Chapter 18

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CH APTER 18
Bush/Animals
Peter Kulchyski
What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship

with them. – John Berger1
On the Dehcho
One time in late June I was on the Dehcho (Mackenzie river, Northwest
Territories) in Frank T’seleie’s boat, with his adult son Jr. and my little
daughter Malay. We had hit a rock earlier in the day and had to change
the prop on the boat motor. The replacement prop used a lot of gas
because it had been designed for a different purpose than running up the
river. Instead of the normal six or so hours from Tulita to Pehdzi’ki we
were plodding along, our fifteenth hour in the boat, worried now about
running out of gas. Late June is the season of twenty-four hours of day-
light in the far north: at three in the morning we had a surreal twilight
to navigate in. Somewhere in this zone of indistinction, this dream time,
exhausted, worried, half awake, the boat following the contours of the
shoreline so if our fuel gave out we could land, seemingly out of nowhere,
about fifty feet in front of us we spot something black moving towards
shore in the water ahead of us. Almost at the moment we see it, it rises
out of the river, water splashing and dripping from its deep black fur. My
mind has a moment of displacement: the creature is too tall and thin to
be a bear, but a large black beast swimming across and climbing out of
the river is always a bear. The beast slips from the linguistic to the pre-
linguistic. It seems aware of us but somehow not afraid. It doesn’t look
our way. As it rises out of the water it lopes across the short bottom shelf
and towards the sheer seven- or eight-meter bank of the river, and effort-
lessly hurls itself up and over the bank and gone. All in less than a minute.
Somehow as it rises from the water and up the river bank and I realize that
it is a wolf, it moves back from the pre-linguistic to the linguistic: a giant,
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black, lone wolf, my consciousness barely having the time to recognize it
for what it is before it is no more.
In his reflection on the gift, Derrida writes “if it remains pure and without
possible reappropriation, the surprise names that instant of madness that
tears time apart and interrupts every calculation”;2 the gift. Giving some-
thing someone desperately needs or wants but was entirely unaware that
the giver knew this, giving something that surpasses the “expected”; giving
something at an unusual time: these are some of the ways in which sur-
prise, the moment that “tears time apart,” is created through gifting. Every
bush animal that appears, appears with something of this quality. Even in a
known bio-rich hunting territory, where the actual moose or caribou or seal
or whale will appear – and precisely when – is always and inevitably a sur-
prise. Bush animals cannot be disentangled from the logic of the gift. They
are a gift to humans, to humankind, to humanity: most especially and par-
ticularly, to hunters. The logic of the gift, itself a result of the impossibility
of calculating precisely where and when they will be encountered, always
inheres in those fleeting moments of contact with bush animals. Adrian
Tanner writes of this in his now-classic Bringing Home Animals:
The facts about particular animals are reinterpreted as if they had social
relationships between themselves, and between them and anthropo-
morphized natural forces, and furthermore the animals are thought of as
if they had personal relations with the hunters. The idealized form of these
latter relations is often that the hunter pays respect to an animal; that is, he
acknowledges that animal’s superior position, and following this the animal
“gives itself ” to the hunter, that is, it allows itself to assume a position of
equality, or even inferiority, with respect to the hunter.3
Bush people, hunters, are acutely aware of this facet of their relation to
bush animals. Bush people rarely if ever boast of their hunting prowess;
rather they respectfully, humbly, and gratefully acknowledge the bush
animal that gifted itself to them.
Social Boundaries and Ethical Systems

