Hunters, Predators and Prey

Inuit Perceptions of Animals

Frédéric Laugrand, Jarich Oosten

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781782384069
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de nativos americanos

Inuit hunting traditions are rich in perceptions, practices and stories relating to animals and human beings. The authors examine key figures such as the raven, an animal that has a central place in Inuit culture as a creator and a trickster, and qupirruit, a category consisting of insects and other small life forms. After these non-social and inedible animals, they discuss the dog, the companion of the hunter, and the fellow hunter, the bear, considered to resemble a human being. A discussion of the renewal of whale hunting accompanies the chapters about animals considered 'prey par excellence': the caribou, the seals and the whale, symbol of the whole. By giving precedence to Inuit categories such as 'inua' (owner) and 'tarniq' (shade) over European concepts such as 'spirit 'and 'soul', the book compares and contrasts human beings and animals to provide a better understanding of human-animal relationships in a hunting society.

PART I

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

Theoretical Perspectives

While we still have our body functioning so that we are still breathing the breath of life that was given to us by God, while we still have to step on the earth before we part with her, we cannot live a life that is completely different from what we have got. This is known from time immemorial. Therefore you cannot neglect it as long as our body is still alive. These were the reasons why the elders wanted us to know about these things, that is being cruel to animals and in addition, that the game animals that we hunt for food, are the things that come from God. From the time earth came into being and subsequently after that, game animals were placed so that humans can use them for sustenance. That is the reason why they are, right up to this day.

—George Kappianaq, IE 330

In recent years, the study of human-animal relations has developed so much that it has become a field of research in its own right.¹ The emphasis has shifted from symbolic approaches to ethno-zoological, ecological and environmental perspectives.² In this book, we will adopt an anthropological perspective that gives priority to the participants’ views (see Oosten 2005). In this approach we do not explore whether Inuit knowledge of animals and their environment is symbolic or experiential, technical or spiritual, modern or traditional.³ These distinctions make little sense to the participants anyway, as the very connections between these various levels are essential to the nature of their knowledge of animals and their world. Rather, we focus on the organization, dynamics and developments of this knowledge itself. It is quite clear that Inuit knowledge transformed considerably in the twentieth century, when Inuit gradually left the hunting camps to settle in small permanent communities, embracing Christianity and modernity. Today, Inuit knowledge is usually referred to as Inuit qaujimajatuqangit,⁴ in the context of Nunavut as a new political entity. Ideas and values that are central to Inuit knowledge play an important role in contemporary conflicts and debates focusing on the hunt of animals such as caribou, belugas, polar bears, whales and so forth. Inuit strongly resent external attempts to manage animals as if they were a limited resource. Now that Inuit have become familiar with Western concepts relating to animals and their environment, and the Nunavut government has taken responsibility with respect to the management of wildlife, Inuit have tried to reconcile the different perspectives.

However, Nadasdy (2003) is quite right when he argues that the idea of co-management of wildlife and other resources and land claims processes are based on Euro-American concepts of ‘knowledge’ and ‘property’ more than on local aboriginal perspectives and that incompatibilities between aboriginal views and perspectives with Western ones are still significant (see Nadasdy 2003; Cruikshank 2004). In many respects the implementation of new bureaucracies does not help the hunters faced with new expectations and new rules. As Nadasdy observes, ‘In many ways First Nations offices across Canada now resemble miniature versions of federal and provincial/territorial bureaucracies. They are staffed by fish and wildlife officers, lands coordinators, heritage officers, and a host of other First Nations employees who deal regularly with their bureaucratic counterparts’ (2003: 2). These transformations had and still have numerous and far-reaching effects for all aboriginal groups, including Inuit. People have to learn new ways of speaking to be understood by wildlife, biology, and bureaucratic resource management officers. They have to put aside many of their beliefs and practices and trust these new relationships with old colonial institutions at a time when the financial and international markets tend to impose their own logics, as in the case of mining activities and the protection of the environment.

Inuit therefore look to qaujimajatuqangit for guidance, as this knowledge allowed them to survive for thousands of years. In this book we explore the richness of Inuit traditions, the perceptions, practices and stories relating to animals and the land. We focus on the ethnographic data and leave aside substantial discussions about the relation between traditional/indigenous knowledge and wildlife management. In discussing the academic debates on human-animal relationships, we will confine ourselves to a broad outline of the main currents in the debates and focus especially on topics that are relevant to our understanding of Inuit perceptions and practices.

