This study investigates the importance of traditional hunting knowledge to Cree identity and experience. My fieldwork was conducted in Wemindji, James Bay, Quebec, with Cree trappers and on the interactions of scientific researchers and Cree trappers. I explore the connections between these interactions and wider relationships of the Crees with histories of extractive development and the State. The misrecognition or negation of Cree authority in development discourse and outcomes has contributed to subsistence practices and traditional hunting knowledge becoming politically and emotionally charged signifiers. I argue that subsistence practices and traditional hunting knowledge have come to encode cultural difference and the assertion of authority in relation to struggles for recognition of Cree authority over their traditional territories.

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This dissertation examines the activities of hunting and exchange and how they are thought about by the northern Quebec Cree of Wemindji. The activities of material production are generated in the dialectical relation of experience to Cree structures of thought. Reciprocity amounts to a paradigm for Cree thought, informing models of both ecological and social relations. The effect of material relations on structural transformations is viewed in discursive genres of several levels, ranging from everyday dialogue to mythico-ritual symbolism. Special attention is paid to four categories of "persons" which have been of consuming interest to the natural and social science of the Crees: Canada geese, black bears, Crees, and "White Men".

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