For Love of the World: Essays on Nature Writers

A Letter from Richard Nelson

A Letter from Richard Nelson [I began to correspond with Richard Nelson when, having spent a futile day in a map library, I wrote to him to find out the exact names of the places mentioned in The Island Within. He noted in his reply that in the original introduction to the book he had explained that all the place-names were fictitious but had decided against informing the reader of this because it might awaken curiosity and threaten the right of privacy he believes belongs to the landscape. Besides, he would have us discover, study, and care for our own places, those where we have our daily lives. When I completed my essay I sent it to him, and he replied in the letter that follows. This letter has been edited at the expense of its felicity in order to delete corrections of fact that could be incorporated in the essay, exact place-names in The Island Within that I sometimes knew, and encomiums consonant with the generosity of response and always gentle argument. It should be noted that the letter is a commentary that follows the exposition of the essay.] February 5, 1991 You correctly surmise that parts of the essay concerning The Island Within are troubling to me.... I am especially concerned about passages that draw conclusions about my personal values and feelings, based on the glimpses I've provided in writing. This brings to mind a feeling I've often had about my own ethnographies--especially how they're viewed by the people about whom I have written. I believe the best we can do in ethnography is to create something like a caricature; the subject's identity is clear enough, but the image is distorted because the ethnographer stands outside the culture and is limited by time, experience, information, language ... In my later work I have responded to this problem by asking for readings and corrections from Native people in the communites where I lived. Koyukon villagers also did this for me, with wonderful results, in the "Make Prayers to the Raven" television documentaries. With this same hope, I am responding to your . . . decision to allow me to read your essay before it is published. . . . After several rereadings, I begin to see how Thoreau's view of hunting influences the essay's perspective on The Island Within and by extension affects its view of my character and values. This starts with Thoreau's interesting twist on the idea that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," here the assertion that individuals recapitulate the history of human culture as they go through a childhood hunting phase, which they eventually outgrow as adults. In response, I would like to say a few words about how the outdoors fits into my life as an adult member of my society. The idea, if I understand correctly, is that my outdoors activities--especially hunting-may be grounded in a quest for adventure and a reaching toward childhood. In my opinion, both points are bound to a specific cultural milieu. I believe this because I would have thought similarly before I experienced the lifeways of Eskimos, Athabaskans, and some Euro-Americans in northern communities. In our Western tradition, removed from day-to-day working relationship with our surroundings, we often regard the outdoors primarily as a source of adven- ture, play, pleasure for the senses, and other pursuits commonly associated with the freedoms of youth. Hunting is strongly perceived as a form of recreation, not as a kind of legitimate work or a way of life to be undertaken by responsible adults. As a serious endeavor, hunting and the intensely outdoors lifeway associated with it are conceived as the realm of "primitive" or "archaic" peoples, whom we may respect but also believe we have evolved beyond. (Anthropologists , of course, recognize that these cultures are as highly evolved in their own direction as we are in ours, just as biologists recognize that all organisms are equally "advanced," though on separate evolutionary courses. I suppose this is why anthropologists and biologists are becoming increasingly cautious about concepts of hierarchy and "stages of development.") I remember when I first lived with the Inupiaq people in Wainwright, thinking how odd it was that these grown men spent all their time outdoors-traveling around with dog teams, camping out, fishing, hunting--doing what I regarded as play or recreation. At first it seemed as if their lives were...