7
"Laboring Thus to Destroy Their Friends"

Introduction

Cree hunting is "spiritualized" in the sense that diverse agencies—including the individual animal quarry, the game rulers, the dream guardian, and human sorcerers—are said to make rational decisions affecting the number of animals on the landscape and their accessibility to hunters. These agencies are conceived as reactive to human conduct, and any event of hunting potentially implicates a complex skein of prior events in which the hunter has participated. Hallowell (1976:74-75) described a "personalistic theory of causation" among the Crees' southern neighbors, the Saulteaux, and I have observed that some Rock Crees accord little scope to the concepts of "accident" and "chance."

The verb ohcitaw predicates of all events conceived to result from the exercise of someone's deliberate will. Vandersteene, long resident with the Thickwoods Crees of Alberta, described its semantics and contextualizations.

Pour signifier qu'un phénomène est naturel, ou naturellement nécessaire, fortuit, librement voulu, permis ou délibéré, le mot clé reviendra sans cesse sur les lèvres: Otchitaw. . . . C'est même otchitaw que la gachette de votre carabine se déclenche par hasard et que la balle s'égare dans la poitrine de votre voisin; otchitaw q'un arbre tombe avec fracas sur votre tente: mais c'est tout aussi otchitaw que vous abbattiez un arbre pour allumer votre feu. . . . Otchitaw lorsqu' après des heures dune chasse effrénée, Tchos parvienne a approcher un caribou à portée de sa carabine, mais c'est également otchitaw—comment est-

ce concevable?—s'il manque son coup. . . . Cette expression signifie une opinion profondément ancrée: en tout ce qui arrive, la volonté de quelqu'un intervient toujours pour true large part: la mienne, ou celle de mon voisin, celle du diable ou celle de Dieu. (Vandersteene 1960:94-95)

In the case of hunting, the will is typically that of an animal or another being with control over animals.

The Grateful Prey

The most commonly expressed Rock Cree ideology of the hunter-prey relationship postulates an endless cycle of gift exchanges between humans and animals. Nimosom , 'my grandfather,' and nohkom 'my grandmother' are used to address game animals, connoting a respectful and nurturing dependency relationship. Similarly, for the Eastern Cree (Mistassini), the idea that animals are friends or lovers of human beings is the "dominant ideology" of hunting (Tanner 1979:151). The event of killing an animal is not represented as an accident or a contest but as the result of a deliberate decision of the animal or another being to permit the killing to occur. The dream events that Crees say prefigure successful kills are sometimes talked about as signs that this permission has been given. In waking experience, the decision finds culmination when the animal enters a trap or exhibits its body to the hunter for a killing shot. Since the soul survives the killing to be reborn or regenerated, the animal does not fear or resent the death. The animals' motivations for participating in these events of killing are figured both in the idioms of love and of interest. Animals may "pity" the hunters who have need of their flesh, and especially is their benevolence evoked when the hunter complies with the conventional objectifications of "respect," treating the carcass, meat, and bones in the correct fashion. Conversely, ritual omission or blasphemy angers the animals, who then withhold themselves. But the role of the hunter-eater is not that of passive recipient only, and the animals themselves stand to gain from the exchange. Having received the gift of the animal's body, the hunter reciprocates. Animal souls are conceived to participate as honored guests at feasts where food, speeches, music, tobacco, and manufactured goods are generously given over to them. Hunter and prey are thus successively subject and object in an endless cycle of reci-

procities. Ultimately, the roles of human and animal are complementary, for each gives life to the other. The treatment of the remains not only objectifies respect but is said to restore the animal to a living condition.

Some Crees say that hunting is possible only with the permission of the animals or the game rulers (cf. Skinner 1911:75; Speck 1935a :97, 114; Feit 1973a ), and the concept of the dominant animal benefactor is elevated to the categorical principle of hunting. From such a perspective, the hunter is subordinate but can influence the animal's choice to give or withhold itself through offerings and prayer. Less dogmatically, some Crees say that it is itatisiwak , or "natural," for animals to avoid hunters, and the gestures of respect are intended to overcome this "natural" disposition and dispose them favorably to the event of their death. These postulates are still widely shared and have survived the confrontation with nonbelievers—white and Indian—who kill animals without observing the appropriate forms. Some Crees are bewildered by this, while others point out that Indians who disrespect animals may hunt and trap but do not often do so successfully.

Marx could hardly have imagined an Algonquian labor processs in which humans and animals successively participate as producers of the other, the animals willingly surrendering the "product" of their own bodies and the hunters returning it to them as cooked food, all figured in the idiom of "love." But his reflections on an authentically social labor process are evocative of the benefactive model of Cree-animal relationships.

In your enjoyment of use of my product I would have had the direct enjoyment of realizing that I had both satisfied a human need by my work and also objectified the human essence and therefore fashioned for another human being the object that met his need. I would have been for you the mediator between you and the species and thus been acknowledged and felt by you as a completion of your own essence and a necessary part of yourself and have thus realized that I am confirmed both in your thought and in your love. In my expression of my life I would have fashioned your expression of your life, and thus in my own activity have realized my own essence, my human, my communal essence. (McLellan 1978:31)

Hunter and prey successively renew each other's lives, and, indeed, each seems to realize its innate nature in the transaction, the hunter as supplicant and the animal as benefactor. The willingness to satisfy humans becomes in narrative a virtue of which animals boast and for which they compete (Russell 1898:216).

These images possess obvious affinities with those in some Ameri-

can food industry advertising, particularly those representing animals as eager to become food or participating actively in the cooking process. Some blocks from my home, for example, a meat storage facility displays a sign in which a bipedal steer in chef's hat and apron presides over steaks grilling on a barbecue. One thinks also of the long-running television campaign representing a humanized tuna who aspires to the honor of being caught, canned, and eaten. The "product" of animals is their bodies, and it is these that they offer freely to hunters. The anthropomorphic animals of the dream and the shaking lodge are members of an expanded human society, a cosmic "species" transcending human and animal differences, and paralleling Marx's vision in which each producer mediates with his products the relationship of men and women to themselves and one another. The "communal essence" of human and animal is realized and created in their reciprocal satisfaction of one another's needs. To the question of how many Crees believe this to be a factual description of the human-animal relationship, I would answer none or almost none.

Animal Adversaries

Reciprocity itself possesses, of course, coercive and exploitative modalities that may be inimical to the creation of friendly feelings. When Mauss (1954:1) wrote of "the force . . . in the thing given which compels the recipient to make a return," he might easily have been describing the nuances of subarctic Algonquian sacrifice. The Severn Ojibwas of Ontario, eastern neighbors of the Pock Crees, tell the following story of hunters and moose.

