Producing Predators: Wolves, Work, and Conquest in the Northern Rockies by Michael D. Wise (review)

In an 1882 issue of the Stockgrowers Journal of Miles City, Montana, S. A. Marney wrote that "in our territory alone, stock worth many thousands of dollars is annually devoured by wolves and other wild beasts." The solution to costly predation, he proposed, was to "[rid] the country of these destructive inhabitants [with] the lavish, universal, and persistent use of poison."¹ Marney's "wild beasts" included the Blackfoot peoples, who transformed their traditional hunting practices and killed cattle rather than starve after settling in permanent reservations when the bison herds were decimated with the rise of the fur trade and cattle production in the mid-1800s. But poison wasn't the first or the only method used by settler colonists to pressure transformations in the resident populations of people on the northern Great Plains of western North America. As Michael D. Wise reveals in this dense history about the collisions of cultural ideologies in the Montana-Alberta region from the mid-1800s to the mid-1930s, both the Native Blackfoot peoples and the wolves of the American Northwest threatened settling European Americans in a psychological sense, as well as an economic one: their behavior, chronicled as "predatory," challenged the underlying value system represented by the idea of Manifest Destiny itself. Predation was not productive, and "the language of the colonial apparatus explicitly reflected this new boundary between predation and production" (xvii) in descriptions that transformed within the historical record as the colonizing project spread west.

In this complexly entwined argument, rooted in human-animal studies and environmental and cultural history, Wise connects canid, bovid, and hominid behaviors in terms of the politics and practice of predator-prey relations and their parallels in European American narratives about economic productivity. Wise frames the colonial settlement and conquest of the West as one dependent on a kind of "predator control" whereby both wolves and Native peoples were described as predatory "nonproducers" while colonizers distanced themselves from their own predatory behaviors. This predator-prey-productivity dynamic became part of the larger settlement narrative as justification for taking possession of Native lands and resources. Wise first explores the rise of the whiskey trade and concomitant stereotypes about drunken Natives within settler narratives of nonproductivity about the Blackfoot peoples, although the trade also strengthened Blackfoot alliances and fortified resistance to colonization, he contends. Wise then investigates the rise of bounty systems and "wolfing" in the northern Rockies within economic systems that transformed representations of both wolves and wolf hunters within ideologies of conquest, labor, and productive value. Wolfing enabled Blackfoot peoples to obstruct assimilation efforts "by opening an entrepreneurial space for indigenous people, poor whites, and others at the margins of colonial society" (43), Wise argues, although it was intended to suit the objectives of ranchers and the livestock industry. Next, Wise explores Blackfoot foodway adaptations in response to the widespread slaughter and depopulation of bison, specifically by exposing how the Office of Indian Affairs built agency slaughterhouses and butcher shops and criminalized subsistence hunting on reservation land in attempts to purge the Blackfoot peoples of their "predatory" hunting and food-making traditions. By 1895 "trading work for prepared meat dissociated from its animal origin had reoriented the process of making meat from a collaborative project of hunting and butchering bison to an individuated procedure of exchanging labor for beef " (66) for the Blackfoot. However, Blackfoot resistance to cultural assimilation and agency dependence rose in 1921 with the Piegan Farming and Livestock Association collective of Blackfoot-led, shared-farming communities across the reservation. In conjunction with a five-year plan of subsistence goals, the "emphasis on communal self-sufficiency signaled a radical departure from the OIA's traditional emphasis on assimilation" (91), even though the five-year plan had an eventual goal of turning allotment lands into producers of surplus agricultural goods. Wise illustrates how these programs were unique for their integration of Blackfoot conceptions of...