Both Western patterns of consumption,
and anthropological analyses of consumption, have embedded within them
root
premises intrinsic to Western epistemology.
In this paper, I shall briefly explore some of the ramifications
of
these core assumptions, using some aspects of Ahnishinahbæótjibway
deer-hunting as a platform from
which to approach the profoundly non-Western epistemology of the Ahnishinahbæótjibway.
I shall begin with a sketch of some
of the salient aspects of the context within which Ahnishinahbæótjibway
deer-hunting occurred, and shall
briefly describe Ahnishinahbæótjibway
deer-hunting and a few relevant epistemological considerations. Drawing upon an Ahnishinahbæótjibway
world-view, I shall then discuss
some of the ways in which key assumptions of Western analysis could be
reconsidered, and outline some of the parameters which provide not only
a
cogent theory of Ahnishinahbæótjibway
deer-hunting, but also some interesting insights into Western theories
of
consumption.
Much of the information in this
paper is drawn from observations made on the Red Lake Indian Reservation{1}. I spent most of my time prior to February of
1984 in the "Copper City" Indian community near Redby, hunted with
both men and women of that community, and listened to the hunting
stories which
comprise a significant aspect of social conversation.
In the spring of 1984 I married Wub-e-ke-niew, who was Ahnishinahbæótjibway of the
Bear Dodem, and moved to the rural
"Little Rock" area of the reservation, about fifteen miles west of
Redby. After our marriage I hunted
mostly with Wub-e-ke-niew, and continued to listen to the hunting
conversations
of Wub-e-ke-niew and our friends and relatives, as well as those of an
elderly
woman who sometimes claimed me as a "daughter."
Wub-e-ke-niew was a brilliant social
theorist in his own right, and both hunting and the ramifications of
Western
theory were among the topics of our conversations.
Many of the insights presented in this paper are his, or were
developed jointly in the course of our fourteen years of often-intense
discussions, and if he were still living and could thus critique this
paper and
add his own commentary, I would list him as a co-author.
Some of the background information
upon which this paper rests is drawn from research done jointly by
Wub-e-ke-niew
and me, including a decade of scrutiny focusing on Bureau of Indian
Affairs
records from the National Archives, along with other historical
documents. Also, my understanding has
benefited from
the corpus of anthropological and other Western academic writing, and
from
discussions with colleagues, mentors and professors in anthropology.
The standard forma of academic acknowledgement
includes a disclaimer to the
effect that any deficiency in understanding and interpreting others'
work is
solely my responsibility. Obviously,
this is the case, and it would be both tacky and false to claim that
lacunae,
thick-headedness, inaccuracies or other problems with my writing were
someone
else's fault. Even the dog is
blameless, the mouse who chewed the label-tabs off of an entire drawer
of file
folders in 1994 has been eclipsed by time and subsequent events, and I
am the
only one who holds responsibility for those aspects of this paper which
are
less than perfect.
I have included as illustrations a
number of Mark Boswell's political cartoons, originally published in
the Ojibwe News in 1988 and 1990.
I thank both Mark Boswell and William J.
Lawrence, publisher of what is presently The
Native American Press/Ojibwe News, for the opportunity to do so.
I do not know whether the
crystal-clear and completely integrated abstract dream-time of the
"ethnographic present" ever existed anywhere or anytime; the reality
at Red Lake between 1979 and 1997 was of multiple cultures and complex,
disputed interfaces, set in contexts of ecological and social-cultural
change. There were threads of
continuity with the past: both the ancient traditions of the Ahnishinahbæótjibway and the
more recent ones of the Métis and the Euroamerican fur traders. There were ongoing cultural transformations
wrought, deliberately and incidentally, by U.S. policy and
administration, as
well as the pervasive consequences of globalization and intrusion of
the Euroamerican
monetary system, television, and other culture-complexes of modernity. In addition, there was a self-conscious
adoption of "tradition" and tokens of "Indian" identity by
some, including occasional challenges to Euroamerican authority via flagrant off-reservation hunting as
a "radical" and/or "militant Indian" assertion of
"treaty rights."
A full discussion of the multiple
communities at Red Lake and the historical, political and demographic
processes
which have played a significant role in the formation of those
communities
would require several books to address adequately.
Here, I can do little more than observe that the model of a
single "Red Lake Indian community" is inadequate and inaccurate. It is also relevant that both the hunting
practices and the conceptual and value systems which underlay them are
different for the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
than for the Métis and acculturated "White Indians," and that there
has been sharp criticism of some of these differences, particularly but
not
exclusively by the Ahnishinahbæótjibway.
My positionality in the Red Lake
communities was strongly influenced by my marriage to Wub-e-ke-niew,
who was Ahnishinahbæótjibway of the
Bear Dodem. Wub-e-ke-niew
was also an author and public speaker, who had a
published book and for a number of years wrote a politically-oriented
newspaper
column. Wub-e-ke-niew was a man of
genius-level intelligence,{2}
impelled by personal commitments to heal the social pathologies he saw
so
clearly, and utterly without fear. He
would not have been "typical" in any society constrained by normative
personal identity, although the only identity norm I have ever heard
expressed
among Ahnishinahbæótjibway
was to "be who you are." In
the sometimes discordant and even shattered mosaic of communities at
Red Lake,
Wub-e-ke-niew was sometimes labeled "controversial."
Beyond our circle of friends and relatives,
there were people who greatly admired him and some who believed that he
was a
"prophet" or "medicine man." He
consistently discouraged such perceptions, explaining
repeatedly that he was "just an ordinary human being like everyone
else." There were also people who
apparently felt that Wub-e-ke-niew's publicly speaking out was a threat
to
their positions of power in the U.S.-implemented and -supported
administrative
structure at Red Lake, and a few who literally wanted to kill, and thus
silence, him. At one point some of them
offered a bounty, which Wub-e-ke-niew belittled by referring to those
who had
tried to put a $10,000 price on his head as "cheapskates."
Although I fairly deliberately stood in my
husband's shadow and kept "a low profile," I was neither invisible
nor perceived as completely neutral.
Although I strive to be fair, the
analysis in this paper centers around Ahnishinahbæótjibway
understandings of hunting: this is the milieu which I know in most
detail. Ahnishinahbæótjibway
perspectives are often quite different from those of the Métis and
other
"Indians"--I have not attempted to present the latter in full detail.{3} The clearest vantage from which to make the
analyses presented in this paper is that of the Ahnishinahbæótjibway.
The reader's assessment of my
writing may be aided by my acknowledgement that I have never been
hunting with
a "white" Euroamerican. I
have talked to whites in the vicinity of Red Lake about hunting (both
licensed
and "poaching"), I have watched men in blaze-orange tromping through
the woods in the fall, I have listened to both Métis and Ahnishinahbæótjibway
tell stories about white hunters,
and I have read articles about hunting in popular magazines from Mother Jones to Field and Stream. Whites
occasionally gave Wub-e-ke-niew and me venison, ranging from
butcher-processed
meat hunted by culturally mainstream farmers to road-kill spiritually
salvaged
by northwoods back-to-the-land hippies, and such gifts were inevitably
accompanied by stories. But, I do not
attempt to compare Ahnishinahbæótjibway
hunting practices to white ones. I do
not know enough about the latter.
Ahnishinahbæótjibway
hunting remained at least partially embedded within patterns of
permacultural
subsistence until fairly recently.
Several informants identified World War II as a watershed of
subsistence-base transformation, although some have also commented that
significant changes resulted from the land losses of 1864, 1889 and
1902. Other events and processes which
informants
described as altering the ecosystem in ways which adversely affected
permacultural subsistence include: the building of a dam at the outlet
to the
Red Lakes in the 1930's, logging and other Bureau of Indian Affairs
operations,
road-building, spraying herbicides on right-of-ways, "white"
agriculture and cattle pastures upstream from the Red Lakes, discharge
of
sewage into rivers and lakes, the influx of refugees from White Earth
in the
early 1900's, the imposition of the Indian Reorganization Act in 1958-9
and the
consequences of that I.R.A. government, recreational use of motor boats
by
whites in "rice lakes," fires started as a result of non-Ahnishinahbæótjibway
activities including Department of Natural Resources burning, drainage
ditches
and river-dredging, silvicultural chemicals which kill bees and other
insects,
feral dogs, European-style housing and rural electrification, decline
of wolves
and beavers, extermination of buffalo and other animals (passenger
pigeons,
cougars, lynxes, and "pheasants"), near-extermination of sturgeon and
population explosions of introduced species like "sheephead," white
values (particularly "greed"), compulsory education, linear and
abstract thinking, encroachment of the money-system, climatic change,
and
parasites introduced via domesticated
animals specifically including liver-worms transmitted from sheep to
deer and
intestinal worms from chickens infecting ruffed grouse.
In terms of deer-hunting, one of the
aggregate changes is that there are less deer than there used to be. In much the same way as memory is embedded
in material objects for urban Euroamericans (e.g.,
keepsakes, mementos, souvenirs, heirlooms), memory is embedded
in the landscape for the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
as well as for other rural people in the region. Both
Wub-e-ke-niew and the elders I sometimes chauffeured would
remark at particular places about having had to wait on the road while
hundreds
of deer crossed, meadows and fields where they had seen large deer
herds, and
at other places where there had "always" been deer.
(The landscape also evoked descriptions of
unusual deer-hunting experiences, the place where someone had gotten
their
first deer, locations where people long-gone had resided or died, sites
of
successful moose-hunts, places where people recalled old-growth
forests, and
other memories. Some of the elders also
knew, but usually passed without mention, the specific places where
people had
been massacred during the nineteenth century.)
Older people's in situ
descriptions of numerous deer and other abundant fauna were
corroborated by
other elders, by historical photographs of white hunters posed with
huge
numbers of dead animals, and by contemporaneous white writers.
One of the problems with the
"ethnographic present" is a hypothetical baseline at some mythical
time in the past. The historical record
demonstrates changes, in some instances radical deep-structural
transformations,
which have influenced subsistence patterns at Red Lake since the first
European
and Euroamerican writers (and the diseases which preceded them) arrived. Although in many respects Ahnishinahbæótjibway
oral
histories of pre-Columbian patterns and events are eminently credible,
I
believe that the most one can assume is a longstanding dynamic
equilibrium
resting on relatively stable core interrelationships, rather than a
static
structure enduring changelessly.
Palpable evidence indicating that at least some of the core of Ahnishinahbæótjibway
subsistence has significant chronological depth includes distributions
of
certain kinds of perennial plants, tap-scars on ancient maple trees
(Wub-e-ke-niew and I counted more than two thousand years of
growth-rings in
one such maple which had died some years previously, and which he
finally cut
for wood), similar tap-scars discernable in the grain of antique maple
furniture, deer-trails in isolated and relatively undisturbed swamp
areas worn
more than a foot into the earth, and the wordless but eloquent
testimony given
by local strains of garden crops, particularly corn.
The broad-brush outlines of Ahnishinahbæótjibway
subsistence patterns are based on an annual cycle, which I sketch
briefly
below:
In the early spring, at Red Lake
usually mid-March, the sap in sugar-maples begins to flow.
The extended-family groups which have been
described as the "unit" of maple-sugar production fit efficiently with
the technology used by the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
as well as with informants' explanations that sugar-bushes belonged to
the Dodems.
A full description of maple-sugaring is not feasible here, but
it is
relevant that venison tallow is used by the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
in two phases of sugar-making: as an anti-foaming agent and to aid
sugar-granulation. Such tallow must be
obtained before deer have depleted their body-fat in mid-winter, and
stored
until spring. A Métis woman with whom I
made sugar for several years preferred to use pork fat which she
obtained from
white farmers (and, one year, from pigs she raised), and another Métis
from
White Earth who ran a large "demonstration" sugarbush in the context
of cultural "reclamation" at Red Lake used balsam boughs as an
anti-foaming agent and focused on making maple syrup rather than maple
sugar. Some Ahnishinahbæótjibway
commented that his maple syrup had
a "turpentine" taste from the balsam boughs, and, when given jars of
maple syrup from his sugarbush would courteously accept the gift, then
subsequently give the syrup to someone else along with a comment as to
who had
made it. Frances Densmore, in her 1929
book Chippewa Customs, details the
use of balsam boughs as an anti-foaming agent.
There are other instances in which such an "Indian" practice
was clearly "reclaimed" from such written accounts--for some of which
certain informants were quite probably inventing "tall tales" for an
impressively credulous ethnographer, then doubtless telling and
re-telling the
hilarious chronicle of what the ethnographer had believed. But, it is also
possible that the use of balsam boughs by this descendant of White
Earth
émigrés was a continuation of the practices of some of his ancestors,
who
because of game wardens' vigorous assertion of State jurisdiction at
White Earth
did not have reliable access to venison tallow for several generations.
Midway through the sugar-season (the
length of which varies according to the weather), spring greens begin
growing
in sunny patches where the snow has melted.
The ice on the rivers and lakes begins to soften, and where
there are
rapid currents in the river the water opens up quickly.
As soon as there is open water, ducks and
other migratory waterfowl appear.
Canada geese mate, I have been told, "for life," more than one
individual has described to me their observing a goose mourning the
death of
its mate, and no Ahnishinahbæótjibway
has ever indicated that geese were hunted before they nested in the
spring, so
I consider it unlikely that Canada geese were a significant source of
food in
the spring. Mallard ducks, however,
court in the spring and may have been hunted before they found a mate
and began
building their nests. Other species of
migratory waterfowl were either quite rare in the Red Lake area by
1979, or
were fish-eating birds which were described as unpalatable by Ahnishinahbæótjibway
informants (e.g. pelicans, loons and
"hell-divers"). A number of
other migratory birds return during or shortly after the sugar-season,
including eagles, crows, ravens and robins.
