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The Hare and Their Dogs: Human-Animal Bonds in an Arctic Community
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17848 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1990 |
4,087 Words |
| Author
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Joel Savishinksky
Joel Savishinsky is professor of anthropology at Ithaca
College. He has studied human-animal relations in Turkey, the
Bahamas, and the Canadian Arctic and is currently researching
the use of pet therapy in American nursing homes. He is the
author of The Trail of the Hare: Life and Stress in an Arctic
Community. |
Canine metaphors dog our language. From puppy love to the provocative bith, from the runt of the litter to the dog days of summer, the qualities of passion, temperament, size and the seasons come from - or go to - the dogs.
While canine expressions litter our conversation, dogs themselves are largely reduced to the role of pets. This is not so, however, in some of the worlds' traditional societies, where canines, as work animals, continue to play a significant part in the human economy. Northern Canada, for example, contains several Native American communities where sled dogs continue to be a significant part of people's livelihood right down to the late twentieth century.
One such settlement is the Ka-so-gotine or Hare Indian village of Colville Lake. Approximately seventy people in fourteen families make their home there, supporting themselves by snaring snowshoe hare and grouse, hunting caribou and moose, netting trout, whitefish, and pike, and trapping furbearers such as fox, marten, beaver and muskrat. During a large part of each year, they nomadically exploit some 45,000 square miles, using mainly canoes in the summer and snowshoes and dogsleds in the winter.
The Hare
The Hare are one of some twenty-five Athabascan-speaking Indian groups whose ancestors have inhabited the forested areas of northwestern Canada and Alaska for centuries. When first encountered by Europeans in the late eighteenth century, the Hare totaled about seven hundred people and were divided into several bands that lived off the fish and game in the areas bordering the lower stretches of the Mackenzie River. It was a homeland cut through the heart by the Arctic Circle - a fact that is reflected in the vast environmental extremes that the Hare have had to surmount. These include temperatures that can range from -60° F in January to 90° F in July and a month-long period of midwinter darkness that slowly gives way to weeks of summertime midnight sun.
Death from starvation has been as much of a threat to these people as death from the cold; both tragedies happened among the Hare well into the twentieth century. In earlier times, the rigors of survival sometimes compelled the hare to take dramatic steps to limit the size of their families or eliminate their marginal members; the people referred to by present-day Indians as "the old timers" occasionally resorted to female infanticide or abandoning the
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