The old Marxist notion of “mode of production” rarely gets its due and
is even in retreat in the current conjuncture, where notions of cultural
hybridity have captured the conceptual moment. Fredric Jameson, how-
ever, insists on the concept as the highest, final moment of interpretation,
while a leading indigenous scholar, Glen Coulthard, has used the word
“bush mode of production” to talk about applying the concept to northern
gathering and hunting peoples.4 Following Coulthard I will use the term
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bush people, and following Jameson will take very seriously the concept
of mode of production as marking a profound and materially based line
of cultural difference that still echoes in contemporary times and perhaps
far into the future.
All concepts, all ways of understanding and embodying time and
space and subjectivity, ways of seeing, hierarchies of affect, life ways or
patterns: all assume a radical difference across the boundary mode of pro-
duction. Social science uses the terms “traditional,” “pre-capitalist,” even
“indigenous” to talk about (and collapse) two distinct modes of produc-
tion: the bush mode and the agricultural mode. Capitalism grew out of the
agricultural mode and the two have more in common, especially pertaining
to social hierarchy, than either does with the bush mode. Animals, and an
ethical relation to animals, are likewise entirely different beings in the con-
text of these entirely different modes of production. The agricultural (or,
following Eric Wolfe, the tithe) mode involves domestication of animals
on an extraordinary scale, the production of work beasts and livestock. The
capitalist mode extends to the production of pets and spectacle animals,
industrializes the production of domestic food animals and industrializes
the slaughter of certain bush animals (buffalo and whales in the nineteenth
century, tuna in our time, as examples).
Attention in recent scholarship has turned to the problem of ethics
in relation to these categories of animals. But no matter how careful
and considered these ethical discussions, no matter how relevant to the
treatment, care, and killing of animals within the system of global capit-
alist food and pet production, ethical reflection has not yet truly landed on
the site where the form of ethical engagement is challenged: bush animals.
What follows aims to evoke rather than exhaustively define such an ethical
engagement. As well, along the way there will be a few engagements with
the literary positioning of bush animals.
The biggest surprise through which bush animals rupture time may be
the way their continued existence challenges the assumptions that circle
around them.
Categories of Animals
With each mode of production there is associated a mode of animal exist-
ence. Capitalist modernism has produced the industrial animal, a form of
living meat in which a concentration-camp existence purely focused on
increasing production while decreasing expense exposes the utter ethical
rot at the core of contemporary life. This mode of production has now
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extended into casual interference in the DNA structure of the confined
species, ensuring their inner being will conform as much as their outer
being to their instrumental purpose as meat. In contrast to this and as a
substitute for the previous affections that may have circulated between
herders and their stock or work dogs, capitalist modernism also produces
the pet as a site of affections that, in possessive individualist social contexts
devoid of anything that deserves the name community, have nowhere else
to rest. Finally, the form of knowledge associated with capitalist mod-
ernism, science, enthusiastically tests its latest theories on other subsets
of animals: test subjects. Meat, pets, and test subjects: each of these pro-
foundly inscribes and reinforces a hierarchical relation in which, at least ini-
tially, ethics has no place. Confine, butcher, sell cook and eat, or reward or
punish, or prod, measure, and test: all these actions conducted in the firm
knowledge that other living beings exist underneath the anthropocentrist
hierarchical logic that positions human at the summit.
Agriculture gave rise to animal domestication and husbandry. The most
viable distinction operating within this social form was between work
animals and sources of food. Compared to capitalism, the work animals
(seen through the lens of pets) were treated very badly, while the livestock
or chickens lived glorious, albeit artificially shortened, lives. The sheep/
cow/horse/pig/chicken complex did involve cross-breeding exercises and
no doubt some degree of affection or disdain depending on the tempera-
ment of the herder. But the animals had an individual existence, some-
thing entirely denied industrialized meat sources. The hierarchy did not
end with humans, but with gods: perhaps this acted as a tempering force
on human arrogance.
Among bush peoples there are often animal helpers, most commonly
dogs or horses. These are treated in highly complex ways, both loved and
beaten, known intimately and used ruthlessly. More common, however,
are bush animals, beings who live their own pattern of being in an eco-
logical system that threatens and nourishes or nurtures them. The pact
between bush people and bush animals is profound, strong, and a solid
foundation of animal ethics: far beyond the tepid rules propounded in the
dominant culture. Among many bush peoples, clans form one of the deep-
rooted social structures. Clans often derive from animals thought to be
ancestors. Members of the deer clan, among my own Anishinabek friends,
for example, will not eat deer. Bear clan. Wolf clan. Raven clan. Beaver
clan. Frog clan. The distinct qualities of animals are translated and matched
with the distinct character of people. A bond, something like what Karl
Marx referred to as the “organic extension of the human body,” is forged
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out of a more nuanced relationship than that which can be imagined in the
instrumental terms of contemporary capitalist modernism.
In all of these social forms there are also vermin: the animals who feed
off of human leftovers or steal human foods: the animals that are thriving
out of place, that depend on the margins of human sociality for their exist-
ence: half a human reality, half an animal existence. Rats, coyotes, ravens.
What form of ethics can be offered vermin?
The Hunter and the Raven