I never heard of anyone eating a carnivorous bird, and
Wub-e-ke-niew
expressed his distaste for domesticated chickens (which are omnivorous
scavengers with a remarkably undiscriminating palate) by repeatedly
referring
to crows as "chickens" when we saw them eating less-than-fresh
road-kill and similar fare. He later
recanted the implied insult to the crows by calling them "eagles."
The bark loosens on birch trees in
such a way that the outer layers of bark can be removed in sheets
without
destroying the tree, shortly after the end of the sugar-season. Birch-bark was the material from which a
variety of implements used in sugar-making were made, and some older
informants
recalled such birch-bark containers from their childhood, one observing
that
maple sugar "kept" better when stored in birch-bark mokuks
than in the glass, ceramic and
plastic containers which everyone who made sugar at Red Lake used by
the
1980's. If one were using birch-bark
implements in sugar-making and storage, one would need to gather and
store
birch-bark for use in the next year's sugar-bush during that short
period in
the spring when birch-bark can be "peeled" properly.
Birch-bark was also historically used for a
variety of other purposes, including the manufacture of canoes and
building of
long-houses; I assume but do not know that such construction-grade
birch-bark
was peeled from the trees in the same season.
Birch-bark has also recently been used for the manufacture of
cottage-crafted trinkets and curios intended for the tourist trade, and
there
has been a resurgence in the gathering of birch-bark in concert with
"Indian identity" movements.
Inexpert peeling of birch-bark (e.g.
cutting too deeply) can either kill the tree or permanently scar the
portion of
the tree where the bark was removed (it heals with a gray, scaly and
unusable
bark); some elders were quite critical of such damage inflicted on
birch
trees. [Deer and birch trees are
integrated into the same ecosystem, and I am continuing to write about
deer-hunting even when the overt subject of this paragraph is birch
trees; they
are part of the same processes, the same patterns.
Ahnishinahbæótjibway
permacultural subsistence involved long-range planning and respectful,
skillful
give-and-take, and in this way-of-being human beings were of
an ecosystem which also included deer and birches.
Both birch trees and deer have been
adversely affected by the incursion of the market economy and
externally
imposed values.]
Ahnishinahbæótjibway
proscriptions against hunting animals during gestation, lactation or
until the
young are "old enough" to survive on their own are interwoven in many
threads throughout the culture, are sustained by pragmatic explanations
and
descriptions of how the meat is "no good" anyway, and are buttressed
by stories telling, for example, of how Aya'a refrained from hunting
for
several seasons after inadvertently killing a doe with a late-season
pregnancy. Nesting birds were similarly
undisturbed, and when various birds built nests in inconvenient-for-us
places (e.g., in a pickup truck which
Wub-e-ke-niew was repairing, on a tractor), we refrained from
disturbing the
nest until the young birds were fledged and left the nest voluntarily
(although
the day that the young robins flew from the pickup truck, Wub-e-ke-niew
moved
both the nest and the truck to discourage the parents from laying a
second
clutch of eggs). Swallows nested for
several years in our out-house and our tool-shed, and Wub-e-ke-niew
always
spoke to the parent birds before entering either building with a
courteous
statement like, "Hello, can I come in?" The
birds would sit on a branch just outside as they waited for
us to leave, and when they became impatient, Wub-e-ke-niew would
reassure them.
Shortly after the end of the sugar-season,
the morels ripen and fiddleheads and other early spring greens are at
their
prime. The ice goes off the rivers and
lakes, and there was a succession of fish-runs as the carp, walleye
pike and
northern pike went into creeks and rivers to spawn.
Older informants talked about fish running so densely in the
creeks that a person "could almost walk across on their backs," and a
number of people have told me about reaching into the creek and
catching fish
by grasping them behind the gills, a fishing technology which
reportedly
remained productive into the 1960's.
The spear-fishing which has played a role in treaty-rights
controversies
in Wisconsin (and to a lesser extent in Minnesota) has been largely
spear-fishing
by torchlight on lakes (one Métis informant detailed making birchbark
torches
to me; such have been supplanted by twelve-volt electric lights). In
the Red
Lake region most of the spear-fishing in the 1980's was done in
daylight,
spearing fish while standing on the banks of creeks and rivers. At that time, people commented that the
fish-runs had declined dramatically, and attributed the decimation of
fish
populations to a number of factors, including over-fishing and use of
small-mesh "illegal nets" by a handful of (named) commercial fishermen,
obstruction of tributaries by dams and culverts, pollution and the
fish-trap
operated by the DNR for the purpose of collecting spawn to "stock"
off-reservation lakes for sports fishermen in Minnesota.
By 1990, Wub-e-ke-niew had retired his
spears to the tool-shed, and subsequently gave one of them away with
the
admonition that it would be useful only in "demonstrations," since
there weren't any fish left to spear, and in any event it was
inadvisable to
eat local fish because of mercury contamination. The
spring fish-runs were an important source of food for bears
waking from hibernation, as well as for the Ahnishinahbæótjibway,
and when the spawning fish disappeared, Wub-e-ke-niew began leaving
fifty-pound
bags of corn in the woods near their dens for the bears.
(He also told the clerks at the regional
farmers' co-ops where he bought the corn and other food that
demolishing the
ecosystem to grow corn and sunflower seeds, which he then had to
purchase to
feed animals whose natural foods had been destroyed, was a foolish,
egocentric
and short-sighted way to run the world.)
Shortly after the sugar-season,
there is usually a warm dry spell lasting for a week or longer, which
dries
soil soaked with snow-melt with weather ideal for preparing gardens. Most of the people who still gardened at Red
Lake had more than one garden, a pattern which maximizes micro-climatic
niches,
makes it possible to maintain several distinct varieties, and
distributes the
risk of crop-damage across several locations.
The dispersed--and unfenced--gardens made by Wub-e-ke-niew and
some
other elders were in relatively small clearings in the woods; I would
guess
there is an optimal garden size for long-cycle forest fallow
subsistence
patterns, which for the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
cycled from gardens to perennial fruits and berries (which are more
productive
in the increased light-levels of garden-clearings), then back to
multi-story
forest.
Although the growing season at Red
Lake is short (about 100 frost-free days and nights), there are a
number of
agricultural technologies used by the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
which made it possible to grow corn, beans, squash, potatoes, tobacco,
and
other relatively long-season crops.
There were also some impressive local varieties.
People told me about "Red Lake
corn" for years, describing the color, kernel-markings and other
details,
and after I had grown other varieties of heirloom corn for several
seasons and,
along with Wub-e-ke-niew, put a great deal of energy into encouraging
community
gardening, someone gave me a pint jar of still-viable Red Lake
hominy-corn
seed. The limited growing season at Red
Lake is further "stretched" by germinating large-seeded staple crops
in the warmth of one's home (using techniques akin to those used by
Euroamericans in growing "sprouts"), hopefully timing the process so
that crops planted from such germinated seed will emerge into the first
frost-free days and nights of the growing season. Local
gardeners were also quite aware that gardens grown close to
the big lakes usually escaped the first few frosts in the fall, and
more than
one person told me that the Ponemah peninsula between the Red Lakes had
a
significantly longer growing season.
Despite some truly elegant varieties
of staple crops (and, I strongly suspect, other annual and perennial
plants
which have either become extinct or have been "lost" in the ecocidal
and genocidal mayhem of recent centuries), the climate at Red Lake is
such that
I do not know if it would be possible to subsist, in the long term,
without
hunting and fishing. The USDA maps an
irregular island encompassing Red Lake and International Falls,
Minnesota, as
almost the only region of "zone 2" climate within the boundaries of
the continental U.S., colder than most of the agricultural belt across
southern
Canada, colder than much of the Alaskan coastline.
When early frosts killed my corn plants when the grain had
reached only the late milk-stage one year, an elder matter-of-factly
advised
that drying the seeds unshelled on cobs hung indoors on braided husks
would
maintain the viability of some of the seed (it did), although the corn
had not
matured sufficiently to make hominy.
The Ahnishinahbæótjibway subsistence
base was distributed
across the entire mosaic of interrelated ecosystems--various swamps,
several
kinds of forests, prairies, rivers and lakes--in such a way that the
abundance
of the entire region would support a fairly large population without
depleting
or damaging the permacultural infrastructure, and was diverse enough so
that
sparsity of one staple in any given year would be offset by adequacy
and even
abundance of others. It also appears
that there was fairly broadly distributed community knowledge of food
sources
which, although they may not have been exceptionally palatable, were
(when
processed properly) edible and reasonably nutritious.
There may be trace minerals which
would eliminate the possibility of humans subsisting on a locally-grown
vegetarian diet at Red Lake (a likely candidate being iodine), and if
living
without hunting and fishing in that climate would have been possible,
it would
have required extensive restructuring of longstanding permacultural
systems,
and possibly a decline in human population density.
A correlated but anecdotal observation is that when I did eat a
vegetarian diet for several months, my tolerance for extremely cold
weather
plummeted.
Shortly after the gardens were
planted, summer-fishing began. Most of
the fishing done at Red Lake between 1979 and the depletion of the
lakes in the
mid-1990's was commercial gill-netting, which, along with the dam and
other
processes of ecological degradation, has radically transformed the lake
ecosystems. Analysis of fishery records
would provide some indication of the details of this transformation,
although
to the best of my knowledge there has been significant diversion of
walleye
pike and other "premium" fish into (illegal according to Minnesota
statutes) fish-peddling enterprises for at least as long as the
commercial fishery
has been in existence, i.e. since
World War I. Elders whom I chauffeured
sometimes directed me to meandering "short-cuts" across the
farm-country to the west and south of Red Lake, and, clearly enjoying
the
detour along memory lane, would often point out farmhouses where they
had once
sold fish or traded them for farm produce (as well as now-barren lakes
where
they had once riced).
Wub-e-ke-niew and I episodically
commercial-fished in partnership with small-scale entrepreneurs. The owner of the boat, motor, pickup truck
and nets paid for gasoline, and sometimes hired others to remove fish
from the
gill-nets and hang the nets.
Wub-e-ke-niew and I would set and pull the nets (typically ten
to
fifteen hundred-foot gill-nets), collect most or all of the weekly
fishery
check, and take our choice of the non-premium fish ("lawyers,"
bull-heads, gold-eyes, whitefish, "suckers" (carp), and sheephead,
although the latter were generally considered only marginally edible)
for our
household consumption. The entrepreneur
would collect the entire "fish bonus" paid by the fishery in
December, usually slightly more than the total dollar-amount of the
fish-checks
paid during the summer fishing season.
We were not atypical in earning somewhat less than the minimum
wage
doing work at which someone was "taken by the lake" almost every
year. If the entrepreneur diverted a
significant portion of his or her catch into fish-peddling, we earned
even
less--and the difference between 17-35 cents per pound paid by the
fishery for
walleye pike, and the one to two dollars per fish for which walleyes
were
peddled to trusted customers was tempting, despite the risk of arrest
for
off-reservation "bootlegging" of fish, to everyone for whom we
fished.
Wub-e-ke-niew strongly disapproved
of the usual practice of discarding hundreds of pounds of "rough
fish" per catch, and, after I experimented with numerous ways of
cooking
the introduced "sheephead," he decided to market sheephead (which
were not at that time covered by Minnesota game-fish legislation) to
Asian
groceries in the Twin Cities. He
arranged with other fishermen to take their sheephead, packed them on
ice in an
old freezer in the back of our van, and gave samples to every Asian
grocer he
could locate. The initially enthusiastic
reception of many of those grocers was replaced by refusal to deal with
him--Wub-e-ke-niew believed that this radical shift in attitude was
because
"someone from the Bureau" had contacted the Asian grocers as soon as
the B.I.A. learned of his plans, which was not a far-fetched
interpretation. Wub-e-ke-niew then
transported rough fish to the Twin Cities and gave them away in the
housing
projects. He told me about people coming
to our van with every container they could find, some, he said, with
tears in
their eyes as they thanked him for the food.
The Minnesota legislature then passed legislation prohibiting
transport
of rough fish off of Red Lake reservation.
The ratio of sheephead to marketable fish in the nets we pulled
was, at
that time, often fifteen pounds of sheephead to one pound of everything
else;
we quit commercial-fishing. I detail
Wub-e-ke-niew's strong responses to discarding hundreds of pounds of
rough fish
per catch largely as an illustration of Ahnishinahbæótjibway
values, which also apply to hunting, as well as to gathering of
permacultural
crops: one takes only what is necessary, and does not waste what is
taken.
There were a number of edible
mollusks in the lakes and rivers, as well as crayfish.
I never heard of any proscriptions against
eating them and when I asked about them the usual response was that
they were
probably good eating, but I also never heard of anyone eating them.
Older people frequently told me that
they remembered when the water in the Red Lakes was so clean that they
could
"see the rocks on the bottom of the lake" through thirty feet of
crystal-clear water; during the late summer of 1997 one could barely
discern
the bottom through two feet of water, and the shoreline rocks were
covered with
slime. Elders also reminisced about
catches so bountiful that their boats rode homeward perilously low in
the
water, and about the years in the not-so-distant past when a person
hook-and-line fishing would "catch a fish with almost every cast." During the nineteen summers I knew the Red
Lakes, I observed a marked deterioration of water quality and believe
that
these elders' chronicles of the destruction of the Red Lakes, and the
ways of
life that the lakes sustained, are credible.