Back in the ancient times, when humans and creatures were living, they stayed in separate places. These humans had a ceremony with their pipe. One evening, just before they were going out hunting, they lit up their long pipe to smoke. That evening the moose were sitting in their lodging. There was a big bull moose, some old moose, cows, young ones, and a young bull moose around the fire. Suddenly, a pipe came through the doorway in their lodging. This long pipe came sailing through the doorway. No one was holding it. It floated by the big bull, the old one, the cows, the young ones. When it reached the young bull moose, he grabbed it and started to smoke on it. The old moose told him: "You have destroyed us. This is what the humans do when they are preparing for a hunt. Now, they will be able to get us." (Fiddler et al. 1985:33)

The sacrificial pipe represents an intersection between exchange and magical control since it is an offering that, once accepted, compels the recipients to make a return. Further, it attributes to the animals—or to the more sophisticated among them—knowledge of this coercive effect. Acceptance of the offering removes the events of the later hunt from voluntary control by the animals, predestining their deaths like events in a dream.

Specks early writing on boreal Algonquian religion contains intimations of ambiguous power relationships between humans and animals.

The animals know be-forehand when they arc to be slain, when their spirits have been overcome by the hunter's personal power or magic. They exact also a certain respect, which is shown to them in different ways, though generally by the proper treatment of their remains after they have been killed for their flesh or skins. If this respect is not accorded to them, the animals refuse to be killed or their souls may not be reborn. (Speck 1935b :22-23)

The synthesis juxtaposes the ideas that hunters can "overcome" animals and that animals may "refuse" to be killed, the latter imposing obvious limitations on the efficacy of the hunters' "personal power and magic." The passage thus leaves indeterminate the question of who, in the last instance, exerts the decisive influence over the hunt's outcome. Hunting songs, tobacco offerings, and the cat-all feast all implicate diverse and contradictory models of the hunter-prey relationship. Just as there is no stable resolution of the question of human and animal difference, there is no consistent answer to how the events of hunting are possible.

Rock Crees sometimes talk about hunting in terms that represent animals as opponents or reluctant victims and killings as domination rather than reciprocity. This is the relationship to animals expressed without euphemization in the trickster myths. The verb sakotiðimiw 'overcome someone' refers to the event of a person prevailing over an adversary, through physical, intellectual, or spiritual means. These images ascribe to the animals a dispositional aversion to the hunt that is either overcome by force or magically dispelled by the hunter. The lines between supplication, manipulation, and coercion are not always explicitly drawn in what Crees say about the hunt, and all these may, of course, be implicated simultaneously in the more observable social relationships that people have with one another. But standing to one side of the animal benefactor is the well-defined image of the animal adversary who seeks to avoid death and against whom physical violence and magical coercion must be exerted. When Crees use "hunting medicine,"

they say that they are trying to exert a seductive influence over a dispositionally reluctant quarry, and some conceive their pawakan as an ally in an adversarial contest with animal victims. The parallels with warfare are suggestive, and it is probable that war-related ritual once practiced against Chipewyans and Eskimos in the eighteenth century resembled the preparations for hunting. Thompson (1962 [1784-1812]:105) observed of the Rock Crees' "Nahathaway" ancestors in the eighteenth century that "they consider the hunter to be naturally a warrior."

"Hunting medicine" usually refers today to substances that are added to baits or positioned elsewhere near trap sets, although some medicines are carried in leather bags by the hunter. They are believed to exert an infatuating influence over the animal or to bewilder it so that it will not perceive the trap or the hunter. These medicines are usually compounded of plant or animal ingredients suggested in dreams. Once discovered and used, medicines or knowledge of their ingredients are sold or given to others. "Hunting medicine" refers also to operations employing imitative magic. In the 1820s, Nelson was told of a hunter who sang and drummed to a birch bark scroll upon which the figures of three moose had been drawn. The scroll began to move, prefiguring a successful kill.

Now he desired in the beginning that if his Familiar would have compassion on him, he would render these three moose foolish: that they might not be possessed of their usual cunning &c. The next day we went out—the old man, his son, and myself, a hunting—we were hungry—we walked till late in the day and finding no tracks I proposed our return, but he told me we ought to proceed; for in the low ground beyond a small ridge then near in sight of us, 'we may perhaps find some tracks. I am never deceived when I am answered (i.e., my bark dances).' We soon reached this low Ground and shortly after heard a noise; jumping, running, and breaking sticks. 'Ah, here they are,' said the old man: 'see how their head is turned! what a noise they make—how they play—they are foolish.' We killed them all. (Brown and Brightman 1988:69)

This narrative is representative of others in which human beings use the pawakan and other resources to overcome animals. In the extreme case, powerful dreamers dispense altogether with the technical requisites of labor and simply summon animals to their camps, as with the great Granville Lake shaman Manicos 'Insect' (Brightman 1989a :152-153). Nowhere in these practices is there reference to the voluntary cooperation of the animal in the hunt. Indeed, the animals are simply "foolish" insofar as they succumb to the hunter's power.

Black (1977:150) discovered that Ojibwas classify hunting techniques of this kind together with love magic as "bad medicine" and concluded that bad medicine techniques are those that subvert the autonomy or welfare of others. The paradoxical status of the animal—that of a person who is also a use-value—creates a moral conundrum in which hunting medicines are "good" for the hunter—since they extend his effectiveness—but "bad" because they interfere with the animal-person's volition. The valuation of hunting medicines as morally ambiguous is seemingly widespread in the subarctic. Skinner (1911:75 [Westmain Swampy Cree]) writes, "In the case of hunting medicine an evil spirit appears and gives the hunter a magic draught which imbues him with the power to attract the beasts to his traps" (emphasis added). Like Ojibwas, Rock Crees classify both hunting and love medicines as macimaskihkiy 'bad medicine'. A dear correspondence exists between the lethal effects of sorcery on human victims and the use of hunting medicine to kill animals. Nelson's manuscript (Brown and Brightman 1988:180-181) makes clear that the specific techniques of hunting medicine and sorcery—drawing and then disfiguring an image of the victim—were sometimes identical. The idea that hunting medicine is morally objectionable exists explicitly among the Athapaskan-speaking Chipewyans to the north where the use of inkoze 'power' against animals reflexively brings bad luck or death (Smith 1982:51-52). In depriving the animal of its volition, the hunter transcends his appropriate role as the grateful recipient of the animals' voluntary gifts. I do not know if some Crees consider such medicines harmful or dangerous because of their effects on animals, but many believe that other "bad medicines" used for sexual seduction or to cause illness reflexively harm the user. Hunting medicine is said to be "bad" because it prevents others from successfully trapping animals in the same area.

