Landscaping Desire

Abstract

There is a long tradition in the Canadian North of outsiders imagining the region in accordance with their own cultural assumptions. At the turn of the century, naturalists, hunters, and explorers such as Ernest Thompson Seton, Caspar Whitney, and G. H. Blanchet began to describe the North as a last wilderness frontier that was teeming with vast herds of caribou. Many of their narratives also described native hunters as “wanton” killers of wildlife who threatened the sanctity of the Northern wilderness; they argued for increased government legislative controls and, paradoxically, the controlled exploitation of caribou in ranches or organized hunts. This article argues that all of these images of the Northern caribou had a profound influence on the federal government's wildlife policy in the region through the early part of the 20th century. Indeed, the federal government's restriction of native hunting rights through legislative reform and their tentative efforts to establish reindeer and caribou ranches can be traced directly to the cultural representations of the Northern landscape that appeared in the earliest natural history surveys of the Canadian North.