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

At first blush, it seems a very long reach from the aboriginal hunting camps of the Kluane in Canada’s Yukon wilderness to the poststructuralist environs of modern French philosophy. Yet a careful reading of Paul Nadasdy’s prodigious new work of contemporary ethnography reveals that geographically, culturally, and philosophically the distance involved is much less than might be expected. On the basis of three years of intimate fieldwork in the Kluane aboriginal nation’s main settlement of Burwash Landing, Nadasdy shows that the much-lauded land claims and treaty processes in Canada are, in fact, double-edged swords. The modes of thought, discourse, and organization required by these processes frequently do more to accomplish the erosion of cultural sovereignty than they do to protect or enhance it. Nadasdy starts by questioning the widely held assumption that the state is the monolithic structure its critics (and sometimes its proponents) imagine it to be. This allows him to discuss the complexities of state–nation interactions in the southwest Yukon in interesting ways. He can acknowledge, for example, the genuine concern many bureaucrats have for the well-being of wildlife and for the cultural and political integrity of the Kluane nation while simultaneously calling attention to the dangers for native people inherent to the land claims and treaty negotiations processes. This tactic is not, however, without its perils, as we shall see. Nadasdy stands in a scholarly tradition in ethnography that is best represented, perhaps, by Hugh Brody’s landmark Maps and Dreams or Bruce Chatwin’s slightly earlier. The Songlines, both of which are products of intensive participation in aboriginal communities; the former in Canada, the latter