Grateful Prey: Rock Cree Human-Animal Relationships.

Abstract

The interaction between beliefs and hunting practices among the Asiniskawidiniwak or Rock Crees of northern Manitoba is the focus of Robert Brightman's study. This foraging society, he says, bases aspects of its hunting and trapping largely on what we call religious conceptions. Seeking an ideology, however, that incorporates Cree beliefs about human-animal differences and the relationships that should exist between them as hunter and prey, Brightman finds these beliefs to be disordered and unstable rather than systematic. Animals are represented as simultaneously more and less powerful than humans. The hunter-prey relationship is talked about as both collaborative and adversarial. Exploring the influence of these representations on technical aspects of subsistence, Brightman finds that the Crees' attitude and actions toward animals were, and are, relatively arbitrary with respect to biological and environmental forces.