Some of the processes which these people blamed are mentioned
above;
Wub-e-ke-niew repeatedly stressed that the forests, swamps and lakes
were
inseparably interrelated parts of a single ecosystem, and that
clear-cutting
the forests, use of agricultural and silvicultural chemicals, and other
manifestations
of "Euroamerican linear thinking" would inevitably devastate the
lakes. One of our close friends, an Ahnishinahbæótjibway of the Dodems
with close kinship ties to
fishing families in Ponemah, stressed the fishery-destruction due to
whites'
use of chemicals, "including 2-4-D," he would usually add in outraged
incredulity, in Euroamerican-administered paddy-rice operations
draining into
the Red Lakes.
The Red Lakes are presently in
serious enough trouble that news items about depletion of the Red Lake
fisheries reach print in mainstream media; in those media the problems
are
usually attributed to "Indian over-fishing" and the proposed
solutions focus on a moratorium on commercial fishing and re-stocking
programs. Over-fishing is but one aspect
of the
problem, and the root causes run much deeper than that.
Beginning in mid-June with the
strawberries, a succession of permacultural fruits ripened throughout
the
summer and into the fall: after the strawberries came juneberries
(service-berries), raspberries, blackberries, blueberries,
pin-cherries,
currants and goose-berries (now nearly exterminated due to forestry
pine-rust
control programs), high-bush cranberries, choke-cherries,
bog-cranberries,
plums and apples. Elders described
drying blueberries and "pounding" choke-cherries to me, but apart
from blueberries (which continued to be picked in quantity to be frozen
or
canned until crops declined drastically because of wetland drainage
programs
and decimation of bee populations) and cranberries (which are presently
grown
commercially), by 1979 most of these fruits were casually picked and
eaten on
the spot, or were made into jams and jellies by some older women. There are a number of other edible and
quasi-edible
fruits growing at Red Lake, which were sometimes gathered incidental to
other
activities (e.g., taking enough
wintergreen to make a few pots of medicinal tea while picking
blueberries); not
everyone of the younger generations knew what these less-used or rarer
plants
were.
Ahnishinahbæótjibway
say that the deer and other large mammals were "ready," meaning in
part that the young had matured enough to survive without their
mothers, by
late August or early September, although summer-hunting seems to have
focused
on "spike bucks" (male yearlings).
As Wub-e-ke-niew explained it to a deer who had developed a
taste for a
fancy variety of my cultivated onions, "you come back when the [new]
potatoes are ready, and I'll have a good meal." I
was told that the Red Lake area previously sustained
significant populations of woods buffalo, caribou, and elk, in addition
to the
now-extant moose, bear, and two distinguished species of deer
(white-tailed and
"swamp"). Moose and deer were
hunted from late summer through early winter.
Fawns were not hunted, it was considered shameful to
accidentally kill
such a young animal, and "fawn-killer" was an insult.
Bear-hunting was a touchy issue with
my husband--because of the Bear Dodem
he understood us to have a blood-kinship relationship with bears. He was an outspoken critic of Métis killing
bears for their commercially-valuable claws, as well as of the Tribal
Council's
practice of setting bear-traps adjacent to their garbage dumpsters. He wrote in his column that feral dogs were
doubtless responsible for most of the plunder of the Indians' garbage,
since it
continued unabated during the winter when the bears were in hibernation. We had several bears living on our property,
and Wub-e-ke-niew defended them, cherished them, and fed them when he
felt that
their natural foods were sufficiently depleted to jeopardize their
survival. He not infrequently told the
story of the yearling bear whom he had scared by rapping a newspaper on
the
kitchen screen when the bear looked in the window.
He subsequently saw the bear sitting down by the garden. "He was crying," Wub-e-ke-niew
said, "and I felt so bad I had to do something." He
filled a roasting-pan with a mixture of
honey, raisins, corn syrup and other bear-treats, and took it into the
woods
where the bear would find it. He was
pleased when the bear accepted his gift, and then periodically
concocted more
treats for the bear until he/she matured.
When one of Wub-e-ke-niew's Métis nephews used Wub-e-ke-niew's
rifle to
kill a dump-ground bear despite Wub-e-ke-niew's admonitions, my husband
skinned
the bear and gave the meat to someone who did eat bear, but then gave
away his
rifle and did not hunt for several seasons.
The Métis's disregard for the
hunting ethics of the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
were the source of considerable criticism by the latter.
The Métis, often named individuals in
respect to particular instances, were condemned for killing fawns,
hunting
out-of-season, killing foxes and other animals for which they had no
conceivable use, "killing everything that moves and leaving it lay,"
hunting trophy-bucks for sale to white hunters and then not using the
meat if
the deer were unsold, killing excessive numbers of deer and moose,
setting
trap-lines improperly and not checking them frequently enough, killing
deer and
taking only the hindquarters and tenderloins or discarding the entire
carcass
at the dumpground, letting deer hang in warm weather so that the meat
spoiled
or letting skinned deer hang so long in cold weather that the meat was
consumed
by "woodpeckers" (carnivorous wrens), wounding animals and then not
tracking them, wounding deer by attempting "head shots" at too great
a distance, shooting signs for target-practice, killing the wrong deer
out in a
herd, and general disrespect. They were
laughed at (or pitied) for getting disoriented or lost in the woods,
and for
their inability to see deer who were plainly visible to Ahnishinahbæótjibway.
White hunters, with whom the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
had more
than casual social contact both as hired guides and in the
checkerboarded
"ceded lands" where both whites and Red Lakers hunted, were
castigated for "taking sound shots{4},"
getting lost in the woods, killing domesticated animals and endangering
everybody, and general carelessness with firearms.
Wub-e-ke-niew, for example, told of his last stint as a
guide. Wub-e-ke-niew loaded the white
hunters into a sports utility vehicle, and as they set off, one of the
men in
the back seat accidentally discharged his rifle, blowing a hole through
the
roof of the vehicle. Wub-e-ke-niew said
that he got out, told the men that they would have to find another
guide, and
walked away, abandoning both the white hunters and his job as a guide. Some white hunters are also characterized as
spending the hunting season drinking and whoring, then buying a deer on
the
reservation "so they have something to show their wives."
It probably merits mentioning that the
designation "white hunter" was applied in this context mostly to the
perceived-to-be-wealthy urbanites who come to the region during hunting
season,
that many of the local whites have generations-long social
relationships with
the people at Red Lake, and that many of these locals hunt for food,
with skill
and respect, and particularly among the self-designated "jackpine
savages," not infrequently without bothering with the expensive
formality
of a hunting license. Processes and
patterns of ascribing characteristics to the "other," and interaction
and avoidance by people of socially distinct groups who are unlikely to
hunt
together, but who hunt on contiguous or overlapping territory, would be
an
interesting topic but is not further detailed here.
Deer and rabbits (properly hunted
only after the first snow-fall) were the staple mammals; ruffed grouse,
ducks
and "pheasants" (prior to their disappearance) the staple birds. Moose had more renown than deer, when
someone got a moose the news circulated on the "moccasin telegraph,"
and a man's abilities as a hunter were to some degree indexed by the
moose he
had gotten. When Wub-e-ke-niew and I
were courting, one of the things which he told me was that he had
killed
"twenty-seven moose," by which he meant that he was a capable hunter
and a good provider, and thus a desirable prospective spouse (and also
that he
had, in fact, killed twenty-seven moose).
In detailing his moose, he also described the ways in which he
had given
away moose-meat, indicating that he was not only competent, but also
generous.
Moose are big. A
mature female moose
whom Wub-e-ke-niew and I hunted together weighed more than the
semi-compact
American car{5}
which we initially used to hoist her for skinning--when we parked the
car, the
moose started to come down and the car to go up into the air. One of the parameters of community-size
among people who hunt moose while the weather is still warm, is that
(at least
prior to the advent of deep-freezers) the group through which one
distributes
meat has to be big enough to eat (and/or dry, which is a lot of work) a
mature
moose before it spoils.
The optimum and/or preferred ways in
which to hunt, the ways in which the meat is distributed or otherwise
retained
for future use, the characteristics of the meat and of the hides, and
the
animals upon whom hunting focuses vary with the season: late-summer
hunting is
different than winter-hunting. I shall
detail a few of these specifics as they pertain to deer-hunting in a
subsequent
section of this paper.
Apart from greenhouse-started
tomatoes and cucumbers, and introduced European crops like spinach,
lettuce,
scallions and green peas, gardens begin significant production in
August, with
green beans, sweet corn, new potatoes, and (another introduced crop)
carrots. If the weather is good, the
bulk of the harvest matures slightly before the first frost, usually by
mid-September. Wub-e-ke-niew described
his grandfather's using straw-lined storage pits for potatoes and other
garden
produce; one woman I knew dug a hole in the floor of her basement for
storing a
bumper crop of potatoes, and I have also been told that potatoes can be
stored,
frozen, outside during the winter, and that if they are not thawed
before
cooking they are "good" in soups and stews. I
never tried freezing potatoes, but properly cured squash can
also be kept outside during the winter, and is still palatable when
baked.
Most of the annual garden crops
usually attributed to the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
are starchy, sometimes high-protein or oily, staples.
My guess is that some quasi-incidental crops (tolerated or
encouraged "weeds") have disappeared or been forgotten; I found it
interesting that most of the weeds in our gardens were Eurasian or
European
immigrants and that some of them (e.g.
dandelions, lambs-quarters) had been incidental edibles in Europe. Wub-e-ke-niew blamed cattle and horses for
spreading many of those weeds, observing that the old road to White
Earth ran
through our yard, and that one of the indications of that road
abandoned more
than forty years previously was clover (another was the discarded
liquor
bottles we found occasionally in the woods near the old road). Horses and oxen pulled carts along that road
for many decades.
I often let weeds in my gardens
mature enough so that I could identify them (and thus gave myself an
ongoing
problem with sow's thistle--another aggressive Eurasian plant). But, I never found significant weed
populations of any indigenous plant, with the exception of persistent
stinging-nettles in one garden we planted after clearing those nettles
from an
area which had been a fenced horse-pasture in the 1920's and early
1930's.
Gardening, even in the absence of
European and Eurasian weeds, is more work than permaculture, and it
seems
reasonable that the crops for which it would be worth investing that
kind of
labor would be ones of exceptional nutritional, medicinal, culinary,
aesthetic
and/or other value. Gardening highly
domesticated plants also involves a degree of control and
"regimentation" of the plants which is significant, especially when
compared to the relative autonomy of perennial permacultural crops. I wondered about Ahnishinahbæótjibway
condiments and seasonings,
successfully grew grain-amaranth to maturity and contemplated that
pre-Columbian trade routes were such that if grain-amaranth and similar
crops
were seen as sufficiently valuable to merit cultivating them, they
would have
been grown at Red Lake. I also thought
about the aesthetics of gardeners long-gone, and their magnificent
legacy of
beauty far beyond utility which endured in delicately patterned corn
and beans,
multi-colored corn-husks which provided the already-dyed raw materials
for mats
and other objects woven from corn-husks, and the amazing aesthetics of
heirloom
squashes. Corn, beans, potatoes,
squashes, tomatoes, peppers ... plants from a wide range of families,
all of
them in varieties embodying the "four colors" (red, yellow, blue and
white), so beautiful they were cultivated for purely decorative
purposes by
European immigrants, the staples large-seeded plants which are
presently
marketed for children as easy-to-grow, the "three sisters" growing
together with remarkable synergy{6},
foods providing impressively balanced nutrition. There
is much about Ahnishinahbæótjibway
gardening which I do not know, and extensive horticultural and
permacultural
knowledge no longer held by the living.
Mahnomen
("wild rice") matures in September.
I have helped with the secondary processing of mahnomen
(parching, threshing and winnowing) but have never
harvested it, although I have listened to many people who have. The basics of mahnomen
harvest have become well-publicized with the development
of domesticated "non-shattering" varieties used in commercial
paddy-cultivation and extensively marketed, and descriptions of "Indian
wild rice" harvest accompanied by photographs are published annually in
mainstream media, so I shall not reiterate a detailed description here. It is worth adding, however, that waterfowl
flocked to the ripe mahnomen, and
that duck-hunting accompanied the mahnomen
harvest.
Apart from noting that
properly cooked Ahnishinahbæótjibway mahnomen
is a substantively different food from domesticated "wild rice," the
salient
points in this
discussion of Ahnishinahbæótjibway
permaculture include that mahnomen is
an annual plant, and permacultural
cultivation depends on the reseeding which accompanies harvest of the
shattering varieties. It is also
relevant that, according to oral histories which were told to me, mahnomen has been deliberately planted:
by named individuals in specified locations.
A detailed description of the
interrelationship of beaver populations with the infrastructure of
climax
ecosystems in the northwoods is beyond the scope of this paper,
although the
dynamic equilibrium of beavers, aspens and otters is a crucial aspect
of the
foundation of Ahnishinahbæótjibway
permaculture. A balance around the
saturation-level of beaver populations maintains navigable
water-levels,
contributes to water clarity, and improves the habitat for a wide
variety of
other species ranging from fish to moose to ducks--as well as
substantially
increasing the areas in which mahnomen
can grow. The decimation of beavers
incurred in conjunction with the fur trade had wide-ranging
consequences, not
the least of which was a significant decrease in the areas in which mahnomen could be grown. Mahnomen
is one of the staples of the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
permacultural cycle.
