The Way of the Hunter (very long, too)

[Guest guest]

What I most like about this piece is that the author () isn't

telling you what you have to do. He isn't a purist in the sense that

he acknowledges the possibility of living the hunter's way even in

the big city. He doesn't explicitly mention vegetarianism and factory

farming, but it's almost clear to see what his position on these are.

JC

.......................................................................

.......................................................................

The Way of the Hunter

[An interview with ]

By White

[The Sun magazine, May 1992]

.......................................................................

.......................................................................

[At the time of the interview, was living on a small

island in southeastern Alaska.]

White: What first led you to live with native people?

: I was studying at the University of Wisconsin when a

professor asked if I wanted to go live with the Inupiaq Eskimos on

the Arctic coast. It was part of a project funded by the air force to

learn how these people hunted, traveled, and survived on the sea ice.

The air force wanted to write a manual to aid pilots who might crash

on the ice.

I was 22 years old. In order to write about how the Eskimos hunt and

travel, I felt I had to learn how to do those things myself. So I

bought dogs, made a dog sled and harnesses, and learned how to drive

a dog team. I also bought a rifle, and the Eskimos taught me how to

hunt in their way. It was really my first year living away from my

home in Madison, Wisconsin.

My ideas about how to live, and especially my ideas about hunting,

completely changed in that year. Not only had I never hunted, but I

was always emphatically opposed to it. I found myself living with

people whose whole lives centered around hunting. We hunted seals and

caribous in winter and bowhead whales and walruses in the spring. I

went along with them and hunted exactly as they did.

I was struck by how much the Eskimos know about animals and their

environment. I had never encountered that level of knowledge –

especially not in the biology department of the university. Eskimos

study animals as intensively as any biologist, but their knowledge is

not as esoteric. It's based on hunting these animals for survival.

I was also impressed by the passion with which the Eskimos pursued

animals, not just in the hunt, but in their desire to learn about

them. I had never experienced anything like the intensity of their

relationship to animals.

The greatest hunter in the village where I lived was an old man named

Wesley Ekak. His sense of animals was so profound that the

distinction between his humanness and the animal's animalness seemed

blurred. One spring, for example, we were camped on the edge of the

ice, hunting for whales. We hadn't seen one in three or four days

because the ice south of us had closed up. There were six or seven of

us inside the tent, and the old man – he must have been about 70 at

the time – was lying on his caribou-skin mattress with his eyes

closed, smoking a cigarette. Suddenly he said, " I think a whale is

going to come. " Then, after a short time, " I think it's going to come

up really close. " To my amazement, all the men raced to ready their

hunting gear. I felt so ridiculous that I got up, too. I remember

saying to Ekak, who was the only person who hadn't moved at

all, " Well, I guess I'll go out and see if you're right. " Before I

got five steps out of the tent, a whale blew right in front of me,

just off the ice.

It was the only whale we saw in three days. No one mentioned a word

about it except Ekak, who said later, " There was a ringing in my ears.

What struck me about hunting was that for the first time in my life,

I was engaged in the entire process of keeping myself alive; it was a

tremendous breakthrough in my understanding of where my life comes

from. I was involved with the laborious and lengthy process of

finding an animal, killing it, taking it apart, and then learning how

it becomes food. I had never done any of that before. Food had always

come out of the store. The deep sense of satisfaction I discovered in

that process has never changed.

W: You later lived with the Koyukon in the Alaskan interior. What had

changed for you in your approach to that study?

N: By the time I went to live with the Koyukon, my orientation toward

working with native Americans had changed. I no longer felt it

ethically justifiable to go and live in a community, study the

people, and then simply depart with the knowledge. That approach

leaves them with nothing in return except the entertainment value of

having a buffoon living in their community.

W: It's clear from many ethnographic studies that there is much we

can learn from native cultures. But do we tend to idealize them? Are

the native peoples you lived with really as conscientious about

environmental issues as is commonly believed?

N: It's fashionable among certain academics and skeptics to argue

that Native Americans were just as bad as we are. As an

anthropologist, I think there is enormous ethnographic evidence to

suggest that Native Americans did and still do have a very strong

sense of conservation. The principles that guide the Koyukon in their

interaction with the natural world are universal. These principles

are practiced by traditional peoples everywhere in the world.