Well, people have these medicines. "Fur medicine" they call it. You buy a medicine like that. They call it ataymaskihkiy 'fur medicine'. You buy that and you'll be the only one that's killing the fur. You'll bring this other guy bad luck. He won't catch nothing. You'll be the only one who's going to catch fur. Anything you catch, that's yours. The guy with you, he'll have nothing. That's how that medicine works.

This typification associates hunting medicine with a kind of sorcery—the paradigm case of "bad medicine"—in which one person condemns another to starvation by mining his hunting.

The Adversarial Animal in History and Prehistory

Mythological narratives and conceptions represent the human-animal relationship as overtly competitive and hostile in the past. Both the cosmogonic myth and the trickster cycle presuppose antagonism between hunter and prey. The Plains Crees (Ahenakew 1929) represent the original relationship as one of animal predators and human prey. Rock Crees do not know this myth, although they recognize the predatory cimiskwanak of the Plains Cree myth as monstrous beings hostile to humans. Other boreal Algonquian groups associated antagonism between humans and animals with the transformation of the protoanimals into their modern condition. In the 1760s, Henry (1969 [1809]:204-206) was informed of an Ojibwa tradition according to which, after the primordial flood, Nenabozo the transformer deprived animals of the power of speech because their increasing numbers made them a threat to human beings and became they had entered into a conspiracy against humans led by the bear. At the same time, beavers were deprived of speech became they were growing more intelligent than human beings. In the 1790s, Thompson (1962 [1784-1812]:155) learned of a comparable tradition from two Indians in the vicinity of Swan River House. Beavers, originally a terrestrial race of great wisdom and power and immune from predation from humans and other species, were said to have been driven into the water by the transformer, reduced in power, and assigned the role of providing pelts for humans and food for other animals. Both of these accounts describe the intervention of spirit agencies to produce a situation in which animals are represented as equal—or potentially superior—to humans, and in both instances, the powers of the animal beings are materially reduced, in the one case to avert a threat to humans and in the other to provide them with clothing and food.

The Nahathaway, the ancestors of the Rock Crees described by Thompson (ibid.: 94-95, 152), represented the human-animal relationship in immediately precontact times in similarly adversarial terms. In several passages, Thompson reflects on the impact of European technology on the stability of Indian production, and it is likely that his thoughts were influenced by Cree discourse on the topic. The Crees told Thompson that they were vulnerable to attacks from bears, that beaver lodges were all but impervious to the aboriginal technology, and

that beavers, themselves secure from human predation, had, in the centuries prior to contact, been steadily expanding their aquatic domain and encroaching on the terrestrial space occupied by humans beings. As a result, the Crees wondered how their ancestors could have survived with the aboriginal technology.

But when the arrival of the White People had changed all their weapons from stone to iron and steel, and added the fatal Gun, every animal fell before the Indian; the Bear was no longer dreaded, and the Beaver became a desirable animal for food and clothing, and the furr [sic] a valuable article of trade; and as the Beaver is a stationary animal, it could be attacked at any convenient time in all seasons, and thus their numbers soon became reduced. (ibid.:95)

These conceptions reproduce the mythological theme of an endangered human race, but it is now European technology that secures human ascendancy. Both Thompson and his Cree clients excessively devalued the efficacy of the indigenous technology, but what is of interest here is the belief that the introduction of European manufactures reversed a previously asymmetric power relationship in which human beings were subordinate to animals. Since the arrival of Europeans and their trade goods was widely understood by subarctic Algonquians as part of the intended design of the creator being or transformer (Brown 1977:46, Petitot 1886:462-472, Bauer 1971:32), the new technology may have been experienced retrospectively by some Crees as another divine intervention on their behalf. These traditions express hostility and fear in Algonquian thought about animals; it is difficult to see in them the benign "grandfathers" who voluntarily yield their bodies to dependent humans. It is interesting to note also that these myths presuppose a cosmic design, imposed by the creator being or the transformer, in which human beings are purposefully located above animals in a hierarchically ordered creation. The spirit agencies intercede on behalf of human beings, suggesting a more anthropocentrically oriented world view than is conventionally ascribed to subarctic Indians.

Hunting as a Game

There exist two additional representations of hunting that occupy transitional positions along a continuum between reciprocity and exploitation. Rock Crees also talk about hunting and trapping as

though it is mitawiwin 'a game' or as though there exists sakihitowin , romantic or sexual love between hunter and prey. Both images presuppose the animals' voluntary participation, but neither resolves the question of who exerts power over the outcome. Neither of these two images figures prominently in the Cree discourses I induced or overheard, but this may well be the consequence of an uneven record. The conception of trapping and hunting as a friendly game enjoyed by both human and animal is best documented in the societies of the Eastern Crees and is directly expressed in the discourses of the shaking lodge. Among Mistassini Crees, a physical contest is understood to take place in the lodge between the operator and the spirit of a bear, a victory by the operator prefiguring the successful kill of bears in the future. Tanner (1979:138) describes this as paralleling the domination of reluctant animals in the hunt. The ability of the operator to bring the souls of animals into the shaking lodge is recognized also by Rock Crees, and they mention the "contest" between operator—or his dream guardians—and animals as predestining hunting success or failure. They describe these contests, however, as amiable games rather than as coercion and say that the animals enjoy them. A similar interpretation was given at Rupert's House.

Sometimes the bear would see when he goes in the shaking tent; he would say, "If you can throw me flat, well, I'll like that; and if you can't, you won't be able to get anything." They will try it three times. The bear isn't mad, he wants to see if the Mistabeo [operator's dream guardian] is strong enough. (Preston 1975:80)

The preliminary enactment of the hunt in the shaking lodge replicates the later encounters between hunters and animals in the bush. In this respect, the shaking lodge parallels the dream, likewise a template in which the outcome of events that have yet to happen are predetermined. This image of the hunt as a game that animals play to win is, of course, more readily assimilated to the flight or fight responses of the boreal fauna than is the doctrine of their voluntary submission.

