Maps and Dreams
297 pages
Contains Illustrations, Bibliography, Index
Published 1981 by Douglas & McIntyre
ISBN: 0-88894-338-5
Maps and Dreams: Indians and the British Columbia Frontier
The Canadian subarctic is a world of forest, prairie, and muskeg; of rainbow trout, moose, and caribou; of Indian hunters and trappers. It is also a world of boomtowns and bars, oil rigs and seismic soundings; of white energy speculators, ranchers, and sports hunters. Brody came to this dual world with the job of "mapping" the lands of northwest British Columbia as well as the way of life of a small group of Beaver Indians with a viable hunting economy living in the path of a projected oil pipeline. The result is Maps and Dreams, Brody's account of his extraordinary eighteen-month journey through the world of a people who have no intention of vanishing into the past.
In this beautifully written book, readers go on a moose hunt; trap beaver; mourn at a funeral; drink in white bars; visit camps, cabins, and traplines by pickup truck, on horseback, and on foot. Brody's powerful commentary also retraces the history of the ever-expanding white frontier from the first eighteenth-century explorer to the wildest corporate energy dreams of the present day. In the process, readers see how Indian dreams and white dreams, Indians maps and white maps, collide.
“…superb anthropology, challenging many of the accepted notions about the lives of hunters.” —Paul Theroux
“[Maps And Dreams] is a wonderful book, as unique and quietly successful as the way of life it describes.” —Macleans
Reviews
Edwin G. Higgins was a freelance writer in Sudbury, Ontario.
This is Hugh Brody’s fifth book dealing with the impact of economic change on native peoples or isolated communities. It resulted from his experience on a research team studying the effects of the proposed Alaska Highway natural gas pipeline on the economy and lifestyle of the natives living in north eastern British Columbia.
As a member of this government-financed study, commissioned in 1978, Brody lived for 18 months with one of the Beaver Indian Bands of the Athabascan cultural group. Their reserve is in an area of foothills, muskeg, and prairie between Fort Nelson and Fort St. John.
This is an account of Brody’s experience and his reflections after the submission of the research report. Odd-numbered chapters are accounts of life with the families on one reserve. The alternate chapters deal with the subject in a more academic style.
By involving him in their daily activities throughout the seasonal cycle, the band members demonstrated how their hunting/gathering economy worked. The narrative, together with Indian maps of hunting, trapping, fishing, and berrying areas, along with income and other tables, gives sympathetic insight into a people whose way of life has been followed in this area for at least 30,000 years. Although their world view and thought patterns are significantly different from ours, our understanding of a very old and flexible lifestyle is broadened by this book. Their way of life is now seriously threatened by the inroads of settlement, oil and gas explorations, sport hunting, the highway and proposed pipeline.
Even-numbered chapters, which treat the effect of white attitudes and encroachment onto the traditional lands of these people in a more scholarly style, will be of interest to readers involved in the fields of anthropology, sociology, psychology, and political science.
This is an informative, provocative account of the people in a little-known area and of white-native relationships. The vulnerability of the Indians to a more technically advanced culture is obvious; the opening sentence of the Preface makes it clear: “The hunting societies of the world have been sentenced to death.”
