Pim Wiebel enters a taboo area, ignoring the signs that say “No truth allowed.”
His article is profound.
“Fur trader, Alexander Ross, observed the Metis hunts and noted that “the great characteristic of all western hunts of buffalo, elk or antelope, was waste.” By 1847 bison were extirpated from southern Manitoba, northern Minnesota, and North Dakota.”
Pim Wiebel’s research is outstanding. What it reveals is the obvious truth about any pre-agricultural people - whether they be in 5,000 BC Europe or North America. They weren’t conservationists they were opportunistic survivors. They would kill as many animals as they could whenever an opportunity presented itself. North American primitives were essentially the same as primitives elsewhere. This is not an insult to indigenous people, it is a simple fact.
Bravo, Pim Wiebel! When a version of this appeared elsewhere earlier this year, I commented:
I visited the Wanuskewin Heritage Park near Saskatoon a couple of summers ago and went on the “bison walk” tour. The earnest young Cree woman who led the tour explained to the group, consisting mostly of parents with young children, that when European settlers arrived they killed off all the buffalo by hunting them “FOR SPORT.” Everyone was naturally horrified and clucked in disgust. I bit my tongue.
I should add to those remarks, that part of the Wanuskewin site is what’s now carefully referred to as a “bison pound” ( https://wanuskewin.com/experience/trails/ ). The administrators understandably want to downplay the fact that bison were driven over the high banks of the South Saskatchewan River in the manner of a buffalo jump, not “empounded” (another hunting method, particularly after rifles were acquired). As I understand it, Kill-as-Many-as-Possible was also the standard procedure where entrapment in pounds was employed.
How did this notion about conservation get started? It sure has traction here in BC in coastal areas. Nothing gets done without some "knowing" being involved. Don't even get me started on the whole "food, social, ceremonial" thing that is just an euphemism for "we take what we want and laugh at you whiteys whilst doing it." I have family in the sports fishing guiding business and I can tell lots of stories. DFO (well, more likely the political figure at the top who stamps the plans) bows to native demands and "knowings." Beaches get closed for "knowings."
I’m reading Angela Sterritt’s *Unbroken: My Fight for Survival, Hope, and Justice for Indigenous Woman and Girls* (2023). Journalist Sterritt laments the way the city of Vancouver ruined the pristine landscape, thusly:
<< Where now stands an iconic steam clock and upscale art galleries and furniture shops once grew swaths of devil’s club, huckleberries, and salal bushes in an understory of the rainforest. Frogs hopped in the swamps, while grouse waddled from the woods. Indigenous people thrived on the wealth of the waters too, including the oysters and mussels on the pebbly shores that wrap the land. Before it became one of the most expensive cities in the world, this area was a gathering place used by the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) for thousands of years.
<< Much like the land around the Highway of Tears, the once generous, resource-rich rainforest was cut up and slashed through by the new colonials who came to the coast in the 1800s. Settlers turned the shoreline into a seaport that gave way to logging booms, the Canadian Pacific Railway, and the Hastings Mill sawmill, and later to roads leading to businesses … >>
While there is much to lament about present-day Vancouver, I have to wonder about where this line of thinking would have us be now, without that seaport and the CPR, the roads and the businesses.
Angela Sterritt is a 40-something CBC journalist who identifies (vehemently, I must say) as Gitxsan because her father was Gitxsan and Irish, though Angela was raised mostly by her white mother and step-father in Campbell River, and when (after friction with her mother) she did go to live briefly with her part-indigenous father in Vancouver as a young teen, he kicked her out at the age of 14 and told her to get herself into foster care.
Sterritt was the journalist who covered the story of the Heiltsuk grandfather and his 12-year-old granddaughter who were detained when attempting to open an account at the Bank of Montreal in 2020, and was one of the select few “indigenous” journalists invited by the Kamloops Band to “write the story” of the 215 in the early days following the graves announcement (the others were Tanya Talaga and APTN’s Tina House, “a proud BC Metis”).
well, the joke's on COV now. MST Corp has a lot of choice pieces of land and seem to be exempt from such colonial practices as official community plans. If you ever wonder why the Vancouver Canucks spend so much time acknowledging native interests, one word: development.
I knew OF her, but hadn't paid much attention until I picked up her book at the library. I wish I had a digital copy so I could do a word search and get a count on the number of times she uses the words "colonial" (or a derivative) and "genocide" in the book. In the chapters I've read so far, there's hardly a page where one or both don't appear, sometimes multiple times on a given page.
Last fall Sterritt participated as a model in Indigenous Fashion Week and posted the following on Facebook:
<< This is what it looks like to build true community cohesion. It's the most powerful affront to colonization because our connections and relations is what the colonials wanted to destroy. Vancouver Indigenous Fashion Week is so much more than fashion. I've always known it's about upholding our sovereignty, laws, culture and community. >>
Then there was a Valentine's Day post in which she extolled her handsome fiancé’s character and gushed about their beautiful relationship, then added without skipping a beat, "Also. Free Palestine. Freedom from toxic patriarchy, hyper consumerism and isolation. Love will always conquer all."