Northern bush people, Inuit and Dene both, tell stories of the ways in
which raven plays a role in the hunt. Wise, experienced, knowledgeable
hunters, while walking on the land or in the bush, keep an eye to the sky.
Raven likewise has an eye out for them. Raven knows what they are looking
for. The tired hunter glances up and sees raven circling on the other side
of the ridge or hill. The hunter watches. Raven continues to circle. The
hunter makes a detour, cautiously moving over the crest of the hill to see
what raven is up to. There are caribou below, or moose. The hunter plots a
course of action, using the terrain and the wind and the position of moose
to place herself in position for a kill shot. When the butchering is done and
the hunter has begun the long walk back to camp laden with meat, raven
will begin her meal. The hunter and raven have never been introduced but
they know each other. They will meet again but only the circumstances of
their meeting will determine whether they are allies or enemies. On this
day, though, they have helped each other to feast.
Animal Ethics
The logic of capitalist modernism offers a profoundly poor starting point
for any substantive discussion of something that deserves to be called ethics.
How is it that “we,” who will cook and consume a shrink-wrap-covered
piece of meat from an animal raised in confinement, fed the worst forms
of meal (often including excrement and hormones), brutally slaughtered,
feel any degree of moral authority over those who can tell the story of the
animal that gave itself to them on the hunt? But modern society must be
the best ever, especially on an ethical level. “We” must restrain the barbar-
ities of “them,” living with some unfathomable attachment to an outdated
mode of existence: do not use leg-hold traps, do not hunt seal, follow
the quotas that have been set, follow the laws and seasons that have been
established.
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A whole movement of animal-rights activists has emerged (since they
can no longer speak for people of color, or women, or indigenous com-
munities, they will orient their politics towards beings without speech),
and the easiest activity for these activists to police is the hunting of bush
people. They are already marginal, seemingly powerless. To protect bambi
the killers of bambi must be policed. It is not the endless destruction of
habitat through industrial resource extraction that threatens the continued
life of elephants, it is the vile poaching of African hunters, so backward
they do not prize the continuance of the species over the meat and profit
from the sale of tusks. But enlightened Westerners, having invented a
social form that demands the eradication of the bush, will brutally impose
their will on the few remaining hunting families who live the bush, who
dream the animals: moral superiority as a refined value structure based
upon social hierarchy. Enjoy your privilege.
There Is Only One Bear: Bear