In the anthropological field of human-animal relationships, four main streams of research can be discerned. They build on the pioneering work of anthropologists such as Irving Hallowell in North America and André-Georges Haudricourt in the Pacific. They were inspired by a variety of structuralists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mary Douglas and Edmund Leach, and by historians of nature such as Keith Thomas in Great Britain and Robert Delort in France, and lately by philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.

Gift and Reciprocity

The first group of important anthropological studies of human-animal relations was inspired by the famous theories of exchange of Marcel Mauss, influencing Robert Brightman, Ann Fienup-Riordan and Marshall Sahlins⁵ at the University of Chicago. The question of to what extent relations between hunters and prey can be considered reciprocal exchange became an issue of debate among scholars working with hunter-gatherers.

In Bringing Home Animals (1979), a detailed study on Mistassini Cree hunters of northern Quebec, Adrian Tanner refers to Mauss and Sahlins. He views Cree religion as an ideology combining shamanism and Christianity. Drawing on information collected during various fieldwork sessions in the late 1960s and 1970s as well as on classic ethnographic sources (especially Speck but also Rogers, Rousseau, etc.), Tanner questions the relation between Cree religious practices and their productive activities, showing that both spring from the same cognitive source. He examines the transformation of the religious ideology of the Mistassini Cree and their rites and beliefs relating to hunting and trapping with the onset of the fur trade. He opposes the ‘religion of the bush’ to the ‘religion of the settlement’, reflecting on a contrast between the hunting domain and the cash sectors of the economy. Such a dualism has been reported in many northern communities in the sub-Arctic and Arctic regions, but on closer scrutiny the boundary is not always clear.

Tanner also shows that Cree ritual and religious activities organize complex relationships in which hunters often have to force or trick their prey. Tanner explains how two modes of production gradually emerged, a capitalist one in the settlement and a domestic one based on subsistence hunting and trapping. Tanner (1979: 207) explains that Cree hunters could be divided into two groups, those having a reputation for skill in religious techniques and those skilled in non-religious techniques. He points out that these various techniques are not considered antagonistic. Tanner provides much of the ethnographic information on what he calls ‘the ecology of hunting’ and on the ritualization of space, on rites of hunting divination (such as the shaking tent, the steam tent or scapulimancy, usually performed with porcupine or caribou shoulder blades), ritual relations between hunters and game animals, and respect for the animals killed. Some of his observations are quite relevant with respect to Inuit hunters.

A first point raised by Tanner is an ethnographic problem. As Tanner (1979: 26) states, ‘Many of these rites are barely noticeable, and by themselves seem trivial superstitions. However, they can be shown to be parts of a system that has the organized purpose of controlling, predicting and explaining the behaviour of game animals, and the behavior of imaginary beings which are believed to influence the animals, or are identified with particular natural phenomena.’ This is also valid for Inuit hunting practices. Many small rites, divinatory signs and rules easily escape ethnographers, as these gestures are part of the hunting routine.

Hunting usually requires preparatory rites, and it would be interesting to compare the steam tent ritual, which was already declining during Tanner’s fieldwork among the Mistassini Cree, with the Inuit nunagiksaqtuq practice. Both rituals are clearly performed and intended to prepare and secure a good hunting season. The cleansing activities involved indicate that hunters cannot enter the animal domain without adequate precautions and preparations. The settlement also appears as a dirty place in contrast to the bush or the tundra.

Another point to be noted is the importance of dreams for hunters to predict their hunting success (Tanner 1979: 124). According to Tanner, a dream about a female human being often forecasts success in hunting. This is also true for the Inuit. Tanner (1979: 132) rightly concludes that hunting divination involves various levels of communication and its explicit purpose is to communicate with the animals and the agencies that control them.

Regarding human and animal relations, Tanner (1979: 138) distinguishes three major models for interaction based on three types of social relationships: (1) male-female, the victim being represented as the female lover of the hunter (see also Preston [(1975) 2002: 21] regarding bear hunting); (2) dominance-subordination, when ‘magic is used to compel an animal to approach the hunter or in some other way allow itself to be caught’, or when the shaman makes game animals come to the hunter, or in cases of animals who have masters; and (3) equivalence. In the third case, Tanner uses the notion of ‘friendship’ to qualify the relation between a hunter, usually a well-experienced hunter, elder or shaman, and the animal. In this case, good hunters are said to have animals that act as pets, such as a goose. The hunter has to make offerings to his animal friend, and the relationship stops when the hunter dies. Much later, Peter Armitage (1992: 2) observed, ‘Among the Innu people of eastern Quebec and Labrador, religious beliefs about animal masters and other spirits also continue to play an important role in shaping human behaviour.’ He identified about ten animal masters, such as Papakashtshihk for the caribou, Nisk-napeu for the geese, Mashkuapeu for the bears, and so forth. Whereas the male-female metaphor certainly applies to Inuit hunting, a distinction between dominance-subordination and equivalence is not very helpful in understanding Inuit hunting.

