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

PERHAPS MORE THAN ANY OTHER NORTH AMERICAN MAMMAL, wolves live more in the human imagination than we allow them to live in the wild. Michael Wise begins his book with this assumption: the wolf has been constructed as a symbol, particularly potent in the American imaginary. The wolf is either the dangerous and ferocious beast lurking in the shadows of the wilderness or the serene and wise free spirit that we should aspire to emulate. In countering this, Wise makes an important contribution to the study of the history of the American West. He considers wolves, as well as the other nonhuman animals in his text, as actual animals, not simply as symbols. Wise's choice, in this exceedingly well-researched text, is to present an in-depth depiction of the history of human and nonhuman relations in the Northern Rockies in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Wise describes this history through the settler-colonial construction of a binary established between producers and predators. With growing European American settlement during this period came growing capitalist economies. In Alberta and the Montana territory, this meant the trade of whiskey and fur and, later, cattle ranching. During the assimilation of the Blackfoot, white settlers saw themselves as productive laborers, changing the prairies into grazing land for beef production. In contrast, they saw the Blackfoot as predators more akin to wolves and as a threat to production. Wise follows the creation of this binary system, which served not only to elevate the status of white settlers, or those who behaved in "productive" ways, but also to animalize those on the margins of white society, including American Indians, trappers, and wolfers.

The Blackfoot refer to themselves as the Niitsitapi, or the "real people," a collective that included both nonhuman and human animals. A history of the Blackfoot, or of Blackfoot land, should consider this collective, as Wise does. While his subtitle suggests that this book is a history of wolves and people in the Northern Rockies, it is really a history of a larger collective—with extensive time paid to bison, cattle, and human relations and conflict. Through historical and ecological detail, Wise places an admirable focus on the actual animals involved in these interchanges.

Of the three issues in his subtitle (wolves, work, and conquest), the main emphasis of the book, however, is "work." The chapters follow the chronology of the settlement of Montana primarily through the lens of the development of trade and industry. The stories of these industries, however, cannot be separated from their impacts on the environment. Wise describes the ways in which increased bison hunting led to a boom in wolf populations and how competition for grazing land created pressure to allot and sell Blackfoot land. It is a history at the intersection of the economy and the environment. Wise shows both where the economic and the environmental combine in a colonial effort and their interstices, which are levied in resistance. By focusing on the seemingly banal specificities of the whiskey, bison robe, and cattle markets in the Northern Rockies, Wise reveals the subtleties of the history of this region. Trading economies, Indian policy, and grazing rights complicated the strict binary of predators and producers that settler society attempted to create.

The value of Wise's study, while focused on a very specific history of the Northern Rockies at the turn of the century, is the way this detailed look can help readers understand a broader North American history. Grazing laws, reservation allotment, and wolf eradication, although inconsistent in their application and scale, have had lasting impacts across the United States and Canada. If we can begin to reconsider wolves, bison, and cattle as actual animals, as players in history, and as actors with a real stake in the future, perhaps even as kin, then maybe we can reassess the ways in which we legislate and interact with the nonhuman world on a larger scale. While much...