.
Biologists, however, were no more receptive to these proposals than they
were to direct criticisms of their ideas about research. Despite their best
intentions, biologists were unable to recognize the knowledge-producing
potential of activities that did not meet their narrow criteria of scientiWc
208 Knowledge-Integration in Practice

research, which, as we have seen, was shaped by their sense of what was
possible given the political context of sheep management in the territory.
Kluane people made one such suggestion repeatedly over the course of
the RRSSC process. They suggested that biologists should spend a year or
two out on the land – hunting and trapping with a First Nations elder.
They felt that this was important for two reasons. First, it would increase
biologists’ knowledge about sheep. They would get a sense of what it
means to live on the land and with animals on a day to day basis. In this
way, Kluane people hoped, biologists would come to know sheep as more
than just numbers. Then they could base their management decisions
on a much fuller knowledge than was currently the case (e.g., RRSSC
1996c: 4). Second, and perhaps more important, Kluane people hoped
that, if biologists spent a year or two out on the land, then they would
gain a real appreciation for the knowledge and skills of First Nations elders
and hunters. Kluane people knew that even two years out on the land was
not really enough time for biologists to learn to make management deci-
sions based on traditional knowledge, but they felt that such an experi-
ence would at least make them more likely to accept as valid the words of
elders and hunters.
Perhaps not surprisingly, biologists never seriously considered this sug-
gestion, much less carried it out. On one or two occasions biologists
agreed that spending time on the land might be a good idea in theory (and
even that they might enjoy it), but they insisted that, given the realities of
state wildlife management, it was not a very practical idea. This is true,
of course. This impracticality, however, in itself illustrates the knowledge-
bias inherent in the institutional context of state management. The
research budget of the Yukon Department of Renewable Resources is cer-
tainly limited, but if resource managers considered it a top priority to send
biologists out to live on the land with an elder, then they could cut back
on other research projects in order to do so.13 Indeed, if they really con-
sidered it important, then they could make this type of experience a
prerequisite for hiring biologists in the Wrst place and/or work to get it
included as an integral part of their education.14 That they have not done
so indicates that they do not view this type of research as vital to the prac-
tice of resource management.
On one occasion, a biologist used a different argument in declining the
offer to spend a year out on the land (RRSSC 1996c: 5). He said that this
approach was actually inconsistent with the idea of co-management. If he
and other biologists spent all of their time out on the land, then they
would not be able to spend time talking with local people or engaging in
co-management processes like the RRSSC. As a result, they would have to
make management decisions based solely on their own knowledge rather
than taking into account the interests and knowledge of others. This
 Knowledge-Integration in Practice 209

argument, of course, takes for granted the fact that ultimate decision-
making power lies with the biologists (although this is not strictly the
case, there is no doubt that they are much closer to the locus of decision
making than are First Nations people). This did not go unnoticed by First
Nations members at the table, who rejected his argument. They claimed
that “talking with people” is a good start, but it is not enough; biologists
must also spend time out on the land to understand First Nations people’s
“way of thinking.” One (non-biologist) government ofWcial was also criti-
cal of the biologist’s reply. He stated that, though the exchange of infor-
mation is certainly important to the co-management process, sometimes
this exchange is not particularly effective in the context of meetings and
conferences. He suggested that sometimes knowledge exchange occurs
best out on the land and concluded that “talking to people” does not
necessarily have to be separate from “being in the bush.” Nothing more
ever came of this, however, because biologists, as biologists, simply could
not act upon such a notion of research. Regardless of their personal views,
such activity does not qualify as a legitimate means of knowledge produc-
tion in the world of bureaucratic wildlife management. Any effort on their
part to engage in such activities would be viewed by other biologists as
“not scientiWc,” and any knowledge they produced in this way would be
seen as “non-science.” It would be extremely difWcult for them to use such
knowledge as the basis for making management recommendations.
We have now seen some of the difWculties encountered by RRSSC mem-
bers in their efforts to conduct joint research. Among the most important
of these was the fact that biologists viewed research as an activity that
would produce certain very speciWc types of knowledge-artifacts. To be
useful to them, these artifacts had to be expressed in a form that is com-
patible with the practice of scientiWc resource management and is seen as
legitimate by the powerful groups with interests in sheep. Regardless of
the experience of joint research, then, the artifacts produced from this
research had to be distilled down to the same numbers and lines on maps
that constitute the formal artifacts of both TEK and science. We saw this
clearly in the case of the ground survey discussed above, where the Wnal
product of the survey was a pair of numbers, and biologists even rejected
the notion that First Nations people’s previous experiences might be used
as a basis for interpreting them. We also saw that assumptions about the
nature of research (and the kinds of knowledge it is supposed to produce)
prevented biologists from even recognizing the potential usefulness of
other types of “knowledge-producing” activities (such as spending a year
out on the land with an elder), whose results would not necessarily have
been expressible as a set of numbers or graphic representations.
In their efforts to both integrate knowledge-artifacts and to engage in co-
operative knowledge production through joint research, RRSSC members
210 Knowledge-Integration in Practice

ended up struggling over the validity of one another’s interpretations and

knowledge rather than putting aside (or, indeed, taking advantage of)
their differences in order to generate truly integrated knowledge. But why
is it – given the full participation of First Nations people in the RRSSC
process – that the biologists’ and/or outWtters’ views always seemed to
win out over those of Kluane people? Was it simply a matter of interper-
sonal dynamics among committee members or was it something inherent
in the structure and procedures of the RRSSC itself? To answer these ques-
tions, we must consider the RRSSC process in greater detail. In the follow-
ing section, I examine not only the physical context of the committee
meetings themselves but also those activities – vital to the RRSSC process
– that occurred outside the context of formal committee meetings. In this
way, I show how the RRSSC process was itself biased against the First
Nations people who participated in it. I argue that RRSSC members failed
in their efforts at knowledge-integration not because of the speciWc indi-
viduals on the committee but because of the nature of the project of
knowledge-integration itself and the political context in which it was
carried out.

The RRSSC in Action

During RRSSC meetings, several committee members expressed the view
that by simply having agreed to form the committee (in response to First
Nations concerns), the government was already taking TEK into account
(e.g., RRSSC 1996c: 3). Indeed, this approach to TEK has actually been
institutionalized through its inclusion in the Yukon Umbrella Final Agree-
ment (UFA). As we have seen, the agreement provides for the creation of
numerous boards and councils to co-manage resources, including Wsh and
wildlife. First Nations people make up 50 percent of the Fish and Wildlife
Management Board and the renewable resources councils established
under the Fish and Wildlife chapter of the agreement. Nowhere in that
chapter, however, does it speciWcally require the board or councils to take
traditional knowledge into account in formulating their recommenda-
tions (though, as we saw, there is a general call for the integration of
TEK and science in the statement of objectives at the beginning of the
chapter). It was felt that 50 percent First Nations representation on these
bodies was in itself sufWcient to guarantee the full use of TEK in the man-
agement process. Although it remains to be seen how well these boards
and councils work in practice, there is good reason to question whether 50
percent representation on these bodies is, in fact, sufWcient to ensure that
TEK receives full consideration. Indeed, there are a number of ways in
which bias is built right into the structure of co-management processes in
the Yukon. The Wrst has to do with the position of these co-management
boards in a wider bureaucratic system.
 Knowledge-Integration in Practice 211

The role of the co-management bodies established under the Fish and
Wildlife chapter of the UFA is purely advisory. They do not make manage-
ment decisions; rather, they make recommendations to the Yukon minis-
ter of renewable resources. The minister is not obligated to follow these
recommendations but only to respond to them in writing within a speci-
Wed period of time. Committee members know that if they want their
recommendations implemented, then they must justify them to the min-
ister and his scientiWc/bureaucratic advisors in the Department of Renew-
able Resources and that they must do so in terms that these government
ofWcials will both understand and Wnd legitimate. In practice, this means
that they must support their recommendations in terms compatible with
the language and conventions of scientiWc resource management. As a
result, these boards and committees are unlikely to recommend a man-
agement action based solely or even primarily on the advice of First
Nations elders and hunters, even if all the members of the committee were
to agree that it was a good idea to do so. This creates an automatic bias
within these co-management bodies towards submitting recommenda-
tions that are based primarily on scientiWc data – regardless of the number
of First Nations people on the committee. Finally, any recommendations
that did manage to survive the self-censorship of the RRSSC would then
be subject to review by the minister and his staff in the Department of
Renewable Resources, who are unlikely to be convinced that any action
is justiWed without scientiWc data to back it up. Thus, 50 percent First
Nations representation on these co-management bodies is in itself un-
likely to ensure that the knowledge of First Nations people is accorded
equal weight with that of biologists.
The situation was somewhat different in the case of the RRSSC since it
was an ad hoc response to management concerns rather than a committee
formed under the provisions of the UFA. To begin with, First Nations peo-
ple did not make up 50 percent of the RRSSC. Also signiWcant is the fact
that the RRSSC was one step further removed from actual decision-making
power than were those co-management bodies that were established
under the UFA; RRSSC members had to submit their recommendations to
the minister through the Fish and Wildlife Management Board. Although
these factors on their own may have decreased the likelihood that RRSSC
members would base their decisions on the knowledge of elders and
hunters, their effects were partially offset by another factor. Committee
members instituted a fairly unusual mechanism into the RRSSC process to
ensure that everyone’s knowledge would be used; they decided early on
that they would forward only those recommendations that they could
agree on unanimously. This, they felt, would prevent one group’s position
from dominating the process and would force committee members to take
one another’s positions seriously. Thus, Kluane people, though they lacked
212 Knowledge-Integration in Practice

50 percent representation on the committee, effectively had veto power

over committee decisions and activities.
This veto power was real, but it loses some of its signiWcance when we
recall the different management positions to which different RRSSC mem-
bers subscribed. We saw in Chapter 4 that biologists and outWtters viewed
the sheep decline as a minor and temporary affair that had resulted pri-
marily from a few years of bad weather. They were willing to implement
some minor and politically benign management initiatives to aid the
sheep population’s recovery, but they believed that ultimately it would
rebound on its own. In contrast, we saw that Kluane people viewed the
decline in sheep as catastrophic and largely a consequence of human
activity. They advocated implementing any and every management strat-
egy that might potentially have aided the sheep population, regardless of
political considerations. In this context, a veto – the power to prevent the
committee from taking action and/or making certain recommendations –
was not as useful to First Nations members as it was to biologists.
The mere existence, then, of a committee like the RRSSC does not in
itself ensure the equitable use of TEK and science in deciding how to man-
age sheep. What is more, the physical and economic context in which
these meetings took place had a signiWcant impact on the dynamics of the
meetings themselves. In addition, a number of activities that were vital to
the RRSSC process – including the actual drafting of the committee’s rec-
ommendations to the Fish and Wildlife Management Board – occurred
outside of these meetings. To understand how the RRSSC really worked,
then, we must look at the complexities surrounding the apparently sim-
ple act of talking together at the committee table. This includes an exam-
ination not only of the context of the meetings themselves but also of
those more mundane and “technical” activities that occurred outside of
the committee meetings altogether. In this section, I examine the RRSSC
process with all of this in mind.
In Chapter 3 I indicated that the physical setting has a signiWcant effect
on the dynamics of wildlife management meetings. This was certainly true
in the case of RRSSC meetings. Although most of the meetings were held
in the community hall in Burwash, the physical context of the meetings
did not differ in any fundamental way from the one meeting that was held
in the Kluane Park ofWce in Haines Junction or, indeed, from any wildlife
management meeting I have attended anywhere in the Yukon. Partici-
pants sat around long tables, used Xip charts, consulted handouts that
had been photocopied and distributed to all, and took coffee breaks. All in
all, the meetings were quite formal affairs compared to the contexts in
which First Nations people usually talk about animals. I argued that biolo-
gists tend to be at home in this type of setting, while First Nations people,
in general, are less likely to be. There were certainly some First Nations
 Knowledge-Integration in Practice 213

members of the RRSSC who did feel comfortable in the meetings and were
active and outspoken, but there were quite a few (especially older people)
who did not. Indeed, there were a couple of elders who stopped coming
to RRSSC meetings altogether; not even the promise of a generous daily
honorarium could induce them to sit through these affairs. In addition,
some other elders continued to attend but rarely (if ever) participated in
the discussions. They admitted to me that they felt very uncomfortable at
these meetings and often understood very little of the discussion because
of the liberal use of technical, bureaucratic, and scientiWc language.
Some elders and hunters also complained that they were not treated
with the proper respect at these meetings. On one occasion, I heard a
non-First Nations person audibly mutter “bullshit” under her breath in
response to a statement by a First Nations hunter. Such blatant acts of dis-
respect, however, were quite rare at RRSSC meetings. If an elder spoke, it
was much more likely that he or she would be met with an uncomfortable
silence. Then, after a short pause, the conversation would resume as if he
or she had never spoken. I do not believe that this was the result of actual
disrespect or contempt on the part of non-First Nations RRSSC members.
Frequently, they either could not understand what the elders were saying
or failed to recognize its relevance. They did not know how to respond, so
they did not respond at all. Elders and hunters who experienced this, how-
ever, told me they felt that the biologists were treating them “like chil-
dren” and ignoring what they had to say. The strangeness of the setting
and of the language used at the meetings, combined with the apparent
lack of respect accorded them, made participation in the RRSSC difWcult
and unpleasant for many First Nations elders and hunters.
Economics also played an important role in shaping the dynamics
of RRSSC meetings. These committee meetings, like all meetings, cost
money. The different abilities of each participant (or group of participants)
to bear the costs of attending these meetings had signiWcant effects on the
dynamics of the meetings themselves. All but one of the RRSSC meetings
were hosted by KFN in Burwash Landing. There was some cost associated
with hosting the meeting (e.g., food was provided for all participants, as is
nearly always the case when Yukon First Nations host meetings in their
communities), but these costs were partially offset by the fact that most
non-KFN participants had to make the three-hour drive to Burwash from
Whitehorse (one outWtter had to drive all the way from Faro, approxi-
mately a seven-hour drive). The most signiWcant expense for all who
attended, however, was their time. Those participants who had full-time
jobs with federal, territorial, or First Nations governments attended these
meetings as part of their job and drew their normal salaries. KFN also
paid elders and hunters a substantial daily honorarium to attend these
meetings. In general, however, neither outWtters nor representatives of
214 Knowledge-Integration in Practice

environmental organizations were compensated for their participation;

they had to take time off from work to attend.15
Thus, all participants (or the governments they represented) shouldered
signiWcant costs to attend meetings of the RRSSC. But those whose atten-
dance was paid for by a government had no Wnancial difWculties in doing
so (indeed, many of them personally proWted from attending). There was,
then, a signiWcant difference between those who paid their own way to
these meetings and those whose costs were covered by some level of gov-
ernment. Furthermore, not every government was equally able to bear
the expense of these meetings. The meetings had a far greater economic
impact on KFN, for example, than they did on either the territorial or
federal governments. KFN has a budget that is only a tiny fraction of either
the Yukon government’s or Parks Canada’s. In addition, they are ex-
tremely short-staffed; every day that a KFN employee spent sitting in an
RRSSC meeting was a day not spent working on land claims or any of a
multitude of other important issues. This meant that, during these meet-
ings, other work was simply not getting done. Finally, much of the money
used to pay KFN members’ salaries and honoraria for attending these
meetings came, at least indirectly, from “land claims dollars” – money
KFN had borrowed from the federal government to negotiate their land
claims, money that will eventually be subtracted from their Wnal settle-
ment amount (more on the relation between land claims and money in
Chapter 6).
On a number of occasions at RRSSC meetings, KFN members indicated
their unwillingness to drag out the RRSSC process indeWnitely, citing as their
primary reason their Wnancial constraints. In response, biologists offered
to help shoulder the Wnancial costs of hosting these meetings (which is
why one meeting was held at the Parks Canada headquarters in Haines
Junction), but they seemed unaware of the other more signiWcant costs to
the First Nations. OutWtters and environmental representatives, too, indi-
cated (either publicly at RRSSC meetings or in private conversation with
me) their concerns about the cost of their participation and their desire to
limit the number of meetings. Thus, everyone participating in the RRSSC
(except government biologists and resource managers) had a real interest
in reaching a consensus quickly and not drawing out the process inde-
finitely. These Wnancial limitations, however, were most onerous for the
First Nations (and, to some extent, for environmentalists) because of the
position they took on sheep management. It was they who advocated the
most extensive and politically sensitive management strategies (such as a
ban on sheep hunting), which would have been achievable only through
the lengthiest of negotiations (if at all). In contrast, outWtters were only
interested in implementing those recommendations upon which consen-
sus was most easily reached (e.g., those regarding aircraft harassment).
 Knowledge-Integration in Practice 215

The fact that biologists in the Department of Renewable Resources had

greater access to both money and personnel had a couple of very signiW-
cant effects on the RRSSC process. To begin with, it allowed them to adopt
a “go-slow” approach in committee meetings. As it turns out, this was
quite consistent with their position on sheep management; we saw in
Chapter 4 that they preferred to deal with the sheep problem slowly and
methodically, as if it were a science experiment, rather than as quickly and
as effectively as possible. They frequently argued that further research
(along with all the time and future meetings such research implied) was
necessary before the RRSSC could make its recommendations. Indeed, it
was often in response to such attempts by biologists to draw out the
RRSSC process in this way that other committee members brought up the
Wnancial constraints under which they themselves were operating. Biolo-
gists were also less willing to confront potentially divisive issues, such as
hunting, than were other members of the RRSSC. Frequently they advo-
cated putting off discussions about hunting until some future meeting,
especially if those discussions were getting heated and threatening to
derail the committee’s efforts to manage those factors they saw as more
likely to make a difference to sheep management (e.g., those regarding
harassment from aircraft and ATVs).16 In contrast, other RRSSC members
preferred to discuss hunting right then and there – however heated talks
might become; they had no interest in having to come back for yet
another meeting to do so.
Biologists’ greater access to resources, especially personnel, also gave
them a measure of control over those aspects of the RRSSC process that
took place outside of the actual committee meetings. Perhaps the most
important of these was the drafting of the RRSSC’s formal recommenda-
tions to the Fish and Wildlife Management Board. During the meetings,
committee members discussed the recommendations, and many of the
points they made were recorded on Xip charts. But, like all discussions,
these tended to go in many different directions. The job of turning the
notes from these discussions into formal recommendations necessarily
involved a good deal of editing, and all of this editing and drafting work
occurred outside of the actual committee meetings. The task fell to biolo-
gists, almost by default, since no one else had the time or money to devote
to it. KFN employees, who might otherwise have taken on this job, were
too short-handed and swamped with land claims work. Although the task
of drafting formal documents might at Wrst seem purely administrative, it
actually gave biologists a signiWcant degree of control over what made it
from committee deliberation into the documents read and acted upon by
RRSSC members at subsequent meetings and, ultimately, by the Fish and
Wildlife Management Board. I believe that the biologists who took on this
job did so with integrity, but, as we have seen, they had a very different
216 Knowledge-Integration in Practice

understanding of the sheep problem in the Ruby Range and its possible
solution than did Kluane people. They could not help but draft these rec-
ommendations from their own perspective. Although draft recommenda-
tions were brought back to the committee for revision and redrafting, the
original draft very much set the terms of the debate so that completely
new ideas (i.e., those that had been excluded from the draft recommenda-
tions because they were “irrelevant”) seldom found their way back into
the committee discussions. And, in any case, it was the biologists who
redrafted the new recommendations from these subsequent deliberations.
I illustrate this by examining the actual process in which RRSSC members
engaged to draft a number of speciWc recommendations regarding the use
of “traditional knowledge” in general.
It was not until fairly late in the RRSSC process (May 1996) that the
RRSSC, at the insistence of First Nations members of the committee, Wrst
discussed including among their formal recommendations three that
explicitly dealt with traditional knowledge. Prior to the May meeting, the
Yukon Conservation Society representative to the RRSSC was asked if he
would prepare a set of traditional knowledge recommendations for con-
sideration by the committee (the KFN members on the committee were, as
usual, swamped with other work, and the conservation society representa-
tive had done occasional contract work for KFN in the past). Not being a
First Nations member himself, he was at Wrst a bit apprehensive about
drafting traditional knowledge recommendations but agreed when he
realized that they were meant only to serve as a basis for committee dis-
cussions. He drafted the following three recommendations in consultation
with several other RRSSC members (including myself and a KFN member):

1 Traditional Knowledge gathered and stored in the community must

be incorporated where possible into the data base which is used to
make wildlife decisions.
2 The holders of TK must be included in the practice and design of
Yukon wildlife management both in the Weld and in the ofWce. As
well, people present on the land must work cooperatively with man-
agers to identify ecosystem problems before they become crises and to
conWrm concerns raised by managers.
3 The establishment of locally developed Harvest Support programs
must be encouraged. By providing First Nation people with an oppor-
tunity to live on the land, these programs will facilitate the education
of First Nation people in Traditional Knowledge. (RRSSC 1996f)

These draft recommendations were tabled at the 8 May meeting of the

RRSSC. Biologists generally opposed including them with the other rec-
ommendations on the grounds that they were (1) too general because
 Knowledge-Integration in Practice 217

they did not apply merely to Ruby Range sheep and were not linked to
speciWc management initiatives; and (2) unnecessary because TEK was
already being used in the management process (RRSSC 1996c: 3-7). Some
KFN members objected to some of the wording contained in these draft
recommendations, but on the whole they approved of including them
among the recommendations to be presented to the Fish and Wildlife
Management Board (RRSSC 1996c: 3-7). After the meeting, Yukon govern-
ment biologists revised these recommendations based on their interpreta-
tion of committee discussions on the topic. The following are the revised
versions:

1 Traditional knowledge that is present in the community should be

incorporated wherever possible into decision making about wildlife in
this area.
2 The holders of traditional knowledge, as well as people with experi-
ence on the land, should be included in the design and practice of
wildlife management in the area.
3 The establishment of locally-designed programs should provide First
Nation people with opportunities to live on the land and provide
ways of maintaining traditional contacts with their culture and with
wildlife in this area. (RRSSC 1996e)

This version of the traditional knowledge recommendations reXected

most of the concerns that RRSSC members had with wording. The use of
the phrase “in this area” (in recommendation 1) addressed some of the
biologists’ and outWtters’ concerns about the over-generality of the recom-
mendations. Biologists, however, were still not happy with this version
because they still saw the recommendations as vague and unnecessary.
On 28 January 1997 the RRSSC met for the last time. One of the main
goals of the meeting was to “reWne and tighten up the recommendations,
for submission to the FWMB [Fish and Wildlife Management Board]”
(RRSSC 1997a: 1). The committee broke into two working groups, each
of which concentrated on rewriting and polishing half of the recommen-
dations. I was not in the group that dealt with the traditional knowledge
recommendations, so the following account of the events surrounding
those discussions comes from conversations after the fact with some of the
committee members who were there.
The working groups were formed shortly before the committee broke for
lunch. Several of the KFN committee members had some things to attend
to in the ofWce during lunch and were approximately half an hour late in
getting back to the RRSSC meeting. The rest of the committee decided to
start without them. It just so happened that the temporary absence of
these KFN members meant that there were no First Nations people in the
218 Knowledge-Integration in Practice

working group that dealt with the traditional knowledge recommenda-

tions; it was composed entirely of biologists and other government ofW-
cials, outWtters, and the Yukon Conservation Society representative. The
group thus constituted was nearly unanimously in favour of dropping
these recommendations because they were “too vague” and “not to the
point.” However, objections from the conservation society representative,
who felt that these recommendations were important, prevented the
group from dropping them altogether; instead, biologists proposed remov-
ing them from their place among the formal recommendations and
putting them in the preamble (a section of the document that contained
quotes from elders and hunters from the November 1995 meeting and a
historical overview of the process), saying that “they would have more
force there.” The conservation society representative opposed this too, but
was out-voted. When the absent KFN members returned to the meeting
and learned what had happened, they insisted that the traditional knowl-
edge recommendations be put back into the main body of the document.
They told me afterwards that they had been quite annoyed that the group
had tried to remove them in the Wrst place.
The story does not end there, however. As usual, Yukon government
biologists assumed the task of editing and preparing the Wnal document.
On 20 February they faxed a copy of the Wnal document to the KFN. In it,
the three traditional knowledge recommendations had been reduced to
the following: “Governments should ensure that the holders of traditional
knowledge, as well as people with experience on the land, should continue
to be co-partners in the management of Ruby Range sheep” (RRSSC 1997b).
This clearly represents a major overhaul of the traditional knowledge
recommendations. Despite First Nations people’s insistence on the impor-
tance of all three recommendations at the May 1996 meeting, biologists
had dropped the second and third recommendations completely. They
had also signiWcantly rephrased the Wrst. Their insertion of the phrase
“should continue to” implied that First Nations people were satisWed with
their role in the RRSSC (since the recommendations had supposedly
received unanimous support), an assertion that was patently untrue.
Although biologists had faxed the document to RRSSC members for
Wnal comments and revisions, the letter accompanying the recommenda-
tions stipulated that comments had to be received by 24 February. This
gave KFN members and others just four days to review the document.
Given the fact that many RRSSC members have other jobs (not to mention
the huge workload of those employed in the First Nations ofWce) and the
unavoidable time lag between receipt of the document and its distribution
(several KFN members of the RRSSC were not even present in the village at
the time), four days were simply not sufWcient time to allow for review of
the document. Not surprisingly, biologists received few comments, and
 Knowledge-Integration in Practice 219

the document was submitted to the Fish and Wildlife Management Board
substantially unrevised (RRSSC 1997c). Later, once they realized what had
happened, several First Nations members of the RRSSC expressed to me
their anger and sense of betrayal at the way biologists had handled this
whole affair.

Conclusion: Results of the RRSSC Process

(Knowledge-Integration Reconsidered)
I have shown how the structure of the RRSSC and the assumptions under-
lying the project of knowledge-integration combined to bias the RRSSC
process against First Nations people and their interests. But what was
the ultimate outcome of this process? Did it “work” or was it a failure? The
opinions of RRSSC members differed signiWcantly on this question. Most
biologists and government ofWcials involved in the RRSSC were enthu-
siastic about the process. As noted in Chapter 4, some felt it had been
such a success that they enthusiastically cited it as a model for future co-
management efforts.17 Yet most of the Kluane people who were involved
in the RRSSC process felt that it had been an utter failure. On what basis
did different RRSSC members make these judgments?
The RRSSC had a mandate to make recommendations to the Fish and
Wildlife Management Board regarding the management of Ruby Range
sheep. These recommendations represented the culmination of the RRSSC
process; and, to a large extent, RRSSC members judged the success of the
RRSSC process based on them. A quick comparison of these recommenda-
tions with the different positions on sheep management that various
groups of RRSSC members brought to the table (see Chapter 4) provides an
indication of how RRSSC members could have seen the process so differ-
ently (RRSSC 1997c). Of the twenty-four recommendations submitted to
the FWMB, twelve dealt with the basically uncontentious issues of harass-
ment, access, education, and predation. An additional six recommenda-
tions dealt speciWcally with how and when to conduct future scientiWc
research. Five recommendations dealt with the contentious issue of hunt-
ing; these were more consistent with the views of biologists and outWtters
than with those of Kluane people. They called for voluntary compliance
by all parties (as opposed to the imposition of a quota) to limiting their
combined kill to a maximum of 2 percent of the total population. If, after
two years, however, RRSSC members were to decide that voluntary com-
pliance was not working, then the committee was to reexamine the issue
and “recommend appropriate allocations” (RRSSC 1997c: 8).
This may at Wrst glance seem to be an equitable compromise between
Kluane people’s desire for an outright ban on sheep hunting and the belief
by outWtters and biologists that no hunting restrictions were necessary.
If we look at how this 2 percent was allocated, however, another picture
220 Knowledge-Integration in Practice

emerges. OutWtters had agreed to limit their kill to 2 percent of the popu-
lation, resident hunters were requested to cease hunting sheep, and First
Nations hunters were expected not to resume hunting in the area. Thus,
“voluntary compliance” meant that outWtters got all the sheep. One other
hunting recommendation requested that all parties “should stop all hunt-
ing of ewes” (RRSSC 1997c: 8). This was clearly aimed at First Nations
hunters since ewe hunting is illegal for non-First Nations hunters; further-
more, the wording implied that First Nations people had been hunting
sheep in recent years (ewes speciWcally), despite all their claims to the
contrary. As we saw above, one recommendation dealt with the issue of
traditional knowledge generally, but it had been so watered down that
Kluane people felt it to be useless.
In the end, however, not even these limited recommendations were
implemented. As of spring 1998 only a single one of these had been acted
upon; and this was a recommendation to restrict ATV use in part of the
Ruby Range, an initiative that had already been under consideration
before the RRSSC process even began. Other recommendations were sim-
ply never implemented, such as the one to hire a Ruby Range “game
guardian” to educate the public about concerns with the sheep population
in the area. This idea, which was supported by all the members of the com-
mittee, was never funded by the Department of Renewable Resources.18
Even the agreement among RRSSC members to voluntarily limit their
hunting of sheep in the area unravelled when it became known that the
outWtter in Area 12 had killed seventeen sheep during the 1997 season,
despite the fact that he had promised to limit himself to twelve (which
was 2 percent of the total population).
The fact that some RRSSC members considered the process a success
regardless of these apparent failures indicates that different members
judged the process by very different criteria. Most biologists felt, at the
start, that there was very little likelihood that the minister would move to
limit hunting in the area. In fact, many feel quite frustrated and powerless
to enact changes in the system generally. One biologist told me that he
and other biologists viewed the RRSSC more as an effort to reduce hostil-
ity between outWtters and the Kluane First Nation than a major manage-
ment initiative, and several of them told me they felt that it had been
something of a victory just to get the different interest groups to sit down
together in a room and speak to one another in a civil manner. They
felt that the relationships that committee members had built with one
another and the frank discussion of different views had been a very posi-
tive development. And the process had, after all, achieved its goal of devel-
oping a set of consensus-based management recommendations. Kluane
people, however, based their assessments of the process solely on its effects
on sheep management. They had called the November 1995 meeting
 Knowledge-Integration in Practice 221

because of their concerns about Ruby Range sheep; and in three years,
despite all the talk, nothing whatsoever had changed. When it became
known that the outWtter had completely disregarded the commitments he
made to the RRSSC, the few Kluane people who had still had any hope for
the process decided it had been more about appeasing KFN than a real
effort to jointly manage sheep. They wrote it off as a complete waste of
their time and resources.
Despite the rhetoric of First Nations empowerment that surrounds the
project of co-management and knowledge-integration, the RRSSC process
has, if anything, increased the power of Yukon government biologists vis-
à-vis Kluane people over the management of Ruby Range sheep. Not only
have biologists retained de facto control over sheep management in the area,
but their participation in the RRSSC process enables them to forestall First
Nations criticisms on the grounds that they are engaging in cooperative
management. And, because biologists now possess the artifacts of TEK, it
is no longer even necessary for them to include actual First Nations elders
and hunters in the process in order to “incorporate traditional knowledge
into the management process.” In effect, then, in the case of the RRSSC,
co-management and knowledge-integration have served to further legiti-
mate Yukon government biologists’ control over sheep management
rather than to grant Kluane people a measure of control over local wildlife.
Some members of the RRSSC disagree with this characterization of the
committee; others whole-heartedly agree with it. Indeed, depending upon
to whom one talks, one will hear either a scathing indictment of the
RRSSC process or yet another co-management success story. By criticiz-
ing the RRSSC – and, by extension, all efforts at co-management – I have
no wish to imply that, to date, every single attempt at co-management
throughout the North has been an abject failure. I do argue, however, that
we must be far more critical in our assessments of co-management. Co-
management involves an exceedingly complex set of cross-cultural nego-
tiations. In the process of conducting these negotiations, even supposedly
agreed-upon meanings are contested at multiple levels. To understand
how well a particular effort at co-management has “worked” (or even what
that means) is as difWcult as is understanding the cultural nuances of the
negotiations themselves. It is always dangerous to generalize from a single
case study, but when I reXect on the outcomes of the RRSSC process and
on the wildly different assessments of that process made by the different
people who participated in it, I cannot help but be reminded of my expe-
riences at co-management conferences and workshops. When I listen to
the grumbling that takes place during the coffee breaks between one co-
management success story and the next, I wonder what these stories are
hiding, and I think about the Ruby Range Sheep Steering Committee.
6
“Just Like Whitemen”:
Property and Land Claims
in Kluane Country