Fall-fishing focuses on
whitefish. During the period when I
observed and participated in fishing activities, whitefish were
occasionally caught
in the summer, but were deliberately fished for with larger-mesh
gill-nets
(called "whitefish nets") during the period in the fall when they
came inshore to spawn. Fall whitefish
are a rich, fatty fish (in many traditional cuisines, fat is considered
desirable), and the portion of the catch which was not distributed
through the
Red Lake communities to be eaten fresh was either stored in people's
electric
deep-freezers, or was preserved by brining and smoking the fish (I
don't know
how fish was smoked prior to the European-introduced abundance of salt). Whitefish were also caught during the
winter, as described below in the section on winter-fishing.
Ruffed grouse, locally known as
"partridges," are hunted for a few weeks after the leaves fall from
the trees in the autumn. During this
period, they are easily visible either on the forest floor, or in the
evening
after they have flown into trees to roost for the night.
The cyclic variations of ruffed grouse
populations are one of the classic textbook cases illustrative of
ecological
interrelationships; I emphasize ruffed grouse in a separate category
mostly
because partridge-hunting is one of the highlights of those crystalline
days of
autumn when the forests are carpeted with golden leaves and the warmth
of the
slanting afternoon sunlight is poignant with the realization that each
warm day
could be the last for six months.
Ruffed grouse are not a staple of the same magnitude as fish or
venison,
but they are a significant seasonal food--and a person who went to
"look
for partridge" sometimes came back with a deer.
At least two species of hazelnuts
were the most common nuts in the Red Lake area, although there were
also
occasional butter-nut trees. Hazelnuts
were occasionally gathered and eaten shortly after harvest as a snack. Although hazelnuts are a brushy plant which
reaches bearing-age in logged or otherwise disturbed areas in less than
twenty
years and are therefore fairly common, the people who gathered them
said that
the squirrels "beat them to" most of the nuts. Hazelnut
seeds were among the collection of
garden-seeds given to us by someone whose elderly mother had gone into
a
nursing home; I did not have an opportunity to talk to her about her
seeds.
There are several species of oak
which grow in the Red Lake area. Oak
trees, particularly red oaks, are subject to fairly heavy pressure as a
consequence of the Métis (many of whom cut green trees for firewood)
and
regional whites seeing them as a premium winter-heating wood; I have
seen
people spot a red oak while putatively in the woods for other purposes,
cut it
down and into blocks, and load up their pickup truck within a couple of
hours
after first encountering the tree.
Almost all of the mature oaks at Red
Lake were logged off years ago; most of the oaks extant in 1980 were no
more
than sixty or seventy years old. Many
of these second-growth oaks were cut and burned during the mid-1980's,
after
the local forestry authorities defined these immature but nut-bearing
trees as
"scrub oaks" with no commercial value. Acorns
are a staple food for bears in the fall, and Wub-e-ke-niew
and some of his cohorts made sustained objections to the
logging--Wub-e-ke-niew
used political satire in his newspaper column to characterize the
forestry
policy-makers as ignorant fools. Some
of the area where these oaks grew was then officially re-categorized as
"bear habitat," meaning that some stands of bearing-age oaks
remained, but also that a number of bears residing along the south
shore of
lower Red Lake were live-trapped by authorities, to be released in the
"bear habitat" area. Among
the bears "removed" was the mother of a barely-weaned cub who resided
on Wub-e-ke-niew's and my land.
Densmore (1928) mentions acorns as
among the foods classified as edible by the people who were her
informants, and
as a person with some California cultural roots I consider acorns not
only
edible but delicious, although they require a fair amount of labor to
prepare:
shelling, grinding and leaching the tannins prior to cooking. Over the years, I talked with a number of
people about acorns as food. Most of
them politely agreed that it would be possible to eat them, but then
indicated
that deer and bears enjoyed acorns and that the acorns could be left in
the
woods. One woman added that she had
once grazed pigs under oak trees in the fall, and that the pigs
relished the
acorns.
Although it was said that "some
people" summer-hunted cotton-tails, the staple "rabbit" was the
snow-shoe
hare, hunted after the first snowfall and when their fur had changed to
winter-white. Rabbits were hunted with
a .22 rifle (or shotgun), or with snares set after the snow was deep
enough so
that the rabbits usually traveled along the paths which they made
through the
snow. I have seen more than one older
man hold his pocketful of change mixed with .22 bullets
in the palm of
hand, and speak of the mixture as so many cents and so many rabbits,
one .22
shell being equivalent to one rabbit.
Larger-caliber bullets were sometimes similarly identified as
"deer" or even "moose," one of the underlying implications
being that the owner of the ammunition was a good enough hunter so that
he/she
could make a clean kill with one bullet.
A part of the cultural context also included remembered years
during
which ammunition was scarce and/or required a significant cash outlay
in a
largely non-monetary economy, and many older men including
Wub-e-ke-niew were
experts at "bore-sighting" rifles--properly aligning the sights or
scope without the expenditure of a bullet.
During the years that I was married to Wub-e-ke-niew, I used a
total of
five bullets in target-practice: one to demonstrate to my husband that
I was an
accurate shot before I carried a rifle while hunting with him, one in
target
practice casually undertaken in the presence of a gossipy visitor after
death
threats were delivered to Wub-e-ke-niew, and three in testing a
newly-acquired
gun which could not be bore-sighted.
Wub-e-ke-niew indulged certain of our urbanized guests'
"shooting
up" his ammunition when they visited, but commented about their
wastefulness after they returned to the Cities; the friends in front of
whom he
ruefully examined his nearly-empty ammunition box concurred with his
assessment.
Rabbits were plentiful until
recently, and the general understanding was that if one had bullets or
snare-wire, any competent person need not go hungry in the winter-time. Almost everyone I knew owned at least a few
lengths of medium-gauge picture-wire, which was the preferred material
for
making rabbit snares. Even when people
had refrigerators and deep-freezers, rabbits were often frozen outside,
intact
and unskinned, and kept in the trunk of a non-functioning car or a
defunct
refrigerator to protect them from dogs.
(Deer hunted in the winter were sometimes similarly frozen and
hung in
trees, unskinned until needed.) When a
person was ready to prepare the animal for cooking, the rabbit (or
deer) was
brought inside to thaw. The usual
method of preparing a rabbit was to boil the entire animal except the
feet and
ears (skinned, gutted and sometimes cut apart), and add mahnomen,
potatoes, hominy, oatmeal or elbow macaroni. In
the context of Indian-identity
resurgence, snaring rabbits became an icon of real Indian-ness, and
during the
early 1980's a bumper sticker displaying a stereotypical "Indian"
feather head-dress and the logo "Rabbit Choker" was popular among
some groups of urban Indians in the Twin Cities.
Muskrats, beavers, porcupines,
wood-chucks and skunks were also considered edible, and a few older
people told
me that they sometimes craved beaver-tails.
Skunk-oil was generally known as a no-longer used specific for
colds and
respiratory problems; according to Wub-e-ke-niew, his grandfather often
cooked
skunk for him, Wub-e-ke-niew thought because his mother had died and
his father
was dying of tuberculosis, and skunk probably strengthened the lungs.
When I asked about other animals, I
was not infrequently told about a white man who had married a Métis
woman
(named, and although he had been dead for a generation, still
well-known for
his rain-making exploits, dance costume, et
cetera). This man ate squirrels,
the connotation being that a taste for squirrel was a personal
idiosyncrasy of
that individual and that his wife accommodated him by cooking them. Raccoons, which had become plentiful in the
Red Lake area since World War II, were occasionally hunted by some
people for
their pelts, but were not usually cooked and eaten, the explanation
being that
one had to locate and remove numerous "glands" in order to make them
edible. Regional whites were sometimes
mentioned as people who oven-roasted raccoons.
I was told, "you could ask [so-and-so, a white] for a recipe,
when
I asked about cooking raccoons.
I never heard of anybody eating
wolves, foxes, weasels, otters, mink or other carnivorous animals,
although
such animals were sometimes hunted by older Métis who remained casually
involved in the fur trade, and occasionally killed by an Ahnishinahbæótjibway
as a source of badly-needed
cash. The skinned carcasses were
usually given to the dogs.
Except for turtles, which were
reputed to be delicious and have "seven kinds of meat," I never heard
of anybody eating amphibians, reptiles or invertebrates.
Although there were a number of jokes about
people of French ancestry eating frogs, I did not know anyone who
admitted to
actually eating frogs. Some people
caught frogs, but said they intended to use them as bait when
hook-and-line
fishing for walleye pike.
Prior to the widespread availability
of electricity in the 1960's (and thus the advent of household
television),
hunting small birds in the summertime and cooking them in the woods was
understood as an activity of young boys.
One man had acquired a childhood reputation of carrying a
salt-shaker in
his pocket so that he would be prepared whenever he got a bird; thirty
years
later he was still known for having done so.
Although some people at
Red Lake had fish-houses or
occasionally fished with a hook-and-line through a hole cut in the ice,
most
winter-fishing was done using gill-nets set through holes cut through
the
lake-ice. Depending on the weather,
there were at least two and a half months (often several weeks longer)
during
which the ice was thick enough and solid enough to support a snowmobile
with
reasonable safety, snowmobiles being an efficient method of
transport onto
the ice for fishing. Whitefish were one
of the foci of winter-fishing, and as long as the weather remained
cold,
whitefish not prepared or given away fresh were preserved by hanging
them
outside on racks built high enough to be beyond the reach of dogs. Although fish are reputedly less active in
the winter, I know of none which hibernate.
The Red Lakes are big enough so that
after they have frozen all the way across, the ice shifts like tectonic
plates,
creating pressure-ridges and fissures which may extend to the open
water below
six feet of ice. There are also springs
and currents in the lakes which contour the ice on the lower surface. There are days when the wind roars across
the miles of ice, blowing snow, creating near white-out conditions and
arctic
wind-chill factors. The air-temperature
occasionally plummets to sixty degrees below zero (Fahrenheit), and
there is
usually at least one ten-day stretch when the temperature never warms
to zero
(Fahrenheit). Wolves travel on the ice,
sometimes surveying the shore from a few hundred feet out, and
occasionally
crossing the lakes.
I have sketched a brief outline of
seasonal subsistence patterns, as at least a few continued to engage in
such
subsistence practices through 1997 at Red Lake. It
merits reiterating that during those years, there was significant
ongoing environmental degradation in the Red Lake region.
I have touched on some of these problems
above, and will add that during those nineteen years vast tracts of
second-growth forest were clear-cut and that thousands of acres were
burned. As mentioned above, fish
populations plummeted
during that period. There was also a
marked decrease in rabbit and deer populations, as measured not only by
the
number of people who returned from hunting successfully and the
frequency with
which we saw deer and other species, but also by an almost complete
absence of
deer- and rabbit-trails in the snow during the winters of 1995 and
1996--in
areas where such trails had crisscrossed the woods just a few years
previously.
The subsistence practices detailed
above were not the normal routine of the majority of people residing at
Red
Lake after the late 1960s, with the exception of summer
commercial-fishing. A reasonably
accurate general description of majority subsistence practices would be
set in
the context of a class-stratified, administered U.S. Indian
reservation, and
very briefly summarized as a mosaic based on government funding,
resource
extraction, monopoly businesses and transfer-payments.
Food was purchased at regional grocery
stores and at restaurants and fast-food chains "in town."
Food provided by "meals on wheels"
programs targeted toward the elderly was distributed beyond the funded
recipients; there were also school lunch programs and congregate-dining
"elderly nutrition" lunch programs.
The diets of some families included significant amounts of
permacultural
foods, particularly fish and meat; others refused to eat or did not
"like" venison or moose-meat{7}.
Government-surplus "commodities"
were distributed to low-income people, then circulated through the rest
of the
community via gifts, barter and
sales. Before the "sanitary
landfills" were closed and replaced by "transfer stations," some
people salvaged food found while doing other scavenging at the dump
("shopping at the Red Lake K-Mart," in local parlance).
Some such food was given to dogs and
domesticated animals like chickens and pigs, and some was considered
"perfectly good" and thus fit for human consumption.
In the foregoing section, I have
focused on subsistence patterns as seen through the lens of food, and
have
largely ignored material and other aspects of culture as well as the
kinship
and other social matrices in which these subsistence patterns were set. Since the analytical crux of this paper is
deer-hunting and length constraints require a fairly delimited focus, I
have
stressed food. Although deer also
provided clothing, medicine, household and ceremonial objects and even
agricultural implements in the recorded and/or remembered past, and
even though
buckskin plays a multi-faceted role in contemporary "Indian" culture,
during the period between 1979 and 1997, hides and other products
derived from
deer played an incidental role in Red Lake deer-hunting.
Deer-hunting was not only "about" food, and
from some perspectives one could
write that one of the motivations for deer-hunting had to do with
identity even
though the primary emic raisons d'etre
for hunting included food. In addition,
I am aware that among the intended audience of this paper are
vegetarians for
whom deer-hunting may seem an anathema, and I have tried to place the
killing
and eating of deer in the broader context of a relatively integrated
system of
subsistence and a permacultural interrelationship with an ecosystem
which made
survival in a relatively rigorous climate not only possible but
abundant.
A
detailed description
of contemporary dietary practices
at Red Lake is beyond the scope of this paper, although in the
interests of
accuracy and avoiding the morass of the "ethnographic present," I
shall make a few summary observations.
