Added Jan 8, 2005
The Contemporary Cree Hunting Culture
Cree Hunting Culture and Knowledge
An early ethnographer of the Eastern Subarctic, Frank G. Speck, called Indian hunting a "religious occupation." Several recent ethnographers have called it a culturally distinct science, an "ethnoscience." How can we understand Cree hunting, a way of life whose destruction would cause not only an economic and social crisis but a cultural and moral crisis as well? To answer such questions we must try to understand what meanings hunting has for the hunters themselves.
We can develop an understanding of how the James Bay Cree think about hunting and about themselves and their world by considering the different meanings conveyed by the Cree word for hunting. We will find that their concept of hunting is very different from the everyday understandings common in our own culture. However odd the Cree conception may appear to be at first, we will find that it not only has logic when understood in the context of Cree thought and action, but also that it has important affinities with the recent discoveries of ecological scientists working within our own culture. These analogies may help us to better understand Cree thought, although they will not make the Cree out to be scientists or transform scientists into effiective hunters.
ANIMAL GIFTS
Nitao, the root of the Cree term that is roughly translated into English as "hunting, fishing, and trapping in the bush," is found in a series of words related to hunting activities. At least five basic meanings are associated with this root term for hunting: to see something or to look at something; to go to get or to fetch something; to need something; to want something; and to grow or continue to grow.
That hunting should be thought of as a process of looking or seeking is apparent to us as well as to the Cree. Hunting is typically a process of seeing signs of the presence of animals - tracks, spoor, feeding or living areas - and of then seeking to encounter the animals and to kill them. The proposition that hunting is "looking" emphasizes the uncertainty involved. The Cree view is that most animals are shy, retiring, and not easily visible, and hunting therefore involves an expectation as well as an activity. The hunter goes through a process of finding indications of possible encounters with animals; if the hunt is successful he fulfils his anticipation. We will see below how this anticipation plays a role in Cree thinking.
That a successful hunt should also be conceptualized as getting or fetching animals is also apparent, but part of what the Cree mean by this is different from what we would assume. To get an animal in the Cree view does not mean to encounter it by chance, but to receive the animal. The animal is given to the hunter. A successful hunt is not simply the result of the intention and work of the hunter; it is also the outcome of the intention and actions of the animals. In the process of hunting a hunter enters into a reciprocal relationship: animals are given to hunters to meet their needs and wants, and in return the hunters incur obligations to the animals. Thus the Cree conception of hunting involves a complex and moral relationship in which the outcome of the hunt is a result of the mutual efforts of the hunter and the environment. This is a subtle and accurate ecological perspective. It may seem odd that animal kills should be conceptualized as gifts, and it is important therefore to note that Cree do not radically separate the concepts of "human" and "animals." In their everyday experience in the bush they continually observe examples of the intelligence and will power of animals. They express this by saying that animals are "like persons"; they act as if they are capable of independent action, and they are causally responsible for things they do.
For the Cree this is an everyday observation. Evidence of intelligence is cited from several sources. One type is that each animal has its own way of living or, as is sometimes said, its own way of thinking. Each responds to environmental circumstances in ways that human beings can recognize as logically appropriate. Each has its own preparations for winter: beavers build complex lodges; bears, dens; ducks and geese migrate. Each also relates to, and communicates with, members of its species. For example, beavers establish three-generational colonies built around a monogamous couple. Geese mate for life and have complex patterns of flock leadership. And inter-species communication is indicated by the intelligent response of animals to the efforts of the hunters themselves. Some beaver will place mud on top of a trap and then eat the poplar branches left as lure and a gift by the hunter. Hunters say their techniques have to depend on how fast an animal thinks. Each animal has special mental characteristics: beaver are stubborn and persistent, bear are intelligent, wolves are fearless, grouse are stupid. Further, animals have emotions and may be "scared" or "mad" when they avoid hunters.
That animals give themselves is indicated in part by their typical reactions to hunters. When a bear den is found in winter, a hunter will address the bear and tell it to come out. And bears do awake, come out of their dens sluggishly, and get killed. That such a powerful, intelligent, and potentially dangerous animal can be so docile is significant for the Cree. The behaviour of moose is also significant. Moose bed down facing into the wind, so that air does not penetrate under their hair. When a hunter approaches from down wind, he comes upon it from behind. A moose typically takes flight only after scenting or seeing a source of danger. It therefore rises up when it hears a hunter approach and turns in the direction of the noise to locate and scent the source. In this gesture, taking ten to fifteen seconds, the moose gives itself to the hunter by turning and looking at him.