The Animal Lover

The likening of hunting and trapping to a sexual encounter is more difficult to interpret. Like the "game" model, this image is best known from Eastern Cree sources where it has been explored

in detail (Preston 1975:198-234, Tanner 1979:138). Rock Cree metaphors (see chap. 3) clearly liken the hunter-prey relationship to a sexual one, and there is also evidence for a literal conception of animal lovers. Both male and female Crees interpret dreams of sex with humanoid partners as referring to and predestining successful hunts of animals in the future. Since sexual encounters in dreams are conceived to be factual events in which the dreaming self participates, it may be that animals are thought to assume human form because they desire sexual contact with humans. The myths of animal marriages are narrative expressions of such relationships, since they always involve an initiative taken by an animal. It is not dear where to situate the ideology of the animal lover on the continuum between reciprocity and exploitation; too little is known of the symbolism of the sexual act in boreal Algonquian cultures. Insofar as the animal is the initiator of sexual events in dreams, the relationship is imaginably one of sakihitowin , love, with its resonances of regard and intimacy. It is possible also to infer that the hunting enterprise places the hunter in a role analogous to that of a person seeking to overcome and seduce a nominally or actually reluctant potential partner. Seduction may be assimilated to the model of domination. If the use of hunting medicines is involved, there exists an obvious analogy to the exploitative use of love medicines to subvert the autonomy of a human partner. There is evidence that hunting and love medicines are conceptually associated. One trapper, who refused to disclose to me the ingredients of his lynx medicine, readily asserted that his medicines made him irresistible to lynxes. "It makes them love me," he repeated with good-natured seriousness.

Killing and Domination

These contrasting benefactive and adversarial models provide different solutions to the question of whether hunter or prey determines the outcomes of hunts, a problem that seemingly engages both practical and philosophical interests. In the most general terms, Crees say that the relative power of different life forms is visibly manifested in food chains. Those who kill and eat are more powerful than those who are killed and eaten. This axiom—the antithesis of the dominant ideology of hunting—represents death and killing as experiences that are not voluntarily cultivated.

While killing and eating animals are represented as events of reciprocity and communion, the same actions acquire different values when human beings are the victims. To kill other humans is to exhibit and secure a "higher" power, as in sorcery.

A guy can kill you anyplace. Like a guy might ask you something. Just to try, you know? If you refuse, then he'll try and kill you. Just for the heck of it. So he gets more . . . like he's deluding himself. Like he's more macayis -like ['devilish']. The more people you get, the higher power you get.

The victimization of human beings by the witiko is probably the dominant symbol of evil and chaos in the Cree universe. And it is in the witiko image that killing and eating are most strongly associated with hierarchy, exploitation, and domination. Eating beings different in type from the self need not, of course, entail the same meanings. It is itatisiw 'natural' for humans to eat animal flesh. At the same time, there is evidence that Crees construe the predatory relationship of human to animal as similar to the relationship of witiko to human. The analogies are present both in literature and in conventional witiko imagery. In each case, predators overcome unwilling victims by cunning or through exertion of mamahtawisiwin , power. If ordinary humans beings are the game animals of the witiko, the similitude is represented as the latter's objective perception: the witiko experiences (and addresses) human beings as animals. In the Hairy Heart cannibal narrative (chap. 5), the youngest monster tells his human wife, "When I hunt with your younger brothers, they resemble animals to me." Similarly, the wihcikosis , small witiko, addresses his intended victim as 'moose' (Brightman 1989a :135). This perspectival distortion is attributed also to Persons who are degenerating into a witiko condition. It figures, for example, also in speech ascribed to the Beaver Indian Mostos , executed as a potential witiko by Thickwoods Crees in Alberta; Mostos allegedly perceived his children as beaver and moose (Teicher 1960:100).

The witiko image clearly exhibits fundamental associations of killing and eating with domination and with differential Power endowment. The ability to kill and eat indexes the superior "power" of the hunter over the prey, and the food chain becomes a pragmatic index of the relative Power of different beings in an intransitive hierarchy. The witiko is known to be more powerful than (most) humans because it kills and eats them, and it is only because it is more Powerful that it can do these things. As one of my Cree hosts observed,

That person [witiko] believes he's the supreme guy. He's the best guy. He can kill the other guy. He can even eat him up. It's just that evil spirit, that evil spirit in him that's conducting his mind.

One of the executioners of Mostos recalled in his testimony the following conversation that occurred prior to the killing while attempts at cure were in progress.

Napaysoosee told me that when they were holding Moostoos down and trying to make him better with medicine, he threw Mihkooshtikwahnis to one side, and the other men sent him out saying his medicine was not strong enough. When Mihkooshtikwahnis came into the shack where I was, he told me that Moostoos' medicine was stronger than his, and added "He's going to eat me now. " (Teicher 1960:96, emphasis added)

Exactly the same idea is held regarding the human-animal relationship. In the 1790s, Crees told Thompson (1962 [1784-1812]:155) that in an earlier state of the world, beavers "possessed great power" and that neither man nor other animals "made war on them." Subsequently, they were driven into the water "still to be wise but without power" and to serve as food and clothing for man. Skinners (1911:76) Swampy Cree consultants likewise explained the modem hunter-prey relationship in terms of asymmetric "power" endowments. Animals die, they said, because their "medicine" is less strong.

The Indians believe that all animals are speaking and thinking beings, in many ways not one whit less intelligent than human beings. The reason that they are less successful in life is that they are unfortunate, their "medicine" is not as strong. The reason that the Indian is able to prey upon them is that he is more fortunate, not more intelligent.

All these texts suggest that killing and eating are irreducibly political acts. The trophic relations in the boreal forest thus provide one answer to the question of differential power. Humans kill and eat animals, while animals, by and large, do not kill and eat humans, and this is the visible measure of human hegemony. When men or women kill animals, the event indexes the hunters' superior power.

But animals possess and regularly succeed in demonstrating the power to escape. When men and women work in vain to kill animals, their failure indexes the animals' superior power. Animals, the bear excepted, do not kill and eat Crees, but they can cause them to labor for little or nothing and they could, in the past, elect to make them starve.

Today, the costs of failure may be a less-preferred diet, a diminished reputation, and reduced disposable income; previously, they could include starvation and death for self and family. The question of power over the outcome of the hunt is therefore insoluble. It is posed anew and renegotiated every time a man goes into the bush with guns and traps. This is the one message of the adversarial model of the hunt in which the outcome of each event is solved by physical or spiritual force.

