Home Is the Hunter: The James Bay Cree and Their Land.

John Stanley is a policy advisor at the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and
Universities.

Hans M. Carlson is an American historian who, in this book, is writing about his more than 20 years of experiences and study of the East James Bay Cree of Northern Quebec, the people affected by the Hydro-Québec megaprojects.

There are many strengths to the book. It reads well, the writer engaging the reader with a strong eco-poetic style, as befits a book in UBC’s fine Nature/History/Society series. It is detailed without being boring, presenting a much-needed geological, geographical, and historical background to the heady days of the conflicts and agreements of the 1970s and beyond in East Cree territory. Carlson clearly and insightfully presents the cultural misunderstandings and more positive negotiations between outsider trader/government officials and Cree trappers. He rightfully challenges the culturally static notion of Cree land use, a notion that has appeared in too many works.

Most of my criticism is of a kind natural to an anthropologist looking at the ethnohistorical work of a historian. Too much goes on in the more than 30 pages of endnotes that should be incorporated into the text. The work’s failings concerning the use of the Cree language are much more important: for example, the author refers to too few Cree terms. The few key words he does include (e.g., atoosh — the cannibal giant of traditional Cree belief), he usually fails to put into the index, writes with an inconsistent orthography, and insufficiently contextualizes — all ways of marginalizing the language that have occurred too often in the past. Carlson would have benefited by consulting Cree Lexicon: East James Bay Dialects, published in 1987 by the Cree School Board, and the co-operative project of Cree elders and linguist Marguerite McKenzie.

Overall, however, this is an important work, and a must-read for anyone interested in the history and contemporary situation of the Cree of East James Bay.