Very briefly, from the mid 1960s through 1997 there was a mosaic
of
normative fares, the salient variables including income/social class,
ethnic
background, the complex of boarding school
experiences/acculturation/identity,
orientation toward asserting more "traditional" identities, education
and nutritional knowledge, generational differences, time available for
cooking
(including factors such as single parenthood and employment), alcohol
use,
family traditions and personal taste.
At the less remunerative end of the socio-economic scale, some
families'
daily fare was frugal but deliberately health-conscious--and some of
the women
at Red Lake are extremely good cooks.
Others' diets centered around government commodities, macaroni
and
bread, fatty cuts of pork, eggs and potatoes; and some frequently ate
what I
would characterize as a "modern poverty" diet based on
staples
like
hot dogs, cheap commercial white bread, dry breakfast cereal and
Kool-Aid, with
"pop and chips" as a "treat." I was not on
intimate terms with any of the wealthiest families
at Red Lake, and would venture only the tentative observation that what
these
people ate was not dissimilar from Euroamericans of similar
socio-economic
status (although perhaps with somewhat more red meat, including moose
and venison
prepared from Euroamerican-style butcher-cuts). There
were more than a few households in which
"traditional" foods were eaten with regularity, and particularly
during the summer-fishing season local fish was fairly widely dispersed
throughout the community. Moose, and to
a lesser extent venison, was also distributed well beyond the nuclear
household(s) of the hunters.
There was also a
"ceremonial" menu which was fairly standard across the Red Lake
communities. Ceremonial fare varied
slightly with the occasion--there were certain foods which were almost
always
served at wakes (like bologna sandwiches on white bread) and others
which
characterized other events. Ceremonial
feasts included many of the staple and seasonal "traditional" foods
detailed above as well as an iconic-at-Red Lake macaroni dish, and also
almost
invariably included such foods as Jell-o incorporating fruit cocktail
and
sometimes topped with Kool-Whip, and "fry bread." (An
older white woman told me that Jell-o
jiggily cementing an aggregate of fruit cocktail, bananas and
marshmallows is a
standard dish at local whites' ceremonial meals, including
"funerals.") As at
Euroamericans' rural church pot-luck dinners, ceremonial feasts
involved the
culinary contributions of a number of women, the cook(s) of any
particular dish
were not anonymous and the quality of the cooking was not unnoticed.
There were a number of people with a
local reputation for their expertise in preparing certain
"traditional" foods: some people grew their own hominy-corn and were
skilled at making hominy, for example, and others were noted for the
quality of
their smoked fish. Some of these
people, although not explicitly "doing business," made a moderate
amount of money selling such products, although Wub-e-ke-niew was not
entirely
alone in the principled stance from which he refused to sell almost
everything
(although he was generous with gifts).
Wub-e-ke-niew and I gave away more than half of our maple sugar
and
maple syrup every year. Some went to
urban kin from whom no reciprocity was to be expected.
Most of what we gave to people who helped in
the sugarbush, as well as that which was given as incidental gifts,
eventually
"came back" through the circulation of gifts emicly understood as
merely incidental to the social relationships: hominy, fish and
venison,
home-made jellies and pickles, frozen blueberries, home-baked bread,
commodities, other food (including an institutional-sized box of "Tater
Tots" from a windfall found by the giver still-frozen at the dump),
roofing tin, vehicle parts, whatever.
Ahnishinahbæótjibway
gift-giving is important, and the circulation of gifts significant in
the
analysis I undertake in this paper.
Such manifestations of community and generosity are also
difficult to
"translate" into a world-view as strongly influenced by
market-economics as that of Euroamerican academics.
For the moment, I shall observe that it is irrelevant and
misleading to approach it as a tit-for-tat exchange.
Although there was a (flexible) "going rate" for some
goods and services which were strongly influenced by the market economy
and/or
which involved significant cash outlay (e.g.
walleye fillets, rides to Bemidji{8}),
some kinds of gifts explicitly circulated outside the realm of
monetarized
transactions. Trying to establish a
"going rate" between carburetors and venison, for example, would have
been worse than foolish--asking questions about relative market value
would
have insulted the people involved.
One further comment needs to be made
here: all but a very few of the people with whom I associated the most
closely
at Red Lake are now deceased.
Respectful readers will pause here for a moment of silence.
There were once many different ways
to hunt deer at Red Lake; most of these were described to me by elders,
or
detailed in hunting stories, but were not, to the best of my knowledge,
employed between 1979 and 1997. Among
these were: snaring deer, "drives" in which a number of people would
walk through the woods chasing the deer toward people who were
"posted" and would shoot the deer as they appeared, sneaking up on
deer from downwind and clubbing them (e.g.
with an axe or jack{9}),
hunting with a rifle from horse-back, night-hunting illuminated by
birchbark-and-pitch torches, and going along the shoreline in a boat
and
drowning deer in the water. (This last
was reportedly a spur-of-the-moment strategy employed when the woman
who
encountered the deer did not have a gun with her; she evinced pride
that she
had been strong enough, she said, to hold the deer under the water long
enough
to drown it.{10}) There
were other alleged strategies for
deer-hunting which were described in hunting stories of the "tall
tale" genre, for example tying cans to the back of a pickup truck with
long flexible wires so that they would drag, and driving along the road
in the
expectation that the deer's curiosity would overcome their caution, and
the
would-be hunter could shoot the deer as they chased after the truck to
investigate the unusual noise.
There were also ways of hunting
which were still used, but fairly infrequently. The
most notable of these is hunting from a tree-stand built with
a clear line-of-sight either along a trail frequented by deer, or
across a meadow
where deer habitually graze. I have
seen people use a block of livestock-salt as an additional enticement
to the
deer. Deer are also known to be
attracted to apples and clover; I have heard of people planting clover
in the
area visible from their stand, but leaving apples for deer was also
sometimes a
matter of giving the deer treats in a friendly manner, rather than
"baiting" them near a tree-stand.
The use of tree-stands is fairly common among white hunters,
according
to people at Red Lake, and I have seen a number of permanently-built
stands in
areas frequented by white hunters, sometimes appointed with such
luxuries as a
roof, rifle-rests and upholstered seats salvaged from automobiles. There was a certain amount of criticism of
whites' use of tree-stands by people at Red Lake, including vivid and
humorous
tales of deer getting cricks in their necks from walking through the
woods
looking up into the trees for hunters.
Some Indians residing on White Earth
reservation, which is subject to Minnesota hunting limits, licenses and
regulations (under a federal statute commonly referred to as "Public
Law
280") also employ the hunting strategy of running into deer with their
cars, particularly in the dense deer populations of certain
"wilderness" parks. This is a
potentially expensive, even dangerous way of hunting, and is
unnecessary at Red
Lake, although accidental collisions with deer are sometimes
unavoidable. Most of the people with whom
I associated
closely at Red Lake would, if she/he hit a deer, stop to see if the
deer was
dead, if it was wounded kill it if practicable, then either take the
deer, hide
it in the brush to be retrieved later, or give it to someone who would
use it
(although there were also "it happened to me" stories about
(sometimes named) whites living near (identified) places where deer
frequently
cross the road who "hear the sound (of a car hitting a deer) and are
right
there" (to claim and take the deer).
Inadvertent vehicular "hunting" of a deer can give rise to
longstanding joking with a person whose car was damaged in a collision
with a
deer, in the vein of, "Let's go hunting ... we'll use your car."
The methods of hunting generally
used at Red Lake were walking through the woods in areas where one
expected to
find a deer, and using a motor vehicle to traverse the back roads,
"looking for a deer." Some
people may have hunted from boats, although my impression is that this
was
talked about more than it was still done.
All of these kinds of hunting were done both during the day, and
at
night with lights--in reservation parlance, "shining" deer. Some of the men on Red Lake reservation had
built fairly elaborate wooden "scaffolds" in the back of their
(preferably four-wheel drive) pickup trucks, where the person doing the
"shooting" would stand to scan the roadside ditches, woods, fields
and swamps for deer. When a deer was
sighted, either the person driving would also see the deer and stop, or
the
person in the back of the pickup truck would knock on the roof of the
cab, and
the driver would stop and back up if necessary for a clear shot. At night, the person who was shooting would
shine a light, often a home-engineered device incorporating an
automobile
headlight or similar source of illumination, and powered via
a long wire attached with alligator clips to the battery of the
vehicle being driven. (When hunting on
foot or from a boat, the light was often powered by a motorcycle
battery.) Especially in the early fall,
there were
"shiners" out every night, all night on the reservation back-roads,
looking for deer.
"Jacklighting" (one of the
local white terms for shining) is illegal within the boundaries of
Minnesota
jurisdictions, the reasoning being that deer will be mesmerized and
will simply
stand there and stare at the light until they are shot.
As everyone who has shined off of the
reservation hunting knows, this is at least a moderately accurate
description
of the deer's behavior in areas where jacklighting is illegal and
therefore
relatively infrequent. The deer are, as
one informant put it, "tame," and some Indians have developed
elaborate strategies for off-reservation hunting, including using
hand-made
silencers and hunting when lightening camouflages their on-and-off use
of a
light. (The challenge in such illicit
hunting comes from evading the game wardens, rather than from hunting
quasi-domesticated deer.) However,
shining is legal at Red Lake, and most reservation deer will do no more
than
glance at the light before turning their heads so that their highly
reflective
eyes are no longer visible and then, not infrequently, departing.
Red Lake deer have also long been
hunted from motor vehicles, and are leery at the sound of them
approaching. Many hunters thus park in
places to which they anticipate deer will return after the sound of
their vehicle
has vanished, and either sit in their trucks waiting for the deer's
return, or
park near an area where they expect to find deer and then walk. Sometimes Wub-e-ke-niew would park, then
walk through the woods, circling back toward the pickup truck after an
interval
which he felt was long enough to prompt "naturally nosy" deer to come
toward the truck to investigate.
Deer at Red Lake lived with the
seasonal cycles, "yarding" into fairly large herds after the mating
season in the fall, wintering in cedar swamps (until almost all of
those swamps
were logged off, burned or flooded by the dam), giving birth to fawns
in the
spring, moving in harmony with seasonal changes in forage,
water-saturation of
the ground, and other factors including intensity of deer-flies during
the late
spring and summer. Wub-e-ke-niew's and
some others' success in hunting came not from relentlessly shining the
back-roads, night after night, but from a deep understanding of deer.
Ahnishinahbæótjibway
hunting can also be described as a dance, a multi-dimensional discourse
between
deer and human beings in which full attention is paid to what
Wub-e-ke-niew
described as "the energy," and to the harmonies and
interrelationships between living beings who have shared their lives
and deaths
as a part of the same land for thousands of generations.
Wub-e-ke-niew's admonitions that I needed to
maintain a harmonious center-of-my-being, a clear and balanced mind, to
be
without greed and to move gracefully with the shifting energy patterns,
et cetera, were reiterated by other Ahnishinahbæótjibway. Many of the concepts and understandings
which are crucial to Ahnishinahbæótjibway
hunting are completely beyond the paradigms of mainstream Euroamerica,
and are
difficult to explain in a Euroamerican context. I
shall touch upon "the energy" as an example.
Wub-e-ke-niew believed that the
meeting of deer and hunter was, on some level, an agreement. He perceived the energy of the deer,
sometimes before he even left on a hunt, and usually knew where the
deer was before
he ever saw him/her. "Around the
next corner," he would tell me, or "there, in that
clump of trees," and he was almost always
right. Sometimes, we would stop and
gather "swamp tea" or berries, and there were times when he would
simply admire the deer rather than shooting--this was a part of his
long-term
connection with the environment; he danced with the deer rather than
single-mindedly pursuing them. The
relationship between deer and hunter was one of gifts: consciously and
freely
giving rather than forcibly taking--"the energy" had to be
harmonious. There was one fall when he
and a friend made several trips to "the narrows" (the western isthmus
between upper and lower Red Lake) to "wait for" an old swamp buck
whom they had no intention of killing.
They simply went to visit him, and when someone else shot that
old buck,
the two men mourned and said that it was foolish to kill an old swamp
buck.
When Wub-e-ke-niew did kill a deer,
a moose, or even a partridge or a rabbit, he always smoked: one of the
nearly-invisible "ceremonies" of the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
for whom, as Wub-e-ke-niew
explained, there was no dichotomy of "sacred" and
"profane," no boundary between "spirit" and
"material" worlds. Some of
the Métis (and their anthropologists) would have classified what
Wub-e-ke-niew
was doing as "hunting magic," which has inaccurate connotations. Wub-e-ke-niew's focus was on maintaining a
longstanding and harmonious interrelationship between the people, the Dodems, and everyone else (in the
epistemology of a language in which even certain rocks are animate, and
which
stresses dynamic patterns of relationship rather than discrete objects). In his own terms, he was being practical. Like the majority of people living on Red
Lake Indian reservation at that time, there were a few times when we
were
absolutely flat broke in monetary terms (the kind of broke involving
searching
coat pockets for small change, rolling cigarettes out of tobacco
salvaged from
butts, and hocking something). But, we
never went hungry. We gave away food
(in retrospect, we gave away some of every deer we ever got), and food
was
given back to us when we needed it, either by other people or by
Grandmother
Earth. Just once, there was a morning
when we had nothing to eat. Then,
Wub-e-ke-niew
took a walk with his rifle, and came home with a duck.
Wub-e-ke-niew's epistemology was one in
which "greed" was insane, inconceivable--and we always had
"enough." Hunting was an
inherent part of the interrelationship between the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
("We, the People") and
Grandmother Earth. If one lived in
harmony and with "good energy," it worked, and Wub-e-ke-niew told a
number of people the story of the duck who was given to us when we
really
needed it as an illustration of the viability of Ahnishinahbæótjibway
ways-of-being.