Not long after my arrival in Burwash Landing, Joe Johnson, then the
elected chief of the Kluane First Nation, told me the following story. Back
in the early 1970s, in the early days of Yukon land claims negotiations, he
had been out in the bush inspecting a piece of land that KFN was consid-
ering selecting as part of its land claim. His grandmother had accompa-
nied him; she was sitting by the Wre sewing while he walked around trying
to decide on an appropriate boundary for the land selection. After a while,
she called him over, offered him tea, and asked what he was doing. He told
her he was working. She looked at him and asked, “What do you mean
‘working?’ You’re just walking around with a map.” He explained the land
claims process to her, and she became upset when she learned that he was
trying to Wgure out which land belonged to them and which to the White
men. She told him that was a crazy thing to do since no one can own the
land – neither Whites nor Indians. The land is there; we move around; we
die. How can anyone own it? She said that she had thought “land claims”
meant that the government and First Nations peoples were getting
together to try to Wgure out how to keep the land and animals safe for
their children and grandchildren. She was very disappointed to Wnd out
what was really going on. Joe told me that he had felt very uncomfortable
while she was telling him these things. He had wanted to run away but
had found himself unable to do so. Finally, she dismissed him, telling him
to go back to “work” Wguring out who “owns” the land. He had walked
away feeling like a child, happy to be away from her disapproval. But, he
told me, after reXecting on her words for a while, he had realized that
everything she had said was true.
The view expressed by Joe’s grandmother in this story will probably not
surprise most First Nations people. Nor will it surprise anyone who is well
versed in the history of Aboriginal treaty making in North America. In
Chapter 2, I described some aspects of the Kluane way of thinking about
the world that are indeed difWcult to reconcile with commonly held
 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country 223

notions about land and property – notions that have their roots in Euro-
pean legal traditions. The same can be said for many other Aboriginal
peoples as well. Yukon First Nations peoples have historically seen them-
selves as part of the land rather than as separate from it (McClellan et al.
1987). Although they have drawn and continue to draw their sustenance
from the land, they did not – until relatively recently – think of their rela-
tion to the land in terms of “ownership”; instead they were – and in many
cases still are – enmeshed in a complex web of reciprocal relations and
obligations with the land and the animals upon it. So, while they have
long made use of the land in certain ways, that use is completely contin-
gent on their fulWllment of certain obligations to both land and animals.
The legal (and cultural) concepts of ownership and property recognized by
Canadian courts and lawmakers cannot adequately represent the com-
plexities of this relationship. Yet these same concepts are fundamental to
the very idea of Aboriginal treaty making. This means that even to engage
in the process of negotiating a land claims agreement, First Nations peo-
ples must translate their complex reciprocal relationship with the land
into the equally complex but very different legal language of property.
In previous chapters, I examined the political ramiWcations of attempt-
ing to incorporate Kluane beliefs, values, and practices into existing
bureaucratic institutions of state resource management. In this chapter,
I look at the northern land claims process and show that it possesses
a dynamic very similar to that which I have already described for the
process of co-management. The negotiation and implementation of land
claims agreements amount to an attempt to incorporate Aboriginal peoples’
unique relationship to the land into the existing legal and political insti-
tutions of the Canadian state. As I argued in the case of co-management,
this kind of incorporation requires translating cultural beliefs, values, and
practices into a language that can be understood and acted upon by Euro-
Canadian bureaucrats, lawyers, and politicians (in this case, the legal
language of property). In addition, the apparently straightforward act of
negotiating these agreements – not to mention implementing them –
requires the creation of governmental structures and processes within First
Nations communities themselves that are far more compatible with the
lifestyles of Euro-Canadian bureaucrats than with those of First Nations
hunters and trappers. Because of this, the negotiation of land claims agree-
ments, much like the process of co-management, is – in its very concep-
tion – incompatible with some core First Nations beliefs and practices
regarding the land and their relationship to it.
Yet, despite all this, First Nations peoples across British Columbia and
the Canadian North have signed, or are in the process of negotiating, land
claims agreements with the federal and territorial/provincial govern-
ments. Like Joe Johnson, many of them feel that there is something deeply
224 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country

wrong with the whole process, but they forge ahead because they see it as
the only viable option for their survival as a people. But what effect is this
having on them? How do they have to change their ways of thinking in
order to engage with government ofWcials in a dialogue over who “owns”
what land? How have they had to change their way of life just to sit across
the table from government negotiators? And what are the implications of
these changes?
Here I take up these questions by examining the concept of property
and its relation to the land claims process in Canada. Relations between
nation-states and the Aboriginal people they encompass have historically
been structured around European notions of property. This has inXuenced
the way that anthropologists and others have understood and used this
concept so that efforts by anthropologists to Wnd (or demonstrate the lack
of) “property” among Aboriginal peoples around the world have been
closely linked to actual political struggles over land. Accordingly, I begin
with a discussion of anthropological understandings of property in gen-
eral and in the Subarctic in particular. I then show how these understand-
ings have both shaped and reXected political struggles over land in the
Canadian North and elsewhere. From this discussion, I propose an alter-
native way of thinking about property, which I use to analyze the land
claims process in the Yukon and, by extension, the rest of Canada. At
that point, I turn to a consideration of the Kluane First Nation land claim
in particular. There have been many studies of land claims and Aborigi-
nal rights in Canada (e.g., Asch 1984, 1997; Cassidy 1988; Daniel 1980;
McCormick 1997; Slattery 1983; Tennant 1990). Unlike these works, how-
ever, I will focus neither upon the terms of the written agreements nor
upon the larger legal and political contexts of their negotiation; instead, I
consider the process of negotiating a land claim and the impacts this
process itself has had at the village level. Using the KFN land claim process
as a case study, I argue that the rendering of Aboriginal beliefs and prac-
tices into the language of property for use in land claims negotiations (a
process analogous to the production of TEK artifacts) has had the effect
of undermining the very way of life that land claims agreements are
intended to preserve in the Wrst place.

“Property” in the Subarctic?

“Property” is the fundamental concept upon which Aboriginal-state rela-
tions are based in Canada (as in many other countries). It is therefore
impossible to understand the relationship between Aboriginal peoples
and the state in Canada without an examination of how different people
(including both government ofWcials and Aboriginal community mem-
bers) understand and act upon this concept. In Canada, the concept of
Aboriginal title forms the legal basis underlying First Nations peoples’
 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country 225

claims to land. Although Canadian courts have been reluctant to deWne

the term Aboriginal title, they have made one thing abundantly clear:
Aboriginal title is a form of property – real if somewhat mysterious in
nature. According to Canadian law, this unique form of property arises
either from First Nations peoples’ prior occupancy of the land and/or from
legal and political systems that pre-existed the Canadian state.1 Either way,
Aboriginal title is not contingent upon the authority of the state, and – at
least since the Constitution Act, 1982 – it cannot be extinguished unilat-
erally by government legislation (Slattery 2000: 204-6).2
Actually, the relevant section of the Constitution Act (section 35) does
not refer to Aboriginal title at all; rather, it recognizes and afWrms existing
“aboriginal and treaty rights.” Aboriginal rights are those possessed by
Canadian First Nations peoples by virtue of their Aboriginality, including
– but not limited to – rights in land. The exact relationship between Ab-
original title and Aboriginal rights in Canadian law is complex and unclear.
Recent decisions by the Supreme Court of Canada have treated Aboriginal
title as a particular category, a subset, of Aboriginal rights (McNeil 1997a).
On another level, however, it can be argued that “Aboriginal title is the
basis of all the other Aboriginal rights; that all the other political and prop-
erty rights Xow from the doctrine of prior occupancy and the [Aborig-
inal] title to land that the doctrine implies” (Kulchyski 1994: 10). That this
latter view has legal signiWcance is clearly evident in debates over the
source of Aboriginal rights to self-government (see, for example, Isaac
1995: 343-52; Slattery 2000: 214-15).
In an important sense, then, all Aboriginal rights (and any treaty rights
for which they may have been exchanged) are dependent on the assump-
tion that First Nations peoples somehow “owned” the land before Euro-
Canadians arrived on the scene. Historically, however, assertions to this
effect have often been denied – especially in relation to nomadic hunting
peoples, such as those who inhabit the North American Arctic and Subarctic.
In 1915 Frank Speck published an article in American Anthropologist that
called into question long-standing assumptions about the relationship
between hunting peoples and the land. His work among Algonquian peo-
ple in northeastern Canada and the United States (especially in Northern
Quebec and Labrador) led him to conclude that “the Indian tribes of east-
ern and northern North America did have quite deWnite claims to their
habitat” (Speck 1915: 289). Furthermore, he showed that families and
neighbouring peoples respected one another’s claims, that trespass was a
punishable offence, and that these hunting territories were inherited
along family lines. He concluded from all this that “such features charac-
terize actual ownership of territory” (289).
As we shall see below, Speck’s work had repercussions throughout the
discipline of anthropology, but its effects were most strongly felt within
226 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country

the Weld of Subarctic anthropology, where it sparked a controversy that

lasted for decades. While Speck and his supporters (see, for example,
Cooper 1939; Speck and Eiseley 1942) maintained that the individual or
family hunting territory he had described was an Aboriginal institution,
his critics (e.g., Jenness 1935; Leacock 1954, 1986; Murphy and Steward
1956; Rogers 1963) argued that it was a relatively recent response to the
fur trade.3 As a result of this debate, researchers began to look elsewhere in
the Subarctic, most notably among the Algonquians’ neighbours to the
west, the northern Athapaskans (included among whom are the people of
KFN) for evidence of family hunting territories like those described by
Speck. It soon became clear that this institution was almost completely
lacking among northern Athapaskans, except among those who had sig-
niWcant contact with their Algonquian or Northwest Coast neighbours or
those whose recently developed notions of private hunting territories were
clearly a direct result of colonization and the fur trade (e.g., Cooper 1939:
81; Jenness 1929: 22; Jenness 1937: 44; McKennan 1959: 128; Speck and
Eiseley 1942: 238; Steward 1941: 501; Steward 1960).
For a time, Speck’s critics seemed to have won the day, but recently
scholars have begun to revise or even reject their conclusions. Arthur Ray
(1991), for example, has disputed Julian Steward’s claim that hunting ter-
ritories among Stuart Lake Carrier were a product of the fur trade. Using
archival evidence, he argues that the Carrier system of land tenure actually
pre-dated the fur trade. Harvey Feit (1991), however, has rejected the terms
of the debate altogether. Although he acknowledges the importance of the
fur trade in the development of the family hunting territory among the
Cree, he argues that these territories cannot be understood as a foreign
institution imposed upon them by external forces. While Cree hunters did
develop the hunting territory in response to the pressures of the fur trade,
they did so in a manner that was consistent with their beliefs about the
land and animals and that allowed them to maintain some degree of
control over wildlife in the area and to defend their interests against
encroaching Euro-Canadians. Rather than being mere testaments to their
increasing acculturation, then, hunting territories are tools that Cree
hunters continue to use successfully in their struggle to maintain a degree
of control over their lives within the context of the Canadian state. This
suggests a different and more constructive way of thinking about property
in the Subarctic – one that focuses on the political dimensions of its “cre-
ation” and use.

Property in Anthropological Perspective

Frank Speck intended his work on the family hunting territory to be, at
least in part, a refutation of the social evolutionary thinking of Lewis
Henry Morgan and others, who held that ideas about property in land had
 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country 227

not developed until well after the invention of agriculture.4 By demon-

strating the existence of “property ownership among the lower hunters,”
Speck was explicitly attacking this evolutionary framework. Indeed, he felt
that his work “must inevitably be troubling to those who, like Morgan,
and many present-day Russians, would see the culture of lower hunters as
representing a stage prior to the development of the institution of indi-
vidualized property” (Speck and Eiseley 1942: 238).5
Anthropologists from around the discipline were quick to pick up on the
signiWcance of Speck’s work for refuting evolutionary theory. In Primitive
Society (1920) as well as in his inXuential article on incorporeal property
in non-European societies (1928: 551-52), which were themselves both
partially intended as refutations of Morgan, Robert Lowie cited Speck’s
writings on the Algonquian family hunting territory.6 Similarly, Melville
Herskovits (1940: 294-95) speciWcally cited Speck in his own writings
about property, which he saw as a critique of “one of the most widely
accepted tenets of the older evolutionary school of social theorists, that in
earliest times hunters and food gatherers recognized no ownership of the
land from which they drew their sustenance, and that not until agriculture
developed was the allotment of land regularized in customary law” (291).
Interestingly, however, participants in the debate over the family hunt-
ing territory imported several key evolutionist assumptions into their
thinking about property. Speck and his critics argued over the degree to
which the hunters of Labrador possessed property rights in land and the
historical origins of those rights. However, neither side ever questioned its
own conception of “property”; rather, much as the evolutionists had done,
they applied their own contemporary Euro-American concepts of property
to the ethnographic data from northern Canada. This is evident in the sharp
distinction they drew between private and communal ownership of land.
Although Morgan (1907: 537) acknowledged that people in hunting
societies might own tools and other movable objects, he argued that
“lands as yet hardly a subject of property, were owned by the tribes in
common.” Such communal ownership of land did not constitute property
because no individual hunter had any right or claim over speciWc lands
vis-à-vis other hunters. It was only with the rise of agriculture, and the
investment of individual labour in land that it entailed, that individual
rights to land could develop. Thus, for Morgan, property in land was
essentially synonymous with European-style notions of private property.7
Speck never questioned this assumption; his central point was that the
hunting societies of the Northeast did possess “individuated” rights to
speciWc hunting territories. Thus, they possessed not only a concept of
property (read: private property) but also a fully functioning system of
property rights arising from individual hunters’ (or their families’) posses-
sion of hunting territories. John Cooper (1939: 70-71), who supported
228 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country

Speck’s position, argued even more forcefully that the hunting territory
represented “true” ownership “in our sense of the term.” Thus, although
highly critical of the evolutionists, Speck and his supporters shared with
them the assumption that a society could only have property rights in
land if it had institutions resembling the European ideal of private prop-
erty. To prove Morgan and the evolutionists wrong, then, Speck and his
supporters had no choice but to demonstrate that hunting societies did
possess an institution closely resembling private property.
SigniWcantly, Speck’s critics also implicitly accepted the distinction be-
tween communal and private ownership. Eleanor Leacock (1954: 1-2), for ex-
ample, argued that “such private ownership of speciWc resources as exists
[among the hunters of Labrador] has developed in response to the introduc-
tion of ... the fur trade” and that “it was these private rights – speciWcally
to fur-bearing animals – which laid the basis for individually inherited
rights to land.” She did not see these rights, however, as fully individuated
even in places where the family hunting territory was fully developed:

Laws of patrilineal inheritance do not supersede band interest. The occur-

rence of widely separated brothers’ lands and the lack of any real small
holdings attest to the continual readjustment of band lands to Wt the
needs of band members. Each Indian has a right to trapping lands of his
own, and at the request of the chief a band member must give up part of
his ground, if necessary for another’s use. There is no material advantage
to an individual hunter in claiming more territory than he can personally
exploit. Nor is there any prestige attached to holding a sizable territory or
any emphasis on building up and preserving the paternal inheritance.
Neither can land be bought or sold. In other words, land has no value as
“real estate” apart from its products. (1-2)

All this led her to conclude that “what is involved is more properly a form
of usufruct than ‘true’ ownership” (2).
Unlike Leacock, Edward Rogers (1963) did see Algonquian hunting terri-
tories as constituting a form of private property, but, like her, he saw these
territories as a direct response of the development of property rights in
fur-bearers resulting from the fur trade. He argued that, under pressure
from the fur trade, the hunting territory system developed from what
he referred to alternately as the “hunting area system” or the “hunting
range system” (emphasis added). Under this system, hunting groups had
“return[ed] to the same general area each year but possess[ed] no exclusive
rights to the resources. The [hunting] area [had] no sharply demarcated
boundaries” (82). Although hunters returned to the same general areas
each year out of convenience and habit, they had no formal claim to
 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country 229

speciWc hunting territories. His use of the term “hunting range,” which he
admitted that he had “adapted from ecology, where the meaning is
roughly comparable to that given here” (ibid.), gives us insight into his
ideas about how pre-fur trade hunters related to the land. A pack of wolves,
too, has a fairly well-deWned hunting range, but it makes little sense to talk
about them owning it as property. The implication is that, until the
hunters of Labrador had developed a notion of private property through
their involvement in the fur trade, they – much like those wolves – had
had no institution of property at all.
Although they disagreed over the extent to which hunting territories
constituted a form of property (i.e., private property) and over how and
why the institution had developed in the Wrst place, all of those who took
part in the debate over the Algonquian hunting territory took it for
granted that property rights in land were only possible in a society that
had developed institutions comparable to the European ideal of private
property. In retaining this strict distinction between private and commu-
nal land ownership, however, they ignored entirely another strand of
anthropological thinking about property. In 1861, Sir Henry Maine (1986)
argued that collective ownership of land by kin-based village communities
in India constituted a legitimate and eminently workable system of prop-
erty. Later, Bronislaw Malinowski (1935) and Max Gluckman (1943, 1965)
also argued against the overly simplistic distinction between private and
communal land ownership. Both of them produced detailed ethnographic
accounts of non-European systems of land tenure. They argued that these
systems, though fundamentally different from those of contemporary
European countries and Wtting on neither side of the private-communal
divide, provided Trobrianders and Barotselanders, respectively, with co-
herent and rational systems for deciding who has what rights to different
plots of land. Furthermore, they argued that such systems cannot be
understood except within the wider context of cultural beliefs and prac-
tices that give them meaning:

You must know Wrst how a man uses his soil, how he weaves round it his
traditional legends, his beliefs and mystical values, how he Wghts for it
and defends it; then and only then will you be able to grasp the system of
legal and customary rights which deWne the relationship between man
and the soil. Now that we have become acquainted with what the Tro-
brianders do with their soil, how they perform their magic over it, how
their pride of lineage and citizenship, their kinship sentiments and family
feelings are bound up with their gardens and garden produce – now land
tenure has become both alive and real to us; its intricacies can now be
mastered. (Malinowski 1935: 320)
230 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country

As it turns out, most anthropologists trying to theorize property have

followed Maine and attempted to expand the concept of property so that
it can be applied analytically across cultures. Starting from the basic as-
sumptions underlying Western property law (i.e., that property is either
a relationship between people and things and/or a relationship among
people mediated by things), anthropologists have sought to expand the
notion of property by reexamining what can qualify as a “thing,” a “per-
son,” or a “relationship” in the constitution of property relations. Lowie
(1928) and Harrison (1992), for example, each exploded the term “thing”
by showing how Aboriginal and other non-European societies had well-
deWned ideas about the ownership of incorporeal things such as songs,
magic, and ritual. Other anthropologists – such as Anderson (1998), de Cop-
pet (1985), Myers (1989), Scott (1991), and Williams (1986), to name
but a few – have examined non-European ways of relating to the land
(which Western jurists would not recognize as constituting relations of
“ownership” at all) and have argued that we must recognize that these
relationships, like private property, grant those engaged in them certain
rights to the land on which they live. Finally, Strathern (1984, 1988) has
argued that European notions about property are contingent upon a West-
ern distinction between subject (the owner) and object (the owned). It is
therefore inappropriate to apply this concept in cultural contexts where
such a distinction does not apply. Although at times Strathern seems to
reject the use of the term “property” altogether, in the end she stops short
of this. She argues instead, that, in our attempt to theorize property, we
need to take into account the radically different ways that humans con-
struct notions of personhood, that we need to expand our notion of per-
son before we can understand how property works cross-culturally.8
These arguments are all well taken, but they leave us with a problem. It
seems that anthropologists want us to see property everywhere. Irving
Hallowell (1955) argued that all societies possess some institutionalized set
of social relations, legal or otherwise, that perform the same function as
legal property relations do in European society. Indeed, he went so far as
to claim that “property rights of some kind are in fact not only universal
but ... they are a basic factor in the structuralization of the role of individ-
uals in relation to basic economic processes” (247). Further, he declared
that “property as an institution is a unique as well as a ubiquitous human
institution” (248). In other words, property is an integral part of what it
means to be human beings living in society. Chris Hann (1998: 5) contin-
ues in this tradition when he argues that property should be seen as “a vast
Weld of cultural as well as social relations ... the symbolic as well as mater-
ial context within which things are recognized and personal as well as collec-
tive identities made.” If we deWne property in this manner, then it is clear
that all people everywhere have, and have always had, property. There can
 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country 231

certainly be compelling political reasons for making such a claim, such as

those that clearly underlie Catherine Bell and Michael Asch’s (1997: 72)
assertion that “because they are human beings, Aboriginal people at the time
of the assertion of British sovereignty [in Canada] did live in societies that
were organized and had institutions respecting land ownership as well as
jurisdiction over members and territory” (emphasis added).
To universalize the concept of property in this way certainly does make
its application less ethnocentric, as Hann and others claim, but there are
potentially serious consequences, both theoretical and political, in doing
so. To make the claim that property is a human universal, anthropologists
must expand the concept so broadly that their claim means little more
than that all people living in society must interact with other people and
things and that they must order those interactions in some way. This is no
doubt true, but it is not particularly useful from an analytic standpoint.
Aside from being so general as to be a truism, it is difWcult to see why one
would necessarily want to call such a conceptualization “property” at all
when other labels, such as “kinship,” broadly conceived, might apply
equally well. Indeed, Rodney Needham (1971: 5) made a similar argument
regarding the term “kinship,” concluding that “the word [kinship] has in
fact no analytic value.” And he went on to deal similarly with other seem-
ingly straightforward categories such as “marriage,” “incest,” and so on.
Evans-Pritchard (1962: 175), too, argued that “general statements about
phenomena of a certain type, or supposed type [including a number of
anthropology’s most basic categories, such as “tabu,” totemism,” and “lin-
eage”], have become so general as to have lost all signiWcance.” Certainly,
one can fruitfully compare the various social relations and practices that
Hallowell and Hann want to call “property relations,” but to say that such
a study is about property and not about, say, kinship, would then be a
purely political decision (more on this below).
This suggests that the question – What is property? – is perhaps not the
best starting point for an anthropological study of the subject. Needham
(1971: 5) again: “anthropologists do often get into trouble of a timewast-
ing and discouraging sort, when they argue about what kinship is or when
they try to propound some general theory based on the presumption that
kinship has a distinct and concrete identity.” In the next two sections, I
argue that, since all theories of property are inherently political, anthro-
pologists would do better to concern themselves less with attempts to
deWne property and more with trying to understand why and how people
use and struggle over different conceptions of property in the Wrst place.
Accordingly, I am more interested in what the concept of property does in
the context of Canadian land claims than in what property is and who
does or does not possess institutions that qualify.
There is also a serious political danger inherent in the attempt to
232 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country

universalize the concept of property. In our desire to legitimize certain

types of non-European social relations by calling them property, anthro-
pologists and others are helping to subject those very social relations to
new and powerful forms of social change. After all, the term “property”
does have a very speciWc set of meanings in European legal and political
discourse, and these meanings are both created by and reXected in the
complex legal and political institutions of the state. We may claim that
some speciWc set of non-European social relations in fact constitutes a set
of property relations, but the moment we do so, we authorize politicians,
judges, and other agents of the state to act upon them as they would other,
more familiar, forms of property. It gives them the conceptual tools and
justiWcation for imposing (yet again) their view of the world on Aborigi-
nal peoples. To translate the ways that Aboriginal peoples relate to one
another and to the land into the language of property is, in essence, a tacit
agreement to play by the rules of the game as set out by the state.

Land Claims: Struggles in an Idiom of Property

The language of Aboriginal land claims is the language of property. The
problem with this, as anthropologists have clearly been aware for some
time, is that property itself is a cultural construct. Aboriginal peoples did
not own their lands as “property” until they came face to face with Euro-
pean colonial expansion. This is not to say that they did not engage in
complex sets of relationships with one another and with the land, broadly
conceived, which gave them a moral claim to the land on which they
lived (especially vis-à-vis Europeans). They did. But they did not relate to
the land in the very speciWc ways that Europeans recognized as constitu-
tive of property relations (see, for example, Cronon 1983: 54-81; Locke
1964; Tully 1993: chap. 5; Williams 1986). This is not surprising, especially
in light of Williams’s (1986: chap. 8) argument that European attempts to
theorize property cannot be understood apart from the colonial project in
which they were embedded. She argues that these theories were, in large
part, explicit attempts to justify the expropriation of lands from Aborigi-
nal peoples, especially in North America. Thus, Aboriginal peoples do not
relate to the land in ways that Europeans recognize as constituting prop-
erty relations precisely because these relations were deWned in opposition
to how Aboriginal peoples related to the land (or, at least, to how Euro-
pean’s perceived them to do so).9
It should not be surprising, therefore, that European and Euro-American
governments have been slow to recognize that Aboriginal peoples might
possess property rights in their lands. The fact that Canada has increas-
ingly done so represents an attempt on the part of the Canadian govern-
ment to conduct its relations with Aboriginal peoples on a more equal
footing.10 The government’s increasing willingness to see Aboriginal peoples’
 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country 233

relation to the land in property terms gives their claims a certain legiti-
macy in Canadian courts that they had previously been denied. This has
greatly expanded Aboriginal peoples’ access to the legal institutions of the
state, allowing them to defend their interests in land and self-government
more effectively. At the same time, however, applying the term “property”
to the relationship between Aboriginal peoples and the land is fraught
with peril.
The act of expressing Aboriginal human-land relations in the language
of Euro-American property law is necessarily one of translation, with all
the distortion that such a process entails. As Colin Scott (1988: 40) has
pointed out, “to speak of [in his case] Cree property, then – even ‘commu-
nal’ property – would be to gloss over the essential dynamic of the sys-
tem [of Cree human-land-animal relations].” If, as Tully (1993), Williams
(1986), and others point out, modern European ideas about property were
developed – to a large extent – explicitly in opposition to European ideas
about how Aboriginal North Americans related to the land, then we might
rephrase that in yet stronger terms: to speak of Aboriginal-land relations
as property relations is to deny, rather than merely “to gloss over,” their
essential dynamic.11 Furthermore, this “translation,” like the development
of property theory itself, must be understood in its proper colonial con-
text. As a part of the land claims/treaty-making process, the translation of
Aboriginal social relations, practices, and understandings into the lan-
guage of property is an integral part of the effort to incorporate Aboriginal
peoples and their lands more fully into the modern nation-state. Given
the fact that Aboriginal peoples’ way of life was (and in many cases con-
tinues to be) incompatible with this type of incorporation, any attempt to
translate the already glossed notion of Aboriginal title into the concrete
political and economic mechanisms of a treaty or land claims settlement
not only runs the risk of inaccurate “translation” but also threatens to
subvert the very social relations that it purports to represent.
The effort on the part of anthropologists to expand the concept of prop-
erty, then, must be understood in the context of their involvement with
and concern about the politics of land. Sir Henry Maine’s critique of the
distinction between private and communal property was part of his over-
all argument that British colonial authorities needed to understand and
respect the social relations, including those of property, of the people they
were trying to govern.12 Max Gluckman (1943: 47-64), too, clearly saw
that the only way to understand contemporary events concerning land
and agriculture in colonial Barotseland (and Africa more generally) was
through an understanding of existing Aboriginal property systems. The
implication was that colonial ofWcials could not hope to administer
Aboriginal-occupied lands properly without understanding the Aboriginal
systems of land tenure. Malinowski (1935: 318) went a step further, claiming
234 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country

that most colonial difWculties were the direct result of a failure to under-
stand existing property systems in the colonies: “It would not be an exag-
geration to say that mistakes in land policy have caused the greater part
of colonial and imperial difWculties. Whether we take Ireland in the past,
or present day India, certain East African dependencies or the Union of
South Africa – questions of land, of arbitrary expropriation or unwise
apportionment, of sheer unnecessary chicanery or even of well meant but
revolutionary reform, take a prominent place in racial and national con-
Xicts.” Speck (1915: 305) made an even stronger political statement: “It
becomes apparent by means of our study how, through misunderstanding
between the colonial authorities and the natives, large tracts of land were
sold by chiefs or by individuals who, from the Indian standpoint, had
absolutely no claim to their ownership nor rights of disposal.”
By asserting that Algonquian peoples had property relations, Speck was
questioning, at a fundamental level, the legitimacy of the colonial author-
ities’ claim to Algonquian land. Radical though this statement was – espe-
cially in 1915 – it also illustrates some of the difWculties one encounters
in trying to employ the concept of property in the Aboriginal struggle for
land and self-government. To begin with, his argument is dependent on
the fact that the Aboriginal peoples with whom he worked did indeed
relate to the land in a manner analogous to European ideas about private
property. He assumes that the legitimacy of their claim to land vis-à-vis
the state is contingent upon this. As we shall see below, such an approach
to land claims does not bode well for those peoples, such as many interior
Athapaskans, who seem genuinely not to have engaged in social relations
that could somehow be construed as analogous to private property. More
important, however, such reasoning is Xawed at a logical level. Just be-
cause a people does not divide up the land amongst themselves in a man-
ner resembling the European ideal of private property does not mean that
they cannot make a valid claim to that land vis-à-vis outsiders. Indeed,
anthropologists have long recognized that even a nomadic hunting peo-
ple might develop a sense of attachment to a speciWc territory.
Speck noted that, “as [the] population [of a group of hunters newly
arrived to an area] grows, and, in addition, remains in the new area,
increased band concern with the new territory and its wild denizens will
take place. The band will grow ever more conscious of its dependence on
a particular area and food supply ... Intrusion of new peoples will be
resented” (Speck and Eiseley 1942: 239). Herskovits (1940: 292-93), too,
recognized a kind of territoriality among hunters, arguing that “full-
Xedged communism in land thus means that land has no economic value
at all except in so far as the holdings of a given tribe are contrasted with
the holdings of another entire tribal group whose encroachment on the
territory of the Wrst tribe is to be resisted by force.”
 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country 235

