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The Canadian Historical Review 85.1 (2004) 129-131



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Game in the Garden: A Human History of Wildlife in Western Canada to 1940. George Colpitts. Vancouver: ubc Press 2002. Pp. 216. $75.00 cloth, $29.95 paper

In Game in the Garden: A Human History of Wildlife in Western Canada to 1940, historian George Colpitts offers an insightful study of changing attitudes towards animals in the Canadian West. Based on the author's master's thesis at the University of Calgary and doctoral work at the University of Alberta, Game in the Garden is constructed around the premise that humans apprehend nature differently according to unique historical circumstances. We judge animals through the prism of our expectations, fears, environmental realities, social mores, and economic necessities. Despite its own consistent habits and behaviours, the beaver, for instance, assumes a different countenance to the indigenous hunter, the fur trader, the prairie sodbuster, and the urban vacationer. As Colpitts contends, 'wild animals continue to occupy specific but changing places within the modern imagination.' Game in the Garden explores this stimulating idea in the crucible of the Canadian West, a region itself resonant with mythologies of progress, opportunity, and wilderness allure.

The book contains five well-appointed chapters that chronicle shifting attitudes towards western fauna. Chapter 1 explores the practice of wild-meat sharing and social exchange that developed between First Nations and European traders during the fur era. Colpitts delineates, in rigorous and engaging detail, how wild meat became 'the first currency of the northwest,' with Hudson's Bay Company men and Native hunters locked into a system of interdependence. For all the capitalist and commercial priorities of the fur enterprise, traders tailored their bartering strategies and lifestyles around ecological factors. In uncertain times, acquiring wild meat for subsistence took primacy over building stocks of fur for the market. Survival depended on developing a keen knowledge of animal populations and forging connections with indigenous peoples. The wild meat trade embroiled traders in social obligations, rituals, and customs - illuminating the fur forts as complex communities rather than simple outposts of empire. Chapter 2 highlights an abrupt change in Western [End Page 129] views of animals in the 1800s, as ideologies of individualism, Christianity, improvement, and progress reconfigured subsistence hunting as savage and primitive. The wild animals of the West were expected to vanish before encroaching civilization (Captain John Palliser, reporting in the 1850s, judged the wolf and frost as the only two impediments to a prospering agricultural economy on the western prairie). At the same time, pioneers propagated a myth of the untamed West as a place of superlative wildlife abundance. By proclaiming visions of inordinate organic wealth, farmers stated their own claims to the West's natural bounty while forging a distinctive regional identity.

Chapters 3 and 4 continue this story of agricultural consolidation by highlighting a new role for animals as symbols of civic pride (a theme evidenced by countless taxidermy exhibitions). A growing estrangement from the wild-meat economy led to clashes between settlers and indigenous peoples over access to resources, while the burgeoning sporting fraternity idealized the West as a game paradise. As chapter 5 explains, popular visions of the West as a realm of faunal plenitude proved a powerful impetus to conservation initiatives. With wildlife populations declining under the pressures of settlement, resource extraction, and tourism, westerners moved to secure their hallowed regional identity by creating parks and zoos, imposing bag limits, and inaugurating hunting seasons. Yet, as Colpitts argues, such measures reflected utilitarian rather than altruistic intentions. Unlike the nascent biocentrism trumpeted by the likes of California preservationist John Muir, grassroots conservationists in the Canadian West moved to protect resources for their exclusive use. Conservationist thinking further drew on contemporary resentment against 'new' settlers, social uncertainty, and a management imperative that situated humans as the rightful managers of nature. Accordingly, national parks were read as monuments to rational planning rather than 'nature's cathedrals.'

Although ideas of wildlife superabundance, tensions between development and conservation, and the relationship between nature and community...

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