Among Dene, Inninuwug (also Inninew, Innu, Inninewak), Anishnaabe,
when one sees or encounters a bush animal it is – in the English-language
variations spoken by these bush people, at least – referred to in the
singular-general form. One does not see “a bear.” One encounters “bear.”
“Yesterday, bear came down from that rock ridge to try and get at my grub
box.” “This morning while I was hanging laundry I saw bear over at the
point.” “Bear was back at the dump today.” Every singular, unique bear
is also the embodiment, the incarnation, of bear itself, the spirit of bear,
bearness, bearivity, bearization. So too lynx, deer, wolverine, fox, moose,
chipmunk, ground squirrel, dall sheep: each is something larger than itself
while being an idiosyncratic version of the larger being or way of being.
“Bear” becomes thus the name of a form of being, rather than a category.
One does not see an example of a broader order, one sees the latest rep-
resentative of a named friend or enemy. An infinite degree of difference
expressed with the slightest linguistic slip: “I saw a bear” as opposed to “I
saw bear.”
In Loon, Henry Sharp, whose work takes a strong semiotic turn within
ethnography, has directed attention to the same aspect of language use:
Perhaps the most comprehensible facet of this unlearning can be found
in the English language’s use of articles when people talk about animals.
What is true for caribou is true for the way Dene use English to speak
of all animals. The Chipweyan word for caribou is “EtOhen,” a word they
frequently prefer to the word caribou even when speaking English. The
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Chipweyan do not say “an EtOhen” or “a caribou,” they do not say, “the
EtOhen” or “the caribou” but EtOhen or caribou, regardless of number.
EtOhen is simply EtOhen; caribou is simply caribou. There are words for
kinds of caribou – for a cow, a calf, a large bull, and so forth – and the
Chipweyan are perfectly capable of distinguishing between one individual
caribou [sic] as well as between kinds of caribou. Nevertheless, caribou are,
simultaneously, individual animals and “spiritual” beings. As individual
caribou they exist in the realm of inkoze [power/knowledge] even as their
bodies walk the earth, but their spiritual status is also simultaneously indi-
vidual and collective.5
For Sharp, the linguistic pattern speaks to the spiritual bear that walks
in step with bear:
Caribou and other wild animals exist in Dene society as but iterations of
their kind. What concerns the Dene is not the individual identity of the
caribou but the tie between the ordinary form of caribou and its spiritual
aspect. What happens to the embodied animal reverberates in the spiritual
realm, but killing an animal is not offensive to it. Animal abuse is not about
predation but about why an animal is killed, the wastage of an animal that
has been killed, the means by which the animal is killed, or the exposure of
its remains to pollution.6
This spiritual bear is lost to us the moment we see “a bear” or “the bear.”
Spectacle Animals
A fourth relationship to animals, in addition to food source, pet, and test
subject, emerges or becomes apparent when capitalist modernism is closely
interrogated: animals as spectacle. Bush animals are objects of visual fas-
cination in capitalist modernity. Whole television channels are devoted
to showing, in intimate detail, their savagery their tenderness. Enormous
and profitable effort goes into submitting bush animals to the logic of the
spectacle. This is how, having profited from their hides and oils, capitalism
can still ensure bush animals form an element of the circuit of capital.
Instead of the hours and days of searching that are required by hunters,
they appear at will on the screen of choice. But the animals who thereby
appear are not bush animals precisely because they appear at will. They are
bush animals consumed by spectacle logic. Better to call them spectacle
animals.
John Berger, in an elegant essay called “Why Look at Animals,”
commented upon this a long time ago. It is notable that Berger pays no
attention to the distinction between bush people and peasant people; there
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is little anthropology informing his analysis. Yet he reflects with remark-
able acuity upon the symptomatic element in the way animals are treated
in the Western world, arguing that “the zoo cannot but disappoint”7 and
that “everywhere animals disappear. In zoos they constitute the living
monument to their own disappearance.”8 Yet the animal cannot be entirely
erased, and becomes inserted into a different representational logic:
The cultural marginalization of animals is, of course, a more complex pro-
cess than their physical marginalization. The animals of the mind cannot
be so easily dispersed. Sayings, dreams, games, stories, superstitions, the
language itself, recall them. The animals of the mind, instead of being
dispersed, have been co-opted into other categories so that the category
animal has lost its central importance. Mostly they have been co-opted into
the family and into the spectacle.9
This co-optation into the spectacle has become the illusory foundation
upon which debates concerning contemporary animal ethics circulate.
A small child wanders into a gorilla exhibit; the gorilla turns out not to be
an image and takes to dragging the child around; the keepers shoot and
kill the animal because as soon as it does not adequately perform its image-
function it is guilty of endangering the real; an uproar ensues as everyone
blames everyone else. No doubt better barriers will be built, allowing all
parties to return to their primordial docile states.
The Speech of Bush Animals