Speck saw this territoriality as a sort of proto-property, a stage of devel-

opment that might or might not lead to a relationship with the land more
like our own, while Herskovits dismissed it as a “political” rather than an
“economic” phenomenon since it did not in itself give land any value. A
sense of territoriality like that described by both Speck and Herskovits
might cause a band of hunters to defend their land against other similar
bands; but they felt that, in the absence of “individuated” rights, it could
not be used as a rationale for defending Aboriginal peoples’ lands against
the “civilized” owners of property (for, as we have seen, even packs of
wolves recognize and defend their territories against invading packs). This
is why Speck and others felt the need to “prove” that Aboriginal peoples
possessed individuated rights, though these rights were perhaps somewhat
different from those of Europeans.
In contrast, “common property” theorists have recently shown that
some systems of group land use function effectively only if outsiders can
be excluded (Berkes 1989; Ostrom 1990). This indicates that there exists
an alternate basis (other than that of private property) upon which Ab-
original peoples, especially hunters, might make claims to land against the
state. Still others have questioned whether it is appropriate to use the term
“property” for such systems at all. As we saw above, Colin Scott is quite
leery about using the label “property” to describe the relationship between
Cree hunters and the land. Like Speck and Herskovits, however, he recog-
nizes that the Cree, by virtue of their use and occupancy, do have a legiti-
mate claim to their territory:

At the same time, this system [of relations between humans and among
humans, animals, and the land] entails speciWc criteria for inclusion
within the network of human beings who practice it. Cree, in their own
view, legitimately exercise and maintain their rights as against alien
claimants who fail to conform to criteria of sharing and stewardship. His-
torically, when white men have apparently conformed to tenets of reci-
procity, and contributed to stewardship of resources, they have been
accorded a measure of legitimate participation in the Cree system. Thus
when white men fail these standards, evasion or opposition is deemed
legitimate by Cree. (Scott 1991: 40)

Scott differs from both Speck and Herskovits here. He does not merely
argue that the Cree have developed a sense of territoriality through their
use of the land. He also claims that, despite the fact that they do not rec-
ognize individuated rights in land, the constellation of beliefs, values, and
social relations that constitute Cree hunters’ relationship with the land
actually provides them with a conceptual framework for measuring the
legitimacy of other people’s use of and claims to the land, and that this
236 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country

framework is fundamentally different from that of “property,” which pro-

vides Euro-Canadians with their own means for measuring such legiti-
macy. This conceptual framework, though it provides Cree people with a
clear sense of who can appropriately interact with the land and how, is
emphatically not reducible to the European language of property.
Why, then, have the Cree and other Aboriginal peoples the world over
felt the need to make their claim to land and self-government in terms
of property? For the same reason that so many anthropologists have
supported Aboriginal claims by Wnding “property rights” everywhere. As
Eleanor Leacock (1986: 143) said of the Montagnais hunters with whom
Speck worked, “since their lands were constantly being encroached upon
by white Canadians,” for them not to have told him that they had right of
private property over their hunting territories “would have been folly.” It
comes down to a question of power, then. If, in the context of the modern
nation-state, Aboriginal peoples wish to claim some form of control over
their lands, and they wish those claims to be seen as legitimate by others,
then they must, as Richard Handler (1991: 71) puts it, speak “in a language
that power understands.” And that language is, and has long been, the
language of property.
Anthropologists who participate in the land claims process, like Aborig-
inal peoples themselves, are forced to speak in the language of property if
they wish to be taken seriously. As we have seen, they have tried to avoid
the most egregiously ethnocentric consequences of doing so by expanding
the concept of property beyond the relatively narrow sense it has in the
European legal context whence it came. In the process, they have tended
to conceive of property as a set of social relations and practices character-
ized by some list of necessary and sufWcient criteria. The problem with this
“laundry list” approach to conceptualizing property (or anything, for that
matter) is that, once one decides to export a culturally speciWc concept
such as property to a new cultural context, the list that deWnes the concept
must be expanded to accommodate the new context into which it is being
imported (i.e., the particular people with whom the anthropologist works).
And once this has been done a Wrst time, there is no logical reason why it
should not be done again and again, until the list has been expanded
beyond recognition, even to the point where the concept is no longer the-
oretically useful (though there might be great rhetorical or political advan-
tage to expanding the concept of property in this way). Fortunately, there
is an alternate approach to the question of property.
Certainly people everywhere engage in complex sets of social relations
and practices that we might choose to call “property.” But the decision to
call them that (or, indeed, to call them “knowledge,” or “kinship,” or even
to deny them a legitimizing label altogether) is a political one. This suggests
that thinking about the term “property” as a label, a marker of legitimacy,
 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country 237

might be a useful way of thinking about property (much as it was for

thinking about knowledge in the previous three chapters). The question,
then, becomes not whether non-European societies “have property,” but
why someone would want to make (or deny) such a claim in the Wrst
place. And, more important, what are the social and political implications
of making, and then acting on, such a claim? This approach has the
advantage of centring the analysis on questions of power, while avoiding
the theoretical difWculties identiWed by Needham and the political difW-
culties discussed above. And, just as important, it locates anthropologists
and other property theorists squarely in the middle of political struggles
over land, which, in reality, is where they have been all along – as is shown
eloquently by Robert Borofsky (1987) and Nancy Williams (1986), among
others.
First Nations peoples and their allies have made the (perhaps necessary)
political decision to engage in land claims negotiations using the idiom of
property. Such an undertaking, however, is far from straightforward: it
involves translating First Nations peoples’ understandings of the world
into a universe of meaning based on fundamentally different assump-
tions, with all the risks of mistranslation and misunderstanding inherent
in any such process.13 To what degree has this translation been successful?
What impact, if any, has this process had on how First Nations peoples
relate to the land and animals? And how has this affected the way the land
claims process itself has unfolded? In the remainder of this chapter, I con-
sider these questions, speciWcally in relation to the experience of the Klu-
ane First Nation and its people.

Speaking and Thinking in the Language of Property:

The Kluane First Nation Land Claim
Early ethnographers of the southwest Yukon and neighbouring parts of
Alaska were well aware of the hunting territory debate and looked for evi-
dence of the institution among the peoples with whom they worked. In
the process, they described what they referred to as “property relations”
among people living in those areas long before the advent of land claims.
In 1929-30, Robert McKennan investigated the question of property rela-
tions among the Upper Tanana people of the Alaska-Yukon boundary area,
directly to the north of Kluane country.14 He found that “family hunting
territories are likewise unknown to the Upper Tanana. Even today the
natives recognize no such property rights in spite of the fact that the
growth of the fur trade and the encroachments of white trappers would
encourage such a conception. The wandering of the individual families
compass such a large area that the institution of permanent hunting and
trapping territories would be completely at variance with the native mode
of life” (McKennan 1959: 128).
238 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country

Frederick Johnson and Hugh Raup, who spent time in the Kluane region
between 1944 and 1948, were the Wrst to inquire about property rights
there. By their own admission, their questioning on the topic was “not
extensive or consistent,” but what they did discover was consistent with
McKennon’s Wndings: “The testimony we have is to the effect that there
are no claims to the land; anyone can travel and hunt where he pleases.
There is some evidence that hunters habitually hunted in certain general
areas, but the camps might be moved, and even the cabins built since
1900 could be used by anyone if they were empty. Whether or not the fur
industry had resulted in some rules we do not know, but in 1948 the fur
trade was at a minimum and appeared to have little effect on the econ-
omy, at least at Burwash” (Johnson and Raup 1964: 196).
Catharine McClellan conducted Weldwork in the southern Yukon
(including the Kluane region) between 1948 and 1951. In her discussion of
property relations, she reported the existence of strong “sentimental ties”
to the land, which in some ways resembled the relation of ownership.
“Moiety or sib members held their common area in a kind of trusteeship,
and developed strong emotional feelings about their stewardship, which
they often symbolized in social situations. For example ... if a member of
one sib or moiety should fall into a river ‘belonging’ to the opposite moi-
ety or to a particular sib, all members of the owning group would imme-
diately mobilize their forces to ‘pay off’ all members of the moiety or sib
of the victim that were present ... This would happen whether or not the
person who fell into the river were drowned” (McClellan 1975: 483-84).
Land could even be alienated to some extent: “Although sib lands were
theoretically held or owned only in trusteeship, even in the past there
were occasional transfers between moieties or sibs, and the stories suggest
that, despite the idyllic picture of lineage, sib, or moiety corporate owner-
ship, strong individuals sometimes seem to have taken matters in their
own hands [such as when] ... the Wolf chief at Klukshu gave the rights to
that Wshing spot to his Crow son when the latter compassionately spared
his life” (486). She found no evidence, however, of individual or family-
owned hunting territories like those described by Speck:

In the past all three groups [Southern Tutchone, Tagish, and Inland Tlin-
git] seem to have recognized that some parts of the territory which they
exploited were “owned,” while other parts of it were “free.” The concept
of “ownership” was most developed among the southernmost of the
Tutchone and among the Tagish and the Inland Tlingit.15 In these groups
the localized sib segments provided a social reality with respect to territo-
rial claims, but there was never, so far as I can tell, any individual or “fam-
ily” ownership of land ... I believe that it was always possible in the past
 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country 239

for a man to manipulate his kin ties so that in effect he could exploit
almost any area which attracted him. (McClellan 1975: 483).

In the absence of individuated rights to particular hunting territories

among the First Nations peoples of the southern Yukon, McClellan was
unwilling to characterize their relationship to the land as one of “true”
ownership (i.e., private property): “a Yukon Indian today may refer to a
particular section of Yukon Territory as ‘my country’ (‘a’keyyi, Tutchone;
‘a’xaní, Tlingit). I believe that in using these terms the speaker wants to
emphasize his sentimental ties to a region. The sentiment arises from the
fact that either he or his ancestors once exploited the area and it involves
the feeling that he continues to have the right to do so. However, it does
not necessarily imply that he ‘owns’ the land” (482-83).
Many First Nations people in the southwest Yukon Territory continue
to feel this way about their relationship to the land. When they speak
about “their land,” they are often referring more to their own connections
to the land and animals (physical, social, and spiritual) than to a desire
to exclude others. Once, addressing the land claims negotiations in Bur-
wash Landing, Lena Johnson, a Kluane elder, likened herself to a tree with
roots in the ground. She said that she and her people would stay forever in
the place they were born and that her parents and grandparents, too, had
been born and buried there.16 She was not opposed, she said, to sharing
the land with White people; for a long time, in fact, they had done so
without many problems. But then the government started trying to take
over, to push Kluane people from their lands, and that was not acceptable.
As in other parts of the continent, it may have been the fur trade that
initially led First Nations peoples in the Yukon to think in terms of indi-
viduated rights of ownership in land. The fur trade gradually made its way
westward, eventually reaching the southwest Yukon by about the middle
of the nineteenth century (Coates 1991; Workman 1978). It seems quite
likely that the dynamic described by Leacock and others for other parts of
Canada held in the Yukon as well; First Nations peoples initially began to
recognize individual claims to fur-bearers themselves and then, because of
the relatively sedentary nature of some of these animals, to the territories
in which they were found.
It was not until 1950, however, that the state (in this case, the Yukon
government) became involved by establishing a system of registered
traplines, which granted their owners exclusive rights to trap fur-bearers
in ofWcially deWned areas.17 Though First Nations peoples objected quite
strenuously to certain aspects of the newly imposed system (most notably
to the ten-dollar registration fee), they were generally in favour of trapline
registration since it protected them from increasing encroachment on
240 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country

their trapping territories by Euro-Canadian trappers (McCandless 1985:

147). Indeed, there is evidence that the protection of First Nations peoples’
trapping rights was one of the principal motivations for the establishment
of the trapline system in the Wrst place (145). Several First Nations elders
with whom I spoke agreed that the establishment of registered traplines
had been a positive development, and one of them even called trapline
registration “the best thing that ever happened” for First Nations trappers
in the Yukon.
It seems, then, that the First Nations peoples of the Southwest Yukon,
like the Montagnais hunters who hosted Frank Speck, were quick to see
the advantages of using the language of property to defend their interests
against encroaching Euro-Canadians. In a world where Euro-Canadians
have regularly claimed ownership of land for the express purpose of
excluding others (including First Nations peoples) and have had those
claims backed up by the authority of the state, it is little wonder that First
Nations peoples quickly learned to make their own claims of this sort.
Indeed, they have become quite adept at speaking the language of prop-
erty. It is true that only a few Kluane people feel at home with the intrica-
cies of Aboriginal title and Canadian property law, but the same could
also be said of Euro-Canadians. Even the oldest Kluane elder alive today
knows exactly what it means to say that someone “owns” the land
(indeed, so did Joe Johnson’s grandmother, or she would not have been so
adamantly opposed to the idea). Quite apart from the land claim, several
KFN members own fee simple title to land in the area, as do a number
Euro-Canadian residents. Everyone in the village knows what they may
and may not do on their own and other people’s private property. In addi-
tion, many KFN members are quite knowledgeable about some of the
other more arcane forms of property in the area, such as rights to subsur-
face minerals, government leases and grants of right-of-way, national
parks and other protected lands, and so on.
In many ways, the present-day process of land claims can be seen as a
natural result of First Nations peoples’ mastery of the language of property
and the culmination of their efforts to turn it to their own advantage. But
does all this mean that ideas of private property have replaced older ways
of relating to the land? Do Kluane people now mean the same thing as
Euro-Canadians when they speak of “owning” the land?
Perhaps not surprisingly, it depends on whom one talks to and in
what context. The range of opinions and experiences among First Nations
peoples is as broad and diverse as it is among Euro-Canadians. Certainly
there are some who, because of their education, see First Nations claims to
ownership of land in much the same way that Euro-Canadians view them:
as claims to exclusive possession and control. Others continue to view
this type of claim with distaste, much as Joe Johnson’s grandmother did –
 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country 241

especially in relation to the land as a whole and its animal inhabitants. At

the same time, however, many of these people have no trouble recognizing,
respecting, and even endorsing individuated property rights that are either
quite small in scale (such as private ownership of house lots) or limited in
scope (such as usufructory rights in traplines). Rather than attempting to
speak deWnitively about “how Kluane people think about property,” then,
I will merely point out that there is a tension (both among and within
individuals) in how Kluane people think about land and their relation to
it. It is a tension between Aboriginal beliefs about the proper relationship
between people and the land and the need to defend their interests –
indeed, simply to function – in today’s Yukon.18 This tension is not new.
As Catharine McClellan (1975: 487) notes:

it is precisely on the points of trespass and killing game that the strongest
feelings now arise over the registered trapline ownership. A few of the
younger trapline owners have tried to prevent all others from passing
through their territory for any reasons whatsoever. They say that moose
and other game, including the fur-bearers, all belong to them exclusively
as does the land. They insist that people will just have to Wnd new routes
to their own trapping grounds, which may lie beyond, and will have to
refrain from following game into land that they do not own. This attitude
directly counters all aboriginal ideas about the sharing of food animals.19

Using the language of property. Sign on the Alaska Highway marking the bound-
ary of Kluane First Nation Traditional Territory.
242 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country

With the advent of land claims, such tensions have only increased.
Many Kluane people – even some of those who have been most involved
in negotiating it, like Joe Johnson – feel quite conXicted about the land
claim. Others are completely opposed to the whole process. One of these,
Agnes Johnson, fears that land claims will make Kluane people “just like
Whitemen,” depriving them of their hunting rights and forcing them to
spend their days in ofWce buildings. She and a number of others in the vil-
lage prefer the “uncertainty” of Aboriginal title and Aboriginal rights to
the clarity of a set of treaty rights conceived of and written in a language
that cannot accommodate some of their most deeply felt beliefs about the
world. They would rather continue to live with the paternalistic dictates of
the Indian Act than sign an agreement whose very form and language is
incompatible with some of their most cherished beliefs and values.20 But
is such an outcome inevitable? Is every attempt to express First Nations
peoples’ interests in the language of property doomed to failure? Is there
no way that the language of property, which in some ways is very Xexi-
ble indeed, can be made to accommodate the concerns of First Nations
peoples? The negotiators of the Yukon Umbrella Final Agreement tried
hard to make it do just that.
As we saw in Chapter 1, the UFA is an agreement-in-principle between
the Council of Yukon Indians, Canada, and the Yukon government that
sets up a framework for the negotiation of speciWc Wnal agreements
between each Yukon First Nation (such as KFN) and the government. It
contains many general provisions that apply to the entire Yukon and iden-
tiWes the areas in which particular First Nations may negotiate provisions
speciWc to their own needs. The UFA does not simply spell out who owns
what land. It is a complex document consisting of twenty-eight chapters
dealing not only with land but also with Wnancial compensation, heri-
tage, taxation, renewable and non-renewable resources, economic devel-
opment, and more.
Negotiators tried in good faith to forge an agreement that would not
only help integrate First Nations peoples into the Canadian state but that
would also do so in a manner that allows them to retain those values and
practices that are so vital to their identities as First Nations people. As part
of this effort, negotiators of the agreement included many provisions
whose express purpose was to accommodate First Nations peoples’ values,
beliefs, and ways of life. For example, Chapter 16 (which deals with Wsh
and wildlife) grants First Nations peoples hunting rights throughout the
territory. It was clear to the negotiators that First Nations peoples’ land-
based way of life would not be protected by simply dividing the territory
into settlement lands and Crown lands, to be exclusively owned and used
by First Nations and Canada, respectively. As a result, First Nations peoples
will have hunting rights throughout the territory regardless of who “owns”
 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country 243

the land on which they hunt (Council for Yukon Indians 1993: 158-60).
Thus, though First Nations peoples will not own the vast majority of land
in the Yukon, they will retain important rights to that land, which, in theory,
will allow them to maintain the way of life that is so important to them.21
First Nations peoples’ retention of hunting rights on Crown lands may
not at Wrst seem consistent with the European ideal of private property,
but it is quite consistent with European legal theory on property more
generally. Indeed, the concept of rights is fundamental to this theory.
Property theorists have long agreed that the legal status of ownership
confers upon owners a set of rights that allows them to act in certain pre-
scribed ways towards things (their property) as well as other people (non-
owners), though the exact nature of these rights depends on such factors
as the type of object involved, the legal system, the socioeconomic con-
text, and so on. Because these different kinds of rights can be quite distinct
from one another, and because they are often easily separable, theorists
have found it useful to conceive of property as a “bundle” of different
rights, each of which can be owned and exercised by a different owner (see
Grey 1980; Hallowell 1955: 240).22
In this formulation it is easy to see First Nations hunting rights on
Crown lands as a form of property right (the right of usufruct), which is
fully consistent with the Crown’s ownership of other property rights in
the same land (including the right to alienate it, to earn income from it,
and so on). This is just one of the ways that the negotiators of the UFA,
writing in the language of property, tried to accommodate Yukon First
Nations peoples’ values and way of life. By allowing them to retain partial
property rights to the entire territory, the UFA enables them, at least in
theory, to maintain the hunting way of life that is the source of so many
of their values and beliefs. On Wrst glance, then, it seems that this will
allow the people of KFN to have a land claims agreement without becom-
ing “just like Whitemen.” But is this really true? How well do the beliefs,
values, and practices that shape First Nations peoples’ relationship to ani-
mals really translate into the idea of a “right to hunt?” Is the concept of
hunting rights really an adequate tool for expressing and protecting the
special relationship that exists between First Nations peoples and the ani-
mals/land upon which they depend?23
We saw in previous chapters how difWcult it is to translate the beliefs,
practices, and values through which First Nations peoples relate to ani-
mals into the language of scientiWc resource management. This difWculty
arises in large part from the need to compartmentalize and distill these
beliefs and practices so as to include them in the management process.
The attempt to translate the cultural realities of First Nations peoples’ rela-
tionships with animals into the language of “hunting rights” entails simi-
lar processes of compartmentalization and distillation.
244 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country

To begin with, the idea that property is a bundle of separable rights leads
automatically to a process of compartmentalization.24 The right to hunt is
distinguished from rights to other types of use (such as mining, logging,
and other kinds of development); and use rights in general are distin-
guished from other kinds of rights in land, such as the right to alienate it,
the right to derive income from it, and so on. This compartmentalization,
useful as it may be from the perspective of legal theory, ignores the fact
that some of these different types of rights may be incompatible.25 The
right to hunt on a particular piece of land, for instance, may not be com-
patible with the right to log or mine it. And if hunting rights to a particu-
lar piece of Crown land do not prevent the government from selling it to
a third party or leasing it for development, then those rights are in reality
subject to the whims of government, despite their “entrenchment” in the
Canadian Constitution. By separating the right to hunt on Crown lands
from the right to otherwise use, alienate, or derive income from them, the
UFA guarantees First Nations peoples the right to hunt only so long as the
condition of the land and the state of development in the area allow. It does
not give them the right to ensure that such conditions continue to exist.26
In addition, use of the modiWer “hunting” in the phrase “hunting
rights” further limits First Nations peoples’ rights regarding the land and
animals to a very speciWc and limited social context based on a European
concept of hunting. While the right to hunt does include the right to
engage in activities related to hunting per se, such as Wshing and posses-
sing and transporting animal parts and products, it does not include, or
only partially includes, many other social practices that are integrally
related to First Nations hunting in the area (see Chapter 2). For example,
the UFA explicitly limits the First Nations right to hunt to “the right to
harvest for Subsistence.” While it does give First Nations peoples the right
to “give, trade, barter or sell” edible parts of Wsh and wildlife, it only allows
them to do so with one another and with First Nations peoples outside the
Yukon who are “beneWciaries of adjacent Transboundary Agreements.”
Although the UFA explicitly allows the sale and trade of meat and Wsh in
order to “maintain traditional sharing among Yukon Indian People,” it
does not give Yukon First Nations people the right to engage in these kinds
of activities with non-First Nations people, including those who may have
married into or otherwise become a part of the community and who
actively participate in the sharing of meat within the village (Council for
Yukon Indians 1993: 158).
SigniWcantly, the treaty right to hunt does not include the right to “give,
trade, barter, or sell” non-edible parts of Wsh and wildlife, including furs
and skins (Council for Yukon Indians 1993: 159). Although Yukon First
Nations peoples will retain the right to trap fur-bearers for their own use,
to the extent that they wish to sell or trade the furs they obtain through
 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country 245

trapping, they will be subject to the laws of General Application. Indeed,

under the UFA, the territorial government will continue to have the power
to regulate First Nations trapping itself (as an activity and not merely the
sale of pelts). This is all despite the fact that non-edible animal parts,
including skins, fur, and sinew, had long been important elements in
Aboriginal trade throughout the area.
We have seen that the right to hunt, as just one from a bundle of differ-
ent possible rights in land, is by itself an inadequate legal tool with which
to protect First Nations peoples’ unique relationship with animals and the
land. We have also seen that to conceive of this relationship in terms of an
Aboriginal right to hunt effectively limits the ways in which First Nations
peoples may relate to the land and that these limits have more to do with
European notions of hunting than with First Nations beliefs and practices.
There is, however, another even more fundamental problem with trans-
lating First Nations peoples’ relationship with land and animals into the
language of property (i.e., hunting rights). This is the use of the concept of
rights. This concept, which lies at the heart of European legal and political
thought and practice, is – like all other concepts – a cultural construction.
Its application across cultures is therefore extremely problematic.
We have already seen how the notion of rights is intimately bound up
with the European legal concept of property (e.g., the “bundle of rights”).
But what must be distilled out of the complex relationship that First
Nations peoples have with animals and the land in order to speak about
it in terms of a “right” to hunt? An Aboriginal right to hunt means that
Aboriginal people, simply by virtue of their being Aboriginal, have a right
to kill animals. However useful this notion might be to Aboriginal peoples
in their struggle with the government, it is not at all consistent with many
of their most cherished beliefs and values regarding their relationship to
animals. In Chapter 2, I described the relationship between First Nations
peoples and animals as one of mutual respect and reciprocity. In this
formulation, one does not possess a right to kill animals merely because
one was born to First Nations parents; rather, animals are a gift. They give
themselves to hunters when and if the hunters prove themselves worthy,
and with this gift come heavy obligations and responsibilities. If hunters
do not live up to these responsibilities, then the animals will stop giv-
ing themselves to the hunters. The notion of rights has no place in this
relationship.
One might argue that we can see hunters as “earning” the right to kill
animals through the fulWllment of their responsibilities and obligations,
but I believe that this is an inappropriate way of thinking about it. Ani-
mals are a gift, and they can justiWably withhold themselves from a hunter
for even so much as an improper word or thought. The notion of rights
is inappropriate because along with the idea of rights comes a sense of
246 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country

entitlement, an expectation that those rights should be fulWlled. If they

are not, then the holder of those rights is being denied his or her due.
Respectful hunters trying to understand their lack of success, however, will
search within themselves for a lapse in character rather than look outward
for someone or something who is depriving them of their rights. Indeed,
the expectation that would accompany someone’s “right to kill” an ani-
mal is contrary to the proper attitude of respect that a hunter must have
if he or she is to be successful. Thus, there is a tension between the lan-
guage of rights and a set of beliefs and values that many Kluane people still
feel is the proper way to relate to animals. This tension manifests itself
powerfully in the lives of Kluane people today.
As we saw in Chapter 2, there are some Kluane people – many of them
younger – who do not always abide by locally accepted beliefs and prac-
tices regarding human-animal relations. As a result, they sometimes hunt
in ways that other community members see as morally objectionable. The
language of hunting rights, however, provides these hunters with an alter-
native moral framework that allows them to regard their own actions as
perfectly legitimate – even in the face of criticism from other community
members. On several occasions, I heard Kluane people defend their own
or a family member’s questionable (from the point of view of many in the
village) hunting practices by claiming simply that “they had the right” to
do what they had done (as part of their Aboriginal right to hunt). Many
Kluane people, however, do not accept this kind of rights-based argument
as legitimate. This leads to tension within the village as some people seek
to substitute a morality based on hunting rights for one based on relations
of mutual respect and reciprocity between humans and animals. The fol-
lowing story about an event that occurred several years before my arrival
in Burwash Landing illustrates this dynamic.
Some years ago, community members publicly, though indirectly, chas-
tized a young hunter for killing an excessive number of Dall ewes. As
we saw in Chapter 2, even in the absence of formal laws and regulations
Kluane people can and do regulate one another’s behaviour, primarily
through joking and indirect criticism. These can be extremely effective
means for getting people to conform to community ideals, and this par-
ticular case was no exception; the young hunter did apparently change his
ways as a result. At the time, however, he had attempted to defend his
actions, and he had done so by referring to his Aboriginal right to hunt. By
arguing “I’ve got rights” he was doing no more than repeating an argu-
ment that many in the room, including some of those most critical of
his actions, had themselves made to government ofWcials in defence of
KFN’s right, as a people, to hunt. Rather than receiving his arguments
sympathetically, however, the elders had “really let him have it.” They had
 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country 247

asked him if he planned on feeding his rights to his grandchildren and

had wondered aloud amongst themselves what rights taste like. The young
hunter had said nothing but had slipped silently out of the room as soon
as the elders had Wnished talking about it. According to the person who
told me the story: “We never had a problem with him again.”
Even so, it is clear that the language of property (here in the guise of
hunting rights) allows First Nations peoples to think and act towards
animals in new ways. Indeed, as distasteful as it is to some First Nations
people, the idea that they “own,” in a European legal sense, the land and
the animals upon it, is becoming quite an acceptable – even unremarkable
– attitude among many Kluane people, especially younger ones. This is at
least partially a result of their need constantly to claim this kind of own-
ership at the land claims table. I do not mean to imply that the language
of rights/property is the only factor that has led to changes over the past
century in how Kluane people think and act towards the land and ani-
mals. It has, however, played an important role in these changes because
it provides Kluane people with a powerful new conceptual and moral con-
text in which to evaluate how they think and act towards one another, the
land, and animals.
By examining the notion of hunting rights in this section, I have tried
to illustrate some of the ideological effects of translating First Nations
peoples’ thought and practice into the language of property. The idea of
hunting rights is but one example of this; one could easily draw many
other examples of this type of cultural mistranslation from the UFA. Now,
however, I turn to an examination of the land claims process itself. What
have Kluane people had to do to engage government ofWcials in the lan-
guage of property and how has this affected social life in the village?