The benefactive model substitutes for this indeterminacy a continuously superior animal who erases through its generosity the negative significance of killing and eating. The ideology obviates, at least rhetorically, the conjunction of killing and eating with exploitation, for how can the latter exist if the animal can only be killed through its own volition? Thereafter, when the hunter kills, the event indexes the animal's love or regard. The primary symbols of human sociality—food sharing and commensality—are conceived and made to exist between human and animal. The animal's gift of its own body parallels the gifts of meat from one family to another. In return, the animal becomes the commensal of humans through sacrifices and in the eat-all feast. In such a universe, the man who fails to kill the animals he needs has erred in judgment, committed an act that suspended the animals' love and regard. And, as with another human, the damage can be repaired with gifts.

Relations between Models

Contrasts between the benefactive and adversarial models are summarized in table 2, below.

I have had occasion to mention the other areas of ambiguity that suffuse the relation. The animal may be figured as a friendly adversary or a reluctant lover. The pawakan , or dream spirit, that acts as the hunter's agent in overcoming animal opponents may itself be an animal. The hunter may construe the decisions that affect his outcomes as those of the game ruler beings who replace or augment the animals as adversaries or benefactors. Human sorcerers may interfere with hunting success, independently of a man's respectful treatment of the animals he kills.

The question of whether Crees believe one or the other model to possess greater validity is exceptionally difficult to address. The same individuals will say and do things suggesting that they take account of both, and I believe that some hunters opportunistically seek to act in terms of both ideologies. It remains possible, of course, that the representations of hunting as reciprocity, exploitation, love, and sport form a set of logically relatable propositions, as conceptions Crees have of their activities, and that I have failed to understand their integration. I believe, however, that the two ideologies are not reconciled in Cree thought and that they provide disparate solutions to the identical moral and practical questions. It would be useful to know whether one or the other model was foregrounded during times of crisis, since this would possibly index Cree conceptions of their differential effectiveness. We lack contextual accounts of how Crees and other boreal Algonquians reacted to food crises, but it is interesting that the adversarial ideology was seemingly dominant in one such case described by Thompson (1962 [1784-1812]:101-103). The Cree "Tapapahtum" related his experiences during early winter when he was unable to kill moose. Attributing his lack of success to the absence of the strong winds that facilitate stalking, Tapapahtum sang, drummed, and sacrificed tobacco and herbs to the superior deity Kicimanitow and to the "Manitoo of the Winds." Ultimately, he traveled to the post and appealed to Thompson, having become convinced that the latter could produce a wind if he chose. Whatever details were omitted or distorted in the original discourse, and in Thompson's record of it, the man's concern focused not on supplicating moose or their deific ruler but on petitioning other spirit beings for the winds necessary to stalk a reluctant quarry.

While I was conducting research in Manitoba, Tanner published Bringing Home Animals: Religious Ideology and Mode of Production of the Mistassini Cree Hunters (1979), a superior and detailed study of Eastern

(Mistassini) Cree production and religion. The convergence of our interpretations suggests the centrality of paradox in boreal Algonquian ideologies of hunting. Tanner (ibid.:138) distinguishes concepts of "equivalence-friendship" and "dominance-subordination" which correspond to what I here call "benefactive" and "adversarial" ideologies. He suggests further that the different classes of hunting ritual arc divided between the two and are pragmatically stratified in temporal relation to individual hunts. Rituals of control occur before the hunt, while those emphasizing reciprocity and respect occur after. This would suggest that the adversarial ideology possesses the greater facticity since it is the one invoked before the productive event; the animal is only transformed from victim to honored benefactor after the death is a fait accompli .

Tanners generalization partially coincides with Rock Cree practices. Hunting medicine, for example, is used only before a hunt and is talked about as controlling rather than supplicating animals. Similarly, the mortuary depositions of skulls and bones are described in terms of respect and regeneration rather than control, and they occur after an animal is consumed, not before new ones are hunted. However, other practices occur both before and after foraging events, and some implicate both ideologies. Hunting songs, for example, whose significance may include both control and supplication, are sung before hunting, immediately after a kill, and at feasts. Wiping the blood from the snow at a kill site simultaneously objectifies respect (the animal wishes the blood to be removed) and trickery (the blood is an unwelcome mnemonic of death). The eat-all feast discussed in chapter 8 is especially rich in its aggregation of oppositive meanings. These factors make the question of differential effectiveness difficult to answer.

As representations of how hunting works, the benefactive and adversarial models—at the cost of confounding each other's premises—exhibit a certain complementarity. The adversarial model would seem superficially to engage more readily with the hunter's experiences of wounded or trapped animals. Animals that bite, struggle, and lead their hunters on exhausting chases through deep snow cannot readily be defined as voluntary benefactors. Even here, however, instances of animal behavior may be assimilated to the reciprocity model. Who is to say that an animal does not voluntarily enter the trap in which it is found dead and frozen? The Waswanipi Crees described by Feit (1973a ) interpret the moment in which the fugitive moose turns to survey its pursuers as the moment of voluntary giving. But there is another point of view

from which the entire question of "realism" is irrelevant to the contextual validation of either ideology. As myths, dreams, and the shaking lodge make clear, the sensory data of waking consciousness may be illusory or partial. The lynx strangling in a snare and striking at the trapper may be only a disguise, concealing the benevolent or seductive visitor whose essential nature is only to be met with in the anticipatory dream.

The adversarial model, in contrast, foregrounds human agency, representing foraging labor as a process over whose outcomes men and women exert decisive influence. The unqualified dependency postulated in the benefactive model perhaps affords too little scope to human autonomy. But animals are powerful adversaries. The obvious practical objection to a world in which hunters use their skill and power to overcome animal opponents is that animals sometimes overcome their hunters by escaping. Human superiority is perpetually qualified whenever animals exhibit their own power by eluding hunters and avoiding traps. There is a sense, then, in which hunters may conceive themselves as lacking sufficient power to regularly and predictably prevail over an opponent susceptible only to force. Neither is the power of animals limited to their ability to escape the hunter, which is in itself sufficient justification for coming to terms with them. Bears, an exceptional case, can kill and eat human victims. More broadly, animals exhibit visible signatures of impressive powers whose full scope remains undefinable: they live without clothing and fire, move beneath the water, sleep without food throughout the winter. In their infrahuman aspect, animals figure among the pawakanak , the beings from whom humans may derive their safety and well-being. Animal enemies are, in all these respects, potentially very dangerous to human welfare, whatever the control that men may momentarily exert over their bodies.

