Hunters and Bureaucrats: Power, Knowledge, and Aboriginal-State Relations in the Southwest Yukon

Governments and First Nations in Canada have long been operating on the assumption that land claims agreements and the co-management of wildlife and other resources will resolve centuries-long inequities. This book challenges this premise, arguing that co-management and land claims processes, based as they are on European concepts of "knowledge" and "property," are in many ways incompatible with First Nations beliefs and practices regarding human-animal-land relations. To participate effectively in these processes, Aboriginal peoples have had to develop bureaucracies that parallel those of the governments with which they must deal. These bureaucracies reproduce existing power relations and compel Aboriginal peoples to speak and act in uncharacteristic ways. As a result, Nadasdy argues, land claims and co-management may be working to undermine the very way of life they are supposed to protect. Based on the author's fieldwork in Burwash Landing, a village of seventy people, most of whom are members of the Kluane First Nation, this book is a revealing exploration of how land claims and co-management, as aspects of an evolving relationship between the Kluane First Nation and the state, are affecting Kluane people and their way of life.