The Effects of the Land Claims Process in Burwash Landing

Regardless of the terms of any Wnal agreement eventually signed by KFN,
Canada, and the territorial government (and, as already noted, there is sig-
niWcant disagreement among Kluane people as to whether or not such an
agreement will be beneWcial), the land claims process has already had an
enormous impact on the lives of Kluane people. Indeed, when I asked Klu-
ane people to identify the single most important factor responsible for
social change in the village over the past thirty years, nearly everyone –
supporters and opponents of the land claim alike – answered, without the
slightest hesitation, “land claims.” In fact, several claimed that land claims
have had as big an impact on life in Burwash since the early 1970s as the
building of the Alaska Highway had in the 1940s – an event that utterly
transformed life in the region. This is especially extraordinary given the
fact that KFN has not yet even signed a Wnal agreement.
248 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country

When I stated earlier that KFN members have had to learn to “speak
the language of property” to participate in the land claims process, I was
saying much more than that they simply had to learn the vocabulary of
Euro-Canadian property law. To be effective negotiators, Kluane people
have had to learn the nuances of the Canadian legal system, acquaint them-
selves with the procedures and social niceties of government negotiations,
and familiarize themselves with the workings of government bureaucracy.
All of this required – and continues to require – huge investments of time
and energy. Various Kluane people have spent years studying law and
government, either formally in Canadian educational institutions or by
working in First Nations ofWces.
But even this is not enough. If First Nations peoples wish to engage in a
dialogue with lawyers and bureaucrats who represent the federal and terri-
torial governments, then they must organize and express themselves in
ways compatible with the government bureaucracies with which they
must deal (rather than in ways compatible with the land-based way of life
that they wish to preserve through land claims). As a result, they have had
to build a bureaucratic infrastructure modelled on and linked to that of
government. This means working in ofWces; using computers, telephones,
and the other trappings of modern bureaucratic life; and making deci-
sions in a way that government ofWcials view as legitimate. And when First
Nations peoples do engage politicians and bureaucrats in land claims nego-
tiations, they must do so in ofWces and conference rooms – surrounded by
thousands of pages of draft agreements and legal documents. Thus, for
First Nations peoples to participate in land claims negotiations at all, not
only must they speak the language of property but they must also do so in
a physical and intellectual context that is far removed from the land-based
way of life that most Yukon First Nations people lived before the advent of
land claims negotiations. Thus, First Nations peoples have had to adopt
Euro-Canadian political institutions as a prerequisite for even engaging
with Euro-Canadian lawyers and politicians in a dialogue about land
claims.
This process of bureaucratization is unlikely to reverse itself upon the
successful conclusion of negotiations and the ratiWcation of a Wnal agree-
ment; rather, the implementation of any such agreement is likely to
further accelerate the process. As noted above, modern land claims agree-
ments do not simply divide the territory into those lands owned by First
Nations and those owned by the Crown. In combination with related
self-government agreements, they also establish First Nations as a new
and distinct order of government in Canada. Thus, they spell out in great
detail the formal institutional relationship that will exist between First
Nations governments and existing federal and territorial (or provincial)
orders of government. Not surprisingly, the relationships described by
 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country 249

these agreements resemble, in form and design, existing intergovernmen-

tal relations in Canada; that is, they are bureaucratic. The implementation
of modern land claims agreements, then, requires the creation of complex
First Nations bureaucracies to interface with those of the federal and terri-
torial governments.
Of course, this is not simply the result of the current land claims nego-
tiations; rather, the land claims process must itself be seen as the current
phase in a long history of government activity in the area (see Chapter 1).
From Aboriginal times until well after contact, First Nations people in the
Kluane region had no formal political institutions. Although people could
gain prestige and inXuence over one another, their nomadic way of life
and egalitarian ideology precluded the development of hierarchical rela-
tions and formal political institutions. According to Catharine McClellan
(1977: 481-82), “at the time of contact the Indians of southern Yukon had
‘political organization’ in only the very broadest sense ... Nor was there
any aboriginal institution or ofWce that was unequivocally political, if we
imply by that term an administrative or judicial unit that was the com-
monly recognized locus of coercive power. No ofWcials or councils existed
whose primary function was to administer either inter-tribal or extra-tribal
civil affairs.” She goes on to note that,

among the more northern bands of Southern Tutchone, the chief was sim-
ply the outstanding man of a labile, kin-structured social group ... In no
case did the “chief” have absolute power. Much depended on the forceful-
ness of his character and on his ability to acquire and manipulate wealth.
In early times this wealth usually resulted from his exceptional prowess in
hunting, or else from his strategic control of a desirable natural product
such as native copper ... However, even in the nineteenth century large
accumulations of property were never possible for anybody, and rules for
distribution and inheritance of goods remained relatively simple.

As we saw in Chapter 1, the band structure, with its elected chief and
council, budgets, and bureaucratic functions, was created by the federal
government in the 1950s and 1960s primarily as a tool for administering
Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) policy at the local level. Under the
Indian Act, the federal government speciWed the form that band govern-
ments would take, and, for administrative purposes, that form was spe-
ciWcally designed to mesh well with the DIA bureaucracy. Although the
advent of land claims negotiations led to an expansion of First Nations
governments (in both the number of personnel they employ and in the
scope of their responsibilities), it has not fundamentally changed the form
of First Nations government in the territory; indeed, the administration of
federal programs and the provision of local services are still among their
250 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country

principal functions. Kluane people are well aware of the colonial nature of
their contemporary political institutions. As KFN member Dennis Dickson
once put it, the government of KFN is “just a little DIA.”
The bureaucratization of First Nations governments has some ideologi-
cal as well as practical dimensions. Despite some recent exceptions, British
and Canadian courts have historically been quite unwilling to recognize
the possibility that precontact Aboriginal societies (especially northern
hunting societies) were “organized,” viewing them instead as “savages”
who lacked the social and political institutions necessary for governance.
Indeed, the fact that many First Nations peoples did not possess a govern-
ment in the European sense of the term was long used as a justiWcation
for denying them political rights to land and self-government (see Bell and
Asch 1997). Although Euro-Canadian lawyers and politicians are now will-
ing to relinquish some land and responsibility to First Nations peoples,
assumptions about their lack of political organization (and associated
inability to govern themselves) remain embedded in government policy
regarding land claims. The federal government will only deal with First
Nations on a government-to-government level. This means that to be seen
as legitimate participants in the land claims process, First Nations peoples
must possess European-style political institutions that Euro-Canadians
can recognize as constituting a government.
This is clearly evident in the terms of the Yukon Umbrella Final Agree-
ment. Despite its use of terms like “self-government,” the UFA contains
provisions ensuring that, with the signing of a Wnal agreement, the gov-
ernment of KFN will resemble in form the territorial and federal govern-
ments. While the UFA provides for the transfer of government powers to
Yukon First Nations, it also gives the federal government a role in devel-
oping First Nations constitutions and legal structures (Council for Yukon
Indians 1993: chap. 24). This virtually assures that First Nations govern-
ments will look like smaller versions of the federal and territorial govern-
ments. The UFA also gives the federal government a role in setting up the
process by which First Nations will ratify their Wnal agreements (Council
for Yukon Indians 1993: 12).
There are a number ways to interpret the federal government’s insistence
on having a role in designing First Nations systems of self-government
and the ratiWcation processes that bring them into being. Government
negotiators, for their part, maintain that these provisions are necessary
to ensure that negotiated agreements can withstand any future legal
challenges in Canadian courts. At the same time, however, such provi-
sions impose Euro-Canadian ideals of political organization on First Nations
peoples. The federal government’s concerns about the form of First Nations
governments under self-government agreements, then, might just as easily
be interpreted as the contemporary expression of an age-old unwillingness
 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country 251

to devolve land and political responsibility to a “bunch of savages”; that

is, the federal government may be willing to grant First Nations peoples
land and self-government but only so long as they prove themselves wor-
thy by setting up European-style governments. This may seem a cynical
view, but that this assumption underlay the government’s position was at
times quite apparent at the KFN land claims table. There, in the course of
negotiations, government negotiators frequently implied that, without
the inclusion of proper safeguards in the Kluane First Nation Final Agree-
ment, Kluane people would (like savages) engage in unrestrained or other-
wise unacceptable activities on their land. Kluane people were constantly
forced to counter these implications with assurances that they are capable
of governing their own land and people – that they would develop laws
and political institutions like those of the federal and territorial govern-
ments. As Joe Johnson argued in response to government negotiators’ un-
willingness to allow KFN to retain land in Kluane National Park (because
there is no telling what they would do on that land): “Many people think
that when First Nations people get land, they are going to go wild. That is
not true. KFN is a government. We will have our own laws and manage-
ment too” (emphasis added).
Initiated by the federal government and intensiWed by the land claims
process, the bureaucratization of Kluane society has led to changes in
Kluane people’s way of life that, paradoxically, have undermined some of
the very beliefs and practices that a land claims agreement is meant to
protect. I will examine these changes by looking at two of the most impor-
tant ways in which Kluane people’s involvement in land claims has
affected their daily lives. First, involvement in the land claims process has
removed many Kluane people from the land; second, it has dramatically
changed Kluane people’s relationship to one another, mostly due to the
inXux of land claims money into the village. I examine each of these phe-
nomena in turn.
The social impacts of the land claims process are especially pronounced
in a community as small as Burwash Landing because the sheer volume of
work related to land claims, combined with limited human resources, has
led to extremely high work loads for a sizable percentage of the commu-
nity. During my time in Burwash Landing, for example, there were be-
tween three and Wve KFN members employed full time purely to research
and negotiate land claims. In addition, most of the other employees of
KFN, from the chief to the renewable resources ofWcer, spent a signiWcant
portion of their time working on land claims-related issues as a regular
part of their job. Every summer, several students returning from universi-
ties in the south took jobs in the band ofWce, often directly related to land
claims. In addition, there were several other KFN members who, because
of their past experiences with land claims, were regularly hired by KFN on
252 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country

a contract basis to aid with research and negotiations. Finally, nearly all
negotiation sessions were held in Burwash, and elders and other commu-
nity members were encouraged to attend. This often meant sitting at the
negotiating table for three to Wve days at a stretch (during the fall of 1997
and the spring of 1998, the height of negotiating activity during my stay,
there was at least one such session each month). Clearly, this represents a
huge burden in terms of both time and labour in a village whose year-
round population consists of approximately forty adult KFN members.27
All of the time spent by Kluane people in the band ofWce or at seemingly
endless meetings in Whitehorse is time they did not spend out on the
land. Several of the people most involved with land claims in the commu-
nity expressed to me their regret that they cannot spend as much time out
on the land as they would like because of their responsibilities in the
ofWce. The fact that land claims have tied a sizable percentage of the KFN
population to the ofWce and prevented them from spending time out on
the land is contrary to the ideas underlying land claims in the Wrst place.
Many of the KFN members involved in land claims do, nevertheless,
continue to spend some time out on the land; they go out to hunt, Wsh, or
trap on weekends, holidays, and even in the evenings after work. But
because they can only do so for relatively short periods of time, they tend
to stay fairly near the village or the highway. The only times they can go
to more remote areas are during extended vacations, but this is only pos-
sible once or twice a year for perhaps a week or two at a time. Thus, their
land claims responsibilities affect not only the amount of time they spend
on the land but also where they spend it.
Land claims have also affected how Kluane people experience the time
they do spend out on the land. Joe Johnson, who, as I said, has been
involved in land claims since their beginning, told me once that when he
was young he had been bafXed by Euro-Canadians’ penchant for hiking
and picnicking. From the time he was a child until he became a young
man, he had lived on the land with his parents, grandparents, and uncles
for months at a time, returning to the village only at certain times of the
year. Neither he nor they had thought of their time in the bush as a vaca-
tion; they had not gone there to “get away from it all” or to relax. They
had simply lived there, and it had been a life that required skill and hard
work. This is not to say that their lives had consisted of nothing more than
a grim struggle to survive. On the contrary, they had participated in a rich
set of cultural practices that extended far beyond mere subsistence needs.
But they could not have survived without spending the majority of their
time in the bush. Their dependence on animals had necessitated not only
that they live on the land but also that they do so in a purposeful fashion.
They knew where to go from season to season to kill and gather what they
 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country 253

needed, and everywhere they had gone and everything they had done in
the bush had had a purpose.
Thus, though he grew up on the land and feels quite comfortable there,
Joe said that he had been unable to fathom the Whiteman’s desire to walk
around in the bush just for the sake of walking or their habit of packing up
a meal at home and taking it out onto the land just to eat it there before
returning home. Joe and those who had raised him had never walked any-
where in the bush except for a speciWc purpose, and, as he put it, “every
meal was a picnic.” He said that he had only come to understand the
desire to go on hikes and picnics once he himself had begun to work in an
ofWce. Since then, he has understood the need to go out into the bush for
walks or picnics just to get away from it all and to reconnect with the land.
Although many of those involved in land claims continue to participate in
subsistence activities, they no longer do so purely for subsistence; they
now do so for recreation as well. Like many Euro-Canadians, they must be
content to “visit” the bush as a break from life in the ofWce. The difference
in attitude between these two ways of relating to the land is profound.
Thus, involvement in land claims is altering not only the amount of time
KFN people spend on the land but also how they spend it.
All these effects are compounded by the fact that land claims in the
Yukon have been going on, at varying levels of intensity, since 1973. A
whole generation has grown up since land claims began. This means that
land claims have not only affected the way that Kluane people relate to
the land but they have also made it very difWcult for them to teach their
children the skills and values they need to live on the land. As Sharon
Kabanak, another member of KFN who is unsure about the value of land
claims, put it: “While people are in the band ofWce working on land claims
and that, where do you think their kids are? They’re at home watching TV.”
Parents and children have both expressed to me their concerns about
this, claiming that they have not had the opportunity to spend much time
out in the bush with one another teaching/learning how to live on the
land because parents have been too busy with land claims. Those of the
younger generation have grown up with land claims. Many have had
to learn to function in a world of bureaucracy, scientiWc management, and
Canadian legal practices. Some have done so to the exclusion (or nearly
so) of learning the skills of their parents and grandparents, and many
of them feel more comfortable in the context of ofWces, conferences, and
negotiating tables than they do in the bush. Everyone in the village is
aware of this dilemma. They are concerned not only for the young people
who lack the knowledge and experiences that they feel are important
but also for future generations who will have fewer teachers. And, as I
indicated above, this is unlikely to change with the ratiWcation of a Wnal
254 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country

agreement since implementing it will probably require more time and

labour than negotiating it.
Although KFN will gain signiWcant powers from a Wnal agreement, KFN
members will be faced with the task of developing and enforcing their
own laws, administering their own settlement lands and a host of social
programs, as well as sitting on a whole array of different boards and com-
mittees to manage land, water, wildlife, heritage, and so on – both in their
traditional territory and on a Yukon-wide basis. Judging from the experi-
ences of other Yukon First Nations, implementing a Wnal agreement will
indeed require even more time and people than negotiating one. This
seems to be the case throughout Canada, wherever First Nations peoples
have signed modern land claims agreements. Harvey Feit (1989: 96), for
example, writing about the effects of the James Bay and Northern Quebec
Agreement (this agreement, signed in 1975, was the Wrst modern compre-
hensive land claims agreement in Canada), has noted that the number of
Cree people working in administrative positions increased from approxi-
mately thirty before the agreement went into effect to about 300 by 1989.
I do not mean to imply that KFN members’ involvement in land claims
is the only thing keeping them off the land. Indeed, in Chapter 1, I
described a number of other historical processes that, over the past Wfty
years, have contributed to this. At the same time, however, it would be a
mistake to underestimate the impact of the land claims process in this
regard. Not only has KFN’s involvement in the land claims process worked
to keep people physically off the land and changed the way they relate to
it when they are on it, it has also changed the way that Kluane people
relate to one another and to the people of other First Nations. These
changes, in turn, affect many of the beliefs and values that themselves
form an integral part of Kluane people’s relationships with the land and
animals. One of the most signiWcant changes in the way that Kluane peo-
ple relate to one another has to do with the increasing importance of
money in the village.
Money was certainly present in the village well before the start of land
claims in the early 1970s, but its introduction into the region was rela-
tively recent. It is difWcult to say exactly when money was Wrst used in the
area, but the early years of the fur trade were clearly dominated by barter.
I heard several stories recounting the Wrst time that Copper Joe, one of the
founders of Burwash Landing (one of whose daughters was still alive and
residing in the village during the period of my Weldwork), saw money.
According to these stories, this occurred when he was a young man,
towards the end of the nineteenth century. Copper Joe and some other
hunters came across a group of Whitemen who had wanted meat. In
exchange, they had given Copper Joe and his companions Xour, tea, and
some coins. These stories are usually quite humorous; their tellers elicit
 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country 255

much laughter as they elaborate on Copper Joe’s efforts to Wgure out what
these little round pieces of metal might be useful for. Interestingly, in
every version of this story that I have heard, the meeting described was the
Wrst time that Copper Joe and his companions had ever seen a White per-
son in the Xesh; it was also the Wrst time that they had seen horses or
tasted bannock or tea with sugar. Regardless of the historical accuracy of
the details of this story or its exact timing, it is signiWcant, I think, that
money Wgures so prominently in this tale of Wrst contact.
To this day, Kluane people associate money, along with the power and
greed that accompany it, with the “Whiteman.” Several people in the vil-
lage told me that it is the Whiteman’s love of money that most distinguishes

Copper Joe and Gene Jacquot, date unknown.

256 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country

him from the Indian. They contrasted their own relationship with the
land, based on mutual respect and reciprocity, with Euro-Canadians’ ten-
dency to see in land only a potential for making money. They made it
very clear that the use of money in itself removes one from the land; both
the making and the spending of money allow one to live without having
to participate in a proper relationship with the land and animals upon
which people ultimately depend. Several people expressed their belief that
there will come a time, perhaps in the not too distant future, when money
will lose all its value; it will be “just paper.” When this happens, the only
way that people will be able to survive is by living off the land, and the
only people who will make it are First Nations people and those few Euro-
Canadians “who learn to live like Indians.” The rest will either die or have
to move south.
The days of Copper Joe’s Wrst encounter with money are long past. Grad-
ually, the use of currency replaced barter. People became more dependent
on money to purchase food and needed manufactured goods. Until the
1950s, however, Kluane people continued to live a subsistence way of life
organized primarily around hunting, Wshing, and trapping. The money
that they did make came directly from activities on the land, from the sale
of fur or seasonal work as hunting guides, woodcutters, or day labourers
for the highway (see Coates 1991: 65, 67-69). For a number of reasons
(see Chapter 1) Kluane people had more or less settled permanently in the
village by the mid-1960s. Their patterns of land use changed dramatically
as newly introduced technologies, such as the snowmobile, made it possi-
ble for them to hunt far from the village for relatively short periods of
time. Use of these technologies further increased their dependency on
money. Gradually, people began to make use of government programs,
such as welfare and the family allowance, to make up the extra cash they
needed for their new way of life (Coates 1991: 196-97). By the time land
claims began in 1973, then, KFN people were already dependent on a cash
economy. But, although land claims did not create this dependency,
according to many people in the village it did radically change people’s
attitudes towards, and relationship with, money.
In part, this is the result of a massive increase in the amount of money
circulating in the village as a direct result of the land claims process. By all
accounts, money was relatively scarce in the village before 1973. People
earned what little money they needed from trapping, seasonal wage
labour, and government payments, and much of it was funnelled back
into the subsistence economy. This began to change throughout the
Yukon in 1973. In that year, the newly formed Yukon Native Brotherhood
received $360,000 in government funding to begin negotiating land
claims in the territory (Coates 1991: 238). As land claims picked up speed,
the amount of money channelled into the process increased dramatically.
 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country 257

By the spring of 1998, KFN alone had received nearly Wve million dollars
in loans over the course of negotiating its Wnal agreement (to be repaid out
of compensation dollars upon the signing of the agreement).28 This money
was used to pay the salaries of KFN staff and lawyers; it covered adminis-
trative and equipment costs as well as the cost of negotiations, travel, edu-
cation, elders payments, and honoraria for attendance at land claims
meetings. A signiWcant portion of this money was spent in the village, sig-
niWcantly increasing the amount of money in circulation there.
The rapid inXux of money into the community as a result of land claims
has had a number of very signiWcant effects on social life in Burwash Land-
ing. Among the most important of these results stems from the fact that
land claims money has entered the village unevenly. Because of differ-
ences in education, interests, and lifestyle, not everyone has participated
to the same degree in the land claims process. As a result, they have not
had equal access to land claims money. According to many people with
whom I spoke, however, this was not always the case. They told me that,
in the early years of land claims, everyone in the community was involved
in the process. Attendance at community meetings was high (they speak
of packed rooms at every meeting), and everyone who was present partic-
ipated. In those early years, no one was paid to attend the meetings; they
participated because they felt it was important and that it was their duty
as community members to be involved. Gradually, however, more and
more money began to creep into the process. With the involvement of
lawyers and other “experts,” the language of land claims became more
rareWed; gradually people began to discuss land claims in language regu-
larly used by lawyers, economists, biologists, and politicians rather than
that spoken by hunters and trappers. These outside experts were paid large
salaries for their participation in the process. As described above, First
Nations people, if they were to engage in a dialogue with these experts,
needed to educate themselves (in school or in First Nations ofWces), orga-
nize into bureaucracies compatible with those of government, and work
full time in ofWces. Not only did this keep people off the land but it also
required a great deal of money. To the credit of both Yukon First Nations
peoples and the federal government, First Nations peoples were quite suc-
cessful at getting the federal government to grant them the necessary
funds to enable the process to go forward.
But not everyone in the community continues to participate equally in
the land claims process. Those without the necessary kind of education
and/or those who refused to spend their days in an ofWce gradually partic-
ipated less and less. With each passing year, they understood less of what
they heard at land claims meetings and negotiation sessions, until at last
they stopped coming altogether. Those in the ofWce who continued to work
on land claims grew concerned about the lack of community involvement,
258 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country

so they began to offer KFN members honoraria (which have become quite
signiWcant) for their attendance at meetings. Today, although many peo-
ple attend land claims meetings, most do not participate very much. Sev-
eral told me that they only understand a little of what is discussed at these
meetings but that they attend because they need the money.
The division of the population into those who are involved in the land
claims process and beneWt monetarily from it and those who do not has
led to increasing social stratiWcation in the community. Although there
are other opportunities for making money in the village, most of these are
seasonal. As noted above, the majority of KFN members who have steady
full-time work spend at least some of their time working on land claims.
Thus, there is a growing sense that land claims are beneWtting some KFN
members at the expense of others. This was most apparent in discussions
with some of those who do not participate in land claims at all. Most of
these people are clearly disillusioned with the entire process, and a few
harbour deep resentment towards those who work in the First Nations
ofWce. Some people complained to me that land claims are just a form of
“fancy welfare” for educated KFN members who sit around in the ofWce all
day doing nothing.29 Others complained that land claims are dividing the
community into “bush Indians” (those who continue to participate in
subsistence activities) and “city Indians” (those who are comfortable with
the ways of Euro-Canadians and who never learned and/or are not inter-
ested in learning how to live on the land). This sentiment is compounded
by the fact, mentioned above, that many people in the village do not
understand land claims. Some of these people worry that those who are
negotiating for them are looking after their own personal interests rather
than the good of the community. They fear that when the Wnal agreement
is Wnally signed things will get even worse, that “only educated people will
get jobs.” People in the KFN ofWce are aware of the widening gulf between
the government of KFN and some of its people. They make efforts to
include KFN members in the process, such as holding regular information
meetings that members are paid to attend. However, some KFN members
are so disgusted with the land claims process that they refuse to set foot in
the First Nations ofWce and will not attend land claims meetings – whether
they are paid or not.
But the distinction between bush Indians and city Indians, between
those who beneWt from the land claims process and those who do not, is
not as clear-cut as some people make it out to be. For one thing, people do
not always fall cleanly into one group or the other. The composition of the
group involved in land claims has been far from constant over the years.
Some of those who used to participate in the process have lost interest,
become disillusioned, or died, while others have become involved only
relatively recently. Still others have participated intermittently throughout
 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country 259

the process. This, in combination with the relatively large proportion of

the overall population that is working on land claims at any one time,
means that most people in the village, including some of the land claims’
harshest critics, have worked on them in some capacity at one time or
another over the past thirty years. Also, as has been noted, many of those
involved in land claims do continue to spend some time out on the land
hunting and Wshing (though perhaps not as much as they would like), and
many of those not employed full time in negotiating land claims do occa-
sionally beneWt directly from them in the form of short-term contracts
and/or honoraria.
Second, nearly everyone in the community beneWts indirectly from the
inXux of land claims money. As Harvey Feit (1991) and Colin Scott (1984)
have noted for the Cree, sharing and customary exchange can hinder the
process of social stratiWcation that arises as a result of unequal employ-
ment in northern First Nations communities. We saw in Chapter 2 that
Kluane people are embedded in a mixed economy; they continue to share
meat, money, and equipment with one another, especially with family
members. Participation in land claims cuts across family lines, so each
family in the village has some members who are involved in the process
and some who are not. This means that land claims money and the equip-
ment purchased with it, much like meat and other subsistence products,
are redistributed throughout the community. Thus, sharing partially off-
sets the social effects of unequal participation in the land claims process.
Another result of the inXux of land claims money into the community
has to do with KFN’s practice of paying its members to participate in the
land claims process. Most Kluane people do not object, in theory, to the
idea of paying people for their participation. After all, the lawyers and
experts employed by the government are paid well to sit across the table
from KFN negotiators. If community members, as the local experts, are to
be expected to give up large amounts of their time, then it is considered
only fair that they too be compensated. Some in the community, however,
feel that many now attend meetings only for the money; they neither
actively participate nor feel any sense of personal responsibility for the
process. The real problem, according to some, is that this attitude has
spilled over into other aspects of village life. The expectation of payment
has become so all-pervasive, they claim, that some people will not do any-
thing for the others in the village unless they are paid. This includes tak-
ing children out on the land and teaching them the things that they
themselves feel are so important (I also heard stories of young people who
refused to go out and learn these things unless they were paid).
This probably has much to do with the place of such activities in the vil-
lage today. Teaching young people how to live in the bush used to be a
matter of course for elders; they merely had to bring them along as they
260 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country

engaged in the activities of everyday life. Children, for their part, have
always been expected to contribute to the community at the same time
that they learned to become a part of it. They split wood and packed water
for elders in exchange for stories and other types of knowledge, and the
more they learned, the more they were able to contribute (in wood, meat,
fur, moose hides, clothing). Young people knew enough, by a very early
age, to be genuine assets in the bush. Now, however, partially as a result of
land claims, teaching young people (especially by telling them stories or
taking them out on the land) usually involves a special effort, a departure
from everyday routines. Frequently such activity must be carried out dur-
ing people’s time off from work or school, during weekends and holidays.
Although many older people do spend a signiWcant part of their time off
out in the bush, they are often reluctant to take young people out with
them. This is because they regard many of the young people in the village
as more of a burden than an asset, and they want to make the most of the
short time available to them. As a result, they expect to be paid if they are
going to take them along. Young people (though not the very young), too,
see activity in the bush as a special effort removed from everyday life. Life
in the bush entails a great deal of hard work, made even harder by their
lack of experience. Furthermore, this hard work appears to some to be
completely unrelated to their lives. Thus, they too often want to be paid
to do it.
Several Kluane people told me that they feel it is wrong for community
members to expect to be paid for these activities. This is not merely
because there is not enough money to continue to pay them (though this
sentiment is also expressed); rather, it is because it is older people’s respon-
sibility to pass on their culture and young people’s responsibility to learn
it. They feel very uneasy about the fact that a price tag is now being placed
on what should be a natural part of their lives. Most people who spoke to
me about this problem attributed it to the advent of land claims and the
money it has brought to the village.

