The Providers: Hunting and Fishing Methods of the North American Natives

E. Leigh Syms was Curator of Archaeology at the Manitoba Museum of Man and Nature, Winnipeg.

The Providers was written by Stephen Irwin, a medical doctor by training, who has a lifelong interest in sports fishing and big game hunting and a publishing record in a number of sports magazines. Numerous drawings by J.B. Clemens portray a variety of hunting techniques.

After an introduction on the long history of hunting among humans and a brief survey of the earliest hunters, the Paleo-Indian Period in North America, the book presents an overview of the hunting, fishing, and trapping methods of the Indians and Inuit of North America. North America is divided into five areas: Hunters of the Ice (the Arctic); Hunters of the Northern Forest (the Boreal Forest and Barren Grounds of the Cree and Athabaskans); Hunters of the Buffalo (Plains hunters); Hunters of the Sea (Pacific Northwest Coast hunters only); and Hunters of the Eastern Forests (an area not clearly identified). Each of these sections can also be purchased separately under the same title from the same publisher for $3.95, but these lack both the introduction and the bibliography of the combined volume.

Each section has a general description of the environment and a lengthy discussion of a variety of techniques used in hunting, fishing, and trapping various animals, fish, and birds. Some sections have considerable detail on some aspects of Native culture, although this is inconsistent from section to section. The text is augmented by a number of black-and-white photographs plus the drawings by Clemens.

Irwin has set out to chronicle the variability and sophistication of Native skills and technology in hunting, fishing, and trapping. For those unfamiliar with the vast amount of anthropological literature that exists, this work is a useful compendium, readable and unencumbered with any references or footnotes. His appreciation for the traditional Native activities is evident in those sections, such as the Arctic and Northern forests, where he vividly portrays the environment with its wonders, beauty, and hardships and then compiles a variety of techniques interspersed with a number of ethno-graphic observations such as construction of igloos.

While this work has many good points, the author’s lack of background in anthropology has produced some serious limitations. For example, the reader will have little idea what groups are being covered in some sections. For the Plains, a totally erroneous impression is repeatedly portrayed: all Plains Indians are viewed as semi-sedentary horticulturalists who suddenly become mobile and nomadic with the introduction of the horse. The section on the Arctic uses the term “Eskimo” rather than “Inuit,” the term now advocated. The section on the Eastern Woodlands group seems to have been added as a hurried after-thought; as a result it is overly brief, somewhat confusing, and marred by erroneous statements — such as there being “a shortage of good descriptive accounts of life before the whiteman” (pp.257-58), meaning a lack of ethnographic statements of traditional lifeways before total acculturation. Clemens’s drawings are, on the whole, very good but a couple of examples are untenable — e.g., the Eastern Indians are shown trapping beaver on a frozen lake in the winter with hides wrapped around their waists and their upper torsos bare! This work could have been improved considerably if the final text had been edited by anthropologists prior to publication.

Despite the errors that occur in the work, it remains a very useful compilation of a variety of techniques used by Native peoples in the northern part of the continent. Many readers will certainly develop an increased appreciation for the Native peoples’ traditional skills and their adaptation to a variety of harsh or demanding environments.