James Bay Cree Representations of Their Hunting Society, Which

Hunting, Nature, and Metaphor: Political and Discursive Strategies in James Bay Cree Resistance and Autonomy HARV E Y A. FEIT James Bay Cree representations of their hunting society, which were developed during the debates over the James Bay hydroelectric projects in northern Quebec, were shaped both by Cree cultural mean ings and by the cultural patterns of non-Native North Americans. Cree elders and younger spokespersons sought effective means of commu nicating to non-Natives a sense of Cree relationships with the lands on which they live and with the animals they hunt. These intercultural discourses took place in the context of developing international alli ances between Cree and environmentalists, as well as in the historical context of fur trade relations and of Christian missionization. The metaphors that were used by Cree and non-Natives to enrich these dialogues were exchanged back and forth, carrying earlier meanings as they took on new nuances. They were also vital to discourses build ing unity among Cree of different generations and of different "life styles." In this paper I will explore the development and importance of several features of these political and discursive strategies for indige nous resistance and autonomy. At the center of these communications are dialogues on nature, production, spirituality, moral standing, and political action. 41 2 Indigenous Traditions and Ecolor;y Hunting, Nature, and Metaphor 413 The Problematic of Discourse and Power being simultaneously promoted and denied in the practices and legiti Tfie Cree people's opposition to development of their lands without mation strategies of dominant groups. their consent acknowledges fundamental and enduring conflicts of Many critics, however, have seen this as also limiting and subordi interest and control with non-Native polities and economies, and it nating resistance, and as channelling it into acceptable forms. This involves them in diverse forms of political action and complex forms may be enhanced where the political action is not between viUage classes in daily fa of communication with sectors of non-Native North American society.1 ce-to-face interaction, as in the case analysed by Scott, but between social groups or encapsulated societies and nation Current strategies of the Cree leadership depend on their already having states. developed a substantial political organization and regional govern Here, claims of serving the common good are distanced and ment, on their having some monetary resources under their own con may be more totally dependent on imagined commonalities and claims.1 trol, and also on having developed rich understandings of the linkages In these cases many of the categories and values drawn from domi and differences between Cree and non-Native North American cul nant discourses in the course of political action are not values of a tural meanings and practices. The first two of these conditions are daily shared community, but values of nation-building and economic more frequently emphasized than the last. institutions-including national histories, property and labor laws, Their representational strategies depend, in part, on their pre public education, institutionalized technology and science, systems of senting Cree positions with frameworks and terms drawn from the public order, mass media news and entertainment, gender and ethnic encapsulating societies. One challenge the Cree leadership faces is to differentiation, and consumerism. Critics are a lot less sanguine about resist fighting the battles in forms the state or market institutions pro what is gained and lost when political action takes up these dominant scribe and, instead, to find ways to communicate and reassert Cree categories and values. Yet, Scott's emphasis on the particular role of cultural meanings without extensively or simply remaking them in the tropes that reference past social relations is important, especially image of the dominant cultures of North American institutions. where those relations are still claimed as present and future possi Social analysts have differed about whether the use by partly sub bilities. ordinated groups of the concepts, metaphors, and rhetorical strategies In Custom and Confrontation, Roger Keesing examined the sphere of dominant institutions and cultures entails an incorporation of of local autonomy within a colonial, and then developing, state and dominant forms of knowing, representing, talking, valuing, acting, challenged too limited a reading of the possibilities for resistance.4 He and self-restraint into their societies. Do such uses entail increased argued that even where resistance to the state uses the categories, ter subordination or limitations on forms of resistance to dominant insti minology, organizational structures, and semiotic patterns of colonial tutions? and neo-colonial authorities, this can lead to more effective resistance One of the most original features of James C. Scott's seminal rather than increased subordination, as it did in the case of the Kwaio analyses of resistance was his emphasis on how everyday forms of people in the Solomon Islands whose century-long struggles of resis resistance depend on the very categories and claims of dominant tance he recounts. Keesing argued that even though the K waio adopted groups within a society.2 By claiming to serve society-wide interests discourses and practices from the state institutions asserting domina and not just class or group interests, ideologies of dominant groups tion, this did not enhance domination because they used these prac create the conditions on which they can be challenged and critiqued. tices oppositionally. Keesing's exploration of the Kwaio's sustained Resistance thus draws on dominant ideologies; it takes up their af colonial resistance is, like Scott's, sensitive to the constraints on and firmation of values of common good and collective interest and re limits of resistance. affirms and reproduces those values as it critiques performances that Both these accounts of resistance leave open possibilities that need do not achieve them. Resistance does so, even as those values are to be explored in other contexts, such as political action by indigenous under erosion by dominant groups, and even though those values are peoples encapsulated in modern neoliberal states, where the opposi tions as well as linkages richly connect the local-, regional-, and 41 4 Indigenous Traditions and Ecology Hunting, Nature, and Metaphor 415 national-level practices. These linkages make assessing "fourth and media, and actively seek to remake the image not only of them world," or indigenous, political action particularly complicated. For selves as indigenes, but of the state as well. I draw on each of the example, in Labors Lot, Elizabeth Povinelli, looking at indigenous contributions cited above in order to explore contemporary conditions resistance within Australia, noted how legal dominance was asserted for indigenous Cree political action. I do so more or less in the reverse without erasing indigenous discourses of resistance and autonomy, order to that which I have just set out: and also how these latter discourses were themselves used by and benefitedthe state.5 On the one hand, Aboriginal discourses and practices • First I explore some of the ways James Bay Cree challenge were richly reproduced, locally and regionally, as they were being re neoliberal state and market institutions, and in lhe process shaped in changing contexts. But Aboriginal customary practices, on significantly limit the utility of their own indigenousness to the other hand, she argued, also contribute to state projects-political, those who would govern them and develop their lands. economic, and cultural-as in Australia's tourist promotion and film • Then I explore how this depends, in part, on a several-decades and media industries and in legitimating both national identity and its long process of developing intercultural discursive strategies asserted achievement of social progress. In each instance, she argues essential both to building alliances and to shaping media and the state offers limited land-rights and self-determination in exchange wider public opinion. for a form of Aboriginality useful to it However, while Australian • Last I explore how the potentially subordinating outcomes of practices thereby shape the local, she also shows that Aboriginal po using these political and discursive borrowings were limited litical action and their relations with the land intrude in unanticipated by the capacity to sustain an indigenous dialogue among elder ways on Australian understandings of self, knowledge, property, and Cree, Cree spokespersons, and school-educated Cree youth nation through legal cases and daily practices of land use. Here, poli about what it is to be and to remain Cree. tical action is both subordinated and sustained.6 In this paper I want to explore and elaborate on some elements of I will thus move from the story of political events, to cultural and each of these analyses, by considering indigenous political action un intercultural practices, to the history of colonial relationships, and on der conditions where the local group interacts beyond the state itself to intergenerational discourses. In addition, I highlight three features in international political, media, and market arenas, and where indige of the semiotic practices the Cree develop that play key roles in their nous communities use strategies that

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