The animal benefactor, epitomized by the pawakan who blesses the hunting project, presents different solutions to the same problems. For the uncertainties posed by an implacable and too frequently elusive opponent is substituted the ambiguity of a superordinate being amenable to petition and sacrifice but omniscient and reactive to human misdeeds. At the limits of human agency, the animal benefactor evokes the surety of food predictably shared, assistance automatically given—without, of course, reliably providing it, for hunters who carefully observe all the forms of respect nonetheless experience bad luck. The adversarial model secures for the hunter autonomy and agency but at the cost of interacting with a formidable animal victim. The reciprocity

model secures a benevolent animal friend with whom exchange is possible but deprives the hunter of autonomy. The animal benefactor does, however, possess, on the moral plane, a quality lacking in the animal victim: it ensures that hunting cannot be murder and cannibalism. One explanation for the co-occurrence of two ideologies of hunting is that definitions of animals as victims and enemies are morally insupportable.

The Eating of Friends

A personified animal is first of all one with whom friendship and reciprocity may be created; second, one whose affinities to the human pose a strategic and moral paradox making reciprocity indispensable. One wonders why the Crees possess two ideologies of hunting. Why not figure hunting exclusively as warfare or as love? At the level of the event, a single answer seems inadequate to the disparate outcomes. At the level of structure, the two ideologies reflect the instability of the focal signs. If maciwin , hunting, has values both of love and warfare, it is because the sign pisiskiw 'animal' is continuous with the sign iðiniw 'human'. Phenomenally discrete in waking life, animals and humans converge in dreams. In consequence, the hunter may be eating the flesh of a being intrinsically different from himself or he may be killing and eating the same. If killing and eating index exploitation and if animals are beings like humans, what differentiates the hunter from the sorcerer and the witiko? Perhaps nothing, in an expanded moral society whose deifies teach that "other Indians, as well as thyself, love life—it is sweet to everybody" (Brown and Brightman 1988:57). Animals are beings like the self, but they must be killed and eaten, each death jeopardizing anew the relationship on which life depends—for who is to say that the animal is really reconciled to its death—and indicting the hunter as a murderer and cannibal. The paradox is moral and, like the Judeo-Christian theodicy, ultimately beyond solution. Since the human/animal categories are themselves continuous rather than discrete, it is unsurprising that no single representation of the hunter-prey relationship can be articulated.

Crees eat meat with relish, enthusiasm, and no visible indexes of guilt or conflict. I know no Cree vegetarians. The theme of witiko cannibalism nonetheless plays along the margins of Cree dietary practice. Certain of the myths of animal-human marriages thematize the hidden

affinities revealed in dreams: the marriages are fecund, happy, enduring. And when the human partner returns permanently or transiently to human society, he or she renounces the flesh of the animal spouse's species. The dietary rules are upheld also by the progeny of the unions. In, for example, the myth of the hero Maskokosan, a woman's bear-husband impregnates her and later returns her to her family.

The bear told her she was going to have a baby boy. He instructed her not to tell the people that he was the father. He predicted that the little boy when he became a man would see many bears but he said that the boy should be instructed not to hunt and kill them. Only if someone who desperately needed meat asked him to kill bears would it be acceptable for him to do so. (Bright-man 1989a : 113)

Those who enter the society of animals and establish family relationships with them must thereafter renounce their meat.

The worldly counterparts of these mythical human spouses of animals are the Cree individuals who refuse to eat particular species of animals with whose members they conceive themselves to possess comparable relations. The possession of an animal pawakan does not automatically result in renunciation of the meat of animals of the same species. But such renunciations do often occur. Consider a man who was restored to life after drowning by a doctor who called on a sturgeon pawakan for aid.

So he pull me through. The old man [doctor] pull me through finally. Two days [after accident]. And he says to me, "Never eat a sturgeon." That's the one who pull me through [cures me], the sturgeon. "Otherwise," he say to me, "you're a dead man. Drowned."

In all these cases, a personal relationship results in a dietary renunciation. Contrary to the dominant ideology, there exist contexts in which refusing to kill and eat is the appropriate response, an act of denial that partakes of reciprocation. The implication is that the human beneficiary should renounce the exploitation of the being that has rendered him a service.

These examples from narrative and autobiography concern individuated relationships between humans and particular species. But the cannibalism metaphor exists even beyond these contexts. It is developed most visibly (and not surprisingly) with respect to bear meat, which a sizable minority of Cree men and women refuse to eat. The logic of their abstention was articulated by a Rock Cree from Pelican Narrows

who "when asked if he ate bear meat, replied indignantly, 'Do you think I am a cannibal?'" (Cockburn 1984:44). Those who discussed their voluntary bear meat taboo with me said matter-of-factly that bears resemble human beings too closely in appearance and behavior to be edible. It is as if the bear—by manifesting in waking perception signs of the covert infrahuman animal—attracts to itself a more profound ambivalence.

The bear is preeminent over all other species in Cree religious ideology, a status unrelated to its (relatively minor) dietary significance. Crees say that bears possess greater spiritual power than other animals, even exerting control over the availability of other species. It is the animal most consistently and lavishly honored in song, feast, butchering, address, sacrifice, and mortuary disposal. When a bear is killed, the forms become more elaborate and are excecuted more assiduously. This preeminence is doubly significant. The bear is called apihtawiðiniw , half-human. Crees emphasize the intelligence of the bear, its bipedal locomotion, its facial expressions and vocalisms, its omnivorousness, and its anatomical resemblance, when skinned, to humans. The bear, of all animals, most closely approximates in waking perception the infrahuman animals whom Crees experience in dreams and in the shaking lodge. The bear poses more forcefully than other species the moral paradox of eating beings similar to the self, a dilemma reflected both by those who abstain from its meat and in the particular intensity of its religious celebration. The bear is paradoxical, however, in yet another way. Alone among the boreal fauna, the bear possesses the capacity to invert the conventional hunter-prey relationship by killing and eating Indians. In this respect, its power in the calculus of eating and domination is more nearly coordinate with that of humans than that of other animals who manifest their power only by eluding capture. Not only is the bear more human than other animals but it is also more dangerous, and hence it is especially imperative that humans come to terms with it. But as the most hominid and most powerful animal, the bear synecdochically represents all animals that the Crees kill and utilize, symbolizing the ambiguity surrounding the hunting project more generally.

