THE HEART OF THE HUNTER
By Dr. John Todd
Not too long ago I was sitting on a pile of seaweed in the lee of a wooded bank, trying to intercept some warmth from the November sun. A couple of older men were silently working the shallow waters for oysters and the clams called quahogs here on Cape Cod. The sun was shimmering at a low angle onto the water, and the light, scattered by the wavelets gave them a flickering quality of another dimension. The men seemed surreal, out of another time, long ago, beyond memory. I sensed these figures were echoes of some ancient behavior that still resides deeply in the being of some of us. Watching their slow motion raking and sorting of the clams, I struggle with my own thoughts.
I had been looking at photographs of the devastating effects of a recent hurricane in the Caribbean. Whole hillsides in Haiti, waterlogged with torrential rains, had slid down, crushing villages in their wake before washing into rivers and then the sea. Commentators blamed the hurricane for the tragedy but it was only a destructive catalyst or trigger for a system that was ready to fail. I think the root cause of the disaster was the expansion of farming on those hillsides. The way the land was being used was at fault. I used to believe that bad agricultural practices and overpopulation caused such problems. Reluctantly, I have begun to think that the problem may lie with agriculture itself.
This isn’t new. Some scholars believe that the biblical flood of the Old Testament was caused by the silting of the Tigris River by reckless agriculture over five thousand years ago. The river jumped its banks and drowned thousands. In China in 1852, during severe storms, the mouth of the Yellow river shifted four hundred miles and killed hundreds of thousands of people. Deforestation, livestock overgrazing, and plowing have destroyed the natural capital of much of the world. Modern industrial farming is not better, just bigger and more far-reaching.
I believe a wrong turn was made by many Euro-Asian cultures some ten thousand years ago. Humanity is a creature of the Pleistocene, the ice age, which goes back some two million years. Early ancestors of our genus were present at the beginning of this age. Our species, Homo sapiens, has been around for almost a million years. For approximately ninety-nine per cent of human history we were hunters and gatherers. Our origins have left an indelible imprint on our psyches and behavior. Our ancestors were not domesticated. We were shaped by hundreds of thousands of years living in close proximity with animals and plants, following them through their migrations and seasons. Humans were partners with other forms of life and with the natural world. For those cultures who shifted to primarily relying on farming — tilling, planting seeds, irrigating, and domesticating animals — land lost its fundamental quality. These cultures moved away from seeing it as an ecologically rich domain against which complicated and migratory lives were intertwined. Land became property to the new farmers, first in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys of the Middle East.
In the European-colonial cultures that conquered and occupied the Americas, the farmer possesses or owns the land and most of what is found there. Land becomes property, and farming paves the way for the accumulation of wealth and dominance. In contrast, we know from Indigenous Knowledge Keepers that, for traditional cultures of Turtle Island, land was not seen as property but a living ecology to be engaged with reciprocity and respect. In Canada, with the forced settlement, legislated restriction of movement, and the massive cultural genocide that was perpetuated on First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples [for a thorough account of this process in Canada see the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation commission: https://nctr.ca/records/reports/], the skills of reciprocal living on the land were nearly eradicated.
As a young man, I worked for the Arctic Research Unit of the Fisheries Research Board of Canada. I was assigned two tasks on the southeastern coast of Hudson Bay. One was to evaluate the numbers of Arctic char as well as a relic northern population of sea-run brook trout. The government had plans for a commercial fishery, distinct from the existing subsistence fishery for the local Inuit with whom I was working. The other part of my job was to hunt for seals and white whales or beluga to gather age and growth data to help determine their population sizes.
The vastness of the terrain dwarfed my sense of what it is to be human. I was fortunate to be there at a time when there was an unbroken continuity in the landscape between the retreat of the last glaciers and the present.
My partner was an older man, Bob, a Scot from Peterhead, experienced in hunting and fishing, as well as some of the languages and ways of the arctic. He had spent most of his life as a factor or trading post chief for the Hudson Bay Company. His stories of the Indigenous peoples of the region intrigued me, especially the tales about bands who occupied the lands where the tundra and the forest meet. Richmond Gulf, the area in which we were based, was one of the places where the Inuit and forest dwelling First Nations came together. He described his encounters with bands that would summer on Hudson Bay one year and the next would be found hundreds of miles away on the Labrador coast. He told me that they followed the caribou and other game animals along the rim of the forest and the tundra.
Near the end of our stay in the gulf we camped at the base of a river waiting for a seaplane to come and pick up our specimens, gear, and freight canoe. Winter was coming on and we were not well prepared. Our plane was overdue. Bob started to hunt geese and to set traps. It was getting too late in the season for the flying boat that had brought us in. Snow covered the land and the coast was beautiful but bleak. There was no sign of any other people. Then one morning, without warning, I saw people coming down the river along its banks. They were a a small group from the Naskapi Nation, nomadic hunters who occupied much of Northern Quebec – at least two families hunting together. Bob spoke their language and he had an hour long conversation with them. Then as silently and as quickly as they had arrived, they left. But they had told us the whereabouts of a food cache should we be left on the coast for the winter.
Afterwards I asked Bob about their conversation. He was unusually vague and distant. I later understood that he was very drawn to the Naskapi culture. When we went back he would settle in Montreal with a wife who had had enough of life in the Arctic. He did not want to go back to a domestic life. I now know that he had the heart of a hunter. But, although it didn’t show, he was getting too old to live in the wild. His sadness was deep.
I believe that the heart of a hunter or a fisherman is an ancient one. Its territory is a watery commons, where the mirror image of the past is reflected in the present.