Dene elder, storyteller, and writer George Blondin begins his When the
World Was New with a chapter called “In the Time When Animals Could
Talk,” which itself begins with the following: “In the very early days when
human beings were just developing, many people were reincarnated from
animals. At that time, powerful medicine people could easily communi-
cate with animals and birds, and that’s why we have stories about talking
animals.”10 There are many stories among all the northern hunting peoples,
perhaps among all bush peoples, of animals talking among each other and
with people. In his book on Yamoria: The Lawmaker Blondin writes:
When the world was new, animals and humans held a conference to see
how they would relate to each other. Yamoria used medicine power to con-
trol everyone’s mind to arrive at a fair resolution. The meeting lasted a long
time and involved humans and every bird, fish, and animal that lived on the
earth. All agreed that humans could use animals, birds, and fish for food,
provided that humans killed only what they needed to survive and treated
their prey with great respect. Humans must use every part of the animal and
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never waste anything. It was also made law that humans take the bones of the
prey and place them in a tree or scaffold high above the ground. And finally,
humans were told to always think well of animals and thank the creator for
putting them on the earth. When the conference was over, communication
was still possible between humans and animals, especially when medicine
people needed to talk to animal leaders regarding issues not resolved at the
conference. Slowly, communication between the two life forms dwindled,
until today it is rare to find someone who can talk to animals.11
The spoken words of bear, raven, caribou, and all the rest are a striking
feature of bush narratives, always a reminder of the degree of intimate
interdependent relations between bush people and bush animals. They
knew each other well. These narratives are a literature of bush animals,
a literature barely read by students of literature, a genre, a tradition, a
powerful literary resource that remains the purview of ethnographers and
creates no ripples on the scene of the literary. “Field,” of course, is a tithe,
agricultural spatial metaphor that involves erasure of “bush”: the literary
field may be due for the epistemological unsettling that comes with getting
lost in the bush. Dene, Inuit, Inninew, and Anishinaabe narratives of bush
animals could be one source of such an unsettling.
It may be that, still, in the bush, far from prying eyes and listening ears,
those bush animals are talking among themselves. If so, we can be sure that
they have fewer and fewer good things to say about us.
Valued Ecological Components