All societies possess conceptions of human-animal similitude, and the humanized animal is of probably universal provenience. There is, however, nothing inevitable to the Cree infrahuman animal image, and, although seemingly paralleled across northern North America, it is not a predictable or universal element in the religious ideologies of foraging societies. Once culturally predicated and then subjectively experienced

in dreams, the infrahuman animal acquires a double significance. It is more readily imagined than the nonhuman animal of waking life as rational interlocutor and benefactor. Seemingly, at the same time, it would exacerbate the dilemma of the cannibalism metaphor. But the flesh and skins of animals are represented as distinct and iteratively detachable from the humanoid essence and identity: specifically, the body is likened to clothing that the animal discards. The conceptual split of anthropomorphic soul from zoomorphic body is evidenced in the doctrine that the soul participates with the human hunters in the eat-all feast, invisibly partaking of its flesh, which has been transformed into cooked meat. This meat becomes, in turn, a vehicle of communion through which the spiritual relationship of hunter to animal is intensified and desired physical attributes of animals are appropriated. There is no cannibalism because the similitude of human and animal exists in relation to the soul that is visible only in dreams, not to the body that it transiently exhibits. Or so, at least, the doctrine would have it.

From multiple points of view—moral, aesthetic, and strategic—the animal benefactor is therefore preferable to the animal opponent. The benefactive ideology simply vacuates the postulate that killing indexes subordination and exploitation by figuring each kill as the animal's voluntary gift. But other compromise formations are attested, for who is to be sure that the doctrine is true, or that the animals can be made to believe that it is? Potentially, each hunt is an event that the defeated animal must be made to forget and forgive or to which it must become reconciled. For the animal's disposition toward future hunts is a question of practical interest, just as it is of moral concern. Consequently, the adversarial model intrudes into the mortuary speeches that are part of the reciprocation owed the animal benefactor. These speeches make dear that neither the hunters nor the prey necessarily regard the killing as the latter's voluntary action. One strategy is moral suasion. In a reversal of the usual roles—for animals are endlesly prepared to punish humans for their past misconduct—the animal can be made to believe that it had it coming. Thus, the Cree speech to a cornered bear noted by Thompson (1962 [1784-1812]:95-96) in the 1790s:

The eldest man now makes a speech to it; reproaching the Bear and all its race with being the old enemies of man, killing the children and women, when it was large and strong, but now, since the Manito has made him, small and weak to what he was before, he has all the will, though not the power to be as bad as ever, that he is treacherous and cannot be trusted, that although he has sense he makes bad use of it, and must therefore be killed.

Alternatively, the animal may be imagined as susceptible to deception. In the 1760s, Henry (1969 [1809]:193-194) overheard his classificatory Ojibwa "mother" readily displace the guilt for a bears death from the Indian hunters and onto himself.

The bear being dead, all my assistants approached, and all, but more particularly my old mother . . . took her head in their hands, stroking and kissing it several times; begging a thousand pardons for taking away her life: calling her their relation and grandmother; and requesting her not to lay the fault upon them, since it was truly an English man that had put her to death.

The same bear was subsequently honored with the customary mortuary treatment, the head decorated, provisioned with tobacco, elevated on a scaffold, and honored with mortuary speeches. But at this stage, the speaker adopted a different strategy. This was to acknowledge candidly what the benefactive model conceals—that animals do not voluntarily choose their deaths, that hunters exploit animals to survive, and that there will either be dead animals or dead hunters.

At length the feast being ready, Wawatum commenced a speech resembling in many things his address to the manes of his relations and departed companions; but having this peculiarity, that he here deplored the necessity under which men labored thus to destroy their friends . He represented, however, that the misfortune was unavoidable, since without doing so, they could by no means subsist. (Ibid.)

Predation was here represented as a lamentable but necessary act into which men enter regretfully, and there was no intimation that the killing is a gift-exchange in which the animal voluntarily participates. The speech was a politic apology for an act of violence against a rational being construed by the speaker as similar to himself. To the degree that reciprocity dominates the man-animal relationship only after the kill is already a fait accompli , the entailments of "respect"—songs, dances, tobacco, purity, and sacrifices—appear as wergild, as compensations for a crime rather than reciprocations for a gift.

Power Indexes and Practice

The adversarial model accords more closely than its benefactive counterpart with the understanding that non-Indians have of hunting. But both ideologies exhibit from the non-Indian point of view

a tautological misrecognition of the effects of foraging labor. Crees say that spiritual influences explain particular foraging outcomes, but it is only in the outcomes themselves that the character of the spiritual influences becomes known and subject to interpretation. In the benefactive model, the hunter's success in killing animals is a phenomenal sign that spiritual relationships are as they should be. The adversarial model is more complex since the issue is differential power. If killing and eating connote and index exploitation and domination, each successful hunting or trapping event is a pragmatic index of the hunter's superior power. The certainty of human superiority is always qualified, however, because each unsprung trap or every unsuccessful hunt—and all hunters have experiences of these—is a pragmatic sign of the superior power of the animal.

Individual events of hunting and trapping thus re-create and continually refigure the hunter's changing consciousness of his or her own technical and spiritual effectiveness. Cree ideologies of hunting acquire from this point of view a particularly material kind of historical efficacy and autonomy since decisions about the technical conduct of production are made on the basis of spiritual considerations. From the point of view of an ecological or sociopsychological functionalism, the "adaptiveness" of these ideologies is problematic. If doctrines of benign animal benefactors or magically efficacious medicines sometimes inspire confidence, the opposite side of the coin is a potentially tragic fatalistic resignation (Brightman 1988). In discussing the witiko complex, Bishop (1982:398) posed the interesting question of the circumstances in which a man would suspend production and resign himself to cannibalism, suggesting that such events reflect not a culturally specific "psychosis" but the fatalistic conviction that animals cannot be killed. There is historical support for Bishops suggestion. According to Thompson,

Amongst hunters who depend wholly on the chase, there sometimes comes a strange turn of mind; they are successful and everything goes well; a change comes, they either miss or wound the Deer, without getting it; they become excited, and no better success attends them, despondency takes place, the Manito of the Deer will not allow him to kill them; the cure for this is a couple of days rest; which strengthens his mind and body. It is something like the axiom of the civilized world, that Poverty begets Poverty. (1962 [1784-1812]:301).

For consistent failure in hunting is never merely "bad luck" but indexes events over which foragers may conceive themselves to have no control. Harmon's journal (1905 [1821]:58, 66-68) from Swan

River mentions pertinent cases. In January 1802, the two Cree or Ojibwa hunters employed by the post claimed to be unable to kill animals, although Harmon's impression was that there was no scarcity of game. One of these hunters refused to leave his tent for fear that a being identified as the "Bad spirit" would devour him. In July of the same year, what may be the same hunter came to Harmon and informed him that the "Evil Spirit" was frightening animals away from him before he could kill them. Famine, death by starvation, and cannibalism could come about through such conditions as broken tools, adverse climatic conditions, injury, or a scarcity of game, but they could also be created artificially by the inactivity of fatalistic producers.