Conclusion: KFN Land Claims

My point in this chapter is not to argue that Kluane people are becoming
“just like Whitemen” by adopting Euro-Canadian notions of property and
their attendant social institutions. Although change is clearly occurring, it
is not a simple matter of transition from Aboriginal to Euro-American forms.
Nor would I maintain that Kluane people are using their Aboriginal ideas
about the land and animals to “resist” the imposition of Euro-American
beliefs and practices; rather, the discourse and practices associated with
European notions of property now coexist in Kluane society (however
uneasily) alongside discourse and practices whose roots lie in a very differ-
ent set of cultural assumptions. Kluane people are – to varying degrees –
 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country 261

conversant in the language of both conceptual systems. As I showed in my

discussion of hunting rights, Kluane people can and do draw on elements
from either conceptual/discursive system, depending on their particular
agendas and the larger social context. The introduction of Euro-American
notions of property – and the social relations and practices they engender
– has provided Kluane people with an alternative moral and conceptual
framework in which to evaluate one another’s values and behaviours, thus
opening up a new cultural space for the renegotiation of how people
should think and act towards the land and animals. Whatever the result of
this process at the local level, it is clear that the way in which First Nations
peoples express their claims to land has important political consequences
at the level of their relations with the federal and territorial governments.
Yukon First Nations peoples (and many Euro-Canadians as well) see
the Yukon land claims process ideally as a mechanism for integrating First
Nations peoples more fully (and fairly) into the Canadian state while – at
the same time – allowing them to preserve their own distinctive identity
and way of life (see Yukon Native Brotherhood 1973). In this chapter I
have tried to show that, regardless of the actual terms of a land claims
agreement, the very idea of such an agreement, conceived and expressed
as it is in the language of property, would have been inconceivable (or
at least utterly objectionable) to the ancestors of Kluane people. Just to
engage in the dialogue of land claims, then, Kluane people have had to
learn a very different way of thinking about land and animals, a way of
thinking that, to this day, many Kluane people regard with disapproval. In
addition, the process of negotiating a land claims agreement has helped
transform the very way of life that the agreement is supposed to preserve.
Despite these difWculties, many First Nations people have put aside their
discomfort with the idea of “owning” land and animals, electing to par-
ticipate in the land claims process because they see it as the only realistic
chance they have to preserve their way of life against increasing encroach-
ment by Euro-Canadians. To do so, however, they have been forced to
express their interests and way of life in the language of property, a process
plagued by problems of cultural translation and riddled with politics. To
engage the government in a dialogue about land claims, First Nations peo-
ples have had to create and operate within bureaucratic structures that
mirror those of the governments with whom they must negotiate. One
effect of this has been that a large percentage of the population has been
kept off the land for an extended period. This trend will only intensify
when an agreement is actually signed and implemented. In addition, the
inXux of the relatively huge amounts of money necessary to negotiate the
claim (and to keep those bureaucratic structures up and running) have
worked to partially undermine the egalitarian values of the community –
values that have long informed Kluane people’s relationships not only with
262 Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country

one another but also with the land and animals. First Nations peoples’
strategy of expressing their claims in the language of property – though it
might indeed be the only realistic way for them to protect their own inter-
ests – helps to obscure the fact that there are other ways to conceive of the
relationships between humans and land/animals. By agreeing to play the
land claims game on terms set by the government, First Nations peoples
and their allies help to assure that property remains a hegemonic discourse
in the arena of Aboriginal-state relations.
I do not mean to imply that land claims are an unmitigated disaster for
First Nations peoples nor that they should abandon the process altogether;
indeed, it may well be that the land claims process is First Nations peoples’
best hope for protecting their interests within the context of their incor-
poration into the Canadian state. What I have attempted to do is to draw
attention to some of the unintended – and largely unexamined – conse-
quences of First Nations peoples’ involvement in the land claims process.
I have shown that the very act of accepting the ideological and social
terms of the debate as a prerequisite for engaging the government in a
dialogue about land claims has led to dramatic changes in how Kluane
people relate to the land and one another. Change is not a new thing in
the Canadian Subarctic, and the members of KFN may ultimately decide
that the beneWts of land claims are worth the changes to their way of life
that they entail. Or they may decide that, without a Wnal agreement, their
way of life will change even more dramatically. It should be up to them to
decide. But it is important to keep in mind that, despite the rhetoric sur-
rounding it, the land claims process will not allow Kluane people to “pre-
serve” their way of life; instead, it will signiWcantly alter how they relate to
one another and the land, as, indeed, it already has. No one is more aware
of this than Kluane people themselves. Even people like Joe Johnson, who
has put a great deal of his life’s effort into reaching an agreement between
KFN and the government, sometimes express uncertainty and doubt about
whether, in the end, such an agreement will be worth everything Kluane
people have had to give up for it.
Conclusion

In Hunters and Bureaucrats I have sought to complicate an overly simplistic

view of Aboriginal-state relations. While there are some compelling rea-
sons for describing these relations as colonialist in nature, characterized by
overt exploitation and dependency, proponents of this view (see Chapter
1) have largely failed to address the subtle complexities of actual interac-
tions between Aboriginal peoples and the various agents of the states that
encompass them. In an attempt to remedy this, I have followed the lead
of Harvey Feit (1979, 1982, 1991), Steve Langdon (1986), Colin Scott
(1984, 1988), and others who have focused on land claims and wildlife
management as the principal contemporary mechanisms of articulation
between northern Aboriginal peoples and the state. Rather than focusing
on co-management regimes or land claims agreements at an institutional
level, however, I have examined the processes themselves: the assump-
tions underlying them, the social context in which they are embedded,
and the consequences for Aboriginal peoples of engaging in them at all.
This has forced me to grapple with the question of power.
Many people – scholars, government ofWcials, and First Nations peo-
ple alike – see First Nations peoples’ participation in land claims and co-
management as potentially empowering. I have shown, however, that
these processes may well be having the opposite effect. Land claims nego-
tiations and co-management are inherently biased because they force Klu-
ane people to speak and act in uncharacteristic ways. By framing debates
over land and animals in the Euro-North American languages of biology
and property relations, these processes put most Kluane people at an auto-
matic disadvantage when dealing with government biologists and lawyers.
And by forcing Kluane people to bureaucratize their society and to spend
their days in an ofWce rather than out on the land, these processes serve to
undermine the very social relations, practices, beliefs, and values that Klu-
ane people hope to preserve through co-management and land claims in
the Wrst place.
264 Conclusion

In my analysis of co-management and land claims negotiations in the

Kluane area, I examined the hidden political dimensions of these pro-
cesses primarily through an exploration of what Foucault (1980) refers to
as “power/knowledge.” In the process, I made two slightly different but
interrelated arguments. First, the production of knowledge is an inher-
ently political process. I demonstrated this by examining speciWc cases in
which Kluane people, government ofWcials, and others attempted to pro-
duce, legitimate, and use knowledge in their struggles with one another
over land and animals. Second, the larger political context in which
knowledge is produced and legitimated has a direct effect on this process
by placing constraints on what can qualify as knowledge and the uses to
which that knowledge can be put. In other words, struggles over knowl-
edge are not waged on an even Weld; rather, the terms under which such
struggles take place tend to favour certain conceptions of knowledge over
others. In the Yukon, environmental knowledge is produced and used in
the context of state power and bureaucratic management. Although peo-
ple in the Yukon are free to construct and produce knowledge according to
whatever cultural criteria they wish, if they want to see that knowledge
actually used in co-management and land claims negotiations, it must
conform to those criteria speciWcally sanctioned by state power.
To be sure, power does not reside only in the production and use of
knowledge, nor can politics be seen as merely the context in which knowl-
edge is produced and used. State actors can exert their power in many
ways, some of which are far more overt and coercive than controlling the
production and use of knowledge. Often, however, it is not so easy to draw
a sharp distinction between coercive and non-coercive manifestations of
state power. The state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force, for exam-
ple, is implicit in the seemingly cooperative and “enlightened” processes
of co-management and land claims negotiations. Although government
ofWcials never use – nor even explicitly refer to the use of – force in these
processes, the coercive power of the state forms the backdrop against
which they occur. First Nations peoples are compelled to participate in
land claims and co-management because, if they do not, the state will
continue to manage wildlife and alienate First Nations lands without the
consent of First Nations peoples – as they did prior to the advent of land
claims and co-management. As we saw in Chapter 1, such actions were
historically backed up by law and enforced by agents of the state, regard-
less of any opposition by First Nations peoples. Faced with this alternative,
it is not surprising that Kluane people have chosen to participate in land
claims negotiations and co-management, Xawed though these processes
may be. As a result, they have little choice but to engage government biol-
ogists and lawyers on terms dictated by the state; that is, they must play
by the rules of state wildlife management and property law – and to do so,
 Conclusion 265

they must bureaucratize their societies and learn to live and function with
all that implies. Thus, the production and use of knowledge as well as the
political context that plays such an important role in legitimating that
knowledge can only be understood in relation to the coercive power of
state actors.
To illustrate the interplay between power/knowledge and other forms
of state power, it is useful to take a second look at one of the examples I
presented in Chapter 3: Kluane people’s objections to the full curl rule. As
we saw, the knowledge of Kluane people and government ofWcials was not
completely incommensurable. There were numerous instances in which
Kluane people were able to express to government ofWcials their disagree-
ment with government positions in a way that the latter could (poten-
tially) understand. The case of the full curl rule was one of these; some
biologists understood Kluane people’s justiWcation for opposing the full
curl rule. As a result, one might argue that things could have turned out
differently. A different conWguration of political interests at the committee
level, for instance, might have led the Ruby Range Sheep Steering Com-
mittee to develop a different set of recommendations (e.g., biologists
might have been overruled, and the RRSSC might have recommended that
the full curl rule be replaced by a quota system). Or else biologists and
outWtters might have accepted Kluane people’s arguments against the full
curl rule and forwarded a recommendation to that effect (in the absence of
scientiWc evidence), only to have it rejected by the minister of renewable
resources. Either case would indicate that “knowledge,” regardless of how
it is produced or legitimated, had very little to do with the decision about
how to manage sheep after all, and that it had been a case of coercive
power, pure and simple.
The chances of either of these hypothetical cases having occurred, how-
ever, are virtually nil. Let us consider Wrst the hypothetical scenario in
which biologists would be overruled by a coalition of Kluane people and
outWtters, with the RRSSC recommending a switch from the full curl rule
to a quota system – a recommendation that would then be accepted by
the minister and implemented. In such a case, political forces within the
RRSSC would have been enough to overwhelm biologists, in spite of the
fact that their knowledge about sheep was backed by the state. The prob-
lem with this scenario is that it is pure Wction; there was never any chance
whatsoever of such an outcome. Aside from the fact that an alliance be-
tween Kluane people and outWtters over this issue was extremely unlikely
(outWtters would never have supported a quota system), the RRSSC was
set up so as to make such an outcome impossible. The RRSSC could only
make recommendations that were supported unanimously by the entire
committee. As a result, even a lone biologist could have vetoed such a
recommendation.
266 Conclusion

It is no accident that the RRSSC was set up this way. We have seen that
the veto (by virtue of the fact that it favours inaction over action) worked
against First Nations people on the committee (who favoured an immedi-
ate and sweeping response to what they viewed as a crisis). Had the situa-
tion been the reverse, however, with the government rather than the First
Nations advocating swift action, it is unlikely that a multi-stakeholder
body of this nature would have been established. One only has to con-
sider some of the other wildlife management initiatives going on in the
Kluane area at the same time to see that this was the case. One such ini-
tiative was the Aishihik-Kluane Caribou Recovery Program, which, among
other things, entailed the killing and sterilization of wolves in an effort
to bring back the caribou population. The Yukon government was very
much in favour of this program, which, needless to say, required swift
and drastic (not to mention controversial) action. This process was not run
by a multi-stakeholder committee that could only act when its members
were in unanimous agreement. It could not have been, since there were
many stake-holders in the territory (especially environmentalists) who were
adamantly opposed to the wolf kill. Although the Yukon government took
pains to make sure it had the support of the local First Nations, the process
bore little resemblance to the RRSSC. In fact, in early 1996, when govern-
ment biologists were poised and ready to begin the sterilization of wolves,
many Kluane people complained that they had not even been kept
informed about this new development, much less been consulted or given
a veto.1
Nor would the minister of renewable resources likely have accepted a
recommendation to switch to a quota system even if the RRSSC (minus
biologists) had somehow managed to make such a recommendation. The
government would have had to justify such a position to the powerful
outWtting lobby in the Yukon. And in any confrontation over this issue,
the already-powerful outWtters would have had the backing of biologists
and all the legitimacy that implies; while the government, having ignored
the advice of its own biologists, would have had only First Nations peo-
ples’ view of animals as non-human persons to justify their actions. The
outWtters, with science backing up their claims and the power to make
themselves heard, would have made the government look ridiculous.
The second hypothetical involves the biologists, in their understanding
of and sensitivity to Kluane people’s views of sheep, agreeing with them
and backing a recommendation to switch to a quota system, only to have
this recommendation rejected by government. This type of scenario is
certainly common enough. Biologists are among the Wrst to complain
that policy decisions often have very little to do with scientiWc knowl-
edge; they point out that politicians often disregard their advice and make
 Conclusion 267

decisions based on political interests rather than on science. In fact, we

need look no further than the case of the RRSSC to Wnd evidence of this.
As we saw in Chapter 5, biologists, Kluane people, outWtters, and environ-
mentalists were able to reach a consensus on a whole range of issues; and
in March 1997 the RRSSC submitted to the Fish and Wildlife Management
Board a whole series of recommendations on education, predation, the
use of ATVs and airplanes, and so on. As of the spring of 1998 only one of
these recommendations had been acted upon. The others, despite the fact
that they had been supported by all members of the RRSSC, were simply
never implemented. Clearly, broader political concerns can shape wildlife
management policy in ways that have nothing to do with the production
and legitimation of knowledge in contexts like the RRSSC.
That said, however, it is extremely unlikely that it would ever have
reached that point. Biologists on the RRSSC simply could not support the
switch to a quota system based solely on Kluane people’s arguments,
regardless of how well they understood them or how personally sympa-
thetic they might have been. As we saw in Chapter 5, biologists have to be
able to justify (with scientiWc evidence) the positions they take on wildlife
management. They must be able to answer the criticisms of other biolo-
gists employed by those with competing political interests. For them to
take a position that they could not defend in this way would be viewed
as irresponsible. This could jeopardize not only the management process
but also their jobs. We saw in Chapter 4 that biologists did examine the
scientiWc literature that had a bearing on the issue of the full curl rule
but that they were unable to Wnd any evidence against its use. Had they
gone ahead and recommended the switch to a quota system anyway, they
would certainly have been criticized by the outWtters for being biased and
unscientiWc. They would have been utterly unable to defend themselves
from these charges, their reputation as scientists would have been dam-
aged, and they might conceivably even have lost their jobs. And all of this
would have been for naught since, without incontrovertible scientiWc
proof showing that the full curl rule was damaging the sheep populations,
the government could not have implemented such a recommendation
anyway. Supporting Kluane people’s position regarding the full curl rule in
the absence of scientiWc evidence simply was not an option for biologists
on the RRSSC.
One could deal similarly with other hypothetical scenarios from the
material presented in Hunters and Bureaucrats. The point of this book is
not that power is simply a matter of the ability to constrain and inXuence
the production and legitimation of knowledge. There are, indeed, other
manifestation of power, such as the ability to use (and legitimize the use
of) force. What I do wish to argue, however, is that power/knowledge is
268 Conclusion

intimately tied to these other more overtly coercive forms of power. It is

easy to overstate the degree to which the dominant language (to return to
the discussion of Bourdieu in the introduction) can, by itself, silence other
ways of speaking. Just as non-ofWcial dialects and languages continue to
exist in supposedly linguistically homogeneous nation-states, so other
ways of talking (and thinking) about land and animals continue to exist
in the Canadian North. Despite their lack of connections to state power,
there are times when these other ways of talking can be heard loud and
clear. But being heard (and even understood) is not enough because, with-
out the necessary links to state power, these alternate forms of talking/
knowing cannot form the basis of legitimate action.
Several of those who read early drafts of this book expressed frustration
that I make no effort to suggest alternative approaches to wildlife man-
agement and land claims. Quite justiWably, they wanted some practical
and constructive solutions to the problems I identify. In fact, at several
points, I do suggest some possible solutions to these problems (e.g., in Chap-
ter 3, I advocate devolving the power to make decisions – as opposed to
recommendations – about wildlife management from centralized bureau-
cracies to local First Nations). Unfortunately, however, such solutions do
not strike most readers as particularly practical or constructive. This is
because, in the current political context, they would be difWcult – if not
impossible – to implement. Since the problems I identify are located
in the very structure of institutionalized wildlife management and land
claims negotiations, and the assumptions underlying them (e.g., knowl-
edge and property), simple (or even not-so-simple) changes in policy are
unlikely to be effective. Solutions to such problems require a radical re-
thinking and restructuring of Aboriginal-state relations.
This is precisely the situation Eric Wolf (1990) describes in his discussion
of tactical and structural forms of power. The bureaucratic context of land
claims negotiations and co-management makes certain types of behav-
iour possible and others impossible – and sometimes even unthinkable.
Biologists, lawyers, and other government bureaucrats, by virtue of their
Xuency in the “ofWcial” languages of wildlife management and property
rights as well as their positions within state bureaucracy, can generally
exercise tactical power much more effectively than can First Nations peo-
ples. Even when Kluane people succeed in making their concerns under-
stood and advocate speciWc solutions, these solutions are seldom adopted
because government bureaucrats view them as impossible to implement
(and, in the contemporary bureaucratic context, they are correct). But the
fact that Kluane people’s concerns about land and animals must be dealt
with in a bureaucratic context at all is a function of what Wolf refers to as
structural power. Given the realities of state power and the bureaucratic
 Conclusion 269

nature of government in Canada, it is difWcult – even for the critical

anthropologist – to imagine some alternate (and non-bureaucratic) way of
giving Kluane people a role in the management of their own land and
resources. In theory, one could certainly suggest all manner of hypotheti-
cal alternatives, but – in the contemporary context – these seem com-
pletely unrealistic, with no grounding whatsoever in social reality. Thus, it
is difWcult for Kluane people even to see, much less to question or protest,
this exercise of structural power. As Wolf points out, structural power –
that which governs the context of human interactions – is necessarily
invisible to those who think about power in interactional terms.
The focus on power – especially structural power – has enabled me to
view the current restructuring of Aboriginal-state relations through land
claims and co-management as part of a new phase in the ongoing process
of state formation in Canada. The illusion of the state that emerges in
part from the day-to-day interactions between First Nations people and
government agents in such processes serves primarily to conceal and legit-
imate the exercise of bureaucratic power. As part of the process of state
formation, then, co-management and land claims may well be, as Abrams
(1988: 77) put it, helping to “conceal[...] the real history and relations
of subjection behind an ahistorical mask of legitimating illusion,” rather
than automatically leading to a more equitable relationship between First
Nations peoples and an entity known as the Canadian state.
This is not to say that Kluane people and other First Nations peoples are
helpless before the irresistible power of state actors. Indeed, the processes
of co-management and land claims are themselves (at least in part) reac-
tions to the growth of First Nations power in Canada. No longer can the
government implement overtly assimilationist policies. Processes like co-
management and land claims, then, must be understood precisely in rela-
tion to the growing power of Canadian First Nations. This increase in First
Nations power has led to a reconWguring of the forms in which state
power can be exercised. In general, it has caused the exercise of state
power to become far more subtle than it was even thirty years ago.
In Hunters and Bureaucrats I have focused on some of the subtle (non-
coercive) forms in which state power, both tactical and structural, is exer-
cised in the Southwest Yukon. Most of these are related to what Foucault
called power/knowledge; though they are backed up by the (implicit)
threat of the use of force by agents of the state. This focus on power has
forced me to look at some of the changes in the organization and func-
tioning of the state itself. I do not claim to have written a comprehensive
ethnography of the state – which, given the size and complexity of the
modern nation-state, is impossible – but simply to have made a contribu-
tion to an ethnographic understanding of the state by looking at how
270 Conclusion

state power – which is extremely diffuse – is exercised and experienced

through everyday practice. By exploring the ways in which state power
manifests itself (and, in a very real sense, “is created”) through bureau-
cratic practices like co-management and land claims negotiations, I hope
to have dispelled the notion that such processes are necessarily empower-
ing First Nations peoples vis-à-vis a monolithic state. Indeed, I have shown
that they must themselves be understood as aspects of contemporary state
formation in Canada.
 Notes

Introduction
1 For those unfamiliar with the Canadian context, “First Nations” is the accepted term
for referring both to Aboriginal peoples and to their governments. It was adopted in
acknowledgment of Aboriginal peoples’ role in the founding of Canada, along with the
“immigrant” English and French nations. “First Nation” has now largely replaced “band,”
an administrative term long used by Canada’s Department of Indian Affairs.
2 Examples of this include Kluane people’s objections to the full curl rule (Chapter 3), their
disagreement about what constitutes “research” (Chapter 5), and Joe Johnson and his
grandmother’s misgivings about “property” (Chapter 6), to name just a few.
3 These conclusions resemble those drawn by Evans-Pritchard (1937), Lévy-Bruhl (1973a, b)
and those inXuenced by them (e.g., the Annales School), who argue that different systems
of knowledge are embedded in their own speciWc cultural contexts and that each pos-
sesses its own internal logic and rationality.
4 A status Indian is a person enrolled under Canada’s Indian Act.
5 Mount Logan lies approximately 75 miles (120 kilometres) southwest of Burwash Land-
ing. At 19,550 feet (5,959 metres), it is the highest mountain in Canada.
6 See Nelson (1983) for an extensive and detailed description of wildlife in the western Sub-
arctic – from the perspective of the Koyukon people of Interior Alaska.
7 All climate data is based on climate normals at Burwash Landing weather station for the
period from 1966 to 1990. I obtained this data from Environment Canada’s Web site at
<http://www.cmc.ec.gc.ca/climate/normals/YTB002.HTM>.
8 The Southern Tutchone language is a member of the far-Xung northern Athapaskan lan-
guage family, whose speakers can be found from the interior of western Alaska through
the Yukon and eastward as far as the shores of Hudson Bay and south into northern
British Columbia and Alberta. Closely related southern Athapaskan languages include
Navajo and Apache as well as several smaller languages along the PaciWc coast.
9 Among their relatives in the Yukon are members the Southern Tutchone Champagne and
Aishihik and Ta’an Kwach’an First Nations as well as members of the Northern Tutchone
Selkirk First Nation and the Upper Tanana White River First Nation. Their relatives in
Alaska include the Upper Tanana inhabitants of Copper Center and Chisana regions to
the northwest and the Tlingit to the south.
10 These include Thomas Dickson and the Jacquot brothers. Dickson was an ex-RCMP ofW-
cer originally from Ontario, who settled in the area with Louise, his Tlingit/Tagish wife,
around the turn of the twentieth century. Eugene and Louis Jacquot came from France
and established the fur trading post at Burwash Landing. The Jacquot brothers both mar-
ried local women (Eugene married Ruth “Pete” Dickson, daughter of Thomas and Louise,
and Louis married Mary, the daughter of Copper Joe, an important local man whose
father had come from Copper Center in Alaska).
11 Out of the approximately 150 members of the Kluane First Nation, only about seventy
live in Burwash Landing. Many have moved to Whitehorse or elsewhere in the Yukon
272 Notes to pages 20-34

and/or Canada. Some even live abroad, mostly in the United States. Despite this, how-
ever, the number of Kluane people living in the area has remained fairly constant
throughout much of the twentieth century, Xuctuating between approximately Wfty and
seventy people (see McClellan 1981: 495).
12 The term also can apply to a handful of First Nations people who reside in the area who
are members (and therefore beneWciaries of) different First Nations. Most of these people,
however, are related, by either blood or marriage, to members of KFN, and they partici-
pate actively in the social relations and practices to which I refer when I talk about “Klu-
ane people.”
13 Bill C-31 allowed nearly all of those who wished to become members of KFN to do so. To
my knowledge, no Kluane people who already had status opposed its extension to their
non-status relatives. The only cases that I know of in which membership in KFN is at all
in question concerns a handful of individuals who claim membership but lack the neces-
sary documentation to prove this to the federal government. Kluane people, however,
seem united in their support of these people’s claims, and KFN is actively intervening
with the government on their behalf. None of these people currently reside in the village.
14 See Isaac 1995: 402-11, for a discussion of Bill C-31 and its amended criteria for Indian
status.
15 Two meetings of international scope that I attended were (1) the Conference on Circum-
polar Aboriginal People and Co-management Practice, held in Inuvik, NWT, on 20-24
November 1995 and (2) the Two Eyes, One Vision Conference held in Whitehorse on 1-3
April 1998.

Chapter 1: Aboriginal-State Relations in the Kluane Region

1 McClellan (1975: 109) heard a report that there was an old caribou fence “a few miles
from Burwash Landing on Kluane Lake.” I, too, was told that there had once been a cari-
bou fence at Rushes Lake, just a couple of miles (a few kilometres) from the village, but I
never saw it.
2 See also Clark (1991: 79-89) for a discussion of the extensive trading networks that existed
throughout the northwestern Subarctic prior to contact with Europeans.
3 George Dawson reported in 1898 that “the value of furs reaching the Lynn canal from the
interior [which would likely have included most of the furs taken in the Kluane area] is
from $12,000 to $15,000 annually (cited in Cruikshank 1974: chap. 4, 4-5). This repre-
sents a volume of approximately 4,000 to 5,000 animal skins (of all species).
4 On the history of trade in the area (both Aboriginal and historical) see de Laguna (1972)
and McClellan (1950, 1964, 1975: 501-10).
5 To protect their trade monopoly, a Tlingit war party even crossed into the interior in 1852
and destroyed Fort Selkirk, a Hudson Bay trading post on the Yukon River in Northern
Tutchone country.
6 For a short time the mining town of Dawson City, with a population of over 30,000, was
the largest Canadian city west of Winnipeg.
7 In the summer of 1909 Thomas Dickson and the Jacquot brothers guided Wilson Potter,
an American big game hunter, on what was perhaps their Wrst attempt at big game outWt-
ting (McCandless 1985: 51). In short order, these men established themselves as some of
the Wrst big game outWtters in the Yukon, hosting hunters from all over the world who
were willing to pay top dollar for the chance to hunt Yukon wildlife (see Martindale 1913;
Young 1947). Burwash Landing was the centre of their operations.
8 Japan did invade the Aleutian Islands, but there is good reason to suppose that the high-
way was built at least as much for political as for strategic reasons (see Coates and Morri-
son 1998: 221-27).
9 Those Kluane elders who were old enough to remember when the highway came through
vividly recalled the scarcity of game that followed its construction.
10 Coates (1985b: 162-64) argues that the pattern of First Nations drinking in the region
did not change in the period immediately following highway construction, and that the
dramatic increase in the number of First Nations convicted for alcohol-related offences
 Notes to pages 35-49 273

during this period was more the result of increased enforcement by the RCMP than
anything else. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that drinking became a much bigger
problem for First Nations communities in the Kluane region in the decades following the
construction of the highway than it ever had been before.
11 “Skidoo” is the brand name of the earliest snowmobiles sold in the region. Produced by
the Canadian company Bombardier, this brand of snowmobiles is still widely available.
The word “skidoo,” however, has long since come to be a generic term for “snowmobile”
throughout the Canadian North. The introduction of the snowmobile had a huge impact
on Aboriginal societies across the Arctic and Subarctic. For a nice analysis of the snow-
mobile’s impact on the lives and social relations of the Skolt Lapps of Northeastern
Finland, see Pelto (1973); for a discussion of its impact on hunting in interior Alaska, see
Nelson (1973: 177-82).
12 Dog sleds were themselves an earlier technological import, developed by Inuit peoples in
the Arctic and introduced to the southern Yukon by European traders (see McClellan
1975: 161-62). Before that time people had travelled by snowshoe in the winter, using
pack dogs.
13 During highway construction, women had been able to sell moccasins and other bead-
work to highway workers, and the highway itself gave them access to markets further
aWeld – even after the workers had left.
14 The federal government granted legislative powers over Yukon wildlife to the territorial
government in 1900.
15 Although the Yukon government was responsible for legislating game laws, the federal
North-West Mounted Police – and later the Royal Canadian Mounted Police – continued
to enforce these laws for many years.
16 Letter from “The Indians of Burwash Landing” to J.E. Gibben, Dawson City, Yukon, 23
June 1946. The letter is accompanied by the signatures or marks of sixteen individual Klu-
ane people. It was also signed and endorsed by Father Eusebe Morisset. Copy in Kluane
First Nation Wles, Burwash Landing, YT.
17 Letter from Reverend Eusebe Morisset to Indian Affairs Branch, Department of Citizen-
ship and Immigration, Ottawa, ON, 11 April 1950. Copy in Kluane First Nation Wles, Bur-
wash Landing, YT.
18 People still tell stories about these areas, but to many they are just stories since they them-
selves have never been there. Kluane people have been trying to reacquaint themselves
with the lands in the Kluane Park and Sanctuary; on numerous occasions I accompanied
Kluane people on trips into these areas. An important theme on most of these trips was
that of exploration – to look for old trails and camps they had heard stories about and/or
just to get a sense of the land and what is on it. These attempts to regain the knowledge of
their grandparents is a testament to the continued importance to Kluane people of knowl-
edge about the land. The effects on the community of the loss of knowledge about these
areas, which are some of the richest for hunting in the region, cannot be overestimated.
19 Children who had a Euro-Canadian father – notably the children of Thomas Dickson and
the Jacquot brothers – were permitted to stay at St. Paul’s Hostel in Dawson and attend
territorial school there.
20 A few First Nations children in Burwash attended the Baptist mission school in White-
horse instead.
21 See also Coates (1991: chap. 7, 10) for a discussion of residential schools in the Yukon in
general.
22 Although he did not speciWcally say so, it is likely that he got the term from a well-known
television documentary of the same name (Northern Native Broadcasting 1988).
23 Memorandum Regarding Amalgamation of Indian Bands written by F.E. AnWeld, Indian
Commissioner for British Columbia, 8 February 1961, and sent to all Indian superinten-
dents in British Columbia and the Yukon. Copy in author’s possession.
24 The White River Band, composed of Upper Tanana and Northern Tutchone speakers and
based in the village of Beaver Creek, approximately 100 miles (roughly 160 kilometres) to
the north of Burwash, was itself the product of the government’s amalgamation of the
Snag and Stewart River Bands in 1956.
274 Notes to pages 49-64

25 Destruction Bay, ten miles (Wfteen kilometres) south of Burwash Landing, was originally
constructed as a camp for men building the Alaska Highway, and it remains the site of a
highway maintenance camp as well as the primary school, nursing station, and other
government services.
26 As noted above, the Kluane Tribal Brotherhood was formed through the amalgamation of
the Burwash and White River Bands in 1961. The KTB – and its subsequent incarnation,
the Kluane Tribal Council – represented status Indians in the region until 1990, when it
split again into the separate Kluane and White River First Nations.
27 This is not because parents refused to send their children to the school but because there
were no longer enough school-aged children in the village – not necessarily an unusual
occurrence in a such a small community.
28 Adrian Tanner (1999: 135-36) even argues that Cree opposition to the James Bay Hydro-
electric Project is inextricably linked to the emergence of a Quebec Cree ethnic identity.
29 The Council for Yukon Indians was created shortly after the tabling of land claims
through a merger of the Yukon Native Brotherhood, which represented only status Indi-
ans, and the Yukon Association of Non-Status Indians. The Council for Yukon Indians
was recently reconstituted as the Council for Yukon First Nations.
30 It is no longer illegal for KFN members to trap there. They regained the right to hunt
in the sanctuary in 1982, after the Yukon Court of Appeals overturned the conviction
of Edward Johnson and Henry Michel for shooting caribou in the sanctuary ( R. v. Johnson
and Michel).
31 I would not, however, want to claim that Sam’s decision to trap at Andrew Atlin Lake in
May 1980 was politically motivated. He and his family, after all, had regularly trapped
there long before the creation of the Kluane Game Sanctuary. Given the fact that Sam was
under the impression that he would be allowed to hunt there that spring, a host of other
considerations may also have inXuenced his decision regarding where to trap.