There is much more that could be
detailed about deer-hunting, including facets which are more than
marginally
relevant to interpretations of "economics" which underlie some
aspects of consumption theory. Of
particular interest are the grassroots geography and processes
underlying
generally recognized "rights" in the multidimensional mosaic of where certain people and families hunted
(the geography varied depending on whether one was "looking for" a
rabbit, partridge, deer or a moose), set their nets, picked berries,
"knocked" rice, and made gardens--and the interstitial processes at
the discongruent intersections between Ahnishinahbæótjibway
ways of being and the often mutually incompatible market-oriented
and/or bureaucratically
fostered "resource" use/abuse, extraction and
"exploitation." However, the
background information necessary for a clear and accurate description
is
lengthy, and fairly fine-grained detail is necessary for a clear
analysis of
the overlapping and sometimes conflicting understandings and systems in
the
context of the several paradigms of cultural orientation of the people
involved. I regret that it is not
feasible to address these aspects of Red Lake deer-hunting here.
Deer-hunting heightens awareness of
the world in multiple and interrelated ways, some of which are touched
upon
below. Another important aspect of
perception, intrinsic to deer-hunting and Ahnishinahbæótjibway
epistemology, but which space precludes my detailing in this paper,
involves
the omnipresent reality of tracks.
Except on the unyielding near-trackless hard surfaces
manufactured by
urbanity, the world is filled with tracks: utterly readable trails
across
fresh-fallen snow, physical footprints in soft earth, leaves on the
forest
floor shifted slightly in passing, branches from which the berries have
been
removed in certain patterns, trees touched in clearly discernable ways
by
generations passed ... and the social tracks preserved in oral history
sometimes for centuries. Life-processes
make tracks, clearly written for all who care to read them, clearly
remembered
by those who may choose to tell them--and for anyone who tries to blur
his/her
tracks, there is another who can discern both the marks and the attempt
to
disguise them. Tracks inscribe even the
most surreptitious footsteps in the public record, mean that privacy is
maintained by "respect," and are a ubiquitous and tangible
reality-check. According to
Wub-e-ke-niew, Ahnishinahbæótjibway
"reality" extended beyond Euroamerican "truth"--tracks are
a part of that.
Deer make imprints of hooves on the
earth, antler-rubbings on trees, swirls of grass where they have
bedded,
nibbled tender tips of shrubs. They
make "roads" and paths. And,
deer make spoor, just like everyone else.
In the context of mainstream Euroamerican society (where modern
cities
would be uninhabitable without plumbing), such natural functions become
matters
about which discussion is tightly constrained by social convention, and
even if
there were ample blank pages to fill with text here, I would not
belabor the
topic. The differences between a
flush-toilet society in which excrement is "waste" often synonymous
with obscenity (and even introducing the topic in an academic paper may
make
some readers subtly uncomfortable), and that of a people for whom the
spoor of
many species is an inherent and information-rich part of the landscape,
gradually melding with the body of Grandmother Earth through the cycles
of the
warm seasons, are worth serious consideration, though.
So are the many species of flies, ticks,
gnats and mosquitoes ... there is much which could be written, and
relatively
little space/time in which to write it.
Deer-hunting is one of several
integrated aspects of Ahnishinahbæótjibway
permacultural subsistence. With all due
respect for vegetarian readers, I have focused on hunting rather than
on
permacultural or garden-cultivated plants because some aspects of
hunting-based
subsistence provide a clearer basis from which to reconsider Western
analyses
of consumption.
Long-term sustainable
interrelationships between large mammals and hunters involve dynamic
discourse
and intimate understanding of both the habitat and habits of the hunted
animals, in this case deer. In Ahnishinahbæótjibway
terms,
respect for deer as living beings and harmonious energy between human
beings
and deer (as well as the rest of the environment) are also necessary. Euroamerican forestry-management terms such
as "maintaining the viability of the herd" and "deer
harvest" have hierarchical interrelationships embedded within them, and
only present a part of the total picture (and that inaccurately, from
an Ahnishinahbæótjibway
perspective). Deer and human beings are
both dependent on the same environment, one which they have shared for
countless generations, and are, ultimately, complimentary aspects of
the same
whole-systems.
Ahnishinahbæótjibway
see deer as intelligent living beings, who feel, think, reason, have
spirituality and communicate both with each other and with other
species
including humans. In the context of the
Dodems, there were, prior to the
Holocaust of most of the indigenous peoples of these continents, Ahnishinahbæótjibway of the
Deer Dodem who had blood-kinship
relationships with deer, in the same way as the people of
Wub-e-ke-niew's Bear Dodem were related to bears. (The Ahnishinahbæótjibway
of the Deer Dodem are now, along with
most of the other Dodems, extinct,
although many years ago I knew a Shoshone woman who spoke as one of a
Deer Dodem, and who acknowledged her kinship
with deer in her name.) People of a
Deer Dodem [obviously] would not hunt
or eat deer.
There are other reasons why a person
would at least temporarily refrain from hunting, for example as
Wub-e-ke-niew
did after his rifle was used by someone else to kill a bear. Similar such restraints on hunting and other
behavior are codified into proscriptive and prescriptive rules by some
revitalized "traditionalist" Métis, for example that a man should not
hunt while his wife is bleeding (i.e.,
menstruating). Wub-e-ke-niew objected
to such rules at length--a part of his point was that they rigidified
and
abstracted epistemology, and that the formalization of isolated and
decontextualized Ahnishinahbæótjibway
practices into "sacred tradition" transposed and transformed them
into "disconnected" hierarchical infrastructure and thus destroyed Ahnishinahbæótjibway
meanings. Wub-e-ke-niew lived in
harmony with the energy patterns of Ahnishinahbæótjibway
reality, the times when he refrained from hunting being one
manifestation of
that way-of-being.
From an Ahnishinahbæótjibway
perspective, the concepts discussed
in the preceding three paragraphs are also relevant to plants. But, for Euroamericans whose native English
language has embedded within it hierarchical relationships like the
"chain
of being," an analysis is probably more accessible when explained in
terms
of deer than mushrooms or non-domesticated alder bushes.
A subsistence pattern which includes
hunting large mammals influences residence patterns and community size. No place is exactly the "same" as
another place, and a very deep interrelationship with the environment
is one of
the requisites for long-term successful, efficient and sustainable
hunting. Ahnishinahbæótjibway
residence was generally patrilocal,
and (most) men were more extensively involved in hunting than were
(most)
women. In addition to residence
patterns in which most of the hunters live on land with whom they have
a
lifelong familiarity, patrilocality also results in local communities
largely
comprised of inter-related men, and women whose kinship-ties with their
natal
families link local communities. When,
as for the Ahnishinahbæótjibway,
this pattern is enhanced through the chronological depth of the Dodems, vast networks of kinship connect
a broad geographical area into an interconnected system.
In the absence of mechanized
transportation, people who hunt large mammals have a vested interest in
residing within reasonable proximity of the animals they hunt--moose
are heavy, and deer are not light.
There is a maximum community size beyond
which "enough" meat could result in non-sustainable numbers of
animals being hunted. There is also a
minimum optimal size for local communities in this context, constrained
in warm
weather by parameters including the number of people who can process
and eat
about 1,500 pounds of meat before it spoils.
When working in the open in the summer or early fall, people who
are "taking
care of" hunted animals must consider not only bacterial decomposition,
but also flies. I do not intend to be
grossly graphic, but it is relevant that in some kinds of weather, one
has only
a few hours before starting to have problems with maggots.
An animal needs to be skinned, cut up, distributed
and put under cover in that time period: in my experience it takes
about six
person-days to take care of a moose, using steel hand-tools and cutting
three-fourths of the meat to be deep-frozen--preparing the meat for
drying
would take longer. This is a relevant
factor influencing minimum community size, as is the fact that a mature
moose
is too heavy for just two people to even budge,
much less carry across marshy land. Two
people can "drag" a deer, and take care of it in a few hours--but not
a moose.
A number of elders have commented
about the impact of home freezers on "community." Before
the importation of artificial
refrigeration, the most practical way to "preserve" fresh meat and
fish in warm weather was to give it away, at least in the context of an
egalitarian community comprised of people whose value system emphasized
generosity. In a fluid system of
generalized generosity (rather than tit-for-tat reciprocity), the gifts
of the
land, the deer, the ecosystem flowed to the people who needed them,
when they
needed them, in a harmonious system of give-and-take--but never just
"taking and taking," as Wub-e-ke-niew phrased it in criticizing
Euroamerican values. In the context of
a community where there is general consensus concerning generous
give-and-take,
the system works. Greed interrupts the
flow, and throws the harmonious circulation of gifts out of balance. When the excess of food which someone might
greedily keep for themselves was utterly useless (it would rot), then
the
viability of a community knit together by generosity was obvious, the
legitimacy of a value-system based on generosity was self-evident. The stench of greed was, literally and
palpably, rotten, and the putrescent fruits of greed self-evident. Authoritarian admonitions and abstract
value-codifications were unnecessary: people could see it for
themselves. Mechanical refrigeration has
changed that.
Even though a person might be an
extremely competent hunter, hunting is not entirely predictable
(neither is
cultivating broccoli, but the parameters are different).
But, in a giving community with a
multifaceted subsistence base, set in an ecosystem of permacultural
abundance,
the multiple variables affecting any individual hunter evened out. When one gave without greed, and paid
attention not to detailed "accounts" with individuals but to
harmonious "flow," the system worked. Everyone
had "enough."
The emicly defining parameters of
interpersonal relationships, including intimate ones, were influenced
by the
flow of gifts, particularly food, through the community.
"We are all 'We, the People,' and if
anyone has food, nobody starves ... if you are hungry, I will give you
food," pertained to strangers as well as to community and kin. The flow operates both ways in each exchange:
it is almost as rude to refuse share food by not-eating as it is to
decline to
share food by not-feeding, thus sincere excuses are in order of one
cannot eat
the proffered food (e.g., I really am
violently allergic to peanuts, although "Aya'a fed me lunch twenty
minutes
ago" is reasonable and fairly courteous).
Gifts also reify the connections of intimate relationships, love
expressed not in words but in actions, for example: "You are my wife,
so I
put harmonious energy into building a house that suits your taste as
well as
mine ... I cut enough firewood so that you are comfortably warm ... I
bring you
rabbits and deer so we have plenty to eat ... if I don't like what you
cook for
me, I will courteously eat some anyway [and discretely feed the rest to
the dog<{1}
after suggesting that you go on an errand]" ... "You are my husband,
so I grow foods that you like in my garden ... I will put harmonious
energy
into cooking food that you enjoy, that sustains your pleasure as well
as your
strength and health" ... Food and
life are overtly interconnected; Wub-e-ke-niew's self-assessment of his
health,
"I am still eating, so I must be alright," was an example.
The foregoing is a brief and partial
sketch of a few aspects of Ahnishinahbæótjibway
subsistence which are relevant to consumption theory.
There is much more to be written; I have not even touched some
of
the other factors affecting hunting, for example the real possibility
that the
hunter could be the one meeting his/her death, rather than the deer,
although I
have previously mentioned that people were "taken by the lake," i.e. drowned while fishing. I
have focused on a few relatively material
facets of subsistence-hunting in relationship to community and values,
as
examples which hopefully provide a clear basis for the ensuing
discussion of
consumption theory.
I regret that space limitations
preclude adequately addressing some other extremely important issues
here. Among these are the epistemological
ramifications of long-term and intense interrelationships with
non-domesticated
sentient beings like deer, who live on their own "turf."
Academic understandings of deer, and/or
abstract theories derived from observations of domesticated animals
under controlled
conditions, are mostly useless (or worse than useless) when
deer-hunting. It is a reality-check on
profound levels: in
order to be a successful hunter in an Ahnishinahbæótjibway
context, one must pay attention to the ways in which deer think,
communicate
and perceive--from the perspective of the deer. Similarly,
harmony with deer (and with the rest of the ecosystem)
is not an abstract nor idealistic aesthetic, but rather a reality of
survival. If the water is polluted, for
example, one gets very thirsty on a
three-day hunt (and the deer are sick or non-existent).
There is an obvious and readily perceptible
connection between multiple aspects of environmental quality and health. The gentle quiet words of older Ahnishinahbæótjibway
are
still clear across the years: "You don't have to take my word for
it--see
for yourself."
The complex and contested mosaic of
the Red Lake communities present multiple aspects upon which the lenses
of
conventional consumption theories could be focused.
Native American
Press/Ojibwe News publisher William J. Lawrence's public
observations about
"crabs in a bucket," for example, are an insight-laden starting point
for potentially very interesting analyses of competitive
anti-consumption as an
aspect of identity maintenance and a (self-defeating/present-system
maintaining) means of resistance in administered communities such as at
least
some U.S. Indian reservations.
["White crabs" climb on top of each other to escape, but
"Indian crabs" pull each other back down into the bucket, according
to Bill Lawrence.] But, however
fascinating a consumption-theory exegesis of the sometimes aggressive
"leveling" in Indian communities might be, it is an engrossing
diversion away from deeper critique of the foundations of Western
theories of
consumption.
