A01=Michael D. Wise
Alberta
American Frontier
American History
American West
Assimilation
Author_Michael D. Wise
Blackfoot
Canada
Canadian History
Carnivore
Category=NHK
Category=WNCF
Category=WQH
Cattle Rancher
Colonialism
Ecosystem
Environment
Environmental History
Environmental Studies
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eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Ethnic Studies
Ethnohistory
History
Hunting
Imperialism
Indigenous Studies
Labor
Livestock Industry
Montana
Montana History
Native American History
Native American Studies
Predator
Predator eRADICATION
Predatory Behavior
Ritual Practice
Salish Kootenai
Settlers
Tribal Land
Western History
Wolf
Wolves
Product details
- ISBN 9781496222336
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Nov 2020
- Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In Producing Predators Michael D. Wise argues that contestations between Native and non-Native people over hunting, labor, and the livestock industry drove the development of predator eradication programs in Montana and Alberta from the 1880s onward. The history of these antipredator programs was significant not only for their ecological effects but also for their enduring cultural legacies of colonialism in the Northern Rockies.
By targeting wolves and other wild carnivores for extermination, cattle ranchers disavowed the predatory labor of raising domestic animals for slaughter, representing it instead as productive work. Meanwhile, federal agencies sought to purge the Blackfoot, Salish-Kootenai, and other indigenous peoples of their so-called predatory behaviors through campaigns of assimilation and citizenship that forcefully privatized tribal land and criminalized hunting and its related ritual practices. Despite these colonial pressures, Native communities resisted and negotiated the terms of their dispossession by representing their own patterns of work, food, and livelihood as productive.
By exploring predation and production as fluid cultural logics for valuing labor rather than just a set of biological processes, Producing Predators offers a new perspective on the history of the American West and the modern history of colonialism more broadly.
By targeting wolves and other wild carnivores for extermination, cattle ranchers disavowed the predatory labor of raising domestic animals for slaughter, representing it instead as productive work. Meanwhile, federal agencies sought to purge the Blackfoot, Salish-Kootenai, and other indigenous peoples of their so-called predatory behaviors through campaigns of assimilation and citizenship that forcefully privatized tribal land and criminalized hunting and its related ritual practices. Despite these colonial pressures, Native communities resisted and negotiated the terms of their dispossession by representing their own patterns of work, food, and livelihood as productive.
By exploring predation and production as fluid cultural logics for valuing labor rather than just a set of biological processes, Producing Predators offers a new perspective on the history of the American West and the modern history of colonialism more broadly.
Michael D. Wise is an associate professor of history at the University of North Texas.