The extensive knowledge Cree have of animals becomes, therefore, a basis for their understanding that animals are given. The concept of an animal gift indicates that killing an animal is not solely the result of the knowledge, will, and action of humans, however necessary these are, but that the most important reasons for the gift lie in the relationships of the givers and the receivers. Because animals are capable of intelligent thought and social action, it is not only possible for them to understand human beings, but for humans to understand animals. The actions of animals are events of communication that convey information about intentions. Saying that the animals are gifts therefore emphasizes that the hunter must adapt his hunt to what he learns from and knows about the animals. To see how this works we must examine the Cree world.
THE HUNTER'S WORLD
Because animals are gifts, it is appropriate to ask "Who gives the animal?" and the answer to this question leads us to important features of Cree logic and cosmology. Recurrent answers are that animals do not only give themselves, they are given by the "wind persons" and by God or Jesus.
Just as animals are like persons, so, too, are phenomena that we do not consider to be living. Active phenomena such as winds, water, as well as God and various spirit beings, are all considered to be like persons or to be associated with personal beings. And because all sources of action are like persons, the explanations of the causes of events and happenings are not in terms of impersonal forces, but in terms of the actions of one or more persons. Explanations refer to a "who" that is active, rather than to a "what" (Hallowell, 1955; Black, 1967). The world is therefore volitional, and the perceived regularities of the world are not those of natural law but rather like the habitual behaviour of persons. It is therefore possible to know what will happen before it does occur, because it is habitual. But there is also a fundamental unpredictability in the world as well: habits make action likely, not certain. This capriciousness is also a result of the diversity of persons, because many phenomena must act in concert for events to occur. The world of personal action is therefore a world neither of mechanistic determination nor of random chance: it is a world of intelligent order, but a very complex order, and one not always knowable by men. The Cree world of complex interrelationships is analogous to that of some ecological scientists, although the scientists use an organic rather than a personal metaphor.
For the Cree, the relationship of the wind persons to animal gifts is constantly confirmed by everyday experience. The wind persons bring cold or warmth and snow or rain, and with the coming and going of predominant winds the seasons change. They are responsible for the variable wealher conditions to which animals and hunters each respond. The bear hibernates and is docile only in winter when the north wind is predominant. The geese and ducks arrive with the increasing frequency of the south wind and leave with its departure. In a myriad of other ways, the animals and hunters, and the success ol the hunt, depend in part on the conditions brought by the winds.
Each of the four wind persons resides at one of the four points of the compass, and each has specific personal characteristics related to particular seasons, weather and animal patterns, hunting conditions, and success. When a hunter is asked by young men and women who have been away to school why he says that the animals are given by the winds, he often answers that they must come and live in the bush to see for themselves. It is demonstrated in the daily and yearly experience of the hunters, and it can be shared with anyone who will spend enough time in the bush.
Parallel discoveries of the relationships of animals, weather, and hunting can be found in hunting lore in our own society. But whereas this knowledge plays a role in our culture of hunting, scientists have devoted limited research effort to it. By contrast, such relationships are centrally important in Cree hunting practice, and they are encoded and highlighted by Cree concepts and in what we might call their science of hunting.
The concepts of the wind persons mediate and link several series of ideas that serve to order the Cree world in space and time. The wind persons are said to live at the four corners of the earth, thereby orienting space on a four-point compass. The wind persons also link God to the world. They are part of the world "up there," but they affect the earth down here. They thus link the spirits and God who are up there to the men and animals who live their lives on the earth.
"God" and Jesus are the ultimate explanation for all that happens on this earth, but He2 also gives all the personal beings of the world intelligence and will in order to follow His Way, or abandon it. God alone gives and takes life, but beings are ultimately responsible for their actions. God therefore plays a key part in the gift of animals to hunters, but only a part. He is the leader of all things, and He is assisted by the wind persons and a hierarchy of leaders extending to most spirits, animals, and humans. The idea of leadership is persuasive in the Waswanipi world, and the hierarchy of leaders is spoken of as one of power. Hunting therefore depends not only on the hunter and the animals, but on an integrated chain of leaders and helpers acting together to give and to receive animals.
In this chain, human beings fit somewhere in the middle range, closely linked to those both above and below them. Human beings are mutually dependent on animals, who are generally less powerful than humans, and on spirit beings, who are generally more powerful. But the linkages are close and the positions flexible. As Cree myths indicate, some of the less powerful spirit beings were formerly human beings who have been transformed into spirits. Animals themselves used to be "like us," and in the "long ago" time of the legends they could talk with one another and with humans.
THE POWER OF HUNTING
The power of God and humans is manifest in the relationship between thought and happenings in the world. What God thinks or knows happens; His thought is one with happenings and thus He is all powerful. Spirit beings participate in this power to a lesser degree; they know only some of what will happen in the future or at a distance. Their thought and happenings frequently coincide. God and spirit beings may give their powerful knowledge to humans in dreams and in thoughts, and by signs in the world, but they never tell all that humans would like to know. People can often be said to "discover" their understandings rather than create them; and thought or insight may "come to us" as a gift from God and spirits, in waking thought or in dreams. Thinking and prayer may be one. The knowledge that spirits give anticipates the future with some real - but always unknown - degree of certainty.
