Hunters and Bureaucrats: Power, Knowledge, and Aboriginal-State Relations in the Southwest Yukon

Governments and First Nations in Canada have long been operating on the assumption that land claims agreements and the co-management of wildlife and other resources will resolve centuries-long inequities. This book challenges this premise, arguing that co-management and land claims processes, based as they are on European concepts of "knowledge" and "property," are in many ways incompatible with First Nations beliefs and practices regarding human-animal-land relations. To participate effectively in these processes, Aboriginal peoples have had to develop bureaucracies that parallel those of the governments with which they must deal. These bureaucracies reproduce existing power relations and compel Aboriginal peoples to speak and act in uncharacteristic ways. As a result, Nadasdy argues, land claims and co-management may be working to undermine the very way of life they are supposed to protect. Based on the author's fieldwork in Burwash Landing, a village of seventy people, most of whom are members of the Kluane First Nation, this book is a revealing exploration of how land claims and co-management, as aspects of an evolving relationship between the Kluane First Nation and the state, are affecting Kluane people and their way of life.

Table of Contents:
Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Aboriginal-State Relations in Kluane Country: An Overview 2 "It's Not Really 'Knowledge' at All, It's More a Way of Life" 3 The Politics of TEK: Power and the Integration of Knowledge 4 Counting Sheep: The Ruby Range Sheep Steering Committee and the Construction of Knowledge 5 Knowledge-Integration in Practice: The Case of the Ruby Range Sheep Steering Committee 6 "Just Like Whitemen": Property and Land Claims in Kluane Country Conclusion Notes References Index

About the Author :
Paul Nadasdy is an associate professor of anthropology at Cornell University.

Review :
The book is well written and carefully argued. Nadasdy draws effectively on the seminal ethnography and ethnological work of the Penn Boasians: Frank Speck, A.I. Hallowell, and their many informal students, and his own ethnographic observations are revealing and apt. - David Dinwoodie, University of New Mexico (Western Historical Quarterly, Summer 2005) At first blush, it seems a very long reach from the aboriginal hunting camps of the Kluane in Canada's Yukon wilderness to the poststructuralist environs of modern French philosophy. Yet careful reading of Paul Nadasdy's prodigal new work of contemporary ethnography reveals that geographically, culturally, and philosophically the distance involved is much less than might be expected. - William Hipwell, Department of Geography, Kyungpook National University, South Korea (Journal of International Wildlife Law and Policy, Spring 2005)