In 2012 I was involved with a group of activists and researchers in pre-
paring a case for public environmental hearings into a proposed hydro-
electric dam in northern Manitoba (the Keeyask project). Our group was
called the Concerned Fox Lake Grassroots Citizens, and was led by an
Inniniwak elder named Noah Massan. The company had paid for an envir-
onmental assessment, which outside groups like ours could then criticize
or supplement. The assessment was partly based on the company identi-
fying what it called “valued ecological components” (VECs) then deter-
mining the impact of the damn (I cannot but refer to it this way) on each
VEC, then developing “mitigation” measures to reduce or compensate for
that impact. Such a nicely wrapped power/knowledge bureaucratic plan
leaves no room for air.
Much of the discussion focused on sturgeon and caribou. The damn was
to be built (and is now being built) on the last natural spawning ground of
an endangered sturgeon species. It was somewhere between disconcerting
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and actually shocking to see biologists employed by the company confi-
dently argue that their never-tested artificial spawning technologies would
mean, in the end, that there would be “more sturgeon in the river than
ever before.” Science, too, can be bought and has its price. The discus-
sion of caribou – an issue of more public concern since caribou are so
much cuter than sturgeon – focused on whether endangered woodland
caribou use the territory affected by the damn or not, or whether caribou
in the vicinity were from a non-endangered species. The elders we worked
with, including Noah Massan, insisted that near the site of the damn was
a caribou calving ground. The company’s lawyers and scientists took to
calling these “summering caribou,” as if the caribou had their own cottages
in the country and beach vacations.
But Noah Massan was not distracted by the smokescreens being
blown around by biologists and bureaucrats. He kept asking not about
the caribou and sturgeon, though these were of concern, but about the
squirrels and rabbits and other creatures that literally did not count to
the project proponents: they were not “valued” enough to be a “VEC.”
He would say: “what about these rabbits? These squirrels? Where are they
going to go? What is going to happen to them?” No one ever bothered
to answer: no one else in the process was concerned about squirrels or
rabbits: no one took responsibility for them. In Noah Massan’s world, the
wanton destruction of any members of any animal species, any, is a deep
violation of an ethical tie to bush animals. To the company these bush
animals do not deserve to make a list titled “valued.” They are expendable,
roadkill, of so little concern that there would be no reason even to bring
them to the level of conscious thought or reflection: their individual exist-
ence or non-existence a matter of absolute disregard. This is the pinnacle of
modern ethics: it tells us what we can utterly disregard – roadkill, civilians
in Aleppo, the bush, the homeless.
Bush people, who hunt, kill, skin, butcher, and eat bush animals
every day, are not responsible for the global destruction of bush animals.
Primarily, habitat loss or degradation due to industrial extraction and pro-
duction is the core factor destroying bush animals. When enough habitat
is destroyed, even squirrels and rabbits may become endangered. Then
they’ll be classified as VECs and by then, of course, it will be too late. But
to be clear, Noah Massan’s point is not that we should assess the viability
of each species and find a way to protect the most vulnerable. His point is
that we have an ethical relationship and therefore responsibility to all the
bush animals: the unthinking brutality of the logic of the bulldozer is an
incomprehensible ethical absence.
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Observation and Close Watching

Writing about the zoo as also a site of an objective, scientific gaze, Berger
noted of the animals that “the more we know, the further away they are.”12
The determination to be rigorously “objective” drives a gap between the seer
and the seen, a gap that eventually precludes the possibility of empathy or,
indeed, ethics. Bush people must watch closely enough to be able to draw on
their own still-active mimetic abilities, to copy the sounds or movements of
animals. Close watching does not lead to detachment from the subject, but
rather an increased sympathy towards it: how will it build this part of the
beaver dam with these materials? Can it find a way over these rapids? Will
it escape the attention of the eagle perched above? The drama of the indi-
vidual bush animal is an element that can rarely or ever be given attention
by the biologist, but remains a preoccupation of the hunter.
As Frank Tester and I documented in a book called Kiumajut, in the
immediate post-war period biologists became very interested in using the
latest technologies to push the previous limits of their field. Counting
caribou from aircraft became, with all the self-regard of high modernism,
the newest, latest, best approach to determining caribou populations. One
could extract from old accounts of explorers how many caribou had been
in a district in the early twentieth century (never mind that these numbers,
which became a base, were wild speculation). One could then fly over a
region, count the caribou, multiply by the overall land area, and come up
with a gross number of contemporary animals. Further, by extrapolating
from the earlier “data,” one could determine the rate of population loss.
The results of this calculation led to the conclusion that the species was at
risk. This led to more funding for the biologists, and so a happy bureau-
cratic feedback loop. With all the self-assuredness of science, plans could
now be made that were the best, most advanced, most modern. It all went
along smoothly until someone got the bright idea of testing the veracity of
the counts by flying a second plane behind the first to see if both counters
arrived at similar results. The discrepancies were such that they became an
embarrassment.
Meanwhile, policy planners, also in love with the truth of their scientific
knowledge, placed all manner of restrictions on Inuit and Dene hunters
of caribou. These restrictions played a significant role in damaging the
ability of bush people to live as contemporary hunters. Today, there are
many biologists who work closely with and prize the knowledge of indi-
genous partners. But there are many who do not, and who underwrite
increasing restriction of hunters’ relationship with prey. They still have
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the confidence that their newer approaches, tagging individual animals
with radio signals or some such, represent the best, the most advanced, the
most modern knowledge. Conflicts over quotas on whales, caribou, bears,
sturgeon, musk oxen, moose, swans, and many other species are a key
element in the struggle for aboriginal rights in Canada, and a version of
similar conflicts exists wherever there are bush animals and bush people in
this world. The restrictions fly in the face of bush people’s knowledge and
understanding. Hugh Brody notes that “many Inuit say that animals that
are not hunted will decline in number. People have an obligation, there-
fore, both to respect the animal that is willing to die and to hunt animals
to ensure that their species will thrive.”13
Hunting vs. Hunting