Length constraints make this paper
necessarily incomplete. There is much
to be written about the biases and limitations inherent in the language
of
analysis which is relevant, germane and in fact quite important to the
issues
considered below. Wub-e-ke-niew discusses
some of these problems of language in We
Have The Right To Exist (1995:215-241, etc.)
and elsewhere, and some of them are examined in further detail in
forthcoming
work. Analysis of linguistic
infrastructure and its impacts on theory, however, requires
establishing a
position beyond the limitations of the language under consideration. In order to write in the English language
about conceptual structures which are beyond the paradigms readily
expressed in
English, one must extend the parameters of discussion step by step, at
each
step building the foundations upon which to enlarge the bounds of that
which is
potentially thinkable thought in English.
This is beyond the scope of a putatively short paper.
Thus, rather than attempting a
comprehensive and integrated critique of the bases of Western
epistemology and
English-language discourse here, I shall touch upon a few points. I am fully aware that in so doing, there are
some aspects of both academic theory and Ahnishinahbæótjibway
about which I shall make some fairly broad generalizations. There are fine-grain details about both
perspectives which cannot be fully considered here, neither paradigm is
monolithic nor uniform, and the universe is complicated enough so that
from any
particular stance there are inevitably exceptions to any general
observation. The following is written
not with the intent to paint with a broad brush in any particular
spectrum, nor
as an attempt to create a definitive and authoritative theoretical
structure,
but rather to raise questions, to invite discussion and to point out
vantages
from which it could be interesting to re-examine some aspects of
present
theory.
There are many ways of knowing, in
any culture, one of the quite valuable aspects of anthropological
perspectives
being the interstitial positionalities of anthropology as a discipline:
between
science and art, straddling the abyss between major dichotomies in
Western
epistemology. Although there are
certainly conventionally-acceptable ways of perceiving, understanding,
analyzing and publishing academic representations in anthropology, it
is also
possible to remain within the discipline and yet step beyond the
constraints of
culturally-bounded parameters of analysis, including those of Science.
Despite this flexibility, there is a
normative tendency toward the embedded emic assumptions which structure
scientific analyses. Also, it is not
feasible to examine all of one's
implicit foundations in the context of reasonably concise and coherent
academic
writing. Even if one were to undertake
extensive exegesis of just one thread of the world-view within which
one is
writing, words rest upon other words, and every one of those words
conveys not
only one's intended meanings, but also a deep historical legacy of
cultural
biases and difficult-to-examine assumptions.
Similarly, the grammatical structure of any particular language
focuses
knowledge in particular ways, and the norms of discourse and narrative
make
writing which flows in certain directions obviously "right" in a
common-sense sort of way. If one
attempts to convey patterns which are against the grain of the language
in
which one is writing, the reactions of reader are quite likely to
include
intuitive discomfort derived as much from discursive patterns which are
not
quite congruent with those implicitly "proper," as with the validity,
legitimacy and/or plausibility of one's arguments.
Some such reactions are subtle, and some readers may respond
with
strong criticism concentrated on milieux which are peripheral (or even
irrelevant) to the core of one's argument, or may be so discomfited as
to not
even perceive the central aspects of that about which one is writing.
There are the generalists, and there
are the particularists. Anthropology
has shifted like a compound pendulum, in long oscillations between
broad
analyses of comparative cultural patterns and fine-scale focusing on
detailed
descriptions of putatively incomparable particulars.
From one perspective, this is simply a shift in scale--even the
most meticulously measured minutiae are, from another vantage,
multi-dimensional patterns of relationship even though they may be
observed,
discussed and analyzed as though they were unitary (reified or overtly
abstract) objects connected in ways most "elegantly" theorized as
either linear and vectored, or analogous to simple geometric forms.
When the feedback
sustaining/challenging one's world-view is largely within the context
of
socially-constructed systems under hierarchical control, apparent
discongruities between such abstract theoretical structures and reality
can be
quantified and dismissed as "random," authoritatively denied as
not-real, and/or, if sufficiently threatening epistemological
"weeds," "criminals," "wolves," defined as beyond
the pale of valuable domesticated facts and subjected to
culturally-sanctioned
destruction.
In permacultural systems such as
that of the Ahnishinahbæótjibway,
humans interrelate with other beings in complex and relatively
egalitarian
non-domesticated systems. (I do not use
"wild" because of the distorting value-load connoted by this
English-language word, and "virgin" in reference to the symphony of
life-and-death anywhere is not only inaccurate, it is a silly metaphor
which
reveals much more about European/Euroamerican ways of thinking than it
does
about an ecosystem.) It is possible to
describe, analyze, abstract and theorize about the ecosystem at Red
Lake in
hegemonic Euroamerican terms, and sustain the "validity" of such
understandings in multiple socially-constructed domains: peer-review
processes
of academic publication, ivory-tower pontifications and arguments, and
bureaucratic legitimization of forcible ecological alteration via government agencies (D.N.R.,
U.S.D.A., B.I.A., et cetera). When
one's meat is fenced, branded,
castrated, industrially-processed and shrink-wrapped; when one's access
to food
depends on criteria almost exclusively within hierarchical
human-controlled
milieux, disparities between authoritative hegemonic theories and the
realities
of natural systems can be dismissed as irrelevant, incorrect or as mere
ignorant misapprehension. When
not-eating-for-many-days-and-nights hunger is a consequence of
theoretical
constructs inadequately correlated with on-the-ground reality, however,
criteria for assessment of theoretical legitimacy may be different. Such consequences do not necessarily impel
epistemological shifts; within certain world-views there are crucial
lacunae
which sometimes persist even in extremis.
The people of the Donner Party, for example,
were so attached to their conceptions, perceptions and projections of
the place
where they spent one winter as an "inhospitable wilderness" that they
engaged in cannibalism and/or starved, rather than expanding their
understanding of the world around them, setting rabbit snares and
cutting holes
through the ice to fish in the lake by which they were
"stranded"--they apparently could not conceive the possibility of
being "camped."
Wub-e-ke-niew appropriated
Dennison's phrase, "the glass wall{12},"
and
used it to refer to the epistemological barriers which separate Ahnishinahbæótjibway from
Euroamericans and Métis. Wub-e-ke-niew
was more interested in engaging in lengthy theoretical conversations
about
epistemology and foundational differences in world-views than the other
people
whom I knew at Red Lake, and we spent fourteen years engaging each
other in
often-intense dialogue, working toward what he called "translation of
Aboriginal Indigenous perspectives."
Our joint understanding was enhanced by the collaborative
writing which
we did during most of those years--finding accurate words with which to
express
something (in fixed and monologous writing) is different than verbally
reaching
consensus. Many of the positions
presented in this paper were initially formulated in Euroamerican
English
during Wub-e-ke-niew's and my conversations and written drafts, but
are, as
Wub-e-ke-niew wrote, "What the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
have been saying for centuries, ever since we came into contact with
the
Euro-Americans, ... finally ... written in English" (1995:52). Wub-e-ke-niew's analyses of Ahnishinahbæótjibway
perspectives, paradigms and epistemology were generally confirmed,
directly or
indirectly, by other Ahnishinahbæótjibway
at Red Lake, although Wub-e-ke-niew was exceptionally fluent in
English, widely
read and passionately interested in comprehending deep-strata
foundations of
both Western/Euroamerican and Aboriginal Indigenous ways of being, as
well as
in addressing "social problems at the root causes."
The glass wall between Euroamerican
and Métis on one side, and the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
on the other, was an abundantly apparent barrier to finding mutually
acceptable
ways of interrelating with the environment at Red Lake.
It was not the only obstacle--some of the
processes intrinsic to Euroamerican resource extraction systematically
(and
sometimes deliberately) preclude Ahnishinahbæótjibway
permacultural subsistence, for example--but problems in communication
between
the two groups also included mutual incomprehensibility as well as
intentional
obfuscation and utter disregard for Ahnishinahbæótjibway
priorities by at least some Euroamerican policy-makers.
Glass wall issues are at the nexi of
a number of anthropological debates, some of them quite contentious. A full detailing of the positions taken and
the foci of arguments made by eminent theorists is not possible here
(even
ignoring obscure but insightful writers), although it is relevant that
there
have been expansive claims made by some attempting to deny the very
existence
of the theoretical ground held by certain others. For
the present, I shall merely note that from the position
held by some the terrain of certain others is
categorized, interpreted or otherwise delegated beyond the parameters
of
acceptable "reality" in ways which make it possible to entertain the
notion that some theorists' categorical refusal to recognize the
legitimacy of
some others' positions is more than politicized academic posturing.
One key realm of such debate centers
around the possibilities of translation.
Is, for example, a Euroamerican English-language deer the
"same" as an Ahnishinahbæótjibway
wawashkish, or even a Reservation-English deer?
On one level, we can indicate a deer a few hundred feet away in
a
meadow, clearly visible as the late afternoon light slants to highlight
the
contours of the deer as he/she stands there looking at us, and probably
come to
general agreement that we are, with our various words, referring to the
"same" animal. We can most
likely come to the further agreement that a rabbit sitting silently
like a
midwinter lump of snow in the woods is not a "deer," and that neither
the white pine which stands at the fork in the road nor the boulder at
the edge
of the yard is a "deer." Some
level of translatability, particularly with regard to pointable
referents, is
clearly possible.
Mutual incomprehensibility is more
of a problem when one is using words to indicate referents. The meanings intended by an Ahnishinahbæótjibway
speaking
of "deer" in the Euroamerican English language may be, and quite
probably are, extremely different than the meanings heard and the
meanings
intended in response by a college-educated resource management
specialist
conversing with the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
about "deer." The differences
in experiences with deer, narratives of deer and other parameters of
knowledge
"about" deer are only one aspect of the unintelligibility beyond the
glass wall.
I noted above that from at least one
vantage words refer to patterns of relationship rather than discrete
and
clearly bounded "objects," even those words with obvious pointable
and potentially palpable referents.
There are a number of ways in which this is relevant to the
present
topic of deer-hunting, and I shall briefly address two of the most
salient of
these: The first is the issue of the
"boundaries" of a deer. For
most Euroamericans, a deer is probably understood as a discrete
individual
animal, or as an enumerable and isolable member of a group; the
relevant
aspects of deer can be quantified and subjected to statistical analysis. Chronologically, the deer begins with
his/her ["its," in Euroamerican English] birth (or conception), and
ends with his/her death; after death the deer is linguistically
recategorized
as venison, buckskin, et cetera. Physically,
there is a clear boundary
between deer and not-deer isomorphic with the presence of the
flesh-and-blood
animal, who ["which," in Euroamerican English] is an entity existing
in precisely three geometrical dimensions and extending, at most, to
the outer
ends of his/her hair. Euroamerican deer
move through their lives directed by "instinct," learn through
"conditioned responses," and are presumed to have only rudimentary
means of communication. Except perhaps
in a largely metaphorical Thoreaudian sense, the meaning
of deer is not created by deer, nor is it approached as a
matter of mutual consensus between deer and humans, but rather it is
"discovered" (or imposed) upon deer, then legitimated and
disseminated by those who have the authority and/or means to do so. For Ahnishinahbæótjibway,
none of these is necessarily a parameter of deer, and furthermore,
significance
is embedded quite differently within cultural universes of meaning.
The second issue is more difficult
to explain, but I shall endeavor to do so briefly.
In Euroamerican English, the meaning of the word "deer"
is significantly influenced by idealized abstract definitions:
"normal" deer, "ideal" deer, tightly delimited taxonomic
species and sub-species definitions of "white-tailed deer" and
hair-splitting legal definitions of exactly and precisely what
constitutes a
deer within .001 picas of the letter of the law, as discrete units with
serf-like attachments to land in some parameters. Deer
are also defined as resources managed and
"harvested" under agricultural metaphors, although the State's
position is inconsistent and fragmented (e.g.,
the State of Minnesota is, by statute, not responsible for damages
attributed
to deer--although in most respects the State claims to "own" deer, in
terms of liability law they are "wild animals"). Although
I think that various levels of
government's efforts to legally and lexically domesticate deer are
fascinating,
and observe somewhat pointedly that present problems of civil rights
abuses on
U.S. Indian reservations derive in part from deer being used as cited
precedents in U.S. case law defining legal status of "Indians," the
present point is that the defining referents for deer are static and
quantifiable abstractions over which the State exercises authority
backed by
armed force and other stringent sanctions.
Although deer in Euroamerican paradigms are acknowledged to be
in
multiple relationships to land and environment, these relationships are
abstractly conceived of as being linear vectors within hierarchical
structures,
and subject to sometimes vigorously asserted State authority and
control. Using Euroamerican English, it is
possible
to culturally-construct such an object-thing ("something") as an
isolated and abstract "deer" who is detached from his/her family,
community and environment.
From Ahnishinahbæótjibway paradigms,
the referents for deer
were the non-static life-and-death realities of deer as sentient beings
inseparably integrated with "We, the People" as well as everyone else
of Grandmother Earth. Discussing
the ideal boundaries of a typical
deer would be talking nonsense. In
Wub-e-ke-niew’s and others’ understanding that "everything is
connected." This is clarified by a
conversation in which I tried the most extreme example I could think of:
...
Clara:
O.K., what about between you and Adolph Hitler, then?
Where would you say the boundary was?
Wub-e-ke-niew:
That's what I keep telling you--there isn't any. (sadly) That's the
problem.
Epiphany--the
sort in which the previously obscure clarifies in successive insights
over days
and even weeks, old conceptual structures shift or even crumble, and
understanding deepens palpably.