Humans not only differ from animals by the degree of power they receive, but also from each other. Powerful and effective knowledge increases with age and with the care and attention individuals give to interpreting and cultivating their communications with God and spirit beings. These differences in power and wisdom are reflected in the patterns of leadership within human communities.
The meaning of power in the Cree perspective, therefore, differs in important ways from our own. We typically think of power as the ability to control others and/or the world. For the Cree it is more complex. Human knowledge is always incomplete, and there is often a gap between what humans think and what actually happens. In hunting, for example, a hunter will frequently dream of an animal he will be given before he begins to look for it. He may then go out hunting and find signs of that animal that confirm his expectation. When the things he thinks about actually come to be, when he is given the animal, that is an indicator of power. But humans never find that all they anticipate comes to be. The power is a coincidence between an internal state of being (thought) and the configuration of the world (event), a congruence anticipated by the inner state and that this anticipation helps to actualize. Both the thought and the event are social processes. Power is not an individual possession, it is a gift, and a person cannot in this view bring his thought to actuality by individually manipulating the world to conform to his desires. And, at each phase of happenings in the world, humans, spirit beings, and other beings must sensitively interpret and respond to the communications and actions of the other beings around them. "Power" is a relationship in thought and action among many beings, whereby potentiality becomes actuality. Hunting is an occasion of power in this sense, and the expression of this is that animals are gifts, with many givers. Power in this Cree sense may have analogies to our concept of truth, i.e., thought that comes to be. We might say that power is truth unfolding, rather than that power is control.
This complex understanding of hunting links intimately with basic Cree attitudes toward human life itself. The symbols conveying Cree concepts of hunting also order the Cree understanding of the life and death of animals and of the hunters themselves. The life and ultimate death of both the hunted and the hunters are as enigmatic for the Cree as they are for us. That humans should have to kill animals to feed themselves and their families in order to live and that humans themselves all die are fundamentally mysterious features of life. Both animals and humans participate in the mystery of death, and Cree symbols of hunting elaborate the mystery and bring the wonder of life and death into the world of everyday meanings.
The hunt is conceptualized as an ever-changing cycle at many levels. If a hunter is successful he will bring game back to his camp. Having received a gift, the hunter is under obligation to respect that gift by reciprocating with gifts of his own. These gifts go partly to other Cree, as most large kills are shared with kinsmen, neighbours, or with the community. By giving meat to others they are said to find more animal gifts themselves in return. The hunter also reciprocates to the spirits who have participated in the hunt, often by placing a small portion of the meat into the stove at the first meal of each day, so the smoke of the gift can go up the stove pipe as a sign of appreciation and respect to the spirits "up there." This return offering is part of an ongoing relationship of reciprocity: it not only expresses respect and repays an obligation, it continues the exchange as a statement of anticipation that the hunter will again receive what he wants when he is again in need. Many Cree rituals follow a similar structure.
Hunting is conceptualized as an ongoing process involving a delicate and ever-changing balance. When bad luck occurs, hunters turn their attention to other species, or they hunt in another area until the animals are ready to be caught again. If animals want to be caught and are not hunted, they have fewer young and more easily succumb to diseases or predation. Thus, proper hunting can lead to increases in the numbers and health of the animals. However, if a hunter kills animals that are not given, if he overhunts, then the spirits of that species will be "mad," and the hunter will have no luck. Thus, in hunting, the life and death of animals form a delicate reciprocal process.
The alteration in hunting luck brings us to the last of those meanings of the word ''hunting.'' Hunters say that when they decrease their hunting they do so in order that the animals may cease being mad and may grow again. Hunting involves a reciprocal obligation for hunters to provide the conditions in which animals can grow and survive on the earth. The fullilment of this responsibility provides the main criterion by which hunters judge one another. In everyday conversation people speak extensively about the reputations and actions of other hunters. What is emphasized is hunting competence (Preston, 1975). A hunter who masters a difficult skill and through his ties with spirits receives hard-to-get gifts exhibits his competence and participates in power. Men and women who are respected for their exceptional competence are contrasted with those who take chances, who fool around with animals by not killing them cleanly, and who seek self-aggrandizement by large kills or wasting animals. The hunters who consistently have good luck but not excessive harvests also demonstrate competence because they maintain that delicate balance with the world in which animals die and are reborn in health and in continuing growth.
This image of the competent hunter serves also as a goal of the good life. The aims of both hunting and of life are, in part, to maintain a continuing sensitivity to and a balanced participation with the world, in which humans and animals reciprocally contribute to the survival of the other. The aim of life is the perpetuation of an ordered, meaningful, and bountiful world. This aim includes those now alive and those yet to be born. The social universe thus extends beyond the human world, beyond the temporal frame of an individual human lif