Abstract

This dissertation examines the conflict between Native hunters and federal wildlife conservation programs within the present-day borders of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut from the late nineteenth century to the end of the 1960s. From the first conservation legislation specific to the northern Canada in 1894 to the broad range of responses to the so-called caribou crisis of the post-war era, the introduction of wildlife conservation in the Northwest Territories brought a series of dramatic changes to the lives of Dene and Inuit hunters in the region. The imposition of restrictive game laws, the enclosing of traditional hunting grounds within national parks and game sanctuaries, and the first tentative introduction of police and game wardens to the area were all part of a process whereby the nation-state had begun to assert authority over the traditional hunting cultures of the Dene and Inuit. This work traces the historical development of the discord between Aboriginal subsistence hunters and federal wildlife managers over three species that were all thought to be threatened with extinction at various points in the study period: the wood bison, the muskoxen, and the caribou. It also questions the common assumption that conservationists were motivated solely by an enlightened preservationist philosophy of wildlife management. Through a close study of the federal government's proposals to domesticate large ungulates on vast wildlife ranches in Arctic tundra, this work argues that conservationists were also motivated by a desire to conserve wildlife for commercial purposes. In either case, the subsistence hunting cultures of Native people were marginalized and excluded from state wildlife conservation programs, a process that the Dene and Inuit resisted through various forms of protest throughout the study period. The dissertation invokes themes from the literature of environmental history, northern Canadian history, and the history of science in an effort to reveal the intersection between the discourse of wildlife conservation and the expansion of state power in the Northwest Territories.