Home Is the Hunter: The James Bay Cree and Their Land (review)

The back cover of Home Is the Hunter tells us, ‘The James Bay Cree lived in relative isolation until 1970,’ when Quebec began its huge projects to exploit hydroelectric power and timber and mineral resources in the region. As the book shows, however, the Cree had been dealing with outsiders ever since explorers and traders began arriving in the 1600s. Their old stories comment on the first visitors and on tactics for coping with them, as they soon realized how their own values differed from those of the men on wooden ships. Hans Carlson (63) cites the tale of the spirit being, Chakaapash, feeding a magically huge squirrel haunch to the first white men in James Bay, and similar themes appear in numerous other stories found in the works of Colin Scott, Louis Bird, Douglas Ellis, Toby Morantz, and others. For two centuries before the cataclysm of Quebec hydroelectric developments of the 1970s, Cree people had engaged with people from other worlds.

The book opens with Carlson’s personal reflections on his experiences with and learning from the eastern James Bay Cree. He first went north in 1982, ‘to find a wilderness and to live out some very romantic notions’ that came from reading fur trade stories and adventures (8). Through repeated visits and archival research as he pursued doctoral studies at the University of Maine, he achieved deeper understandings, particularly about the Cree in the 1900s, the century he has studied best.

Chapter 1 highlights Carlson’s theme that, while ‘Native cultural environments still exist everywhere,’ the James Bay Cree in the 1970s suffered both flooded lands and the loss of ‘a great deal of their historical ability to define the lands of the region within their own narrative.’ As Quebec technocrats and lawyers faced off with environmentalists, anthropologists, and others who took the part of the Cree, the Cree people’s own ‘cultural narrative of hunting,’ which expressed deep personal relationships with animals and the land, was undermined by ‘a non-Cree epistemology of nature and culture’ powered by outsider science, technology, and legal procedures articulated in languages that framed the world in very different ways (22–3). The chapter title, ‘Why James Bay?’ and its text allude to how outsiders have long imposed new names on Cree places. The text might have also have noted how the (re)naming that Captain Thomas James and others began on a large scale from 1631 onward exemplified these powerful displacements.

Chapter 2, ‘Imagining the Land,’ opens with Job Bearskin’s 1973 metaphor of the land as garden (26, 28). It makes effective use of both observation and documentary records to get at Cree ways of thinking about hunting and about relationships with the land and the animals. In places, Carlson could have gone further. Cree stories about cultural heroes and Game Bosses (48–9) are touched on briefly, but with the disclaimer that, if presented in this context, they would lack ‘narrative credibility’ and ‘would appear quaint’ (48–9). Less diffidence and more attention to the Cree words themselves, enlisting Cree speakers to take us beyond translation more deeply into Cree concepts and stories, would have strengthened and enriched the text.

In chapters 3 and 4, Carlson presents the fruits of extensive archival research and analysis to explore eastern Cree relations, first with fur traders, and later with missionaries and Christianity. His lines of argument are not novel to ethno-historians, but he richly mines the archives to bring forward the experiences and perspectives of the communities that were to be so greatly affected by hydro developments. A few points are opaque or puzzling. For example, alluding to women’s importance, Carlson writes, ‘Gender roles were important with regard to the animals and the hunt. There were powerful assumptions regarding how and by whom the hunted would be turned into food, and traders were no doubt pressured by the imperatives of these Native spaces’ (85–6...