Hunting ‘bosses,’ inequality and the question of exploitation: structures and practices in James Bay Cree society

Abstract

This analysis explores the complex and reticulate relationships between Waswanipi Cree symbolic structures, social practices, and the material conditions of hunting. The analyses of contemporary processes are presented around the issue of the nature of the social inequality arising from the contemporary Cree hunting territory leadership and the related question of whether these inequalities are associated with forms of exploitation. These findings and questions build on and revise long-standing accounts of the egalitarian bases of James Bay Cree society. Cree elders teach and legitimate social reality by pointing to experiential knowledge of material being, and in doing so they open the possibility of seeing the Cree world as a social construction which socially located persons reconstruct in everyday action. On the other hand, in that very process they also recreate the social order and the social hierarchy, because even when they point to the ambiguity of experience and structure, they reaffirm their privileged position as bearers of this knowledge and as socially recognized authorities controlling access to hunting territories and resources. Inequality may thus be exposed as socially constructed in the same process that its existence and value is asserted and re-affirmed. Inequality thus becomes discussible, but it is not reduced to a structure without substance, without links to material conditions; it creates respected hunters. On examination, evidence confirms the widely shared assessment among diverse Cree hunters that hunting leaders do provide material benefits by managing game to sustain abundance, benefits which accrue to all hunters as reciprocity works so all have access to wildlife.