Naturally, in any culture there are individuals who follow the moral

code to the letter, and there are individuals who completely

disregard it. Almost any Koyukon can tell you of a time when he or

she violated the code of respect toward an animal and suffered for it.

But for the most part, the Koyukon practice a sophisticated,

empirically based system of conservation – of so-called resource

management. In Western culture, we are rediscovering it by a

different route; we're coming to see the resounding wisdom in these

older ways.

W: If it's true that our sense of nature – and indeed our experience

of nature – is determined by our cultural bias, can we ever fully

understand, much less follow, the example of native peoples?

N: We can't trust the idea that we really understand what someone

from another culture thinks or believes, or how they perceive the

world. I don't know if we should even try. We're deeply different

groups of people. Perhaps the only way to truly understand another

culture is to be raised in it. As an ethnographer, I was always

frustrated by how little I could understand. Ethnography never grasps

the whole truth about another culture. But when we look at the

premises on which a balanced relationship to the natural world is

based, we can find a common foundation for determining right from

wrong.

The natural world responds to us in a universal language. If we're

behaving badly, the world will tell us. If you're a trapper, your

luck will disappear if you trap out all the beavers. You'll get a

message back the next year that you made a mistake. A Koyukon hunter

once told me with great pride, " I've trapped this country for fifty

years, and it's as rich today as it was when I first started hunting

here. " If you overuse or disrespect the environment, you'll get a

message back. Isn't that exactly what is happening to us now, on a

much larger scale? This message comes to us in the form of cancers

that invade our bodies, in the changing climate, in the erosion of

soil, in the diminishing capacity of the earth to sustain us. The

message is that we can't go on living like this.

W: In " Make Prayers To The Raven " , you write that the Koyukon believe

the world is alive and ever aware.

N: The Koyukon believe that everything in nature has a spirit – every

plant, every animal, the physical earth, everything. If you do

something disrespectful toward an animal or a plant, you will offend

a spirit. The offense will bring you bad luck; for a hunter, that

generally means bad luck in hunting. The animal you offend won't

allow you to take it. It's as if the animal becomes invisible. If you

see it, it's just a fleeting glimpse; or if you get a chance to shoot

at it, you'll miss.

In our culture, we believe that if you treat other people

disrespectfully, it will come back to you in some way. If you're

disrespectful toward a person, that person will avoid or shun you.

The Koyukon apply the same principle to the whole world. They believe

principles of ethics and norms of respect are applicable not only to

humans, but to the entire world in which they live.

The Koyukon world is imbued with spirit power. They are never removed

from it, whether they're dealing with a brown bear, a shrew, a tree,

or a raven. I have this image of a forest of eyes. When you're out in

the forest, the Koyukon believe that all the trees know you're there.

The tree you're leaning against on this island know what you're

saying.

From the Koyukon view, animals possess qualities that Westerners

consider exclusively human. They have a range of emotions and

distinct personalities. They communicate among themselves, and they

understand human behavior and language. Animals are constantly aware

of what people say and do; their spirits are easily offended by

disrespectful behavior.

W: You've written about the many rules that govern conduct and

preserve the spiritual balance between nature and the Koyukon. Can

you give some examples?

N: For the Koyukon, bears are among the strongest animals

spiritually. And the strongest and most dangerous of all bears is the

brown bear. In a place like this, a Koyukon would be careful not to

say anything bad about brown bears. For fear of causing offense,

they'd be reluctant even to say " brown bear. "

and Attla, two of my most important teachers, came

to visit me one in a little village in southeastern Alaska. We were

out in my boat, floating down a river, when started acting

strangely. " There's something over there, there's something over

there, " she said. Several minutes later, and I saw a brown

bear right across the river. In the Koyukon way, it was bad manners

for her to look at it, point at it, say its name, or in any way

indicate to us where and what it was.

The Koyukon believe that life leaves an animal slowly. It doesn't die

the minute an animal goes still. With powerful animals like bears, it

can take years for all the life to go out of it. During that time,

its life lingers. It's aware of you, and there are certain rules that

need to be followed. For example, a bear hide keeps its power for a

long time, and so the Koyukon as a rule don't take them. When they

kill a bear, they leave the hide out in the woods. When they hunted

black bears in the old days, they would leave the hides out in the

woods for as long as a year. It would take that long for the life to

drain out of it, and only then would it be safe to be around.