Finally, Tanner provides many details about ritual aspects of killing animals, exploring the cases of the bear and the beaver. He describes the use of charms, clean clothing, decorations, offering of tobacco and so forth, and the various ways to show respect to the prey. He particularly distinguishes three separate occasions when ritual actions are required: (1) when the meat is brought into the dwelling of the hunter, (2) during the eating of the meat and (3) when the inedible remains are disposed of (Tanner 1979: 153). Hunters have to show gratitude and respect towards the animal by treating its body properly; this extends hunters’ good fortune to future hunts. Numerous taboos are mentioned, such as food offerings, rules of serving food and so forth. Among these, the asawaapin is listed as a key operation, and it leads to Tanner’s main thesis, which consists of a greeting ritual performed by children running out and greeting the hunter as he comes in with his prey. With respect to animals, Tanner (1979: 173) concludes that human-animal relations imply a series of prestations and counter-prestations: ‘Men make gifts to the animal world, that is, to the bush, and in return are the recipients of gifts of game animals killed by the hunters.’ Furthermore, Tanner observes:

During the third phase of the hunting cycle great stress is laid on the boundary separating the human domain (the inside of the dwelling) from the animal domain (the outside, and the bush). The asawaapin taboo keeps the domestic group inside as the hunter brings in the animal. … The doorway … permits the entry of the gift animal, while the chimney is used to send the offerings of food put in the fire back to the outside. This gives a model of exchange between man and animal. (1979: 173–74)

Regarding the respect hunters and their kin have to show towards the animal, Tanner (1979: 157) emphasizes that the kill has to be placed in a certain way so it can see the path, such that the animal should be ‘laid on the floor of the dwelling in the middle of the family area, facing the door’, and Tanner concludes, ‘The reason given is that the animal may see out through the door, and see how the hunter went out when he left to go hunting.’ Similar rules for positioning the prey can be found among Inuit hunters.

In Grateful Prey: Rock Cree Human-Animal Relationships (1993), Robert Brightman, a student of Sahlins, shows how the contrasting principles of reciprocity and domination play an essential part in human-animal relations in Cree cosmology. Using Rock Cree oral traditions extensively, Brightman argues that Cree human-animal relationships are complex and ambivalent. He explains that hunted animals are sometimes conceived of as giving themselves to the hunters in response to the hunter’s respectful treatment of them as non-human persons, and sometimes as elusive adversaries.

According to Brightman, animals have their specific forms but reveal themselves as humans in certain contexts, such as death or rituals. Brightman (1993: 176) recalls that animals were initially human beings who lost their humanity: ‘In the bush, they assume theriomorphic form and lose cultural attributes. When “killed” their disembodied spirits “come to be like human”, and the perishable carcass is the medium through which human hunters seek to exchange with them. Thereafter, they are reborn or regenerate, lose their cultural attributes, and the cycle begins anew.’ Brightman (1993: 119) thus connects respect for the animal to its regeneration. Rock Cree say that some animals become very old and can eventually die, and that their souls then move to a post-mortem place. But before that, animals like to renew themselves. A way to respect them is to dispose of their bones in trees in order to protect them from dogs. Brightman adds that Cree even use empty cans to hang the bones in the trees.⁶

Cree, like Inuit and most other aboriginal peoples, are neither ecologists nor conservationists⁷ but hunters. According to Brightman, Cree have always regarded abundance of game as a gift to be fully used with gratitude. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Cree hunters were deeply involved in the fur trade and participated actively in the depletion of game. Yet, Cree stories of animals always emphasize attitudes of respect for the animals and the need to communicate with them through dreams, visions and rituals. Brightman does not explore the issue of the moral discourse of the hunters that was later developed by Fienup-Riordan for the Yup’ik in Alaska.⁸ She argued that the foundation of the relationship between human and animals was neither economic nor social but moral (Fienup-Riordan 2007: 239). After Arthur J. Ray, Brightman (1993: 103) was one of the first anthropologists to describe the exchange between animals and hunters:

[Religious observances] materially affect the efficiency of hunting and trapping in an environment where animals consciously ...