Subject: Re: hunting by native people
Date: Apr 21 13:47:32 1995
From: James West - jdwest at u.washington.edu


One important note needs feeding back into this interesting thread: what
indigenous peoples do _today_ may not be relevant if their traditional
belief systems have been wholly or partly replaced by "European"
thinking. What Gene and I have been talking about is the beliefs and
behaviors of indigenous peoples with their traditional cultures pretty
much intact. The Buriats of today have very little left of the shamanistic
belief system in which the bear was sacred (and in which, birders, the
Buriat people sprang from the union of a hunter and a SWAN!). Like the
average Russian hunter, they will blast away at anything that moves
through their line of sight.

On Fri, 21 Apr 1995, Dennis Paulson wrote:

> Sorry, I changed the name of this thread--it's confusing to go back several
> iterations (I can imagine A: was B: was C: was D, etc.).
>
> I don't have much personal experience with hunting by native people except
> with those often called "Eskimos" in the Arctic. Two summers, one in
> Alaska, one in Canada, convinced me there was no environmental ethic
> present. I won't go into details with my many examples (summed up as
> killing for the fun of killing). This may well be a response to the
> problems of modern day, of which native people have many, but I was left
> with the distinct feeling that if there had been rifles available a
> thousand years ago, and a much larger population of Arctic natives, there
> would be no eiders, polar bears, gray whales, or muskoxen in the world
> today.
>
> The other area in which I have some experience is the Amazon basin. There,
> at every missionary base where Indians are encouraged to come out of the
> forest, all the larger birds and mammals quickly disappear as the density
> of forest hunting people increases at that place.
>
> Finally, I'd like to point out some informed speculation. The tremendous
> Pleistocene extinction of most of the large mammals of North America has
> been attributed by at least some scholars to the spread of "native" Homo
> sapiens from Siberia throughout this continent; at least the time frame is
> right. If a benign environmental ethic or a profound respect for one's
> fellow inhabitants is supposed to have the consequence of not extirpating
> them, this doesn't compute.
>
> Dennis Paulson, Director phone: (206) 756-3798
> Slater Museum of Natural History fax: (206) 756-3352
> University of Puget Sound e-mail: dpaulson at ups.edu
> Tacoma, WA 98416
>
>
>

_________________________________________________________________________
JAMES WEST|University of Washington DP-32, Seattle, WA 98195|206-543-4892