I found it amusing, the way that was tacked on there.
Samuel Hearne wrote about excessive kills of deer { caribou } in his travels in the Barren lands of Canada around 1778. He tried to reason with his indigenous companions to take only what they needed. It fell on deaf ears but maybe going without food for many days may have made them shoot with abandonment. They would process what they could and then continue their travels , and the events would repeat themselves again.
In my research into the Cree snowshoe I came upon references to a trade of deer { caribou } hides being sent south from around Hudson Bay to the trading posts in the Boreal forest where they were used for snowshoe stringing. The solitary animals of the forests had all been consumed for food , clothing , SS stringing. Whether there was wonton killing I cannot say but the quantities of hides needed must have been considerable.
While living in Edmonton I travelled the trails extensively and came upon the horn core of a Bison Crassiocornus. Excavation provided a full skull. This species apparently died out and was replaced by our present Bison. It is preserved and mounted where it fills a wall .It had a 30 inch spread without counting for the keratin sheath overlaying the bone. I also have a weathered modern day Bison skull from the Wainwright area of Northern Albert , an altogether much smaller size compared to its predecessor. I believe the remnants of the prairie herds were brought together in Wainwright with the objective of survival of the species in mind.
While teaching at Grouard mission IRS, I had a student, Roderick Left-hand , who modelled an exquisite clay Bison emphasizing the powerful shoulders and narrower hind quarters. He had obviously seen the Bison of the Woodlands which I think is a distinct specie from the plains inhabitants
It is good to see the revival of the Bison and its development in growing herds in both indigenous and general public hands.
The notions of conservation and stewardship became widespread after the industrial revolution in the west and particularly from the growth of (individual) property rights. The tragedy of the commons exemplified indigenous history and persists to this day with the neo feudal 89% of Canada remaining under Crown ownership, contested now by the SCOC-created expectations of it now being indigenous feudal ownership and apparently seared into the brains of the institutional left. Indigenous stewardship, like indigenous knowledge has become grist for the grievance mill fomenting group rights-inspired endless perpetuation and inversion of racial apartheid and the mining of rent-seeking bounty.
Pre-contact native life was a brutal existence. Constantly warring with other tribes, taking slaves, killing those considered a burden. They were nomadic following the food supply, when an area ran out, no writing, no math, no horse, no wheel, they walked everywhere. There were not stewards of the environment because there was very little they could do to the environment. They were essentially at it's mercy.
Pim Wiebel enters a taboo area, ignoring the signs that say “No truth allowed.”
His article is profound.
“Fur trader, Alexander Ross, observed the Metis hunts and noted that “the great characteristic of all western hunts of buffalo, elk or antelope, was waste.” By 1847 bison were extirpated from southern Manitoba, northern Minnesota, and North Dakota.”
Pim Wiebel’s research is outstanding. What it reveals is the obvious truth about any pre-agricultural people - whether they be in 5,000 BC Europe or North America. They weren’t conservationists they were opportunistic survivors. They would kill as many animals as they could whenever an opportunity presented itself. North American primitives were essentially the same as primitives elsewhere. This is not an insult to indigenous people, it is a simple fact.
Bravo, Pim Wiebel! When a version of this appeared elsewhere earlier this year, I commented:
I visited the Wanuskewin Heritage Park near Saskatoon a couple of summers ago and went on the “bison walk” tour. The earnest young Cree woman who led the tour explained to the group, consisting mostly of parents with young children, that when European settlers arrived they killed off all the buffalo by hunting them “FOR SPORT.” Everyone was naturally horrified and clucked in disgust. I bit my tongue.
I should add to those remarks, that part of the Wanuskewin site is what’s now carefully referred to as a “bison pound” ( https://wanuskewin.com/experience/trails/ ). The administrators understandably want to downplay the fact that bison were driven over the high banks of the South Saskatchewan River in the manner of a buffalo jump, not “empounded” (another hunting method, particularly after rifles were acquired). As I understand it, Kill-as-Many-as-Possible was also the standard procedure where entrapment in pounds was employed.
How did this notion about conservation get started? It sure has traction here in BC in coastal areas. Nothing gets done without some "knowing" being involved. Don't even get me started on the whole "food, social, ceremonial" thing that is just an euphemism for "we take what we want and laugh at you whiteys whilst doing it." I have family in the sports fishing guiding business and I can tell lots of stories. DFO (well, more likely the political figure at the top who stamps the plans) bows to native demands and "knowings." Beaches get closed for "knowings."
I’m reading Angela Sterritt’s *Unbroken: My Fight for Survival, Hope, and Justice for Indigenous Woman and Girls* (2023). Journalist Sterritt laments the way the city of Vancouver ruined the pristine landscape, thusly:
<< Where now stands an iconic steam clock and upscale art galleries and furniture shops once grew swaths of devil’s club, huckleberries, and salal bushes in an understory of the rainforest. Frogs hopped in the swamps, while grouse waddled from the woods. Indigenous people thrived on the wealth of the waters too, including the oysters and mussels on the pebbly shores that wrap the land. Before it became one of the most expensive cities in the world, this area was a gathering place used by the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) for thousands of years.