The corporate executive, stranded in the middle of a social hierarchy
with too few people beneath him to do his bidding and too many above
demanding him to do theirs, goes hunting. His hunt is an echo of that
undertaken by aristocratic forebears, for whom hunting is a privilege and
a pleasure. He will fly in his rented helicopter back over the mountains to
where he can see the dall sheep. He will shoot the animal, often from the
helicopter, and then take the head with its large horns to mount over his
fireplace. His superiority, his place high up on the social chain, has been
reaffirmed. He will tell a story based on his superior shooting ability, where
the moment of the kill is the centerpiece of the narrative: “kill” as “climax.”
The executive has absolutely no concern if another bighorn sheep is ever
hunted by anyone. He has his.
Begade Shuhtagotine, mountain Dene of the Keele river area, are
camped near the river at the foot of the same mountains. From below they
will patiently watch the thin traces of trails high up on the mountainside.
In time, they see tiny white dots on those trails. Looking carefully,
patiently, they realize that the dots are moving: not a rock, but sheep.
Where there are enough hunters, two groups will make the arduous hike
up along parallel ridges, the sheep in between. After a long steep climb, the
trail is reached; the hunter waits. A sheep appears, perhaps another. A shot.
One sheep falls down a steep cliff, the other turns and runs back into the
waiting rifles of the other group of hunters. Both sheep are dragged far
from the trail so that what remains after they are butchered will not scare
off other animals: the sheep will return to that trail. Most likely, the story
that will be told will be about putting a heavy wrench into someone’s pack,
so he unknowingly carried it up the whole way.
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In capitalist modernism, hunting is a masculine activity that speaks to
prowess. The moment of the kill is the centerpiece of any hunting story.
Effectively, everything about the hunt, including or especially who gets to
do it, is steeped in gendered social hierarchy. Brody writes that in the world
of hunters “no one can be superior to that upon which he depends.”14 For
bush people, hunting is about relationship, respect, and the attribute most
necessary for a successful hunter, even with modern technology, is patience.
Mostly, hunting bush animals is about waiting, about a time suspended,
lingering, expanded, and then, suddenly, and for a period that seems to
end before it began, contracted, intensive, engaged. Capitalist modernism
is profoundly unconcerned with the fate of species, especially when placed
on a scale next to the latest round of capital accumulation demands. Bush
peoples do what they must to ensure the animals will return.
Something of this is reflected in Henry Sharp when he writes:
Animals are persons. As persons they individually, collectively, spiritually
and physically replicate the relationships with human persons that have
existed within the realm of inkoze [power/knowledge] since before the begin-
ning of time. It is not the individual that endures in Dene reality but those
relationships between human and animal/persons. When the Chipweyan
say animals become young again in the spring, they speak the truth, for it
is not the individual that is renewed but those enduring relationships that
are the covenant between human and animal within the reality of inkoze.15
Something of this is reflected in Robert Brightman when he writes:
The animals are endlessly regenerated, and yet they are finite. I am more
powerful than the animal because I kill and eat it. The animal is more
powerful than I because it can elude me and cause me to starve. The animal
is my benefactor and friend. The animal is my victim and adversary. The
animal is different from me, and yet it is like me, as much like me as its
ancestors were in the earliest time of the world.16
Paradoxically, hunters are the bush animal’s best friends. The people who
hunt, kill and eat bush animals represent their best chance of continuance. As
animal rights activists, often, do not. For there to be bush animals, there need
to be bush lands. For there to be bush lands, there need to be bush people.
The Literary Field
At the edge of the field is the bush. In the liminal zone where they inter-
sect a million misunderstandings have developed. Imagine translating the
bible, rich with agricultural and husbandry metaphors, into Inuktitut, the
language of Inuit. What will we ever do with sheep, or daily bread, or the
332

