Abstract
Ecosystems are complex and difficult to predict and control. Western science-based societies have tended to simplify ecosystems to manage them. Some indigenous and other rural groups who interact closely with a given resource system seem to have developed practices that are adapted to live with complexity. This paper examines how indigenous Cree hunters in James Bay, subarctic Canada, understand and deal with ecological complexity and dynamics, and how their understanding of uncertainty and variability shape subsistence activities. The focus is the Canada goose (Branta canadensis) hunt which is adaptive to shifts and changes in local and regional conditions. Ecological understandings of Cree hunters allow them to account for and deal with a very large number of variables at multiples scales. The Cree deal with these variables qualitatively, an approach consistent with some scientific ways of dealing with complexity, such as adaptive management and fuzzy logic.
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Notes
While Rappaport’s study remains a hallmark as one of the earliest applications of cybernetics and systems thinking in human ecology, it has been criticized for relying too heavily on ecological energetics, and focusing on homeostasis to the exclusion of dynamics (e.g., Vayda and McCay 1975).
The Wemindji-Paakumshumwaau Project: Environment, Development and Sustainability in a James Bay Cree Community www.wemindjiprotectedarea.org.
For more details on the methodological approach, see Peloquin (2007:44–58).
See Peloquin and Berkes (forthcoming) for more details on how this plays out at the level of one hunting territory.
Post-glacial isostatic uplift is the slow rebounding of the land after the release pressure of glacial ice. Near Wemindji, the land is currently ‘growing back’ (as the Cree put it) at a rate of approximately 1 m per century.
The reasons for the decline of eelgrass in Hudson and James Bay have not been resolved but are thought to be associated with changes in water temperature, salinity, and turbidity, with impacts on the ecology of waterfowl, especially brant geese but also Canada geese and ducks (Short 2007).
In fact each box in the figure represents one category of factor that was mentioned by at least one participant in the study (but usually by more). Arrows linking the boxes are relationships, observed or hypothesized, between the different categories of factors that have been mentioned by participants. This diagram is conservative in that many other links are plausible between these factors but they were not explicitly mentioned during our conversations with hunters.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the people of Cree Nation of Wemindji for making this study possible. This research was financially supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Canada (SSHRC) CURA grant to The Wemindji-Paakumshumwaau Project (Colin Scott, PI), a SSHRC Graduate Scholarship and NSTP grant to Peloquin. Berkes’ work has also been supported by the SSHRC and the Canada Research Chairs program (http://www.chairs.gc.ca).
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Peloquin, C., Berkes, F. Local Knowledge, Subsistence Harvests, and Social–Ecological Complexity in James Bay. Hum Ecol 37, 533–545 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-009-9255-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-009-9255-0