<< Much like the land around the Highway of Tears, the once generous, resource-rich rainforest was cut up and slashed through by the new colonials who came to the coast in the 1800s. Settlers turned the shoreline into a seaport that gave way to logging booms, the Canadian Pacific Railway, and the Hastings Mill sawmill, and later to roads leading to businesses … >>
While there is much to lament about present-day Vancouver, I have to wonder about where this line of thinking would have us be now, without that seaport and the CPR, the roads and the businesses.
Angela Sterritt is a 40-something CBC journalist who identifies (vehemently, I must say) as Gitxsan because her father was Gitxsan and Irish, though Angela was raised mostly by her white mother and step-father in Campbell River, and when (after friction with her mother) she did go to live briefly with her part-indigenous father in Vancouver as a young teen, he kicked her out at the age of 14 and told her to get herself into foster care.
Sterritt was the journalist who covered the story of the Heiltsuk grandfather and his 12-year-old granddaughter who were detained when attempting to open an account at the Bank of Montreal in 2020, and was one of the select few “indigenous” journalists invited by the Kamloops Band to “write the story” of the 215 in the early days following the graves announcement (the others were Tanya Talaga and APTN’s Tina House, “a proud BC Metis”).
well, the joke's on COV now. MST Corp has a lot of choice pieces of land and seem to be exempt from such colonial practices as official community plans. If you ever wonder why the Vancouver Canucks spend so much time acknowledging native interests, one word: development.
Angela Sterritt is all over the place these days in BC. Her name pops up in all kinds of court proceedings.
I knew OF her, but hadn't paid much attention until I picked up her book at the library. I wish I had a digital copy so I could do a word search and get a count on the number of times she uses the words "colonial" (or a derivative) and "genocide" in the book. In the chapters I've read so far, there's hardly a page where one or both don't appear, sometimes multiple times on a given page.
Last fall Sterritt participated as a model in Indigenous Fashion Week and posted the following on Facebook:
<< This is what it looks like to build true community cohesion. It's the most powerful affront to colonization because our connections and relations is what the colonials wanted to destroy. Vancouver Indigenous Fashion Week is so much more than fashion. I've always known it's about upholding our sovereignty, laws, culture and community. >>
Then there was a Valentine's Day post in which she extolled her handsome fiancé’s character and gushed about their beautiful relationship, then added without skipping a beat, "Also. Free Palestine. Freedom from toxic patriarchy, hyper consumerism and isolation. Love will always conquer all."
I found it amusing, the way that was tacked on there.
Samuel Hearne wrote about excessive kills of deer { caribou } in his travels in the Barren lands of Canada around 1778. He tried to reason with his indigenous companions to take only what they needed. It fell on deaf ears but maybe going without food for many days may have made them shoot with abandonment. They would process what they could and then continue their travels , and the events would repeat themselves again.
In my research into the Cree snowshoe I came upon references to a trade of deer { caribou } hides being sent south from around Hudson Bay to the trading posts in the Boreal forest where they were used for snowshoe stringing. The solitary animals of the forests had all been consumed for food , clothing , SS stringing. Whether there was wonton killing I cannot say but the quantities of hides needed must have been considerable.
While living in Edmonton I travelled the trails extensively and came upon the horn core of a Bison Crassiocornus. Excavation provided a full skull. This species apparently died out and was replaced by our present Bison. It is preserved and mounted where it fills a wall .It had a 30 inch spread without counting for the keratin sheath overlaying the bone. I also have a weathered modern day Bison skull from the Wainwright area of Northern Albert , an altogether much smaller size compared to its predecessor. I believe the remnants of the prairie herds were brought together in Wainwright with the objective of survival of the species in mind.
While teaching at Grouard mission IRS, I had a student, Roderick Left-hand , who modelled an exquisite clay Bison emphasizing the powerful shoulders and narrower hind quarters. He had obviously seen the Bison of the Woodlands which I think is a distinct specie from the plains inhabitants
It is good to see the revival of the Bison and its development in growing herds in both indigenous and general public hands.
The notions of conservation and stewardship became widespread after the industrial revolution in the west and particularly from the growth of (individual) property rights. The tragedy of the commons exemplified indigenous history and persists to this day with the neo feudal 89% of Canada remaining under Crown ownership, contested now by the SCOC-created expectations of it now being indigenous feudal ownership and apparently seared into the brains of the institutional left. Indigenous stewardship, like indigenous knowledge has become grist for the grievance mill fomenting group rights-inspired endless perpetuation and inversion of racial apartheid and the mining of rent-seeking bounty.
Pre-contact native life was a brutal existence. Constantly warring with other tribes, taking slaves, killing those considered a burden. They were nomadic following the food supply, when an area ran out, no writing, no math, no horse, no wheel, they walked everywhere. There were not stewards of the environment because there was very little they could do to the environment. They were essentially at it's mercy.