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.