An old man once told me that every hair on a brown bear's hide has a

life of its own. He meant this literally; he claimed that was why

bears have such vitriolic tempers.

W: So an animal doesn't just represent spirit, it is spirit.

N: The Koyukon say, " When you say an animal's name, you're calling

its spirit. " I can't say I know exactly what that means. Yet if I

make an insulting remark about the brown bear, they might say, " Good

grief, you're going to pay for that. " The invisible spiritual life of

the bear is as real as the physical world around it.

....

The Koyukon understand that we interact with nature and that we're

part of a broader community; talking to nature is perfectly normal.

Our inability to grasp this interaction is evidence of the depth and

poignancy of our loss. The most important transformation in all of

human history may be the loss of this recognition of the spiritual in

nature. Surely it has the greatest consequences. That's why regaining

respect for nature is the most important thing we could ever do.

W: If everything is so aware, is there a sense in which the deer is

choosing to be taken? Is the deer giving itself to you when you hunt?

N: Both the Koyukon and the Eskimo say that animals give themselves

to the hunter. When a hunter has a long history of respect toward a

particular kind of animal, those animals will give themselves to him

or to her. The Koyukon won't say, " I'm a good hunter. " First, that

would be bragging. Second, it would be taking credit for something

given to you. If your friends give you a lot of gifts at Christmas,

you don't say, " I'm really good at Christmas. " You say, " I'm lucky to

have friends who are so generous. " Similarly, the Koyukon hunter will

say, " I had luck. I was lucky. " Some will even say, " I'm lucky with a

certain kind of animal. "

....

These ideas form the basis of my own life as a hunter. I won't say I

absolutely believe there's a spirit in everything in the natural

world, but I believe that I should behave as if there were.

....

W: When hunting, it seems that you can't focus too much on any single

thing, but that you must be aware of many things at once.

N: The Eskimos taught me the best lessons about attention. When

hunting seals on the sea ice, it's dangerous to focus all your

attention on one thing. You never know when the ice is going to shift

or crack. If it does, it could be fatal. Or a polar bear could be

stalking the same seal you are. Or it could be stalking you.

Hunting is the most focused activity of my life. Neither bird-

watching, photography, nor hiking demands the same level of attention

from me. When I'm hunting, several hours pass without my noticing.

I'm a fidgety person – not the sort who can sit around – but hunting

for me is almost hypnotic. It's like a walking meditation. But my

attention is not exclusively on deer, because here on the island I

need to be aware whether there's a bear around. That's much more

important to me than knowing if there's a deer around, because out

there I'm not on top of the food chain.

I use my eyes more intensely in hunting than in anything else. I'm

always looking to see if a branch has nipped off, or to see if there

are any tracks or fresh droppings, or I'm watching my dog to see what

she's doing. I'm also watching ravens, because the Koyukon say ravens

tuck their wings and roll halfway over in the sky when there's an

animal below. They'll make a particular sound, too, that goes gaaga!

gaaga! The Koyukon believe the raven is saying ggaagga, which means

animal. I follow a raven if it's doing that because more often than

not I find a deer there.

W: Hunting seems both a physical and a spiritual seeking – an

invitation to encounter our own mortality, our own animalness.

N: My sense of connection to the natural world comes mainly from

being a hunter. Remember, I grew up thinking that hunting was wrong.

But now I feel that when you assume responsibility for the taking of

a life to nourish your own life, you're engaging yourself fully in

the natural world. Whether we know it or not, we are all equally

rooted in the natural world. An Australian Aborigine, a Pygmy, or a

Bushman living with stone tools and hide clothing stitched with sinew

is no more bound to the natural world than a person living in the

middle of New York City. Every one of us is 100 percent connected to

the natural world at every instant of our lives. The difference is in

the level of ignorance and denial. We've forgotten our connection to

the natural world in part because we've delegated the

responsibilities of killing our food to someone else.

When you go out and harvest your own food, you get a deeper awareness

of what makes up your body. The body that I harvest comes into me and

becomes my body. I don't know anything that teaches this lesson

better than actually going out and hunting – or fishing or gathering

food or growing a garden. Although I do all these things, nothing has

the force and power of hunting. When you hunt, it's so much more

evident that the life you take into yourself is the same kind of life

you possess. A plant can fully nourish my biological life; my

biological life, in turn, supplies nutrients to sustain the life of a

plant. The plant and I have exactly the same kind of life. We pass it

back and forth between us. In my case, it so happens that a lot of

the plant food comes to me through deer. The deer eats the plant and

I eat the deer.