Reciprocity and Domination

Crees seemingly experience with animals two modes of relationship familiar also in human society, the satisfactions of exchanging with a benefactor-friend and of prevailing over an adversary. In "archaic" economies lacking institutionalized mechanisms for appropriating the labor of others, Bourdieu (1977:171-197) has argued that competitive and exploitative strategies are most effectively pursued through acts of reciprocity that are publicly and officially represented as voluntary and economically disinterested. Strategies of domination—for appropriating the goods and labor (or homage or respect) of others—are present but necessarily exerted through personal relationships that may be transacted with force and physical violence or, more efficiently, with "symbolic violence," of which a characteristic modality is the engendering of obligation through strategic exchange.

Gentle, hidden exploitation is the form taken by man's exploitation of man whenever overt, brutal exploitation is impossible. It is as false to identify this essentially dual economy with its official reality (generosity, mutual aid, etc.), i.e. the form which exploitation has to adopt in order to take place, as it is to reduce it to its objective reality, seeing mutual aid as a corvée, the khammes [Algerian tenant farmer] as a sort of slave, and so on. (Ibid.:192).

The Crees' benefactive ideology of hunting exhibits suggestive analogies to Bourdieu's constructions of how actors in archaic economies orient themselves in relation to those whose labor or loyalty they desire to appropriate.

In Bourdieu's "economy of practices," actors seek whatever is "rare

and worthy of being sought after" (ibid.: 178), including both material goods or services and the less quantifiable commodities subsumed as "symbolic capital," the prestige and renown acquired (among other means) by engendering obligation and by visibly exemplifying the official canons of virtuous conduct. The classic puzzle posed to economism by such institutions as the kula and the potlatch—the nominally "noneconomic" character of ceremonial generosity and redistribution—is resolved in the claim that the symbolic capital accrued through lavish giving is always then reversibly interconvertible with material capital in the form of future claims on the goods and labor of others. The actors seek capital—both material and symbolic—and endlessly transmute each form to the other. From this disenchanted perspective, the irreducible axiom of generalized sharing of meat in Cree (or other foraging societies) could be read as a systemic strategy of domination and interest. Thus A gives meat to B both because to do so accrues "symbolic capital" (or at least precludes its loss) and because this capital is convertible both into future gifts of meat from B and—in the case of long-term asymmetries in quantities exchanged—into domination of B in any context of contending interests, leadership of a foraging group, for example. All this is transacted in the name of disinterested generosity rather than economic calculation, and, as Bourdieu states (ibid.:196), the two become effectively equivalent because, in such a society, generosity is the only way in which private interest can effectively be served.

If domination is read, in part, as the appropriation of material satisfactions from others, then killing and eating animals is patently an instance of it. The Cree conception of food chains as indexing the domination of the eaten by the eaters makes this clear. Between foragers and prey, as among the foragers themselves, there exist no objective and legitimized social mechanisms that automatically secure the surety of material appropriation, for the animals periodically contest it either by failing to be caught or by exacting objectionable levels of effort. Bourdieu (ibid.:192) identifies in "archaic economies" the juxtaposition of physical with symbolic violence as techniques of domination. Force is the objective technical condition of foraging, for the animals do not come voluntarily to the hunter; they must be searched for, made incautious with medicine, trapped, cornered, or surprised. But force is never consistently successful.

In a society in which overt violence, the violence of the usurer or the merciless master, meets with collective reprobation and is liable either to provoke a vio-

lent riposte from the victim or to force him to flee (that is to say, in either case, in the absence of any other recourse , to provoke the annihilation of the very relationship which was intended to be exploited), symbolic violence, the gentle, invisible form of violence, which is never recognized as such, and is not so much undergone as chosen, the violence of credit, confidence, obligation, personal loyalty, hospitality, gifts, gratitude, piety-in short, all the virtues honoured by the code of honour—cannot fail to be seen as the most economical mode of domination, i.e. the mode which best corresponds to the economy of the system.

The response to force by animals, as by any person in Cree society who resents another's attempts at domination, may always be withdrawal or retaliation.

Cree animal ceremonialism does not conceal the hunters' narrowly material interests, their objective need for meat and skins. Instead, it ceremonializes this need by conjoining it with a misrecognition of the ambiguous power relationships involved in the hunt. Killing and eating are recognized indexes of domination, and hunters thus the exploiters of involuntary animal victims, and it is these relations that are disguised in hunting songs, sacrifices, eat-all feasts, and reverent mortuary depositions. Most trivially, physical violence is concealed by eliminating the evidence: the animal's blood is removed from the snow, its name is not uttered, and its meat is ceremonially consumed indoors in carefully sealed dwellings. More profoundly, the event of violent appropriation is represented to the animal as its own act of disinterested and voluntary reciprocity. The dominant hunter-eater becomes, in the benefactive ideology, the dependent client of animal patrons who control both the desired material commodity (a "truth") and the terms of all transactions through which it may be secured (a "deception"). And the dependent hunters themselves reciprocate the animal's generosity with their own, rendering tobacco, meat, "respect," and all the goods and services that could imaginably evoke either obligation or disinterested friendliness in the animal patron and thus assure an uninterrupted plenitude. The question naturally arises as to the genuineness and the emotional tenor of the beliefs and sentiments implicated in these forms. The benefactive ideology of hunting probably expresses the relation that Crees desire to create with their prey, a persisting personal and moral alignment that secures material interest more reliably than force. The respect and gratitude the forms express are as real as the exploitation they conceal.

The mute, soulless, inferior, and nonhuman animals of the Oblate missionaries may have been welcomed by some Crees because they

posed fewer enigmas. The exploitation of animals as food, garments, and laboratory subjects has engendered diversity in opinion and practice within Western traditions predicating biological and spiritual distance between human and animal. Today, the indigenous trapping communities of the North are subjected simultaneously to cultural critique and economic stricture by animal welfare groups seeking the dissolution of the fur industry. There is little prospect for agreement between native fur producers and those who would destroy an industry that is for its practitioners at once a means of participation in the dominant economy, a source of meat, and a traditional mode of relatedness to the land. But many trappers are not strangers to moral paradox in the hunt; they participate in religions that both celebrate and disguise it.