What, historically, has the relationship been like between biologists and hunters?
The following response comes from former BQCMB member and longtime Canadian Wildlife Service caribou biologist Don Thomas with regard to a specific example, that of the relationship between Canadian Wildlife Service biologists and aboriginal people during the “caribou crisis” of the 1950s-1970s. “Some anthropologists suggest that non indigenous people can never understand traditional knowledge for they must extract it from its context within the culture. And so you will have to extract the relationship between Dene and CWS biologists in the 1950s and 1960s from writings that are scientific in nature and perhaps from interviews with elders in both groups from that period. You are too late in the case of Frank Banfield, John Kelsall, and Vern Hawley. The context is that the biologists were trained in biology, zoology, and wildlife management and they applied what they had learned to caribou in the Arctic and Subarctic. They knew little of traditional knowledge and language was a barrier.
The following response comes from former BQCMB member and longtime Canadian Wildlife Service caribou biologist Don Thomas with regard to a specific example, that of the relationship between Canadian Wildlife Service biologists and aboriginal people during the “caribou crisis” of the 1950s-1970s. “Some anthropologists suggest that non indigenous people can never understand traditional knowledge for they must extract it from its context within the culture. And so you will have to extract the relationship between Dene and CWS biologists in the 1950s and 1960s from writings that are scientific in nature and perhaps from interviews with elders in both groups from that period. You are too late in the case of Frank Banfield, John Kelsall, and Vern Hawley. The context is that the biologists were trained in biology, zoology, and wildlife management and they applied what they had learned to caribou in the Arctic and Subarctic. They knew little of traditional knowledge and language was a barrier.
