“Breakdown and Survival of a Conservation System: Waswanipi Game Management in Historical Perspective and Stories.”

Abstract

This paper examines how local game management conservation systems have to be understood historically, as local and regional cultural practices, and as linked with national and international economic and political conditions and interventions. In the 1920s and 1930s in the Waswanipi region of northern Québec, Cree hunters abandoned certain practices related to their own conservation models because of external interventions. It was not the existing extent of the depletion of game by competing outside hunters, but the perception of the foreseeable consequences of their intrusion which was sufficient to provoke a breakdown of some Waswanipi conservation practices. But conservation breakdown was not an unplanned total abandonment of game management. When the long-term management objectives were perceived as unachievable by means of Waswanipi conservation hunting for particular game species the practice of hunting limitations was abandoned in practice by steps over the course of a decade. The models for action remained, and still guided decisions and practices for those species whose conservation hunting was not threatened because they were not targeted by the outside hunters. Waswanipi also sought new and innovative means of re-establishing conditions in which conservation in conformity with their ideas and practices would again make sense and be achievable for depleted game populations, including their introduction of new community-wide constraints, and by seeking cooperative action from governments.