"It's hard enough to control yourself; it's ridiculous to think you can control animals": competing views on "the bush" in contemporary Yukon.(Report)

Abstract: Aboriginal Athapaskan (Dineh)conceptions of the "bush" and its occupation by "other-than-human persons"--and the nature of proper relations between "human persons" and the bush and its occupants--stand in vivid contrast to Euro-Canadian views of the "wilderness" and its "natural resources." Because of these distinctive perceptions, misunderstandings arise in the arena of "joint management," which is a provision under the Umbrella Final Agreement (UFA) on Aboriginal land claims, signed by the Council of Yukon First Nations and the governments of Yukon and Canada. Alternating between Dineh and western academic perspectives, in this article I examine the competing discourse that has arisen in the Yukon during efforts to implement joint management provisions of the UFA, using the Yukon Fish and Wildlife Management Board's consideration of the issue of catch and release in recreational fishing. Due to a variety of cross-cultural factors, including different orientations to the notions of personhood, power, consensus, and embedded colonial relations, the current structure and implementation of "joint management" is, in practice, contrary to one of the over-arching goals of the UFA: that of the "wish to recognize and protect a way of life that is based on an economic and spiritual relationship between Yukon Indian People and the land."

Bush Lessons

I'd like to begin by relating two anecdotes from my fieldwork experience in the 1990s.

The first involves the title of this paper; the second a more subtle evocation of a difference between what I've come to know as Indigenous Yukon Dineh (1) values regarding the bush and its inhabitants (and, by extension, humans and the world around us), which are distinctive from my own Euro-Canadian culture's values.

I had spent the better part of a year living with Mr. Joseph Tommy Johnny in his cabin, which sits above Tsoogot Gaay Niik--Little Scottie Creek--about two kilometres east of the Alaska border. Mr. Johnny was born further up the Scottie Creek valley before the Alaska Highway was built. In 1942 or '43, when he was a young child, he was transported to Washington State by the US Army for treatment of a severe case of tuberculosis of the skin. There's little doubt that the treatment, which involved cutting off numerous lesions, saved his life. After his recovery, he was released from the sanitarium; since his records indicated that he was an "Alaska Native," the Alaska Native Service returned him to Juneau where he was placed in the care of non-Native foster parents and attended school. Upon his graduation, his foster parents moved to Anchorage, where Mr. Johnny took a job with the intent of entering college in order to study marine biology, a subject he found of great interest.

College, however, was not to be his fate. Rather, as he was walking down one of the streets of Anchorage he was stopped by a person who seemed vaguely familiar. "I know you," the stranger said. "You're Joseph. I know your parents. They think you are dead"--and his life took another turn, this time back into the culture of his birth.

The stranger turned out to be a Nabesna Native who knew his father, Little John or White River Johnny of the Scottie Creek borderlands. He gave Mr. Johnny the money for a bus ticket to the border and saw him aboard. When Mr. Johnny arrived at the Border City Lodge he immediately came upon his older sister, Mrs. Bessie John, who had come to the lodge to pick up some groceries. "I was getting sugar, tea, lard, just sitting there to see the bus come," she recalled to me. "I don't know he's alive. Then he come back, right there. I thought he was a ghost, but he's real. I took him to my father and mother; everyone cry we're so happy."