As a culture, we have forgotten that each of us lives by taking other

life. There isn't any alternative. Rather than simply wringing our

hands over this fact, it's more important to live in daily awareness

of it: to sit at the table and experience gratitude for the other

lives that nurture our lives; to recognize that the process of life

and death is a beautiful process in which we are all fully engaged.

There is no life of any kind without death. Each life is nourished by

thousands of little deaths, and each life in turn becomes one of the

many deaths that nourishes other life. That's the way it is. If we'd

stop worrying about it and immerse ourselves in this process, I think

we'd be much healthier as a culture.

W: Causing death challenges our conscience. Why is it so much more

difficult to cause the death of a warm-blooded, furry animal than a

plant?

N: When we kill an animal, that death is in a sense our own death. We

look at it and we can't help but see our own mortality. The death of

a warm-blooded, furry animal is particularly vivid and poignant. I

don't think any of us can take an animal's life without projecting

ourselves into it.

W: You talk about the Koyukon sense of respect, which encourages an

awareness of and direct participation in the cycles of life and

death. Yet many people in our culture are not only physically removed

from this cycle, but have developed the perverse notion that any kind

of death is wrong.

N: Death is viewed as destruction. We feel we are destroying

something when we kill an animal or a fish or a plant. The Native

American tradition recognizes that life is not destroyed, but only

passed along.

I get great pleasure from knowing that my body is made in no small

measure from deer. I am passionately in love with deer, but I also

kill them. I appreciate the fact that I am made out of the animal I

love. Somewhere, both literally and physically, a deer looks out

through my eyes; someday my body will feed deer, too. The whole cycle

will come round. We don't own life, we just take its shape and then

pass it on.

I'm not saying it's easy for me to hunt deer. It's very hard, both

psychologically and emotionally. But I feel a responsibility to

confront the process of my own life through hunting.

Each year millions of deer are killed to protect crops of corn,

grapes, and lettuce. Any time an American sits at the dinner table,

there's a fair chance deer have been killed to protect the food on

the table. Because deer are killed to protect grapes, you can't drink

a glass of wine made in the United States today without participating

in the lives – and the deaths – of deer.

Although animal-rights activists will say otherwise, there isn't a

shred of evidence that we could sustain agriculture in many parts of

the United States today without some kind of predation on deer. Both

deer populations and their nonhuman predators were nearly wiped out

by the turn of the century. In the absence of nonhuman predators, and

with the enactment of hunting laws, deer populations have increased

tremendously. In some parts of the country, their numbers cause

severe damage to crops. In Wisconsin, the agricultural economy would

be wiped out in as little as three to five years if deer hunting were

prohibited.

W: When we were out the other day and you killed a deer, I was struck

by the responsibility of it all. After it was gutted and cleaned, we

carried it; I felt its presence very strongly all day. What are some

of the thoughts you have after you kill an animal?

N: After I take an animal, it hangs for a few days in my basement,

and whenever I go down there I think about it. I don't think of it as

a senseless conglomeration of bones and meat and fat; I still think

of it as an animal. I try to talk carefully around it and to treat it

with respect.

People think hunting is simply going out and killing animals. That's

one part of it – certainly the most emotionally powerful and

compelling part – but working with an animal and making it into your

food, or using the hide and making it into things that you use, has

its own power. The process of taking an animal apart – what they call

dressing or butchering it – is a really moving process. I love doing

that. There is a lot of skill involved; it takes a long time to learn

how to do it well.

I feel a strong need to use everything we possibly can from the deer.

I take the bones up to the woods behind the house and put them on an

old stump for the ravens to find. I'll put fat up there, too. I

always say, " I'm leaving this for the other animals, " or " I'm leaving

this back here behind the house for the raven, " or if there's one

around I'll say, " I'm leaving this for you. " That's something the

Koyukon do. They're always careful to place any part of the animal

they can't use into the woods in a respectful way. They say that

parts are never thrown away " as if they were nothing. "

For the Koyukon, meat is a sacred substance. My teacher

Attla never walked around outside with meat in a plate in the open

air. She always covered it. " You don't want to act as if you don't

care about it, " she would say. Every bit of the process is sacred.