flock? Hugh Brody’s The Other Side of Eden reflects in part on this par-
ticular disjunction.
Bush animals are at the edge of the literary field: their eyes can be some-
times spotted, glowing with the reflection of our fires in the night. In lit-
erature they most commonly express some notion of the unconscious: a
powerful desire, as in Marian Engels’ Bear, or a savage bestiality, as in Yann
Martel’s Life of Pi. These are versions of the literary field expanding but
cutting down more of the bush at its edges. So perhaps we need to leave
the literary field entirely, and enter the literary bush. Doing so would have
us read the literary in passages by Henry Sharp or Hugh Brody, to play
close attention to the narratives of George Blondin and Louis Bird, and to
see the power and poetry and the epistemological and ethical challenges
posed by bush narratives.
Bush Animals Own Nothing But Their Bodies

Modernist capitalism is a process of allowing the logic of abstraction to dom-
inate all forms of existence, with exchange-value being the most powerful
but not the only vehicle for abstraction. Adorno and Horkheimer, extrapo-
lating from Marx, understood this clearly. Feminists and Foucauldians
alike, meanwhile, emphasized the body and embodiment as a critical site
of engagement. The notions of abstraction and embodiment mark a key
polarity in late twentieth-century critical theory.
While they can be commodified as rare meat delicacies or as objects of
spectacle, the particular bush animals so captured by the logic of capital
have left the bush behind, have forsaken their very being itself or had it
stripped away. But in the bush, bush animals may be the precise exemplar
of non-capitalist being inasmuch as they own nothing but their bodies.
They embody their bodies. They remain no more or less than those bodies.
This thought perhaps mirrors another, by John Berger, who wrote: “the
life of a wild animal becomes the starting point of a daydream: a point
from which the day-dreamer departs with his back turned.”17
Notes
1 John Berger, “Why Look at Animals,” in About Looking (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1980), 7.
2 Jacques Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans Peggy Kamuf
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 147.
333
Bush/Animals 333
3 Adrian Tanner, Bringing Home Animals: Religious Ideology and Mode of Production
of the Mistassini Cree Hunters (New York; St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 136.
4 See Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics
of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 171.
5 Henry S. Sharp, Loon: Memory, Meaning, and Reality in a Northern Dene
Community (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 67.
6 Sharp, Loon, 67–8.
7 Berger, “Why Look at Animals,” 26.
8 Ibid., 24.
9 Ibid., 13.
10 George Blondin, When the World Was New: Stories of the Sahtu Dene (Outcrop:
Yellowknife, 1990), 5.
11 George Blondin, Yamoria: The Lawmaker (Edmonton: NeWest Press,
1997), 48.
13 Hugh Brody, Living Arctic: Hunters of the Canadian North (Vancouver: Douglas
and McIntyre, 1987), 77.
14 Ibid., 73.
15 Sharp, Loon, 72.
16 Robert Brightman, Grateful Prey: Rock Cree Human-Animal Relations (Regina:
Canadian Plains Research Center, 2002).
334

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319

What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship

320 Peter K ulchyski

Social Boundaries and Ethical Systems

322 Peter K ulchyski

The Hunter and the Raven

324 Peter K ulchyski

There Is Only One Bear: Bear

326 Peter K ulchyski

The Speech of Bush Animals

Valued Ecological Components

328 Peter K ulchyski

Observation and Close Watching

330 Peter K ulchyski

Hunting vs. Hunting

332 Peter K ulchyski

Bush Animals Own Nothing But Their Bodies

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