Everything is really
connected, of the whole not as discrete parts, but inseparably
integrated. My appreciation of ironic
jokes about
"track soup"{13}
became deeper, sadder and funnier. The
"glass wall" from the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
side is clearly without substance--one of many abstract Euroamerican
constructs.{14}
Understanding interconnectedness is
one crucial aspect of what I am endeavoring to explain here about the
meaning
of "deer." Another is that Ahnishinahbæótjibway
culturally and linguistically affirmed attention to the constant motion
and
change of everything. Frozen, static
and perpetually inalterable existence are hypothetical artifacts of
abstractly
based epistemology, and I know of nothing in the natural world which is
actually static or changeless--not lake ice in mid-January, not rocks,
not even
the dead. It would be appropriate in
terms of relevance, but unreasonable in terms of paper-length, to
detail some
of the extensive ramifications of this core-structural difference
between Ahnishinahbæótjibway and
Euroamerican epistemology and language.
Perhaps the most crucial for present purposes is that from the
perspective of a world-view, language and social-cultural milieu where
almost
everything is cyclic non-linear dynamic interconnected non-hierarchical
interactive process, and static property
is a non-existent and
irrelevant abstraction, the culturally-embedded meanings of
"consumption" will tend to be quite different than those usually
assumed by Western analysts. Concepts
can be transported from one paradigm to the other, but need a fair bit
of
background information and exegesis to retain a modicum of their former
meaning. Even when the meaning may be
clear, the concept may be relatively useless as means of explanation,
except
perhaps when employed as a part of comparative analysis.
Western economics, whether that of
Marx and Engels or that elaborated by Keynes, is grounded on a series
of
assumptions about the nature of labor and property.
Almost invisibly emic--in the wake of centuries of colonization,
neo-colonization, post-colonization and globalization there are very
few even
quasi-intact societies which provide sufficient contrast to render them
visible--some of these assumptions are self-fulfilling in the sense
that
presuming that they are accurate pan-human descriptions rather than
culturally-embedded emic beliefs generates both analyses which
legitimate the
underlying assumptions, and underlies processes which further entrench
systems
alien to all but those whose world-views are in concert with those emic
assumptions. For example, the
structures underlying the concept of "capital" are reasonably
congruent with subsistence infrastructures centered around herding and
more
intensive animal husbandry, and cultivating domesticated plants so
extensively
that the ecosystem is transformed to the degree that people would
starve without
such cultivation. But, such analyses
profoundly distort the perceived foundations of permaculturally-based
societies--what they highlight are not key nexi within such systems,
either
emicly or eticly.
The subsistence bases of
market-oriented, industrially based and "information age" economies
have been overlaid with sometimes quite numerous intermediaries and
obfuscational symbolism, but still depend on domesticated plants and
animals. Although there have been
moments when I briefly fantasized about shooting the predecessor of my
present
computer (after it and two previous ones died in quick succession),
computers
are inedible, unwearable except maybe as truly eccentric and
uncomfortable
hats, and even if sledge-hammered into thin sheets would probably be
leaky
roofing material. Not superordinate
status, fleets of superdupersonic surgically-accurate guided missiles
loaded
with ultimate weapons, entire vaults of gold nor vast networks of
optical
cables transmitting twenty-seven point six godzillion gigabytes of
flawlessly
reproduced information per nanosecond will help put food into anyone's
kettle
when permacultural systems have been demolished and agricultural land
abandoned, laden with toxic contamination and/or desertified--and there
is no
food to be had. Symbolic, persuasive
and even coercive systems of allocation cannot reasonably be isolated
from
subsistence realities.
It is possible to
"explain" the permacultural systems which once sustained Ahnishinahbæótjibway
in
Western economic terms, and it is probable that well-executed attempts
to do so
would seem accurate and reasonable to those whose conceptual grounding
is
within the parameters of such systems.
But: would such theoretical structures and explanations
facilitate or
confound sensible decision-making in the context of the holistic
world-view and
egalitarian social systems which were an integral part of Ahnishinahbæótjibway
and similar people's permacultural
subsistence base? Would impeccable
textbook knowledge (and even ten years high-level administrative
experience) in
State or Federal wildlife management policy be at all helpful while
looking for
a deer in an ecosystem as-yet unmodified by the implementation of such
policies? Abstract statistical
probabilities of "well-managed" deer in an area where real deer would
reside mostly during the spring if unconstrained by habitat
destruction, would
not even make good track soup during the fall.
Food, and clothing and shelter in
inclement weather are (along with potable water, breathable air,
sanitary
provisions and enough physical space), it cannot be disputed, necessary
requisites for the maintenance of human life.
Mates of the appropriate biological configuration, whether
physically
present or merely the anonymous providers of extracted and perhaps
frozen
cells, are indispensable if those hypothetical and minimally-sustained
humans
are to persist beyond the ephemeral moments of a single life-time. The "conventional wisdom" focusing
attention on the "food, clothing and shelter" trilogy of basic
necessities is fairly deeply embedded in Euroamerican theory and
practice. Along with approximately
humanitarian
medical care and the societally-stabilizing mandates of compulsory
education
for children, the provision of the three "essentials" to most
Americans, most of the time, comprises a large portion of the overt
agenda of
public and private social-service agencies, for example.
Theories of consumption also extend
in other interesting and informative directions. Among
these are the ways in which particular parameters and
processes of consumption interact with material, embodied and symbolic
discourses socially constructing identity; complex reflexive systems
involved
in production, distribution and allocation of things which do not occur
as-consumed
in the natural world; and analyses of symbolic power-laden discourses
at least
partially conducted with material objects.
There are several assumptions which are embedded or stated as
implicitly
or overtly "of-course" postulates, perhaps not universally but at
least in all such theories with which I am acquainted.
One of these is the sometimes deeply buried
food-clothing-and-shelter axiom.
Another is that all human society is innately hierarchical, and
that
access to desirable scarce goods is correlated with social status, that
social
identity and status is in turn correlated with tasteful, appropriate
and/or
other socially-indexed aspects (or consequences) of the consumption of
certain
goods. Social status may be discussed
in broad terms, or the focus may be on status as negotiated and ranked
within
fairly narrow parameters, such as the "in-crowd" of a particular
"out-group", but the concept is consistently there as
an "of-course" assertion.
In broad-brush generalities,
Western/Euroamerican analyses are centered on generic or statistical
individuals, and groups derived from/comprised of such individuals, who
compete
for "basic necessities" and for hierarchically-ranked
"higher" status which differentiates access to the means of obtaining
both those necessities and socially-valued augmentations.
There is a positive-feedback loop between
raising status and increasing those assets which improve access to the
means of
raising status, as the abstract individuals move through, negotiate and
transform socially-constructed domains.
While working on this paper, I conducted a non-scientific survey
of
casually-encountered distinguished-looking men at a high-status
metropolitan
business school, asking what the "motive force" behind modern society
was. "Greed," I was
told. The emic "conventional
wisdom" is sometimes phrased as, "Fear and Greed."
In a societal milieu which is almost
hermetically sealed from the understandings of Ahnishinahbæótjibway
and other aboriginal indigenous
hunters by layer after historical layer of abstractly based human
constructs and
the filtering of the natural world through a labyrinth of symbolic
mediation,
the avaricious stench of maggoty moose-meat is imperceptibly distant,
thought
to be irrelevant, and all-but obviated by the destruction of moose
habitat. I grant that Wub-e-ke-niew's
aphoristic characterization of Euroamerican values, "Greed is good. Exploitation is healthy," is not the
unmitigated
reality of all Euroamericans, and in fact that there are many who
energetically
resist the dehumanization of greed and exploitation.{15} Nonetheless, the issues of how deeply such
values are embedded in anthropological theory merit serious
consideration.
An analysis based on Ahnishinahbæótjibway
epistemology would reasonably have as its underlying grounding not the
bare
"essentials" of individual survival, but rather the health and
harmony of long-enduring patterns and processes of community. There is a subtle but important difference
between such an orientation, and that described in the previous three
paragraphs. The former is structured in
terms of the individual, and understanding of the group formulated from
postulates centered around the needs of the individual.
The heart of the latter is patterns and
dynamic processes in relationship to the totality; not "groups" in
the Euroamerican English sense of aggregated individuals but a rather
the
non-bounded interconnected being-ness discussed at some length above,
and for
which I know of no concise term in English language.
The explanatory analogy which comes most readily to mind, that
of
"biochemicals" and "organisms," conveys some of the
whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-the-parts aspects of the differences
between
the two world-views being presently discussed, but is inaccurate both
because
the conceptual structures with both biochemicals and organisms are
thought are
similar, and because the analogy to some degree implies hierarchical
"levels" of analysis.
I and my husband worked for more
than a decade, attempting to build "bridges" between the two
ways-of-being, scrutinizing words and sometimes mutilating proper
Euroamerican
English in trying to describe Ahnishinahbæótjibway. During the last summer of his life, we made
a number of formal, often tape-recorded interviews in which we talked
at length
about some of the issues related to extending a language beyond its
extant
paradigms. The most concise explanation
was Wub-e-ke-niew's: "all you have to do is look at the water." When human beings lived in the harmonious
interrelationships sustained by Ahnishinahbæótjibway
permaculture and epistemology, "you could drink the water anywhere,"
but "now, you might as well live in the desert." The
water is all polluted, and you can't
drink it anywhere.
I am not at the moment prepared to
offer a comprehensive theory of the anthropology of consumption from an
Ahnishinahbæótjibway
perspective, although I emphatically concur with Wub-e-ke-niew that
"the
water" is far more important than some might realize.
That one must go to a store and buy drinking
water, because there is no
longer any safely potable natural water in this land of thousands of
once
crystal-clear lakes and sparkling-fresh springs, is a reality that
merits
serious consideration{16}.
I also note a few nascent
seeds-for-thought--brief and sketchy comments on some facets of an
anthropological theory of consumption as it might be formulated from
the Ahnishinahbæótjibway side of
the "glass wall":
·
flow of goods and services seen and
evaluated in parameters extending beyond human communities and on both
sides of
life and death.
·
discourse which is part of organically
integrated whole-systems communication.
·
an economic grounding based on
"enough" and abundance, rather than on theories with axioms such as
unattainable desires and the inevitability of Spencerian conflict under
"natural" conditions of scarcity.
·
generosity and sharing, rather than
segmented short-cycle competitive systems.
When one
interrelates with the world from an Ahnishinahbæótjibway
perspective, rather than Euroamerican ones, meaning changes, therefore
socially-constructed reality changes, therefore co-evolution of human
beings
within the inescapable context of natural systems changes.
Firstly and most importantly, I
thank you, the reader, for your consideration of the fairly lengthy and
sometimes densely presented issues in this paper. Seriously. The subject
matter touched upon in this paper is personally as well as academically
important to me, and I appreciate your taking the time to think about
it.
From an Ahnishinahbæótjibway
positionality, it is rude to
belabor the obvious, it is disrespectful of the intellectual capacities
of
one's listeners/readers to repeatedly iterate points which have already
been
made, and to arrogantly insist on presenting one's own conclusions as
an
already-constructed monologue/piece instead of discussing the issues
with those
to whom one has raised them is arrogant, disharmonious, and
discourteous. However, the intended
audience of this paper
includes people within academic milieux, and one of the fairly
immutable
conventions of academic writing is to end one's papers with a summary
and
conclusion.
For the Ahnishinahbæótjibway who may
read this paper, therefore,
Ahau'. I have written what
I had to say at present. My mailing
address and voice mail number are
on the title page of this paper.
For Euroamerican academics and other
readers who expect a conclusion, I have detailed some aspects of Ahnishinahbæótjibway
epistemology and the permacultural infrastructure with which it is
interconnected. I have indicated ways
in which understandings and ways-of-being differ between the Ahnishinahbæótjibway and
Euroamericans. What remains to be
written is far less than I have been able to touch upon here; I have
indicated
some of the salient-to-deer-hunting areas in which there remains much
to be
said and considered. I have also
briefly indicated some of the ways in which Ahnishinahbæótjibway
(and other aboriginal indigenous peoples') epistemologies could augment
Euroamerican
and other Western understandings of the world.
Also, I have occasionally indicated throughout this paper that
the
issues under consideration are relevant to more than abstract academic
theory. Socially-constructed realities are
in
dynamic, transformative interrelationship with in-the-world reality,
and recent
history indicates that we ignore or deny that at not only our own
impoverishment, but also at the peril of our children, grandchildren
and the
generations yet to come.
References
Cited
<>
Boswell,
Mark,
in Lawrence,
William J., publisher.
Native
American Press/Ojibwe News (formerly The Ojibwe News).
Bemidji, MN. Cartoons from the following issues:
1:18, September 21, 1988, "
Wild rice harvest on the
reservation."
1:23, October 26, 1988, "
Progress, otherwise known
as 'Manifest Destiny'."
1:26, November 16, 1988, "
Deer Hunting."
1:28, November 30, 1988, "
I
thought you brought the gun!"
1:30, December 14, 1988, "
Now
put this around your neck and swim!"
1:31, December 21, 1988, "
Last
minute shopping on the reservation."
1:44, March 22, 1989, "
'The Easter
Bunny cometh!'"
3:4, August 29, 1990, "
Spuds
takes to the Lakes!"
3:5, September 12, 1990, "
You got any more of them
Twinkies?"
Densmore, Frances ([1928]
1974).
How Indians Use Wild
Plants for Food, Medicine, and Crafts.
Dover
reprint.
Densmore, Frances ([1929]
1979).
Chippewa Customs.
St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society.
Wub-e-ke-niew
(1994).
We
Have The Right To Exist; a translation of Aboriginal Indigenous
Thought; the
first book ever published from an Ahnishinahbæótjibway
perspective. New York: Black Thistle
Press.