Chapter 2: “It’s Not Really Knowledge at All”

1 I use the term “hunting” in the most general sense to refer also to Wshing and trapping. I
do so not only as a form of shorthand but also because, as will become apparent, there is
good reason to consider all of these seemingly different activities as simply different
aspects of the same thing. Indeed, I will expand the notion of hunting, as it applies to
Kluane people, much further than that.
2 I did not conduct a formal study of caloric intake during the period of my Weldwork, so
this estimate is necessarily a rough one. I calculated this Wgure by multiplying the num-
ber of moose killed by community members in 1997 by a (very) conservative estimate of
the number of pounds of meat per moose, and dividing by the population (seventy). This
is a very rough estimate because Kluane people give away a great deal of meat – often to
people outside the village. Much is also served and given away at potlatches. On the other
hand, Kluane people attend potlatches and receive gifts of meat and Wsh from people in
other villages as well, so my estimate is probably not too far off. Expressing the total
amount of meat as a per capita Wgure, however, may be a bit misleading. Not everyone
spends the same amount of time hunting, nor do they meet with the same success. This
means that meat is not necessarily distributed evenly throughout the village. Though
people do continue to share meat with those who need it, sharing is not as generalized as
it once was. There are social divisions in the community across which meat is not (or,
rather, is only seldom) shared. This means that some people do not eat as much moose
meat as others in the village. People’s supply of and access to meat, however, changes
over time, somewhat smoothing out such disparities. Also, people who run short of
moose can make up this shortfall by eating some of the other animals listed below.
3 During my stay in the village, the population of snowshoe hares was on an upswing in its
ten-year cycle; so they were readily available, and people ate quite a few of them. After
one of their regular population crashes, however, they are virtually unavailable for several
years.
4 Some of these animals have at times been of primary importance to the diet of Kluane
people, particularly caribou and Dall sheep. The drastic decline in the region’s caribou
 Notes to pages 65-80 275

(and their replacement by moose) over the last century has transformed caribou from
perhaps the single most important animal in Kluane people’s diet to a very occasional
meal (usually occurring only when someone in the village receives a gift of caribou meat
from elsewhere in the Yukon). Likewise, Dall sheep were once of primary importance in
Kluane people’s diet, but the creation of Kluane National Park, which encompasses much
of the good sheep habitat in the region, combined with serious concerns about those
sheep populations outside the park (see Chapters 4 and 5), have kept Kluane people from
taking many sheep over the past decade or two.
5 This limited concept of hunting, for example, is implicit in the whole debate about gen-
der roles in hunting that grew out of the Man the Hunter Conference in 1966 (Lee and
DeVore 1968). Those who saw hunting as a male activity, as well as those who questioned
this view (e.g., Dahlberg 1981), all conceptually distinguished between hunting and other
types of related activities, such as cooking.
6 See McClellan (1975: 95-105) and McClellan and Denniston (1981: 375-77) for gen-
eral descriptions of the annual round in the southern Yukon and the entire Cordillera,
respectively.
7 See McDonnell’s (1975) ethnography of the Kaska in the southeast Yukon for a nice
description of the relationship between hunting and the dynamics of social organization.
8 I was present at several spontaneous “gatherings” of Wfteen people or more at a popular
hunting camp thirty miles (forty-eight kilometres) from the village.
9 Though Catharine McClellan (1975: 115) was primarily interested in reconstructing the
past, she noted that “the general feeling persists that meat should be widely shared.”
10 Some of the giving that goes on at a potlatch is not random but, rather, ritually prescribed
along moiety lines. Once the feast is over and the appropriate people have been ritually
“paid,” however, everything else is given away in a fairly random fashion. In fact, some-
times an announcement is made that everyone should just help themselves to whatever
food is left. It is not uncommon to see people leaving a potlatch loaded with boxes full of
food.
11 If anything, the grumbling and indirect criticism that surround these exceptions to the
rule actually help reinforce the ideology of sharing. A number of scholars (e.g., Kelly
1995: 164-65; Myers 1989; Woodburn 1998) have pointed out that the term “sharing”
often does not present an accurate image of how meat is distributed in hunter-gatherer
societies. Though there are certainly instances of altruistic giving among hunting peoples,
frequently individuals are not so eager to share as they are often portrayed to be. People
will sometimes hide meat to avoid having to share it, and others will demand shares
not freely given. The important social fact, however, is the expectation that people will
share. This means that claims on others for meat, as long as they are not excessive, are
generally viewed as legitimate by the community. This is certainly the case in Burwash
Landing, where people will sometimes force a “gift” of meat through indirect accusations
of “stinginess” and so on.
12 Exceptions include holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas as well as numerous com-
munity meals served in the community hall at various times throughout the year. There
are also, however, some families in the village who do regularly sit down to eat together.
13 Or, more likely, simply helps him or herself without waiting to be asked.
14 This story illustrates the complex nature of the relation between food and identity. My
friend never implied that by eating moose meat or Wsh guts a Euro-North American per-
son would “become” an Indian, since other factors, like kinship, also come into play in
the construction of Indianness. He was worried, however, that if enough Euro-North
Americans began eating “Indian food,” First Nations peoples might lose their ability to
make certain kinds of political claims to the land and animals – claims that, in Canada
today, are inextricably linked to notions of Aboriginality.
15 Others have advocated a more linguistically oriented approach to such problems. Goulet
(1998: 255), for example, in his study of knowledge among the Dene Tha in northern
Alberta, states that “the meanings of English words used by the Dene Tha become obvi-
ous only when they are asked to translate their statements to Dene Dháh and back into
English.” Useful though this technique may be, it has its limitations – especially in a
276 Notes to pages 81-90

village like Burwash Landing, where people seldom speak Southern Tutchone any more
and most people under the age of Wfty (and some who are considerably older) do not even
understand it. As a result, many Kluane people are not actively translating from Southern
Tutchone when they use the word “respect.” Nevertheless, their understanding of the
term is quite different from that of most Euro-Canadians and derives from a set of beliefs,
values, and practices that have their roots in a Southern Tutchone past. In such a situa-
tion, the only way to get at the meaning of such terms is by paying attention to their use
and context.
16 Some scholars (e.g., Brightman 1993; Krech 1999) have claimed that the injunction
against waste is actually a relatively recent development in the ideology of Aboriginal
hunting in the North American Subarctic. They argue that it originally arose in response
to widespread wildlife declines resulting from the fur trade and was only gradually incor-
porated into Aboriginal peoples’ ideas about how humans should properly relate to ani-
mals. It is unclear to what extent this is true for the Kluane area. Here, however, it is
enough to note that – regardless of its history – the injunction against waste is currently
(and has been for some time) a very important aspect of human-animal relations in the
Kluane area, as it is throughout the rest of the Subarctic.
17 See Cruikshank (1990: 75-78, 208-13) for two full versions of this narrative. Regarding
this story (or a similar variant) McClellan (1975: 185) states, “All tribes [Southern
Tutchone, Tagish, and Inland Tlingit] know the story of the boy who was taken away by
the salmon people after he had made disrespectful remarks about a moldy piece of
salmon. When he had again been restored to human form, he was able to tell humans
how salmon like to be treated and greeted.”
18 Though, strictly speaking, this need not always be an animal. People may be contacted by
and gain the support of the spirits of other entities and even of “inanimate objects” (see
Brightman 1993: 76; Goulet 1998: 89-90).
19 A little over a month later, I was visiting with Agnes when she brought up the topic once
again. She said that our conversation had reminded her of something that had occurred
when she was a little girl, an incident she had not thought about for a long time: the Wrst
time she had caught a lynx in a trap. She had been alone, checking traps that her father
had set. It had been a young lynx, and it had been “just sitting there.” She said she had
been about to kill it, but then had felt bad because it looked just like a little kitten. She
said that she had “just walked away,” unable to kill it – exactly the way I had when I saw
that Wrst live rabbit in a snare. She had walked straight home, a walk of about an hour,
and told her father what had happened. She said that he had had no sympathy for her
feelings of compassion for the lynx. He had told her that it was not right to think like that
and had sent her right back out to kill it. She had walked the whole way back to the lynx
(another hour) thinking about what she had to do. When she got there, she shot it and
brought it home. I asked if it had been difWcult for her. She said no; she had not wanted
to kill it but knew she had to, so she just did it. Subsequently, I heard a number of “Wrst
kill” stories from other people. Many of these stories were similar to my own and Agnes’s
in that the tellers said the killing had been difWcult or that they had not wanted to do it
because they felt bad about it or because the animal “looked cute.” In all of these cases,
however, an elder had told them that these feelings were wrong, often stressing – as Joe
had done in his explanation to me – the link between killing animals and survival.
20 The notion of “need” is, of course, culturally constructed. As I have already discussed, one
may very well “need” moose meat, despite a freezer full of beef.
21 Interestingly, however, I heard several stories involving people (respected and knowl-
edgeable hunters, some of whom had died some time before my arrival in the Yukon)
who harassed wolverines for no apparent reason and even, in one case, of a man tor-
menting a wolverine caught in a trap. These are the only exceptions to the rule against
“bothering” animals that I ever came across. Interestingly, McClellan, too, came across a
similar exception involving a wolverine. And, as was the case with the stories I heard, the
storyteller “denied that any ill consequences followed or should have followed” this mis-
treatment, despite the fact that he “regularly insisted that all animals should be treated
with respect” (McClellan 1975: 134). In the story I heard about the man who tormented
 Notes to pages 91-103 277

the wolverine in the trap, however, the wolverine very nearly tricked him into coming
close enough to be within range of its sharp claws.
22 Many First Nations peoples in the Arctic and Subarctic believe(d) that animals do not
die forever when they are killed by hunters; rather, so long as their remains are treated
properly, they will be reborn and will be able to give themselves again in the future (see
Brightman [1993] and Fienup-Riordan [1990] for extended discussions of ideas about ani-
mal reincarnation and their social consequences among the Rock Cree and the Yup’ik,
respectively).
23 I never personally witnessed anyone kill an otter or mink, so I do not know if anyone
follows these particular rules. It is signiWcant, however, that Joe speciWcally mentions
otter and mink here because these are considered among the most spiritually dangerous
animals; so it may well be that people would still treat their remains with special care.
However, people do not kill them much these days because of low fur prices. It is also
interesting to note that he explicitly relates the special treatment of animal remains to
the fact that “all the animals used to be people before.”
24 Here “secondary knowledge” stands in contrast to the “primary knowledge” of direct per-
sonal experience. I borrow these terms from Rushforth (1992, 1994), who in turn bor-
rowed and adapted them from Marshall Swain (1981).
25 Many of these authors point out that northeastern Athapaskan people are careful to
include in most stories and accounts an indication of whether the information is primary
or secondary and, if secondary, they name the source (Goulet 1998: 33-36). I noted a sim-
ilar tendency among Kluane people.
26 I do not mean to imply that experiential knowledge/learning has no place in Euro-North
American society. Indeed, as I discuss below, there are thousands of things that Euro-
North Americans do regularly – from driving a car to playing chess – that can only be
learned by doing. There is, however, a strong bias in Euro-North American society that
equates education with formal instruction. And it is this bias that Kluane people confront
head-on when trying to justify their own knowledge about the land and animals vis-à-vis
that of Euro-North American “experts,” such as wildlife biologists. Often when Kluane
people explicitly contrast their own way of learning/knowing with that of Euro-North
Americans, they are making a conscious political statement that their way of knowing is
more accurate and so should be the basis for management and decision making. Never-
theless, when it comes to the bush, Kluane people and Euro-North American experts do
indeed have very different ways of producing and legitimizing knowledge.
27 Kluane people and other First Nations peoples in the North frequently speak of the bush
as their grocery store, highlighting its importance to them for survival and their extensive
knowledge and ability to live off the land.
28 See Basso (1979) for a rich analysis of the social dimensions of certain forms of joking
among the Western Apache (southern Athapaskans).
29 There was considerable variation regarding what constituted “enough.” Some people said
that they had been expected to know something after watching it just once. Others said
it had depended on the complexity of the task, but elders had expected them to perform
even complex tasks reasonably well after watching them three times. Still others said that
elders had made allowances for age; very young children were not expected to master
complex processes despite having watched them. Even so, they maintain, children used
to learn things in the bush at a much younger age than they do today.
30 This is the process of scraping the skin with a sharp implement to remove all the meat
and fat from it.
31 In the late summer, bull moose enter the rut. During this period it is possible to call them
by simulating the sound of another bull scraping his antlers against willow branches. This
sound, a challenge to other bulls, can carry for many miles in the cold air. This method
of hunting moose, though highly effective, can also be dangerous because the bulls arrive
– often in perfect silence – ready to Wght.
32 Kluane people are themselves among the Wrst to admit that contact with Euro-North
American society has had a huge impact on how they interact with one another and peo-
ple in general, and few of them feel that these changes have been positive. Many people
278 Notes to pages 103-9

spoke to me of a crisis of respect in the community. They feel that many people are not
treating one another properly, that alcohol, welfare, the mission school experience, and
sedentary life in the village have all combined to undermine people’s respect for them-
selves and for others. Also, the need to deal with Euro-North Americans in adversarial
contexts such as land claims has forced people, if they wish to protect their interests in
the land and their autonomy as a people, to speak and act in new ways – ways that they
see as inherently disrespectful. Many people claimed that there are those in the village
now who demand respect rather than earning it by acting respectfully themselves. I cer-
tainly witnessed some examples of what Kluane people consider to be disrespectful be-
haviour during my time in the village. Some such behaviour, however, has no doubt always
occurred. The important thing is that the community by and large shares a view of what
constitutes “respectful behaviour,” and most people continue to strive to live up to that
ideal. They see such behaviour as the proper way of conducting social relations, and this
gives them a basis for criticizing the unacceptable behaviour of others in the village.
33 Others (e.g., Scollon and Scollon 1979: 187-89) have preferred the term “non-intervening.”
The ethic of non-interference is not restricted to Athapaskan peoples, however. Scollon
and Scollon point out that it exists among Aboriginal peoples throughout the North,
while Ross (1990), Wax and Thomas (1972), and others argue that it is present in the eth-
ical systems of Native Americans more generally.
34 Rushforth (1992, 1994) makes a similar point, linking the stress on experiential knowl-
edge with egalitarian social organization.
35 Readers may note what seems to be an inconsistency here since I have already described
numerous occasions on which adults have told children what to do (e.g., “you’re not sup-
posed to play with animals”). While adults will sometimes warn children not to behave
inappropriately, that is as far as they will go. I never once saw an adult “enforce” proper
behaviour (through punishment) if the initial warning went unheeded. Indeed, children
seldom even hear the same warning repeated more than once. It is left up to them to
decide whether or not to heed their elders’ advice.
36 Goulet (1998: 54), however, does note that patience is an important aspect of interper-
sonal relations among the Dene Tha.
37 See Goulet (1998: 37-39).
38 See Fumoleau (1995), Goulet (1998), and Scollon and Scollon (1979) for insightful dis-
cussions of Euro-North American perceptions of typical northern Athapaskan behaviour
patterns. A number of anthropologists have been among those outsiders to come away
with negative impressions of Athapaskan peoples. Goulet (1998: 56-58) and Scollon and
Scollon (1979: 203-7) have argued convincingly that this is because Athapaskan peoples’
stress on experiential knowledge and related beliefs about what constitutes respectful
behaviour actually make it very difWcult to conduct intrusive interview-oriented research.
Like many other outsiders, I, too, found this to be the case and quickly realized that for-
mal interviews are a relatively unproductive method of conducting research in the area.
39 Again, the notion of respect here denotes an ideal. There are those in the village who
occasionally or even regularly hunt in a manner that most consider disrespectful. When
they do so, however, their actions are viewed with disapproval by others in the village
and they face social sanctions.
40 As an aside, it is considered acceptable in the community (as far as respect is concerned)
to shoot a moose from your vehicle if you should happen to see one while doing some-
thing else (unless it is in the highway corridor). This occurs now and then because few
people in the village will venture into the bush without a gun, even if they are not speci-
Wcally hunting.
41 Richard Nelson (1973: 84-108) gives a detailed description of moose hunting techniques
among the Chalkyitsik Gwich’in. Among other practices, he describes the widespread
Athapaskan technique of semi-circular tracking (104-5), which he said was seldom used
any more. Several Kluane people described this technique to me as well, but I never actu-
ally saw it in practice. Nelson also describes some of the “clever” strategies that moose use
to evade hunters (esp. 106).
42 Except negatively in unusual circumstances such as famine caused by animal shortages.
 Notes to pages 109-25 279

43 Many Kluane people have expressed discomfort with biologists’ use of the term “harvest”
to refer to the animals shot by hunters (as well as with a number of other common terms
in the Weld of wildlife management similarly derived from the vocabulary of agriculture).
They object to implicit notions of planning and control that are contained in the use of
this agricultural metaphor. As one KFN member explained: “We ‘kill’ animals; we don’t
‘harvest’ them.” Accordingly, throughout this book I refer to “killing” rather than to “har-
vesting” animals, unless I am speciWcally referring to the perspective of biologists and
resource managers.
44 This man’s son, who is a member of KFN, nevertheless shares many of his father’s beliefs
and values regarding animals. I noted earlier that Kluane people no longer treat animal
remains in the same ritually prescribed manner as did their grandparents. Similarly, few
young people spoke to me about the importance of respecting animal excrement as an
aspect of respecting animals, though all were aware that elders felt this way, and some
seemed fairly conXicted on the subject.
45 SigniWcantly, the one Yukon government biologist who seemed to have gained a measure
of respect in the village for his knowledge of animals had done so by living “with the
sheep” on Sheep Mountain in Kluane Park for four consecutive summers in the early
1970s.
46 Stanley Tambiah (1990: chap. 5) sees this debate over the “multiple orderings of reality”
as initiated by the writings of Lévy-Bruhl rather than Malinowski. As he himself notes,
however, the debate stemmed from Lévy-Bruhl’s later writings (e.g., Lévy-Bruhl 1973b).
By this time Lévy-Bruhl had substantially revised his view on different modes of thought
as a result of his long debate with Evans-Pritchard, who took a Malinowskian position in
arguing against Lévy-Bruhl’s initial premise that Native peoples subscribed to a mode of
thought that was “pre-logical” while European thought was characterized by rationality
and science. As a result of this debate, Lévy-Bruhl eventually came to see all people as
capable of rational and non-rational thought at different times – a position that Mali-
nowski had taken much earlier.

Chapter 3: The Politics of TEK

1 See Chapter 1 for a discussion of these agreements and their relationship to one another.
2 Unfortunately, one of the very few formal public expressions of this second type of expla-
nation, a 1996 article entitled “Traditional Knowledge Threatens Environmental Assess-
ment” published in the Canadian Journal Policy Options (Howard and Widdowson 1996),
is closer to a racist tirade than a constructive analysis of the situation. Although the arti-
cle received some effective (and much deserved) criticism (see Berkes and Henley 1997;
Stevenson 1997), it nevertheless remains virtually unique in the literature on TEK in that
it questions, rather than takes for granted, the political agendas of those engaged in the
effort to integrate TEK and science (though, in the process, its authors make their own
unfortunate and unsubstantiated assumptions about those agendas).
3 Widdowson and Howard (1996: 36), for their part, take the position that “the federal
government’s unconditional support of traditional knowledge ... is just a tactic to buy off
First Nations’ leadership” and that “the aboriginal leadership does not challenge the
manipulative approach of governments because they are the primary beneWciaries of
attempts to integrate TK.” As they see it, “the importance of TK lies not in its under-
standing of environmental impacts but in an ability to extract money from government.”
4 In other parts of the world, “Indigenous Knowledge” (IK), rather than TEK, has become
the buzzword for engaging in these types of debates. The term “indigenous,” however, is
every bit as problematic as is “traditional” (Kalland 1994). In any case, the arguments
here apply equally well to a discussion of IK as to a discussion of TEK.
5 For exceptions in the Yukon, see the work of Lionel Jackson and Ruth Gotthardt (1990)
on volcanic and earthquake activity. See also Julie Cruikshank (1981, 2001) for discus-
sions on how glaciologists and geologists have used (or might use) local knowledge of
place to inform their work. In addition, because of the widespread historical use of Wre as
a management tool on the part of Aboriginal peoples the world over, TEK on forest Wres
is one Weld of traditional knowledge related to forestry that is generally accepted as valid.
280 Notes to pages 127-28

6 SigniWcantly, the one person who responded to this “social” argument at the RRSSC meet-
ing was the big game outWtter from the neighbouring White River area, who is himself
a member of KFN. Interestingly, he countered it with a social argument of his own. He
agreed that killing all the older rams was potentially a problem, but he claimed that
he and his hunters were often unable to shoot these rams because of the wisdom and
cunning they had gained over the years; after all, “they got big for a reason.” Thus, he
argued, despite the full curl rule and the fact that these older rams are the most desirable
trophy animals, they still manage to pass on their knowledge to younger rams (RRSSC
1996a: 9).
7 Interestingly, although biologists did not respond directly to Kluane people’s social argu-
ment against the full curl rule, they had clearly considered the possibility that killing all
the older rams might affect sheep population in a manner disproportional to the number
of animals actually killed. This became clear when a biologist (who attended only a sin-
gle meeting of the RRSSC) refuted an outWtter’s claim that there was nothing to worry
about in his hunting area because the average age of the rams taken there had remained
high. The biologist argued that there are limitations to the (long-accepted) practice of
using the average age of harvest as an indicator of population stability. He argued that
shooting all of the older rams in a population would mean that all of the breeding would
be done by younger rams. Since breeding is physically demanding, this might lead to
higher rates of natural mortality among the already-diminished population of rams. He
also noted that, since younger rams are less experienced, this could lead to less effective
mating as well as possible injury to breeding animals. In addition, biologists distributed
to RRSSC members a copy of a study evaluating the effects of trophy hunting on Dall
sheep in Alaska (Singer and Nichols 1992). This study considered several possible effects
of hunting older rams. Though it was fairly inconclusive (calling for further research), it
indicated that there might indeed be signiWcant effects to the population from trophy
hunting. Finally, the Sheep Management Guidelines, published by the Yukon Department of
Renewable Resources in July 1996, stated that: “There is a concern that the removal of all
old, big-horned sheep could be detrimental to the population. It is important that supe-
rior quality rams (as exempliWed by exceptional horn growth) be allowed to breed and
pass on their genetic qualities to succeeding generations. It is also important that older-
aged rams remain in the population to pass on traditional range-use patterns. This is
known as the ‘Big Ram’ theory” (Carey et al. 1996: 5).
Each of these examples, however, highlights the difference between biologists’ concep-
tions of sheep and those of First Nations elders and hunters. At the RRSSC meeting, in the
article, and in the guidelines, biologists focused on the biological rather than on the
social effects of killing the older rams. They recognized that this might affect the sheep
population by selecting against valuable genetic traits (big horns) and/or by leading to a
decrease in population through ineffective breeding and increased rut-induced mortality
and injury. Although biologists did not deny the fact that rams might inadvertently pass
on some knowledge (of range-use patterns and predator avoidance) to younger sheep,
they clearly saw this role as much more limited and passive than did First Nations people.
By contrast, Kluane people explicitly viewed older rams as teachers and elders, actively
teaching younger sheep how to mate properly and how to survive.
In the end, however, despite Yukon biologists’ recognition of the issue and the incon-
clusive nature of the Alaskan study, they dismissed as irrelevant even their own biologi-
cal version of the Big Ram theory: “Under the current harvest regime, it is believed that
there are sufWcient big-horned, older-aged rams remaining in the population following
the hunting season such that the ‘Big Ram’ theory is not an important consideration”
(Carey et al. 1996: 6).
8 A related complaint was that biologists and outWtters see sheep as just “money running
around on hooves.”
9 There are many other examples in the literature of Aboriginal peoples using their
own understanding of animals as intelligent and social beings as the basis for opposing
state management strategies based on quantitative models of animal populations (e.g.,
 Notes to pages 132-45 281

Fienup-Riordan 1998; Freeman 1985: 271-74). In at least some of these cases (see especially
Freeman 1985), predictions based on the social/behavioural understandings of Aboriginal
peoples have proven to be more accurate than have those made by wildlife biologists.
10 Conspicuous exceptions in the literature have been those attempts (of which there have
been a substantial number) to integrate TEK and science by carrying out joint research
with scientists and First Nations elders and hunters. Such efforts, though they represent
a much more sophisticated process-oriented approach to knowledge-integration, never-
theless perpetuate the fundamental assumptions about knowledge described above. By
assuming that the results of such joint research are clear-cut (independent of personal
experience and social context), these studies have tended to reinforce the idea that
knowledge is a purely intellectual product. In fact, biologists and First Nations peoples
can and often do interpret the seemingly straightforward results of joint research in radi-
cally different ways (see Chapter 5).
11 In Chapters 4 through 6 I expand on this theoretical argument through detailed ethno-
graphic analyses of particular attempts to integrate traditional and scientiWc knowledge.
12 This is illustrated powerfully by rhetoric about the need to integrate science with tradi-
tional or indigenous knowledge around the world. The fact that the term “traditional/
indigenous knowledge” is seldom, if ever, pluralized indicates that the primary distinc-
tion between “knowledge systems” is that which is presumed to exist between science
and all others rather than that which is presumed to exist between a multiplicity of dif-
ferent ways of knowing.
13 He argues that science “is just one of the many ideologies that propel society, and it
should be treated as such” (Feyerabend 1981: 162).
14 Colin Scott (1996: 72) argues that “it is only in moments of unusual reXexive insight, for
example, that modern Westerners are conscious of the extent to which a (meta-)physics
of impersonal forces imposes itself on our perception of ‘nature.’ So embedded are the
Cartesian myths of the dualities of mind-body, culture-nature, that we tend to privilege
models of physical causality, rather than relations of consciousness or signiWcance, in our
perception even of sentient nature.”
15 Indeed, Feyerabend (1981: 161-62) argues that many of the great advances in science
have been generated outside of its accepted boundaries; and only later, after their “util-
ity” has been demonstrated conclusively – usually after a long and bitter Wght – do they
become science.
16 I refer to science as a collection of “beliefs and practices” rather than “knowledge” since
the notion of “knowledge” is as problematic as is that of “science.” It is just as difWcult to
come up with a hard and fast set of rules for conceptualizing non-Western knowledge
systems as it is for conceptualizing science; indeed, anthropologists have long made sim-
ilar arguments to the one I am making here about science for non-scientiWc systems of
knowledge: that they are held together through institutional and ideological rather than
epistemological means. Indeed, knowledge, just like science, is a label, and the difference
between knowledge and belief is one of power rather than of epistemological worth.
Given the constructed and context-dependent nature of all knowledge, it is difWcult to see
how one might distinguish – at least epistemologically – between belief and knowledge.
If, as it seems, knowledge differs from belief only in the degree to which it is linked to
power, then one might see their relationship as a twist on an old linguistic theme and
claim that knowledge is just belief with an army.
17 The term “management” is itself extremely problematic. Scholars have made much of the
differences between systems of indigenous, Aboriginal, or self-management and those of
state-management (Feit 1988; Usher 1986; Williams and Hunn 1982). While the point of
this distinction is well taken, it is as dangerous to make as is the one between traditional
knowledge and scientiWc knowledge. The term “management” is every bit as riddled with
assumptions and contested meaning as is the term “knowledge.” Indeed, the two terms
are inextricably linked in Euro-American thought. The term “management” in relation
to resources refers to the attempt by managers to use a particular resource rationally,
based on their knowledge of that resource. Use of the term “management,” therefore,
282 Notes to pages 148-55

implies the existence not only of knowledge as separate from practices, values, and social
relations, but also of a formal institutionalized system of management complete with
specialized managers. This is why many scientists and resource managers have been so
reluctant to admit the existence of such a thing as indigenous management systems in
the Wrst place, preferring to argue that human impact was low in precontact times
because of low population densities or citing Pleistocene extinctions as evidence for the
absence of such systems (this latter argument is quite unconvincing given the role of sci-
entiWc managers in such management disasters as, for example, the collapse of the east-
ern cod Wshery, which illustrates clearly that the failure of animal stocks does not in itself
indicate the absence of a management system). The focus on systems of management
(whether state, indigenous, or cooperative in nature) facilitates the extension of scienti-
Wc resource management institutions into the communities. Why else label a set of prac-
tices, values, and social relations “indigenous resource management” if not to categorize
and distill them so as to give scientiWc resource management something with which to
interface?

Chapter 4: Counting Sheep

1 Although many studies have identiWed problems with the design and implementation of
various co-management processes, they have tended to present them as technical prob-
lems that can detract somewhat from the effectiveness of the co-management process
under scrutiny (see Chapter 3). Few scholars, however, have critically examined the pro-
ject of knowledge-integration itself and the assumptions underlying it. Notable excep-
tions include: Cruikshank (1998: chap. 3), Fienup-Riordan (1999), and Nadasdy (1999).
But, although these works are quite critical of TEK and knowledge-integration, they are
not detailed case studies of speciWc co-management processes per se.
2 See Arthurs (1995) for archaeological evidence of sheep hunting in the region going back
2,000 years. Also, during the summers of 1948 and 1949, McClellan (1975: 120) reports
having seen “good numbers of sheep being dried at a Tutchone meat camp on the Big
Arm of Kluane Lake [in the Ruby Range].”
3 McClellan (1975: 121) also found this. In addition, she discusses their use of sheep skin
to make parkeys and blankets, babiche for snowshoes, horns for ladles, and forelegs for
knife scabbards. Though these parts of the sheep are seldom used today, I was told of all
of these uses and saw several old objects of this kind.
4 Though I never encountered any mythic stories or ritual behaviour related speciWcally to
sheep, McClellan (1975: 121-22) found instances of both in the Kluane area.
5 Until that time they had refused to consider including sheep with moose and caribou as
animals to which First Nations peoples should have special rights in the event of the need
to establish a Total Allowable Harvest as per 16.9.0 of the UFA (Council for Yukon Indians
1993: 176-77).
6 This committee was composed of representatives from the Fish and Wildlife Management
Board, the Yukon government, the Yukon OutWtters’ Association, and the Mayo District
Renewable Resources Council (established under the Nach’o Nyak Dun Land Claim
Agreement in central Yukon).
7 A quota was to be imposed only if the average age of the sheep taken by an outWtter in
his area were to fall below eight for two consecutive years. This is based on the long-
standing assumption, made by outWtters and biologists alike, that the effects on a sheep
population of hunting full curl rams can be assessed by monitoring the average age of the
rams killed. As it turns out, however, wildlife biologists have recently begun to question
the validity of this assumption (Carey and Dehn 1998; Dehn 1997).
8 I have no independent way to verify this claim for the period before my arrival in Bur-
wash in December 1995 – aside from the fact that I trust those who made it. However, I
can verify the fact that no KFN members took any sheep in the Ruby Range during the
period in which the RRSSC was meeting.
9 It was my impression that no one in the room took this threat very seriously, but it is
likely that, over the years, First Nations peoples throughout Canada have on occasion
 Notes to pages 155-71 283

reacted to excessive hunting and/or trapping by Euro-Canadians in just this way. Harvey
Feit, for example, notes that Cree elders in the southernmost section of the Cree area
admit that they themselves trapped out the beaver population in the 1930s because they
saw no possibility of maintaining that population in the face of increased pressure
by Euro-Canadian trappers. By 1950, however, once the area had been closed to Euro-
Canadian trappers, the beaver population recovered (Feit 1986: 187). Shepard Krech (1999:
193), too, describes a similar episode of preemptive over-trapping among the Northern
Ojibwa in the 1840s.
10 One must, however, be resident in the territory for at least three years before becoming
eligible for a resident hunting licence.
11 Yukon OutWtting Areas 11 and 12.
12 The Yukon Department of Renewable Resources requires hunters to report their kills. First
Nations peoples, however, are not required to report the animals they take. As a result,
the “resident harvest” Wgures provided by the Department of Renewable Resources
include only animals taken by non-First Nations hunters. Both KFN and CAFN, however,
claimed repeatedly that none of their members took sheep in the Ruby Range in 1995.
Though it is possible that individual members took sheep there without the knowledge of
the First Nations governments (which is a perfectly legal thing for them to do), my expe-
rience in Burwash Landing makes me quite conWdent that no KFN members did so that
year.
13 For reasons to be discussed later, the RRSSC was given a mandate to address the sheep
problem in an area that was actually much smaller than the area about which Kluane
people expressed concern at the November 1995 meeting.
14 Letter from Lee Bolster, President of the Yukon OutWtters’ Association, to the Yukon Fish
and Wildlife Management Board, 6 December 1995. Presented to the Ruby Range Sheep
Steering Committee on 10 January 1996. Copy in author’s possession.
15 Some (e.g., Cruikshank 1998; Kalland 1994) use the term to avoid the political connota-
tions of the modiWers “indigenous” and “traditional.”
16 They were, however, willing to use the Sheep Mountain population to control for some
factors, such as hunting (see below).
17 Cruikshank (1998: 45) shows how First Nations peoples sometimes explicitly think and
talk about scientiWc knowledge as a set of stories told by scientists.
18 These are the geographical units into which Yukon government biologists have divided
the territory for the purpose of organizing wildlife management efforts (see map, p. 164).
19 Numbered plugs are used to combat theft and the illegal trade in sheep horns.
20 It is currently illegal to shoot ewes in the Yukon. As a result, evidence of sex must be sub-
mitted to the conservation ofWcer or wildlife technician. Horns qualify as evidence of sex.
21 In reality, determining the sex ratio is a bit more complicated than simply counting male
and female sheep. This is because two-year-old rams remain in nursery bands with the
ewes and are not easily distinguished from them. Therefore, biologists must make a num-
ber of assumptions about them to correct for the bias that would otherwise be introduced
into the survey Wgures (see Hoefs and Bayer 1983).
22 Because they found only twenty ewe skulls, biologists were unable to construct a life table
for ewes. From the skulls they did collect and from observation of marked animals, how-
ever, they felt conWdent in assuming that maximum age and mortality rates for younger
ewes were similar to those found for rams. However, rams had a higher mortality rate in
the higher age classes (Hoefs and Bayer 1983).
23 It seems that one might legitimately question this conclusion solely on the basis of the
assumptions contained within the study itself. For instance, though the sheep kill data
collected by the Department of Renewable Resources gave biologists a fairly complete
record of the number and kinds of rams killed by hunters in the territory since 1979 (and
less complete records going back to 1960), and since they also know when and where
these kills took place, they have a clear picture of sheep mortality due to hunting in the
Ruby Range throughout this period. But converting this kill data into a percentage of the
total population is another matter. At the time of the study, biologists had conducted
284 Notes to pages 175-79