This sense of respect shouldn't end with animals or with people who

hunt. The same kind of humility and gratitude should be shown by

anyone who sits at a table arrayed with living things that died to

feed them.

W: In " The Island Within " , you talk about hunting as a means of

finding your way home. It's significant that you live in the same

community as the deer you hunt.

N: You should live in the community where you hunt. The fact that you

live there binds you to the plants and animals and the other people

who live there, too. There's a commitment that perhaps wouldn't be

there if you did your hunting and fishing and gathering someplace

thousands of miles from home. It would be more difficult to feel that

reciprocity.

When you commit yourself to a place and you draw your livelihood from

that place, you're more likely to develop a sense of moral

obligation. I like the way Wendell Bery speaks about this commitment

to place as " marriage " . This sense of " marriage " characterizes my

participation in a community that includes a lot more than just

people.

W: Is it possible to gain this sense of authenticity and " marriage "

in an urban environment?

N: Since I don't live in an urban environment, it's hard for me to

speak with authority. But there are two things you can do anywhere.

One is to develop an awareness of where your food comes from and how

that binds you to the environment of the entire continent. The other

is to establish a personal relationship to your place, and to the

animals that are a part of your community.

Even if you live in a city, you live on corn and wheat from Iowa and

Indiana, and you are engaged in an ecological relationship. The

relationship is less obvious, so it requires more conscious thought.

When you sit at a table laden with food, no matter where you are,

remember that you are participating in an ecological interchange.

You can also develop a sense of belonging by attending to a

particular part of your environment. For me, it's an island near my

home. If you live in a big city, maybe ther's a park nearby. It

doesn't have to be a wildlife park, but any park where squirrels and

birds and other animals live. Pay attention to that place, go there

as often as possible, go throughout the year and over a period of

years to see how the place changes. Repeated experiences of a place

are important.

....

W: There's a passage in " The Island Within " where you refer to

yourself as a stain on the landscape. What do you mean by that, and

has your perspective changed since you wrote it?

N: Yes, it has. Sometime after " The Island Within " was published, I

was rereading it and noticed that I had referred to myself as an

irrelevant flaw on the island's face. It really caught me by

surprise; why in the world did I say that? When the book came out in

paperback, I changed " flaw " to " fleck " . Recently I discovered I'd

referred to myself as a stain, as you point out, and I'd like to

change that, too. It relates to an older way in my thinking.

For along time I regarded myself as a negative element in the

environment. There was some vague sense of embarrassment about being

human in the natural world. Unfortunately, I think many of us grew up

with this perspective. Because of the damage we're doing to the

environment, we seem to feel that there's no right place for humans

on the earth. I don't believe that at all. Human beings have a

tremendous capacity for living in harmony with the environment. We

just happen to be wildly off track right now.

I grieve for the destruction of nature, but I don't want to spend my

energy grieving. I want to use my energy to look for solutions.

W: I find it revealing that otherwise sensitive people respond to the

environmental crisis by condemning the entire human race. As you say,

there's an underlying embarrassment and shame about being human. The

guilt we feel can be debilitating. This attitude only seems to

intensify our estrangement from nature.

N: It's dangerous to think of ourselves as loathsome creatures or as

perversions of the natural world. We have a rightful place and we

need to rediscover that rightful place. In photographing nature

scenes, we often try to avoid having a human being in them. A natural

place with human habitation blended into it is beautiful, too. In our

society, we distance ourselves from the natural world by creating

parks and wilderness areas where our only role is to go in and look.

And we call this loving it. We lavish tremendous concern and care on

scenery, but we ignore the ravaging of environments from which our

lives are drawn.

Until we as a culture understand that nature is not just scenery,

that this natural world is our community and that we live in

ecological relationship to it, I think we're going to continue in the

wrong direction. I'm a big supporter of national parks and national

monuments and scenery of all sorts, but I think it's dangerous to

consider nature simply as scenery.

When you have a better sense of the way the environment flows through

your own body, you're liable to work harder at taking care of the

environment. The cornfields of Iowa are what you're made of. If those

fields are poisoned, then that poison is running through your body.

If the soil of Iowa is eroding into the Mississipi River, so is your

body and your children's and your grandchildren's bodies.

.......................................................................

.......................................................................