only four surveys of the Ruby Range population, three of which were carried out between
1980 and 1983. To estimate total population over the ten years, they used an average of
the four counts. This essentially ignores the quite signiWcant year to year variations that
occur in actual sheep populations. Therefore, a relatively constant level of hunting could
have had dramatically different effects on the population from year to year (especially in
the 1970s, for which there are almost no data). I mention this only in passing because it
is not my goal here to criticize biologists’ knowledge about sheep but only to explore how
this knowledge informed their position regarding management.
24 In the White River area, however, they tended to blame resident hunters and illegal hunt-
ing by Alaskans rather than outWtting.
25 This solution seems quite plausible in the Yukon, where animal cycles are a fact of life.
The most obvious such cycle is the lynx-hare cycle. Every ten or eleven years the snow-
shoe hare population, mirrored by that of the lynx, cycles between a condition of incred-
ible abundance and near-total absence. Everyone who has spent any time in the Yukon
knows about this cycle, which is amazing for its regularity. The existence of this cycle
suggests the possibility that other animals may also be regulated by cycles which are too
long-term to be apparent. Quite a few people, Kluane people and biologists alike, have sug-
gested to me the possibility that moose and caribou may be regulated by such a cycle since
both of these populations have been alternately scarce and plentiful at times in the past.
26 Interestingly, in the past several years (but only after the RRSSC process had come to an
end), a few Kluane people have apparently begun to change their minds on this, includ-
ing one Kluane hunter who, during meetings of the RRSSC, had been quite outspoken in
his rejection of weather as an explanation for sheep declines. Although Kluane people
have spoken to me regularly about climate change since I Wrst arrived in the region (all
agree that the weather has become signiWcantly warmer since the early 1970s and that
there has been less snow), they seem not to have connected these changes to the decline
of the sheep population until quite recently. It is not clear to me why some Kluane peo-
ple have begun to change their position on this, but I suspect it has to do with a growing
awareness of the effects of climate change on animal populations throughout the Arctic.
The same Kluane hunter mentioned above has attended several government-sponsored
climate change meetings in Whitehorse over the past several years. There he heard testi-
mony by Inuit people and biologists who blame dramatic changes in the size and be-
haviour of animal populations on current warming trends. SigniWcantly, the context of
climate change allows Kluane people to discuss weather as a factor in the sheep decline
without feeling that this is offensive to the sheep (since it is neither the animals’ fault nor
a result of their stupidity).
27 They did, however, have some concerns that the wording of these recommendations
might implicate them in the unsavoury (and illegal) practice of aerial game-spotting.
28 Letter from Keith Carreau to the Yukon Fish and Wildlife Management Board, n.d., pre-
sented to the Ruby Range Sheep Steering Committee on 10 January 1996. Copy in
author’s possession.
29 The exception to this was the White River outWtter. As noted above, he was a KFN mem-
ber and had grown up in the territory. He had hunted and guided throughout the area
since he was a boy, learning about animals and how to hunt from older family members,
several of whom represented KFN on the RRSSC and gave some of the testimony cited
above. He had taken over the outWt from his father, who had inherited it from his own
brother. Indeed, the outWtter’s family has owned the White River outWt since the outWt-
ter’s grandfather started the business some time around 1912 (McCandless 1985). As indi-
cated earlier, however, this outWtter was somewhat peripheral to the discussions as his
outWtting area falls outside of the Ruby Range management area.
30 One might argue, as a number of RRSSC members did privately, that the outWtters’ posi-
tion on sheep hunting was based on self-interest rather than on their understanding of
the sheep decline. Certainly self-interest played a role, as it did for all RRSSC members, but
we must also remember that it was in the outWtters’ best interests to ensure the mainte-
nance of a healthy sheep population into the future. Somehow, outWtters had to balance
their need to sell sheep hunts with their interests in the future health of the population.
 Notes to pages 183-206 285

Their choices in this regard were necessarily based, at least in part, on their understand-
ings of the population and the effects that their actions might have on that population.

Chapter 5: Knowledge-Integration in Practice

1 The reverse is equally true, but we shall see that, due to their unequal position with
respect to state power, the judgments of biologists were generally accorded more weight
than were those of elders and hunters.
2 Of course I have greatly simpliWed the relation between these scientiWc reports and biol-
ogists’ ofWcial positions regarding different aspects of sheep management. Since biologists
involved in the RRSSC meetings were also involved in producing most of these reports,
one could easily claim that their positions regarding sheep management helped inform
their production of the reports. By this, I do not mean to insinuate that any of these biol-
ogists tampered with results to make them Wt with their political views. On the contrary,
I believe that all of them possess a great deal of intellectual integrity. I am referring to the
interplay between culture and knowledge discussed in Chapter 3. In any case, the dis-
tinction is largely irrelevant at this point in my argument.
3 The Wrst draft recommendations produced by the RRSSC are dated April 1996, while the
report was not distributed to RRSSC members until the summer of 1996. I don’t mean
to imply any foul play here. My understanding is that the delay was caused by unavoid-
able difWculties with the transcription process. This, however, does not change the fact
that the draft recommendations were prepared before anyone on the RRSSC even had
access to the TEK artifacts that were speciWcally produced for use in developing these very
recommendations.
4 In GMS 5-31, 5-34, and 5-36.
5 I am speaking here of the village viewed collectively. Certainly there are gaps in speciWc
individuals’ personal experiences of the Ruby Range, but it would be difWcult to Wnd a
long stretch of time in which no one in the village visited the Ruby Range. And, as noted
in Chapter 4, Kluane people regularly share their observations with others in the village.
Some might object that in recent years there are such gaps because Kluane people do
not spend as much time out on the land as they once did, but my own experiences in the
village do not bear this out. In fact, people continue to spend quite a bit of time in the
Ruby Range, especially on the two arms of Kluane Lake and at Cultus Bay, areas that they
and their elders also used historically. Although the amount of time they spend in the
more remote parts of the Ruby and Nisling Ranges has declined over the years, there are
still those who do spend considerable time in these areas, especially during the winter.
6 In reading a draft of this chapter, one biologist objected that they had made no effort
at that November meeting to estimate the size of the sheep population over time. He said
that to do this they would have had to ask elders and hunters how many sheep they
thought had been in speciWc mountain blocks during different periods – something that
they did not do. I submit, however, that the elders and hunters who participated in the
meeting did think that they were making very clear statements about the relative size of
the population at different times in the past.
7 One outWtter, however, did record his sheep counts by subzone. He was the same outWt-
ter who “found” the sheep missing in the 1996 survey.
8 OutWtters and Kluane people are unlikely to trust one another with very detailed infor-
mation about their sheep sightings. As a result, it is not surprising that biologists and
outWtters did not invite KFN to participate in these discussions. The fact that Kluane peo-
ple were also denied the opportunity to question the validity and use of the outWtter’s
knowledge, however (especially considering the outWtter’s obvious motive for fabricating
his results), clearly illustrates the political dimensions of the incident.
9 As we saw in the case of the 100 missing sheep, however, biologists ultimately decided
that the July survey provided a worse estimate of the number of sheep present in the
study area during the hunting season than had surveys conducted in July. In 1997 the
survey was switched back to June, indicating that biologists were less concerned with the
problem of harassment than with the accuracy of the count.
10 Upon reading a draft of this chapter, one biologist commented that my selection of this
286 Notes to pages 207-20

example and the way I chose to present it make it seem ridiculous. He wrote that “the
assumption was that the actions (both management and monitoring) should be designed
to test predictions about the effects of these actions and to measure and compare popu-
lation and behavioral parameters in sheep exposed to different human actions. In this
way, the relative inXuence of different inXuences on the sheep could be assessed. This
applies more of an adaptive management paradigm.” I have elected not to change how I
portray biologists’ description of their research plans, however, because this is exactly how
they presented these plans to the RRSSC, and many of the committee’s (non-biologist)
members did indeed Wnd it ridiculous, not to mention utterly unintelligible.
11 This quote is from written comments he sent me regarding this chapter. Although here he
is speciWcally talking about environmental assessment, as opposed to wildlife manage-
ment per se, he did so as part of an effort to illustrate the relationship between the pro-
duction and legitimation of biological knowledge/research and the political contexts of
its use more generally.
12 Although only one committee member publicly questioned the biologists’ research plan
at the meeting, several others with whom I spoke privately had not understood the biol-
ogists’ plan and/or had disagreed with it. It is perhaps signiWcant that the member who
did question the assumptions underlying the study plan was neither a biologist nor a First
Nations member but a representative of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society and
a teacher of environmental ethics at Yukon College. He has a working understanding of
the principles underlying scientiWc wildlife management. As an active environmentalist
and outspoken critic of some of the Yukon government’s wildlife management policies,
however, he has a critical perspective on the subject.
13 In relative terms, this would be much cheaper than most other types of research in which
the Yukon Department of Renewable Resources engages as it does not involve large
expenses such as the use of helicopters.
14 The Yukon Department of Renewable Resources is clearly in no position to affect the
training of biologists and resource managers in the rest of Canada or elsewhere, but it is
actively involved in the training of future resource managers in the Yukon through its
involvement in the Renewable Resource Management Program at Yukon College. This
program does not include any such requirement.
15 One outWtter, however, told me that, since the RRSSC directly affected his livelihood, he
saw it as a cost of doing business.
16 The facilitator of the committee throughout most of this process was a Yukon biologist.
He told me he had felt uncomfortable in this role and would have preferred it to have
been Wlled by an independent and disinterested party. As it was, he claimed responsibil-
ity for this approach to the issues, saying he had been attempting to build trust and to
give the group a sense of success before dealing with the difWcult issues. Be that as it may,
it was also clear at the meetings that the biologists as a group supported putting off the
discussion about hunting.
17 The one exception to this was a Yukon government biologist who told me that he felt
badly about his experience with the RRSSC. He disagreed with his colleagues’ glowing
assessments of the process and felt that the territorial government had essentially co-
opted it. He complained that, since the Department of Renewable Resources has no mech-
anisms in place for reviewing its role in management initiatives like the RRSSC, biologists
cannot really assess how well they have worked, nor can they learn from their mistakes.
18 In 2001 a wildlife monitoring program was Wnally set up in the Kluane area (as well as in
other parts of the Yukon). A KFN member was given a part-time position monitoring
wildlife and informing the public about management issues in KFN’s traditional territory.
Although the Yukon Department of Renewable Resources provided some money for this
program, the bulk of the funding came from the Yukon Fish and Wildlife Enhancement
Trust, established under the Umbrella Final Agreement (Council for Yukon Indians 1993:
chap. 27). During the summer of 2002 I discussed the program with KFN’s monitor as well
as with a biologist in the Department of Renewable Resources. Both expressed frustration
that the territorial government was not yet making use of the information gathered by
First Nations wildlife monitors throughout the territory.
 Notes to pages 225-32 287

Chapter 6: “Just Like Whitemen”

1 The Supreme Court of Canada has been somewhat inconsistent in its identiWcation of the
ultimate source of Aboriginal title (see McNeil 1997b).
2 At present the only politically acceptable way to extinguish existing Aboriginal rights and
title in Canada is through land claims negotiations. “Extinguishment” has been a stick-
ing point in all modern Canadian land claims negotiations. Initially, Canada insisted
on the total extinguishment of Aboriginal rights and Aboriginal title, so that, once the
agreements had been signed, these difWcult and slippery terms would never again rear
their heads. Understandably, First Nations peoples have been reluctant to sign away their
as-yet-undeWned rights. Recently, however, Canada has begun to soften its position on
extinguishment. This enabled the parties in the Yukon to sign an agreement that does not
explicitly extinguish Aboriginal title on settlement lands (see Council for Yukon Indians
1993: 15-17, 43; McCormick 1997: 67-68).
3 Although Speck himself changed his position somewhat over the years, he continued to
see the hunting territory as an Aboriginal institution. He viewed it primarily as a response
to population pressure among hunting peoples dependent upon the beaver. He argued
that the hunting territory allowed hunters to manage and to conserve beaver popula-
tions, which, because of their sedentary nature, were easily over-hunted. Since these
hunting people had depended on beaver for food long before the advent of the fur trade,
he saw the hunting territory as a pre-fur trade innovation (Speck and Eiseley 1942: 220-
22), though he used other types of reasoning and evidence as well (see, e.g., Speck 1923:
459). By contrast, he explained the absence of the family hunting territory among
hunters in northern and southeastern Labrador by their greater dependence on migrating
herds of caribou (Speck and Eiseley 1942: 238).
4 Of course, Morgan was not the originator of this idea. Indeed, it can be traced back
at least to Hugo Grotius, writing in 1625. For a good overview of seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century European theories on property, see Williams (1986, chaps. 7-8).
5 In light of the fact that ecologist Frederick Clements had published his groundbreaking
theory of ecological succession just a few years earlier, it is interesting to note that Speck
and Eiseley (1942: 238-39) seem to be replacing the older evolutionary model of property
with one that resembles a process of ecological succession: “In any new, unpopulated ter-
ritory being penetrated by wandering hunters small in number and not, as yet, pressing
heavily upon the game supply, land will tend to represent an economically free good ... It
is what we might term the ‘pioneer’ period before the pressure of population and long-
term residence create greater territorial consciousness on the part of the group ... Out of a
certain degree of permanence of residence will then develop a sense of band territorial
possession which, under ecological conditions leading to a dispersion of effort in the hunt,
may also trend in the direction of individual family exploitation of a given territory.”
6 In fact, Lowie (1928: 563) even argued that hunting territories like those described by
Speck qualify as incorporeal property in disguise since Aboriginal hunters do not so much
own the land itself as the right to hunt upon it.
7 Once again, Morgan and other nineteenth-century evolutionists drew on older theorists,
among whom Locke (1964) is probably the best known, for this “labour theory” of prop-
erty. The idea that property developed out of people’s desire to secure the fruits of their
own labour led property theorists, Morgan among them, to see private property as the
only form of true ownership in land. Since forms of common tenure would not necessar-
ily protect an individual’s right to harvest the products of his or her own labour, they did
not believe that they qualiWed as property at all.
8 Liberal and Marxist scholars alike have long been aware of the close relationship between
European/capitalist conceptions of property and a particular construction of personhood
(see, for example, Macpherson 1962; Whitehead 1984: 179-80). Intriguingly, Strathern
(1998) suggests that a Melanesian model of personhood might help Euro-American prop-
erty theorists make sense of complex questions of property that have arisen with the
recent introduction of new reproductive technologies.
9 There was, of course, a large gulf between how Aboriginal peoples related to the land
and how Europeans perceived that relationship. In many cases, Europeans refused to
288 Notes to pages 232-39

acknowledge that Aboriginal peoples did engage in practices that, even by Eurocentric
standards, were constitutive of property relations – namely, agriculture. In fact, some-
times they did so even in the face of staggering evidence to the contrary. As historian
James Muldoon notes: “It is rather curious that the English appear to have ignored the
fact that the Indians were agriculturalists. Most of the [contemporary] sources contain ref-
erences to Indian gardens which provided the natives with food. The essence of the objec-
tion to describing Indians as farmers was that the style of agricultural life which they
followed enabled men to wander from place to place for long periods of time” (cited in
Williams 1986: 122, n. 1). J.G.A. Pocock (1992: 32), on the other hand, has argued that
the European concept of property was not tied to agriculture in general but, rather, to
agriculture carried out with the heavy plow. Kent McNeil (1997b: 143), however, has
argued that, despite all the focus on agriculture, there is legal precedent – even within
English common law – for hunters to gain fee simple title to land (through adverse pos-
session) simply by virtue of their hunting upon it.
10 This has been the case especially since the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in the case
of Calder v. Attorney General of British Columbia in 1973. Even before this decision, how-
ever, the Canadian government (and the British before it) had recognized that Aboriginal
peoples possessed some types of (contingent) property rights (e.g., usufruct) to the lands
on which they lived, and it was largely because of these rights that they felt the need to
negotiate treaties with them at all (see Isaac 1995: 99).
11 I have perhaps phrased this a bit strongly. Given the gulf between Aboriginal peoples’
relations with the land and Europeans’ perceptions of those relations, one might argue
that Canada’s recognition of Aboriginal title is a denial not so much of Aboriginal
human-land relations themselves as it is of long-held European perceptions of those rela-
tions. Be that as it may, I remain extremely leery of any attempt to render Aboriginal
human-land relations into the conceptual framework of property. To claim that Aborigi-
nal peoples owned property just because they too practised agriculture, for example, is to
“gloss over the essential dynamic” of the social relations surrounding not only Aboriginal
agricultural practices but European and Euro-American ones as well.
12 His argument to this effect was quite inXuential; Ancient Law was required reading for
ofWcials in the British Colonial OfWce for many years.
13 Scholars from an array of different disciplines have explored the idea of “cultural transla-
tion” and the theoretical difWculties associated with it (e.g., Asad 1986; Kuhn 1970; Wilson
1970). Several anthropologists have focused on the particular problems of translation asso-
ciated with the practice of universalizing European concepts and using them cross-culturally.
I have already discussed Needham’s objections to universalizing kinship; see also, among
others, Clifford (1988) on art and Tambiah (1990) on magic, science, and religion.
14 Although the Upper Tanana language is quite distinct from the Southern Tutchone lan-
guage spoken in the Kluane area, there has been much social interaction and intermar-
riage between Kluane people and their northern neighbours. Indeed, one does not have
to trace the genealogy of most Kluane people back very far into the past to Wnd one (or
more likely several) ancestors who came from Upper Tanana-speaking parts of Alaska, and
Kluane people keep in reasonably close contact with their Alaskan relatives. Those who
married into the Kluane area, however, adopted Southern Tutchone as their primary lan-
guage and raised their children to speak it. As a result, Kluane people refer to themselves
as Southern Tutchone and see themselves as quite distinct from Upper Tanana people.
15 SigniWcantly, these areas had much more extensive contact with the Tlingit people of the
coast, whereas northern groups of Southern Tutchone speakers (including those in the
Kluane area) had less direct contact with them and more with the Athapaskan peoples of
the interior (Upper Tanana and Northern Tutchone).
16 Similarly, a 3 June 1977 article in the Whitehorse Star regarding the Alaska Highway
Pipeline Inquiry quotes Lena as saying the following: “I feel like I was planted here like a
forest tree, and raised here, not born nowhere, just sitting here as a plant and getting old.
And I know I’m going to die here. I’m not going to die somewhere else” (Hume 1977: 1).
The use of a tree metaphor to describe the human-land relationship is fairly common
among Yukon First Nations peoples (see, for example, Cruikshank 1990: 163).
 Notes to pages 239-44 289

17 In practice, however, the RCMP had already been recognizing and protecting individuals’
(including First Nations peoples’) exclusive rights to speciWc trapping areas for several
decades by that time (see McCandless 1986: 142).
18 By using the term “Aboriginal beliefs” I do not mean to imply that speciWc beliefs and
practices regarding the land and animals have not changed since precontact times (as
indeed they must have before contact as well). I use it simply to refer to a view of human-
land relations (to which many Kluane people continue to subscribe – at least at certain
times, in certain contexts) that has its roots in Aboriginal society and remains difWcult to
reconcile with modern Canadian legal views on land.
19 This attitude towards traplines continues today in a somewhat modiWed form. Although
I heard one young trapline owner claim outright that no one had the right to shoot a
moose on his trapline (somebody had), in general trapline owners allow other people to
travel through and hunt on their traplines. Many, however, claim a special sort of stew-
ardship relationship to the land encompassed by their traplines, usually based on their
own and/or their ancestors’ long-time use. (Although even those who have recently pur-
chased theirs tend to behave similarly. Indeed, they may still have hunted and travelled
extensively in the area before buying the trapline.) They usually have several cabins and
considerable amounts of equipment physically out on the trapline, and they closely mon-
itor animal populations (not just fur-bearers) and other developments in the area. They
are apt to voice very strong objections to any kind of development that might affect the
animal population on their traplines in any way (mining, road building, etc.). In one
case, I heard a KFN trapline owner complain to a Yukon government ofWcial about a graz-
ing lease that had been granted to a third party on her trapline. Though the lease had not
physically affected the area, she felt that the granting of the lease conXicted with her own
form of ownership.
20 She also has legitimate concerns about the terms of the agreement itself; she feels that
KFN is getting “ripped off.” Again, she is not alone in expressing these sentiments.
21 Similar provisions are contained even in the old numbered treaties elsewhere throughout
southern Canada (though they were not always honoured), and it is probably accurate to
say that no First Nations peoples in Canada would sign a treaty without provisions of this
sort. Indeed, existing aboriginal hunting rights were protected by the Constitution Act,
1982, and the 1990 Supreme Court judgment of R. v. Sparrow ruled that these rights take
precedence over federal, provincial, and territorial legislation; so Canadian common law
now recognizes and protects the Aboriginal right to hunt in the absence of a treaty.
22 Interestingly, property is not the only concept Western scholars have conceptualized in
this way. Needham (1971: 6) points out that marriage, too, has been viewed as a “bundle
of rights,” and he quotes Edmund Leach, who stated that, as a result of this, “all univer-
sal deWnitions of marriage are in vain.”
23 The concept of hunting rights need not explicitly refer to these beliefs and practices, but
its use must not contradict them, and it must create a legal space in which they can con-
tinue to exist.
24 See Rose (1994: chap. 7) for a discussion of how the “bundle of rights” metaphor has
affected people’s thinking about property in the Anglo-American context.
25 See Verdery (1999) for an analysis of overlapping and sometimes contradictory property
rights in post-socialist Romania.
26 Peter Usher (1986: 86-89) has noted that, though the Canadian government now recog-
nizes the existence of Aboriginal hunting and Wshing rights, there are two fundamentally
different ways of interpreting them. The Wrst is a narrow interpretation, which means
“only that aboriginal people have the right to hunt, trap, Wsh, and gather on Crown lands
at all times.” In this narrow interpretation, the right to hunt “is not exclusive; it is not
binding on third parties granted competing land or resource rights by the government;
and, for practical purposes, there is no commonly accepted remedy for violation by virtue
of loss of use and enjoyment.” As a result, these rights tend to erode over time through
settlement and development by Euro-Canadians. In contrast, a wider interpretation of
the Aboriginal right to hunt holds that “the right is not limited to pursuing fur, Wsh, and
wildlife, but extends to the abundance, quality, and use of the resources themselves.”
290 Notes to pages 252-66

Under this interpretation, Aboriginal peoples “have a form of proprietary interest in those
resources, and have the right to make a living from fur, Wsh, and game.” If the govern-
ment were to recognize this wider version of the right, then it would “have a legal oblig-
ation to protect the interests of the property holders, and could grant other rights in land
and resources only subject to aboriginal rights.” To date, however, the Canadian govern-
ment has recognized only the narrow interpretation.
27 It is very difWcult to give a meaningful Wgure for the population of Burwash Landing.
Although there is a core of perennial year-round residents, many people split their time
between Burwash and Whitehorse or Haines Junction. A signiWcant number come to live
with relatives in Burwash for several years at a time, while others go off in a similar fash-
ion to reside in other Yukon communities or to Wnd work elsewhere in the territory or
Canada. There is also signiWcant seasonal variation; students return to the village in the
summer, and many people take seasonal jobs in construction or highway maintenance
that take them out of the community for signiWcant parts of the year. This Wgure is, there-
fore, only a very rough estimate.
28 This sum includes only the money used by KFN to negotiate a Wnal agreement. While it
does include KFN’s share of negotiating the Umbrella Final Agreement, it does not
include the money spent by any other Yukon First Nations to negotiate or implement
their own claims. Nor does it include any of the money that came into Burwash Landing
through KFN members’ involvement in other land claims-related activities, such as prepa-
ration of the Greater Kluane Regional Land Use Plan. While I do not have Wgures for the
amount of money entering the village as a result of all these other activities, it was con-
siderable. And these funds are over and above the money that continues to come into the
village from other sources, such as seasonal wage labour and social assistance.
29 In light of the long hours and great effort that KFN employees do put into land claims, it
is tempting to dismiss such statements as mean-spirited attacks by those who feel left out
of the process. But statements like the one made by Joe Johnson’s grandmother, cited at
the beginning of this chapter, remind us that to one not accustomed to working in an
ofWce, writing and reading do not seem much like “work” at all.

Conclusion
1 In the end, although KFN was not completely comfortable with the sterilization plans, it
agreed not to oppose them. That government biologists had been prepared to begin the
sterilization project without seeking KFN’s permission to do so, however, indicates that
this process was quite unlike the RRSSC process.
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Index
Note: Page numbers in italics refer to a
photograph; (m) refers to a map and (t)
to a table.
Aboriginal rights, 54, 122, 224;
relationship to Aboriginal title, 225; to
hunt, 78, 242-47, 261, 289n21, 289n26
Aboriginal-state relations: history of, in
the Kluane region, 27-59; the
restructuring of, 1-4, 8-9, 26, 261, 263,
269-70. See also co-management; land
claims; property; traditional knowledge
Aboriginal title, 224-25, 240, 287n1;
extinguishment of, 287n2
Abrams, Philip, 3, 4, 269
Aishihik-Kluane Caribou Recovery
Program, 161, 266, 290n1
Alaska, 237; Kluane people’s relatives in,
17; sheep populations in, 167, 193-94
Alaska Highway, 12, 33, 241; construction
of, 32, 272n8, n9; effects of, 27, 32-40,
42-43, 48, 68, 247; use by Kluane
people, 36-37
Alaska Highway Pipeline, 54, 288n16
Alaska Pipeline, 54
alcohol: and the Alaska Highway, 34; and
mission schools, 44; and welfare, 50;
and hunting, 68
Allen, James, 122
Allen, Lorraine, 77
Alsek Renewable Resources Council, 150
amalgamation: of Kluane and White
River Bands, 48-49, 273n23, 274n26; of
Snag and Stewart River Bands, 273n24.
See also colonialism
Andrew Atlin Lake, 37, 56-58, 274n31
AnWeld, F.E., 48
animals: bothering/playing with, 82-83,
89-90, 109-10, 276n21; eaten in
Burwash, 64; Euro-American concep-
tions of, 109, 111, 128, 280n8; feasts
and taboos for, 91-92; as food (see
meat); as gifts, 80, 88-91, 245; and
human speech, 89; inhabiting Kluane
Region, 15; as intelligent, 83, 92, 106,
108, 111, 128, 177, 279n6; as other-
than-human persons, 83-85, 88, 91-92,
94, 101, 108, 111, 127-28, 177, 277n23;
population cycles, 22, 177, 274n3,
284n25; reciprocal relations with,
85-94, 108, 223; reincarnation of, 91,
277n22; social relations with, 84-94,
101, 108; spiritual power of, 83, 93-94,
277n23; as teachers, 100-101, 108,
280n7; thinking/talking bad about,
86-89; treatment of remains, 90-91,
277n22, 279n44. See also hunting;
patience; reciprocity; respect; wildlife
management
annual round (subsistence): and the fur
trade, 31-32, 34; modiWed, 35-36,
68-69; pre-contact, 28-29, 66-67;
and social organization, 66-67
Arch Creek, 35
Asch, Michael, 231
authenticity. See tradition, concept of
Azande, the, 62
Bacon, Francis, 134-35
band structure, 48-49, 249-50. See also
colonialism
Barichello, Norman, 170-71
Bearlake Athapaskans, 96
Bell, Catherine, 231
Big Arm (of Kluane Lake). See under
Kluane Lake
Bill C-31, Amendments to the Indian
Act, 17, 20, 272n13, n14
304 Index
Bloch, Maurice, 98
Bodenhorn, Barbara, 66
Bolster, Lee, 283n14
Boss, Jim, 52
Bourdieu, Pierre, 4-5, 11, 268
Boy who Stayed with Fish, The, 82, 84, 101,
276n17. See also stories
Brightman, Robert, 92, 276n16
Bruneau, Joe, 14, 41
bureaucracy, 6-8; incompatibility with
First Nations human-animal relations,
6-9
bureaucratization: of First Nations
society, 2-3, 7-9, 143, 223, 248-50, 253;
of Kluane society, 11-12, 251-54, 257.
See also co-management; land claims;
wildlife management
Burwash Creek, 31
Burwash Landing, 13, 30, 33, 43; author’s
arrival in, 21-23; description of, 12;
founding of, 31-32, 254, 272n7;
government services, 49; inhabitants
of, 17-18; mixed economy in, 64, 259;
population, 12, 290n27
bush Indians. See identity
Calder v. Attorney General, 53, 288n10
Canada, government of: policy on land
claims, 53-55; providing funding for
Yukon Land claims process, 256-57;
role in setting up First Nations
constitutions, 250-51. See also
Department of Indian Affairs (DIA);
Department of Indian Affairs and
Northern Development (DIAND)
Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society,
150, 286n12
Carcross (mission school at), 43-44, 47
caribou: importance of, to Kluane people,
274n4; caribou fence, 272n1
Carmacks, 28
Carreau, Keith, 284n28
Carrier, Stuart Lake, 226
Chambers, Grace, 37, 152, 174
Champagne and Aishihik First Nations,
150, 271n9
Charles Campbell Hospital (Edmonton),
33
Chipewyan, 65, 85
Chippewa. See Ojibwa
Chisana Stampede, 31
Church, Roman Catholic: in Burwash,
42, 43, 44; struggle with Anglicans, 38,
42-43. See also education; mission
schools
city Indians. See identity
Clements, Frederick, 287n5
climate change, 284n26
Coates, Ken: on alcohol, 272n10; on land
claims, 53; on mission schools, 42-43;
on welfare, 48-50; on wage labour, 256
colonialism, 3-4, 24, 28, 263; and band
structure 249-50; and education, 41-42;
and property theory, 232-34; and
wildlife management, 24, 38-39, 58-59
co-management: bureaucratization and,
2-3, 7-9, 142-43, 223; the co-
management success story, 147-49,
219-21; conventional explanations for
problems with, 9, 117-19; forms of,
115; and the land claims process, 115,
210-11; the ofWcial discourse of, 5-6;
political consequences of, 1-3, 9,
141-46; political context, 4, 144, 263;
rationale for, 1-3, 60, 114; Renewable
Resources Councils’ role in, 116, 144,
149-50, 210-11; self-censorship of
co-management bodies, 144, 211; social
context of, 130-32; and the term TEK,
118-19; in the Yukon context, 115-16,
144-46; Yukon Fish and Wildlife
Management Board’s role in, 116, 144,
210-11. See also knowledge; knowledge-
integration; research, wildlife; Ruby
Range Sheep Steering Committee
(RRSSC); traditional knowledge (TEK);
wildlife management
common property, 235. See also property
compartmentalization (of knowledge and
practice): and hunting rights, 243-45;
of scientiWc knowledge, 123; of
traditional knowledge, 123-26, 141,
143-44, 183. See also knowledge;
knowledge-integration; science;
traditional knowledge (TEK)
Constitution Act (1982), 225, 244
Cooper, John, 227
cooperative management. See co-
management
Copper Center (Alaska), 271n9, n10
Copper Joe, 254, 255, 271n10
Council for Yukon First Nations, 116,
274n29
Council for Yukon Indians, 55, 116,
274n29
Cree, 88, 98, 136, 277n22, 283n9;
property relations among, 226, 233,
235; and land claims, 254, 274n28
Cruikshank, Julie, 11, 82, 129, 145,
279n5
cultural translation. See translation,
cultural

culture, commoditization of, 259-60
Cultus Bay (Kluane Lake), 78, 285n5
Dall sheep, 151, 152, 153; effects of
weather on, 161-62, 173, 177, 179,
284n26; environmentalist interests in,
156-57; harassment of, 160, 175,
177-78, 202-203, 285n9; hunting of, by
First Nations people, 153-55, 171-72,
246-47, 282n2, 283n12; –, by outWtters,
153-56, 165; –, by resident hunters,
153, 155, 165; –, effects of, 161-62,
170-73, 175, 179 (see also hunting);
importance of, 151-53, 274n4;
knowledge of, big ram theory, 280n7;
–, biologists’, 125, 162-73, 184, 189,
282n7, 283n22, n23; –, conventional
categorization of, 157-58; –, environ-
mentalists’, 179-80; –, First Nations
elders’ and hunters’, 173-77, 182-84,
189-90, 285n5; –, outWtters’, 178-79,
184, 284n29; –, life table, 169-70,
283n22; –, sheep mortality, 167,
169-73, 283n23; –, sheep reproduction,
167-68, 171, 173; –, spatial dimensions
of, 193-96, 285n7; –, temporal dimen-
sions of, 188-93, 196 (see also knowl-
edge; research, wildlife); management
of, full curl rule, 127-28, 153-54,
265-67; –, political considerations,
151-57, 160-61, 172-73, 175, 179-80,
196-99; –, quotas, 154, 156, 161,
265-67, 282n7; –, in the Yukon, 153-54
(see also wildlife management;
Department of Renewable Resources,
Yukon); predation on, 125, 160-61,
178; research on, aerial survey, 160,
162-68, 186-87, 200-203, 285n9; –,
ground survey, 203-205; –, joint
research, 199-210, 281n10 (see also
research); struggles over, 152-53,
156-57. See also Kluane Lake; Ruby
Range Sheep Steering Committee
(RRSSC)
Dalton, Jack, 31
Dalton Post, 31
Dawson City, 272n6, 273n16, n19
Dehn, Michael, 168
Dene Tha, 104-105, 275n15, 278n36
Denniston, Glenda, 31
Department of Indian Affairs (DIA): and
First Nations education, 42; programs
and services, 48, 249-50; and welfare,
42
Department of Indian Affairs and
Northern Development (DIAND), 150
Index 305
Department of Renewable Resources,
Yukon: as a center of calculation, 141;
portrayal of First Nations’ notion of
respect, 80-83; and the management of
Dall sheep, 154, 165, 176, 220; role in
educating wildlife managers in the
territory, 286n14. See also Yukon
Territorial Government (YTG)
Descartes, René, 134-35
Destruction Bay, 20, 42, 49, 274n25
Dickson, David, 193
Dickson, Dennis, 72, 250
Dickson, Dick, 189
Dickson, Dickie, 193
Dickson, Douglas, 35, 79, 174, 193
Dickson, Gerald, 69, 76, 101, 107
Dickson, Louise, 271n10
Dickson, Ruth (Pete), 271n10
Dickson, Thomas, 152, 271n10, 272n7,
273n19
disease, 31-33, 68
distillation (of knowledge/practice): and
hunting rights, 243, 245-47; and joint
research, 204-205, 209; of scientiWc
knowledge, 166-67; of traditional
knowledge, 111-12, 126-32, 141,
143-44, 183-84. See also knowledge;
knowledge-integration; science;
traditional knowledge
dog teams, 35-36, 273n12
Donjek Range, 15
Donjek River, 15, 41, 107
dreams, 84, 95
Duke River, 15
education: Athapaskan approach to, 96-
101, 259-60, 278n35; and the Catholic
church, 41-48; and colonialism, 41-42;
effects of land claims on, 253; effects
of, on land claims, 46-47, 54; First
Nations attitudes toward Euro-American
form of, 45-46, 51-52, 97, 101; effects
of Euro-American, on hunting knowl-
edge, 68; joking as a form of, 99-100;
learning by observing/doing, 22-23,
96-99; learning from animals, 100-101;
and territorial schools, 51-52, 273n19.
See also knowledge; mission schools;
residential schools
Eikland, Charlie, 90, 110
Eikland, Mark, 90, 163
Eiseley, Loren, 226-27, 234, 287n3, n5
elders: distribution of meat to, 72-73;
honoraria paid to, 213, 257; knowledge
of, 46; respect for, 47-48, 79-80, 85,
102-103
306 Index
environment, concept of, 120-21
environmental impact assessment: use of
TEK in, 60, 114-15, 122, 143, 145
ethnicity, of Kluane people, 17. See also
identity
Evans-Pritchard, E.E.: on conceptual
categories, 231; on knowledge, 61-62,
113, 271n3, 279n46
evolutionism, 226-27
family allowance, 49, 256
family hunting territory, 225-29, 237-39,
287n3. See also property
federal government. See Canada,
government of
Feit, Harvey: on the effects of the James
Bay Agreement, 254; on family hunting
territories, 226; on the politics of
wildlife management, 38, 58, 283n9
Feyerabend, Paul, 135-38, 281n13, n15
First Nations, deWnition of, 271n1
Fish and Wildlife Management Board. See
co-management; Ruby Range Sheep
Steering Committee (RRSSC)
Wshing, catch-and-release, 81-83, 89
Fort Selkirk, 272n5
Foucault, Michel, 10-11, 264, 269
Fourth World, 3, 41. See also colonialism
full curl rule. See under Dall sheep,
management of
fur trade: effects of in Kluane region,
31-32; and the family hunting territory,
226-29, 237-39; and registered traplines
in the Yukon, 239-41, 289n19; and
snowmobiles, 36
game management subzones, 163,
164(m), 194
gender. See hunting
Gibben, J.E., 39, 273n16
Gluckman, Max, 229, 233
gold rush, Klondike, 31, 52, 189
Goulet, Jean-Guy, 103-105, 275n15,
278n38
government programs and services,
48-52, 68, 249, 256. See also welfare;
education
Grotius, Hugo, 287n4
Gwich’in, 278n41
habitus, linguistic, 5-6
Haines Junction, 21, 49, 51, 107, 212, 214
Hallowell, A. Irving, 83-84, 230-31
Handler, Richard, 236
Hann, C.M., 230-31
Hanson, Swede, 57
Hensel, Chase, 119-20
Herskovits, Melville, 227, 234
Hoefs, Manfred, 168, 170-72
Howard, Albert, 279n2, n3
human-animal relations. See animals;
bureaucracy; hunting; reciprocity
human-land relations. See property
hunting: aboriginal right to, 78, 154,
243-47; anthropological conceptions
of, 63, 65-66, 274n1; caloric
importance of, in Burwash, 64, 75-76,
274n2; capital requirements of, 71;
cultural importance of, 64-65, 67;
eating as the culmination of, 65, 75,
77; and gender, 65-66, 275n5; and
identity, 59, 64-65, 75-79, 94, 152; and
kinship, 67-68, 71-72; First Nations
attitudes toward Euro-American prac-
tices, 77; and knowledge, 67-68, 97-98,
106, 175; labour requirements of, 71,
73-74; moose calling, 100, 106, 277n31;
moose tracking, 107-108, 278n41; and
patience, 105-108; rabbit snaring, 85-88;
and residence patterns, 66-67, 71; and
respect, 87, 92, 106-108, 278n39;
spiritual dangers of, 93-94; spiritual
obligations associated with, 88-93, 245;
social dimensions of, in Burwash,
66-75, 275n7; and survival, 63-64, 79;
time requirements of, 71. See also
animals; meat; over-hunting; respect
identity: bush vs. city Indians, 19, 258;
and Indian food, 75-76, 81, 275n14; of
Kluane people, 17-21, 94. See also
hunting; social stratiWcation, under
land claims
income: sources of, 32, 36, 256-60; need
for, 36, 256; and welfare, 50, 256.
See also money
incommensurability (of knowledge
systems), 62, 111-13, 117, 265. See also
knowledge-integration
Indian Act, 17, 20, 242, 271n4. See also
Bill C-31
Indian food. See identity
Indian status, deWnition of, 17, 271n4
Indianness. See identity
indigenous knowledge, 11, 60-61, 279n4,
281n12. See also traditional knowledge
indigenous management, 61, 281n17. See
also wildlife management
Jackson, Moose, 107-108
Jacquot, Eugene, 31, 255, 271n10,
272n7, 273n19

Jacquot, Joe, 175
Jacquot, Louis, 31, 271n10, 272n7,
273n19
Jacquot, Mary, 271n10
James Bay Hydroelectric Project, 54,
274n28
James Bay and Northern Quebec
Agreement, 254
Joe, Frank, 174, 177, 192
Johns, Art, 80
Johnson, Agnes, 69, 76, 77, 100; on land
claims, 242; on the proper treatment of
animals, 87-88, 276n19
Johnson, Alana, 70
Johnson, Bob, 41
Johnson, Edward, 70, 73, 274n30
Johnson, Frederick, 28-29, 238
Johnson, Jessie, 101
Johnson, Jimmy, 152
Johnson, Joe, 14, 21, 107-108, 240,
271n2, 290n29; on land claims, 222-23,
242, 251-52, 262; on learning/teaching,
100-101; on the proper treatment of
animals, 86-87, 90-91, 276n19, 277n23
Johnson, Kathleen, 70, 73
Johnson, Lena, 239, 288n16
Johnson, Luke, 14, 153
Johnson, Mary Jane, 94, 106
Johnson, Michael, 70, 73, 76
Johnson, Moose, 57, 108
Johnson, Peter, 69
Johnson, Sam, Sr., 56, 57, 58-59, 101,
108, 274n31
Johnson, Sandy, 21
Johnson, Simon, 153
Joint research. See research under Dall
sheep; research, wildlife
Kabanak, Sharon, 85-86
King, Richard, 44, 47
kinship: and distribution of meat, 67-68,
72-74; with neighbouring First Nations,
17; and identity, 275n14; and property,
229, 231, 237. See also hunting
Kluane First Nation (KFN): membership
of, 12, 20-21, 271n11, 272n13; KFN
land claim, 55-56, 237-62; relations
with Canada, 11-12 (see also bureau-
cratization); role in Ruby Range Sheep
Steering Committee, 126-27, 149-50,
214-15; split with White River First
Nation, 49 (see also amalgamation)
Kluane Game Sanctuary: creation of, 39;
effects of, on Kluane people, 39-40, 55,
56-59; and welfare, 50
Kluane Lake, 12, 14, 15-16, 22, 69; sheep
Index 307
on Little Arm, 174, 285n5; sheep on
Talbot (Big) Arm, 159, 174, 203-204,
282n2, 285n5
Kluane Lake School, 51-52
Kluane National Park Reserve 14, 39-40,
41, 251, 273n18; creation of, 55,
275n4; and the Ruby Range Sheep
Steering Committee, 150, 279n45
Kluane people, deWnition of, 18-19,
272n12. See also Burwash Landing;
social relations, Kluane
Kluane region, 15-17; climate of, 16-17;
ecological research in, 21-22
Kluane River, 14, 15
Kluane Tribal Brotherhood, 49, 51, 57-58,
274n26
Kluane Tribal Council, 49, 274n26
Klukshu, 238
knowledge: about animals, 101-102, 107-
13, 227n26, 280n9 (see also research
under Dall sheep); Athapaskan con-
cept of, 94-108, 277n25; as cultural
construct, 113, 121-23, 133; legitimation
of, 9-11, 113, 138-39, 264-70, 277n266,
286n11; loss of, due to Kluane Game
Sanctuary, 40, 41; non-sentential, 98,
108, 277n26; and power, 9-11, 123,
138-43, 146, 264-70, 277n26, 286n11;
primary vs. secondary, 95-96, 277n24,
n25; problems with cross-cultural use
of concept, 94-95; systems of, 132-38,
281n12. See also knowledge-integration;
research; respect; traditional knowledge
knowledge-integration: and aboriginal
empowerment, 60, 114, 117, 141-43,
221; assumptions underlying, 113,
119-23, 132, 144, 282n1; anthropological
basis for, 60-62; a case of successful,
186-88; as extension of scientiWc
networks, 141-43; failed efforts at,
188-99; political consequences of, 25,
111-12, 138-46, 221; and power, 10-11,
24-25, 112-13; 118-19, 122-23, 129-30,
138-43, 195-99, 211, 279n2, 285n8;
social context of, 130-32; rationale for,
60, 114-15, 143, 187, 190, 196; as a
technical problem, 117, 122-23, 130,
132, 185-86, 196-97, 282n1; and trust,
191, 196-99. See also knowledge; Ruby
Range Sheep Steering Committee
(RRSSC); research, wildlife; traditional
knowledge (TEK)
Koidern River, 153
Krech, Shepard, 92, 276n16
Kuhn, Thomas, 133-35, 137
Kulchyski, Peter, 225
308 Index
Lake Laberge, 52
land claims: author’s involvement in,
23-24; and bureaucratization, 2-3, 6-9,
223, 248-54, 257; consequences of, for
Kluane people, 244-60; conventional
explanations for problems with, 9; and
education, 46-47, 52, 54, 257; federal
policy regarding, 53-54; history of, in
the Yukon, 52-56, 256-57; honoraria for
attending, 257-58; and identity, 19;
implementation of, 254; Kluane
people’s disillusionment with, 257-58,
289n20; and money, 251, 254-61,
290n28; potential alternate basis for,
235-36; rationale for, 1-3, 9, 113, 261;
removing people from the land, 251-54,
260-61; role of war veterans and
residential school alumni in, 54-55;
and social stratiWcation, 257-59; and
TEK, 60, 62, 122, 143, 224; unintended
political consequences of, 1-3, 9, 25-26,
113, 224, 232, 261-62. See also
aboriginal-state relations; property;
Umbrella Final Agreement (UFA)
Latour, Bruno, 138-41
Leach, Edmund, 112, 289n22
Leacock, Eleanor, 228, 236, 239
Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 61, 271n3, 279n46
linguistic Weld, 5-6
Little Arm (of Kluane Lake). See under
Kluane Lake
local knowledge, 60, 140, 158. See also
traditional knowledge
Locke, John, 232, 287n7
Lomawaima, Tsianina, 42, 46
Long’s Creek, 69
long time ago stories. See under stories
Lower Post (mission school), 43-48, 51.
See also education; mission schools
Lowie, Robert, 227, 230, 287n6
McCandless, Robert, 34, 38-39, 152, 240,
272n7
McClellan, Catharine: on animals as
other-than-human persons, 83,
276n17; on the annual round, 29, 66,
275n6; on the distribution of meat,
67-68, 72, 275n9; on the fur trade, 31;
on land claims, 52; on property, 238-39,
241; on political organization, 249;
sheep sighting on Kluane Lake, 282n2;
on spiritual obligations toward animals,
89, 91-93, 276n21
McDonnell, Roger, 275n7
McKennan, Robert, 237-38
Mackenzie Valley pipeline, 54
McNeil, Kent, 288n9
magic, 60-61, 112, 230, 288n13
Maine, Henry Sumner, 229-30, 233
Malinowski, Bronislaw: on gardening, 66;
on multiple orderings of reality,
279n46; on property, 229, 233-34; on
science, 60-61, 138
Mauss, Marcel, 88
meat: and identity, 75-79; sharing of, 67-
68, 72-75, 102, 259, 274n2; symbolic
dimensions of, 75-79; waste of, 80-83,
91. See also animals; reciprocity
Michel, Henry, 274n30
Mile 1120 (hunting camp), 70, 73
Miller, J.R., 42, 46, 53-54
mission school syndrome, 44-45, 50
mission schools: abuses in, 41, 44-48;
and resistance to colonialism, 46-47;
and welfare, 50; in the Yukon, 41-48,
273n20, n21
mixed economy (in Burwash Landing),
64, 259. See also hunting
moieties, 17, 238, 275n10
money: associated with Euro-Americans,
255-56; and bureaucracy, 6-7; inXux of,
into the Kluane region, 254-60. See
also under land claims
Montagnais, 236, 240
moose hunting. See hunting
Morgan, Lewis Henry, 226-27, 287n4, n7
Morisset, Father Eusebe, 36, 40, 42, 44,
273n16
Morrow, Phyllis, 119-20
Mount Logan, 271n5
Muldoon, James, 288n9
nation-state. See state
Needham, Rodney, 231, 288n13, 289n22
Nelson, Richard, 83, 88, 195, 278n41
Neskatahin, 31
Nisling Range, 15; and the Ruby Range
Sheep Steering Committee, 149, 173,
193-94; 285n5
Northern Tutchone, 17, 18(m), 271n9,
272n5, 273n24, 288n15
Oblate Fathers, 42. See also Church,
Roman Catholic
Ojibwa, 83-85, 98, 283n9
Onion Creek, 72
Ostashek, John, 152, 174
other-than-human persons. See animals
outWtter areas (or concessions), 150, 156,
175, 178-79, 194, 196

outWtters: involvement in the Ruby
Range Sheep Steering Committee, 150,
156, 214-15; political clout of, in the
Yukon, 155-56, 198. See also knowledge
of outWtters under Dall sheep; Ruby
Range Sheep Steering Committee
(RRSSC)
over-hunting: and the Alaska highway,
33-34, 189; biologists’ deWnition of,
170-72; by First Nations people, 172,
246-47; and the gold rush, 189; by
outWtters, 171-72, 175, 220-21
ownership. See property
Parks Canada, 150, 163
patience: and interpersonal relations,
104-105, 278n36; and knowledge, 99,
101, 107-108, 110. See also hunting;
respect
personhood, 94, 230, 287n8. See also
animals
Pocock, John, 288n9
political organization, Kluane, 249-51.
See also self-government
Popper, Karl, 134
potlatch, 78, 151; analogy with hunting,
87-88; history of, 30, 32; and identity,
17; and reciprocity, 73, 78, 274n2,
275n10; and social relations, 102. See
also reciprocity
Potter, Wilson, 272n7
power, forms of, 10-11, 264-70. See also
knowledge; knowledge-integration;
land claims; property; science; state
property: as alternative moral framework,
246-47, 261; and agriculture, 227,
287n9, 288n11; among hunters,
226-29, 234-38, 288n9; attempts to
universalize the concept of, 230-33,
236; as a bundle of rights, 243-45,
289n22; as a cultural construction,
229-30, 232-33; deWning, 231, 236-37;
incompatibility with First Nations
human-land relations, 2-3, 6, 9, 25,
222-24, 233, 242, 260-61; as a marker
of legitimacy, 236-37; as ofWcial/
hegemonic discourse of land claims,
5-6, 25, 224-25, 232-37, 240-43, 248,
261-62; and power, 10, 231-37, 263-65,
267-68; private vs. communal, 227-29,
235, 287n7; property relations in
Kluane country, 237-47; property law,
230, 240, 243; and the state, 223-24,
232-36, 240, 263; and the subject/
object dichotomy, 230; in the Subarctic,
Index 309
224-26, 237-38; theory of, in colonial
context, 232-34; usufruct, 228, 243.
See also land claims
Ptarmigan Heart, 29
quotas. See Dall sheep
R. v. Sparrow, 152, 289n21
rationality: and bureaucracy, 7-8; as
culturally constructed, 61-62, 133. See
also bureaucratization; knowledge
Raup, Hugh, 28-9, 238
Ray, Arthur, 226
reciprocity: with animals, 80, 85-94, 108,
223, 245-46; effects of property on,
241-42, 245-47; potlatch as ideal form
of, 73, 88; provisions for in the UFA,
244-45; and social relations, 67-68,
72-75, 88, 102, 256, 275n11
religion, 60, 288n13. See also animals;
ritual
Renewable Resources Councils. See
co-management
research, wildlife: differing conceptions
of, 205-10, 286n10; First Nations
perceptions of, as inaccurate 111,
191-92, 202; First Nations perceptions
of, as disrespectful/inappropriate, 109-
11, 202; First Nations perceptions of, as
self-serving, 159; political context of
joint research, 201-204; political
context of scientiWc research, 206-207;
political context of TEK research,
122-31, 138-43. See also Dall sheep;
knowledge; Ruby Range Sheep Steering
Committee (RRSSC)
residential schools, 41-42, 46-47, 54,
273n21. See also education; mission
school
respect: for animals, 79-94, 101-102,
109-11, 246; for elders, 79-80, 85,
102-103; Euro-American conceptions
of, 80-83, 105, 109; implications of, for
wildlife management, 109-11; and
knowledge, 94, 101-108; for oneself,
79-80, 85, 102-103, 105; for others,
79-80, 85, 102-105, 277n32; and
patience, 104-108; and survival, 102.
See also animals; knowledge; patience
rights, 245-47. See also property
ritual: associated with hunting, 88-94;
and identity, 78-79; as property, 230.
See also hunting
Rogers, Edward, 228-29
Ross, Rupert, 98
310 Index
Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP),
52; and alcohol, 273n10; and
enforcement of game laws, 39-40,
289n17; and mission schools, 43
Ruby Range, 15; and the Ruby Range
Sheep Steering Committee, 149-50,
156, 159, 193-94, 285n5
Ruby Range Sheep Steering Committee
(RRSSC): author’s involvement with,
23, 150; biologists’ management
position, 158-73; conXicting assess-
ments of, 148, 199, 204-205, 219-21,
286n17; creation of, 149-50, 155; and
the drafting of TEK recommendations,
215-19; economic context of meetings,
213-15, 286n15, 286n16; environ-
mentalists’ management position, 179-
80; First Nations elders’ opinions about
meetings, 212-13; First Nations
management position, 159-60, 173-77;
importance of Sheep Mountain popula-
tion to, 163-64, 166(t), 170-71, 283n16;
management recommendations
generated by, 185, 215-20, 286n18;
operational procedures, 210-19;
outWtters’ management position, 178-
79, 284n30; political consequences of,
199, 205, 218-21; political context of,
151-57, 196-99, 265-67; research carried
out by (see under Dall sheep; research);
social context of meetings, 212-13;
and the Yukon Fish and Wildlife
Management Board, 149-50, 211-12,
215, 217, 219; the veto, 211-12, 266.
See also co-management; Dall sheep;
knowledge; knowledge-integration;
traditional knowledge (TEK)
Rushforth, Scott, 96, 277n24, 278n34
St. Elias Mountains, 15
Sandlos, John, 38
Scarff, Jessie, 82
science: attempts to deWne, 60-61, 134-38;
beginnings of wildlife biology in the
Yukon, 189; compartmentalization of,
123; distillation of, 166-67; as ideology,
136, 281n13; vs. knowledge, 281n16; as
legitimizing label, 138-39; networks of,
140-43; and power, 138-43; production
and use of scientiWc artifacts, 133, 182,
184-85, 285n2; root metaphors of,
136-37, 281n14; scientiWc method,
134-36; social construction of, 133,
139-40; utility of, 133-35, 139-41, 145.
See also knowledge
Scollon, Ronald, 103, 278n38
Scollon, Susan, 103, 278n38
Scott, Colin, 136; on property, 233, 235
self-government, 1; assumptions under-
lying, 250-51; and bureaucratization,
248-51; and identity, 21
sharing. See reciprocity
Sharp, Henry, 65
sheep. See Dall sheep
Sheep Mountain. See under Ruby Range
Sheep Steering Committee
Silver City, 31
skidoo. See snowmobile
Smith, David, 85
Smith, Elijah, 53, 55, 58
Smith, Harry, 174
snowmobile, 34-36, 50, 256, 273n11; and
modiWed annual round, 68
social assistance. See welfare; Department
of Indian Affairs
social relations, Kluane: effects of Alaska
Highway on, 32-37; fur trade era,
102-05; effects of land claims on, 237-
60; pre-contact, 28-32; sedentarization,
35, 49, 68; See also hunting; reciprocity;
respect
Southern Tutchone (language), 45,
271n8, 275n15, 288n14
Southern Tutchone (people), 17, 18(m),
271n9, 276n17, 288n14, n15;
distribution of meat among, 67;
political organization, 249; property
among, 238
Speck, Frank, 225-28, 234, 236, 240,
287n3, n5
state: complex nature of, 3-4, 24, 28, 38,
56-59, 269-70; constitution of state
power, 4, 28, 56; and the legitimation
of knowledge/discourse, 5-6, 11, 138,
264-70. See also colonialism; power
stories: Wrst contact, 254-55; Wrst kill,
276n19; long time ago, 83-84, 88, 101,
276n17
Strathern, Marilyn, 94, 230, 287n8
Subarctic, 63-64
subsistence cycle. See annual round
(subsistence)
symbolic capital, 5
taboo, 91-92. See also animals; respect;
ritual
Tagish, 18(m), 67, 90-91, 238, 271n10,
276n17
Talbot Arm (of Kluane Lake). See under
Kluane Lake

Talbot Creek, 29
Tambiah, Stanley, 279n46, 288n13
Tanner, Adrian, 88, 274n28
TEK. See traditional knowledge
Temple, Phil, 57
Tlingit, 17, 18(m), 271n9, n10; role in fur
trade, 30-31, 272n5, 288n15
Tlingit, Inland, 18(m), 67, 238-39,
276n17
Together Today for our Children Tomorrow,
53, 55
trade (in Kluane region): during fur trade
era, 30-32, 34, 272n3, n4; pre-contact,
29-30, 272n2
tradition, concept of, 120-21, 125
traditional knowledge (TEK): and
aboriginal-state relations, 9-10, 24-25;
Euro-American misgivings about, 118-
19, 195-96, 279n2, n3; compartment-
alization of, 123-26, 141, 143-44, 183;
distillation of, 111-12, 126-32, 141,
143-44, 183-84; First Nations people’s
misgivings about, 118-19; funda-
mentally contested terms implicit in,
119-23, 148, 221; holistic nature of,
117, 124-25, 129; local variability of,
195-6; as a political tool, 118-19,
279n2, n3; the production and use of
TEK artifacts, 129-30, 141-43, 182-85,
285n3; as “science,” 139; ubiquity of,
60, 114; as a way of life, 63, 129,
145-46. See also co-management;
knowledge; knowledge-integration;
Ruby Range Sheep Steering Committee
(RRSSC); wildlife management
traditional wildlife management, 81.
See also wildlife management
translation, cultural, 2, 10, 288n13; co-
management and, 126-32, 185, 188;
hunting rights and, 243-47; land claims
and, 223-24, 232-33, 236-37, 261,
288n11
treaties, 223, 225. See also land claims
Trudeau, Pierre, 53
tuberculosis. See disease
Umbrella Final Agreement (UFA): co-
management provisions, 116, 144,
210-11, 282n5; and hunting rights,
242-47; relation to the Ruby Range
Sheep Steering Committee, 149-50,
210-11; self-government provisions,
250-51; signing of, 55; Yukon Fish and
Wildlife Enhancement Trust, 286n18.
See also land claims
Index 311
Upper Tanana, 17, 18(m), 91, 237,
271n9; language, 288n14
Usher, Peter, 289n26
Verdery, Katherine, 289n25
visiting, 22, 71-2, 74
wage labour: and hunting, 64, 68, 71;
opportunities for, in Kluane region, 32,
36, 256, 273n13
Walker, Jasmine, 70
Weber, Max, 6-8
Wedge, Mark, 82
welfare, 48-51, 256; effects on hunting,
68. See also Department of Indian
Affairs (DIA)
White Paper, 53
White River, 15, 28-29, 193-94
White River Band, 49, 273n24
White River First Nation, 109, 271n9;
split with Kluane First Nation, 49,
274n26
Whitehorse, 12, 36-37, 85, 87, 90; as a
“center of calculation,” 141; schooling
in, 47, 51
Widdowson, Francis, 279n2, n3
wildlife management: and aboriginal-
state relations, 1-2, 4, 24, 28, 38-40,
56-59, 141-46, 263; bureaucratic/
political obstacles to the use of TEK in,
112-13, 122-23, 144-45, 196-99,
208-209, 265-67; colonial dimensions
of, 24, 38-40, 58-59; implicit concep-
tions of animals in, 8, 109, 127-29; and
knowledge-integration, 60, 62, 122-23;
ofWcial language of, 5-6, 95, 139, 146,
264-65; prohibition on killing female
game animals, 128; state vs. indigenous
management, 281n17. See also animals;
Dall sheep; co-management; knowledge;
Ruby Range Sheep Steering Committee
(RRSSC)
Williams, Nancy, 232-33, 287n4
Wolf, Eric, 10-11, 268-69
wolf kill. See Aishihik-Kluane Caribou
Recovery Program
yearly round. See annual round
(subsistence)
Yukon Association of Non-Status Indians
(YANSI), 274n29
Yukon Conservation Society (YCS), 150,
180, 216, 218
Yukon Fish and Game Association, 155
Yukon Fish and Wildlife Enhancement
312 Index
Trust. See under Umbrella Final
Agreement (UFA)
Yukon Fish and Wildlife Management
Board. See under co-management; Ruby
Range Sheep Steering Committee
(RRSSC)
Yukon Native Brotherhood (YNB), 53,
256, 274n29
Yukon OutWtters’ Association, 156
Yukon River, 31
Yukon Territorial Government (YTG):
and the enforcement of game laws,
56-59; and the establishment of
registered traplines, 239-40; and juris-
diction over game laws, 39, 245,
273n14; role in co-management, 116,
126-27; role in Ruby Range Sheep
Steering Committee, 149-50, 214-15.
See also Department of Renewable
Resources, Yukon